Emergency lockdown plan

Hundreds of Red Cross volunteers stepped up to help resettled former refugees as lockdown forced them into isolation.

They called 350 families every day to check how they were coping as they started their new lives under extraordinary circumstances.

‘‘We had a lockdown plan with every family to make sure they were safe and well and connected and well-informed on what was happening at the various levels,’’ says general manager of migration Rachel O’Connor.

A lot of families were getting information from offshore, so they were quite rightly terrified because the information they were getting was from countries that were struggling with Covid-19, she says.

‘‘In the early days of lockdown people were telling us they were feeling really scared and anxious. They weren’t getting the messaging about Covid-19 because of the language barriers.’’

Many families in the refugee community were waiting for information to be translated. Red Cross translated Covid information into 13 languages.

‘‘We were having to work at massive speed to translate this important information that was constantly changing and get it out to people. We did it on the phone, email, over WhatsApp, video conferencing.’’

At level 3, some families were saying ‘‘Why are you still calling us every day? We are fine. We’ve been through much worse’’, says O’Connor.

‘‘We were having to remind ourselves that these families had been through traumatic situations before and had developed skills and experience and knowledge on how to survive this sort of situation.’’

New Zealand was due to increase the refugee quota in July 2020 from 1000 to 1500, but this is now uncertain. The 2019/20 Refugee Quota has reached 795 arrivals. No further intakes are scheduled to arrive for the 2019/20 refugee quota. A total of 134 quota refugees are currently being accommodated at Ma¯ngere Refugee Resettlement Centre. The last group from the March 2020 refugee quota intake arrived in New Zealand on March 13.