Papatoetoe community speaks out against ‘regional profiling’ amid growing Covid-19 fears
The south Auckland community fears racism could surge if the ethnicity of the latest cases is revealed.
There’s a video doing the rounds on social media – a spoof based on a scene from The Lion King where Simba is told never to visit the shadowy elephant’s graveyard. Except, in this version, the elephant’s graveyard is Papatoetoe.
‘‘But I thought you said O¯ tara was where I can’t go?’’ an overdubbed Simba asks. ‘‘Well, both places could kill you son – but for different reasons,’’ his father Mufasa replies.
Dr Primla Khar pulls out her phone to show it at arms-length, shaking her head at what she calls its ‘‘regional profiling’’.
That’s the kind of targeting the Papatoetoe community is having to confront, with Covid-19 cases centred around Papatoetoe High School and a seven-day lockdown triggered by a positive case who was in the community while infectious.
The area was dealt another blow when a man was shot dead by police on Thursday night.
The video also points to the kind of ugliness that could rear its head if the ethnicity of the infected families was revealed, Khar says.
Khar works as a GP in Papakura and heads up the Indian Association Manukau, based in Papatoetoe.
South Auckland is the ‘‘cultural hub of New Zealand’’ in her eyes, its beauty coming from the mix of people, cultures, ways of life and income brackets. That can also bring challenges, she says.
For a lot of people, Covid just isn’t the biggest thing that’s happening in their lives, she says. They might be suffering from mental health issues, struggling to make ends meet, or living in a two-bedroom apartment with 10 people. Suddenly, selfisolating at home isn’t so simple.
Saying something is very different to doing it – she likens it to telling her patients they need to lose weight, ‘‘and I say I’ve been trying to lose half a kg for the last month’’.
Getting people to understand the protocols around Covid isn’t just about making sure information is available in different languages, she says. Health literacy – the ability to take that information and know what to do with it – is low, and tackling that means going into schools, working with community organisations and in regional languages, she says.
With the latest outbreak ‘‘literally at the back doors’’ of the families who rely on the O¯ tara Kai Village, fear and anxiety has been high in the community, Lee Naniseni says.
But in times like this, south
‘‘For us it is disheartening to know people are putting the blame on us.’’
Rhonda Nguyen Papatoetoe High School head girl
Aucklanders have each others’ backs, she says.
At the food bank she manages, that means trying to take away some of the stress of families who have lost jobs or shifts and suddenly have to feed a houseful of people every meal in a day.
The food parcels are given out on a first-come first-served basis, so the line of cars is snaking around the car park long before the advertised start time on Tuesday afternoon. The marshals start waving people through early.
This kind of community response is what has stood out most to David Su’a in the latest outbreak. The 18-year-old sits on the O¯ taraPapatoetoe Youth Council. He said the community had been hit hard by the police shooting coming in the midst of the Covid outbreak.
People outside the area look at the shooting and isolated Covid cases and make false generalisations about Papatoetoe and south Auckland, Su’a says.
But the things he’s been struck by in the latest outbreak are the interschool support for Papatoetoe High, the sacrifices made by essential border workers and people’s willingness to follow the rules around mask-wearing and getting tested.
Head girl of Papatoetoe High School Rhonda Nguyen only had a week of year 13 classes before the first community case linked to the school sent her and her classmates home. While all of Auckland is back in level 3 now, the school community has been in and out of restrictions since mid-February.
Most people in the area were very co-operative about getting tested and self-isolating, the 17-yearold says – and where they weren’t, they might have their own circumstances that strangers shouldn’t judge. ‘‘For us it is disheartening to know people are putting the blame on us.’’
But it was ‘‘heartwarming’’ to have other schools reach out in support of Papatoetoe High, she said.
Aukusitino Etuale (Ngati Hamoa, Samoa), a student leader at Aorere College, has lived in Papatoetoe her whole life.
She said most of her year group was working at least a part-time job, and when people scorned south Aucklanders for working in supermarkets and food factories, they didn’t acknowledge these essential roles were providing for the community.