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In the previous episode, Simon and I were talking about disasters relief in New Zealand after the Cyclone, and we’re gonna continue that topic today.
Yeah. I have an office in the town center, the city center, we also have a small school like a private training institute. So we decided to open the doors, our staff and students as well, some of them were in the evacuation centers, they were in emergency accommodation.
So you put them up.
We communicated with them and they communicated with other migrants, like mostly Asian migrants that were living in Hawke’s Bay. We opened our office, opened our school and we provided a free Asian style meals.
Wow.
We managed to get generators going, so we were providing power for charging mobile phones devices. We managed to power the water cylinder, so people could have showers at the office.
That's amazing.
I don't know how we managed to do it, but we somehow managed to secure Starlink, which is a satellite internet service. So even before the government, the local governments could get connected, we had internet power, hot water and hot meals. I think for the first week or so, every day we had around 150 to 200 migrants coming through for charging, food. Mostly Chinese, also quite a lot of Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Filipinos.
Can I just ask that, I know this sounds like a really pragmatic question, but if you're feeding, like you said, you're providing food for that many people like if you're doing it again and again day after day, that is a lot of expenses.
Now is that... do you mind if I ask is that coming out of your basically your company’s account or your own personal account or will the government help out? Because I would assume local government should help out in this because it is disaster relief, right？Or is it through some fundraiser？
Yeah, so to answer your question, it's pretty much ‘yes’ to all of the above.
So firstly, the Korean embassy they contacted me or were... actually pretty early on, they were trying to contact me, they couldn't get through because the phones were down. As soon as we got onto Starlink, we responded to them. They asked me to go to a Korean supermarket which sells Korean food, Asian food, and the embassy effectively instructed them to provide my school with any supplies that I needed for the Korean nationals living within Hawke’s Bay. We were giving out food parcels to the Korean community.
We also got some support later on from a few community groups, but mostly, for example, the generator was provided by me. The fuel was provided by me. A lot of the meat was provided by me. The non-perishables were, some of it was donated, some of it my company paid for.
So basically, you paid for the lion share of it, but also lots of people and organizations, communities chipped in.
Yeah, I mean, for example, quite a lot of the meat because all the fridges, freezers, were dying and were gone because there's no power. I know quite a few people who own restaurants in Hawke’s Bay rather than letting their meet their products go rotten, they would allow me to go and take it and then cook it and then provide it to the migrants.
One of the restaurants is next door to my office. They have gas cookers. The gas was still going so there was no electricity but there was gas. They allowed us to do a lot of our cooking in their kitchens.
That's a good thing. By the way, who cooked those meals?
It was members of the various communities.
So one day we had Chinese, like jiaozi, dumplings, noodle soup that was made by us with our Chinese students. They cook for everyone. We did a Vietnamese like full noodle meal lunch. We did a Korean barbecue. So every day we had different dishes.
It sounds almost like a community cultural week, kind of events. I know it’s disaster relief, but it's very nice to hear the community then comes together, I think we should have another episode
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