Life change in order to help others
The woman who led Feilding to its 15th Most Beautiful Town award is calling time and selling her home business.
Reena Wallis ends her four-year association with Keep Feilding Beautiful and six years with Aroha Bed and Breakfast to move to Palmerston North, where she will have more time to help Afghanistan refugees.
After taking the reins of the volunteer organisation from Del Gibb in 2013, Wallis said it was time for someone else to stand up.
She would depart Feilding when her house sold, but was hoping to find a volunteer to lead the group before she left.
There was a time when Wallis thought she would never leave Feilding, but her next chapter was one that was close to her heart. For several years, she has been helping refugees integrate into New Zealand society, and she wants to pursue that work fulltime.
She said her love of foreigners came in a ‘‘lightbulb’’ moment, while she was reading the Bible.
In it she read, ‘‘[God] shows love to the foreigners living among you and gives them food and clothing. So you, too, must show love, for you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt’’.
Wallis advocates on their behalf to organisations or government agencies such as Work and Income, hospitals and Housing New Zealand.
The former nurse and her husband John retired in 2008 to experience a new lifestyle, making use of her career by turning their home into convalescent care for hospital patients recovering from major surgery. However, the job became too time-consuming and Wallis opted to transform their five-bedroom house into a bed and breakfast in 2011.