Family who lived to give lose everything in blaze
Community rally round to repay the generosity for which family has become renowned. Amanda Saxton reports.
TAUWI Kamira’s morning shower was interrupted by a neighbour banging on her front door.
‘‘Oi, mam, your house is on fire,’’ he yelled.
It was 6am, when the 60-yearold flung on her dress and began shovelling the eight kids and three adults who were asleep in the house out onto the street.
An hour later, everything in their red brick house on Beryl Pl in South Auckland was ruined by smoke, water, and asbestos after the ceiling collapsed.
A fire started in the ceiling on February 21, due to faulty wiring, above where their fire alarms rested.
Emergency services who attended the scene say this resulted in smoke not rising to set the fire alarms off in time to warn the extended family.
They were able to escape the fire unharmed, but lost nearly everything except the clothes they were wearing and a few keepsakes.
The house was insured for $422,000 but four years ago the family cut their contents insurance because they couldn’t afford the weekly payments.
Talks between the Kamiras, their insurance company, asbestos clearers, and builders are ongoing. The family do not yet know if their house can be resurrected.
Beryl – the Kamiras’ nickname for their home – was known locally as a place anybody could find a hot meal, a bed, or both. Struggling parents dropped their kids off there, knowing they would be cared for.
Tauwi’s husband Leleimua, 60, bought Beryl as a three-bedroom bungalow in 1990, after years of long hours and saving on his salary as a bus driver. As the family grew to include five of their own children plus nine they fostered, they tacked on rooms and planted an orchard – a tree named after every child.
The 20 people who lived in the house when it burned down are now scattered between family members. Tauwi and Leleimua have been taken in by their son Leti.
‘‘We have to be so sneaky to get anything to them because they’ll find some way of, you know, redistributing it,’’ Leti said of his parents. ‘‘Giving’s a hard habit for them to break.’’
Masses of people from their community gathered outside their house brandishing food, clothes and linen the night after the fire.
Among them, Tauwi’s nephew Casper Nassau said he was excited to help a family that lived to give, but had refused to accept anything in return in the past.
‘‘We’ve got the schools donating uniforms, the church is giving its tithings and our group LAWRENCE SMITH/ FAIRFAX NZ has organised a singing competition to raise funds for them,’’ said Nassau, a cultural advisor for Auckland’s Cook Islanders from Pukapuka – the 3km square atoll the Kamira family originally came from.
A family friend also set up a Givealittle page to widen the net.
After the fire, Papatoetoe North primary school gave the kids new uniforms, stationery and free lunches for as long as they needed them.
Teachers and students also took part in a mufti day, bake sale, and coin trail – where gold coins were laid out to form the words ‘‘ata wai wolo’’ (‘‘thank you’’, in the language of Pukapuka) – to raise funds for the family that’s been part of the school community for three decades.