We have a really huge Sudanese community and we have a huge Pacific Island community as well.
Knowing who they are is me thinking that I’m culturally, like I’ve got some culture in my centre.
But it’s actually after doing this I found out that it’s actually a lot more than that.
And for me I always had this concern that I don’t know enough about that culture so how do I incorporate them, how do I help them to feel comfortable
Some of the Indian families have not long come over so it’s just learning about their culture and incorporating that into our centre.
We have some families that are from a refugee background.   That are very new to this country.
So that sort of thing is really hard because we have quite a lot of language barriers there.
That was a challenge for me too.
Because how do I communicate with someone who speaks a different language?
And also how do I tell the families what they have been doing for the day,
and communicate and how do we work together from their home environment
to provide it at the centre when we can’t communicate.
Sometimes we have support workers that can come with those families and they have some knowledge of that language but yeah it’s hard.
At my centre we’re lucky because all our staff/educators all have second language ...
I’m lucky to be part of the recruit team, when we do recruit new educators in our centre,
because we recruit people who have that second language – a gift that helps everyone.
So we have an Indian lady, a Thai lady, Bolonese, Sudan so we have all different cultures,
and then there’s me and I speak half Raro half Samoan.
So when the New Zealand community come in or the Pacific Island community come in,
I know how they act with their children so it helps with that.
And other staff can pull from that.  I’m very lucky too we have other staff within the community centre
attached to the occasional child care centre so we can pull from those staff.  Yeah and that helps.
You see some of the relief on some of the families when they do see someone from their community.
Especially when their child is upset.
First thing I’m doing is running around the child care centre to find someone who can help me.
Who speaks Bolognese?  Who speaks Bolognese?
And then it helps.
