Diversity reporting award goes to story on Bhutanese refugees in New Zealand

Rebecca Todd, a Press reporter, and Kirk Hargreaves, a news photographer, were funded by the Asia:NZ media programme to research the plight of Bhutanese refugees living in refugee camps in Nepal. The reporting team travelled to Nepal in February 2010 to meet refugees who were about to resettle in New Zealand under this country’s commitment to a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) programme. Rebecca Todd describes her Nepalese assignment. Photos by Kirk Hargreaves.

This is an overview of the Nepalese stage of Rebecca Todd's project, which helped her win the 2010 Excellence in Diversity Reporting award for her stories on the Bhutanese family settling down in New Zealand.

Around 100,000 Bhutanese refugees have been living in United Nations refugee camps in Southeastern Nepal since the early 1990s. New Zealand is part of a resettlement programme for the refugees and has accepted more than 330 of the Bhutanese since 2007, settling them in Christchurch and Palmerston North.

   

The aim of our project was to track the resettlement process from the refugees' home country to give Kiwis a better understanding of the background of people moving in to their communities.

We wanted to illustrate – through pictures and words – the lives that these people were leaving behind and the huge amount of hope they have for their futures.

The project was enthusiastically supported by New Zealand Immigration which supported our application to the United Nations Refugee Agency to be allowed to visit the camps. The UN receives a lot of requests to do this so we were lucky to have our application accepted on the basis that their own staff were interested in seeing the results of our stories.

New Zealand Immigration also supported us to travel to Auckland and visit the Mangere Refugee Centre while the Bhutanese families were staying there before heading to their resettlement cities.

Once we had UN approval for our visit, the local UNHCR staff were very helpful in arranging accommodation for us at a UN guesthouse, and a driver for the week. This help was essential as the town where we were based called Damak (the seven refugee camps are all within an hour's drive) does not have a big tourist trade so trying to arrange things over the Internet would have been impossible.

One thing I learnt about travel in Nepal is that it is quite unpredictable. The domestic terminal involves paper tickets being written out by hand and flights never take off on time. Regular national strikes often close roads and airports; however, tourists are usually allowed to move around on specially marked tourist buses without being stoned by the gangs of people waiting at major intersections.

My advice to anyone travelling there in the future would be to allow a lot of time between travel connections and make sure that your accommodation has back-up generators as the power is only on for a few hours a day.

The refugee camps we visited had no power, just batteries powering small lights at night, and no running water.

We headed to a different refugee camp each morning and afternoon in search of the families we were to follow. The UN had been extremely helpful in getting everyone who was travelling to New Zealand as part of the March intake to sign a release form, so most knew who we were when we arrived.

Everybody lives in small identical mud and bamboo huts each of which has a number and sector so finding people meant winding down dusty lanes and getting pointed in the right direction by people along the way.

The families were extremely pleased to see us and eager to talk. However, their almost complete lack of knowledge about New Zealand made it difficult to ask much about what they expected from their lives here. Our translator was a refugee who had learned English in the camps so although fluent, he was not a trained translator which sometimes made the interviews difficult.

But what we came away with was a great sense of how devoid of hope these people had been feeling and their immense happiness at being offered the opportunity for a new life.

We got a feel for day-to-day life by simply wandering around and visiting the camp schools, doctor's rooms, women's collectives and the democratically elected camp leaders.

    

Everywhere we went we were followed by a large group of people, children and adults alike, curious to know what we were doing and very interested in my blonde hair.

We also spoke to UN staff about the resettlement work, challenges faced and how they prepare refugees for their new lives.

Seeing the refugees again in Auckland was a fantastic opportunity which we achieved with the support of The Press and gave great insight into how New Zealand teaches its newest residents to be Kiwis.

Three weeks later we were there to meet the families at Christchurch Airport. Seeing them reunited with relatives and then their delight at entering their new homes was a real privilege.

We plan to continue following three families over the next months and years to see how they settle in, what kind of study options or jobs they take up and how they integrate into New Zealand society.

    

- by Rebecca Todd

Images: Kirk Hargreaves

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Last updated: 09 December 2010
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