Laundry for the down and out
Auckland woman Christina Pountney is a beneficiary with two outfits to her name and she can’t afford to wash them.
The 44-year-old recently turned her life around after almost two decades on crack, having worked the streets as a prostitute to fund her drug habit.
She has lived in some of Auckland’s most notorious boardinghouses, dodging attacks from fellow residents and cockroaches on the stairs.
Pountney said she had been off drugs for 10 months, in a selfcontained unit for just over a month, and had given up sex work. Her life adjustments have meant finances are tight, and doing the laundry is something she had sacrificed. She was not yet able to afford a $10 a week washing machine rental, and saving the several dollars it costs to use a laundromat had been more of a priority than having clean clothes. She is one of the people Orange Sky, an Australian charity, is helping via a mobile laundromat it started operating in Auckland last month. It is a van housing two washing machines, two dryers, and a shower run by a generator, funded here by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and the Hugo Charitable Trust.
On Wednesday the van was parked up at the Urban Vineyard Church in Eden Terrace, as the church hosted its weekly free lunch. Pountney has been a regular attendee for the past five years and said having the laundry service there too meant she could ‘‘now kill three birds with the one stone’’.
‘‘I’m getting a decent feed, having that human interaction, and coming out with fresh clothes and sheets – it’s wonderful.’’
Orange Sky’s sole New Zealand-based employee, Eddie Uini, a former social worker, said clean, dry clothes had a positive impact on people’s hygiene and dignity. Last year he helped south Auckland’s homeless wash their clothes by partnering with a laundromat in Manurewa – he would pay half the cost for a load of laundry, and the laundromat would cover the rest.
Uini, 29, managed to fundraise almost $50,000 for the project, before joining Orange Sky.
‘‘I just saw so many people on the streets or in cars down there who couldn’t afford the 10 bucks it can take to wash and dry clothes,’’ he said.
‘‘There were plenty of places giving free meals – it’s not hard to get fed. But there are a lot of people going without showers and clean clothes, and having those things can actually make a big difference in their lives.’’
Orange Sky’s bus operates from 14 venues around Auckland each week – one in the central city and one on the outskirts each day – hitting churches or community centres at the same time they are offering a free meal.
Uini said it was mainly rough sleepers, low socio-economic families, and people like Pountney who treated laundry as a luxury, using the service.
Urban Vineyard Church pastor Cameron Webster said he welcomed the collaboration between different groups helping Auckland’s needy.
Pountney said she was ‘‘grateful for all the organisations’’ helping people like her – living on society’s fringe or trying to assimilate back into a system longshunned. ‘‘It’s taken me my whole life to get off the drugs and into a proper house,’’ she said.
‘‘But getting swamped in bills, I’ve been down that pathway before ... I’m budgeting very tightly now so it definitely helps having these places.’’