Mangere Refugee Reception Centre Gets Beautiful New Garden

Students from Kristin  an independent and nondenominational school of approximately 1600 students from Kindergarten to Year 13, recently designed and built a beautiful new garden at Mangere Refugee Reception Centre as their 2010 Prefect Project. 

  

Every year the Kristin Prefects develop a project that will allow them to give back to their community, and they run the project entirely on their own from start to finish.  This year the Prefects decided to re-furbish the Mangere Refugee Reception Centre, aiming to, according to the prefects themselves, "restore several aspects of the centre in order to provide a more welcoming and peaceful environment and make the transition to New Zealand society easier” for incoming refugees.

 

 

 

The students first held a hugely successful Trivia Night fundraiser called ‘Around the World in 80 Questions’, raising $17,000 for the project. Then, after much detailed planning and design, they built the beautiful new garden, which includes landscaping, benches, plaques (with the names of all countries from which New Zealand’s refuges have come and the UN statement definition of refugees) and a fountain.

 

“The Prefect Project completes a full circle. Excitement and hope of planning, give way to the stress and pressure of creating. Stress and pressure lead to a sense of achievement and fulfilment of finishing. But at the end, personal feelings matter little when you see that the precious commodity of your time and hard work transform into excitement and hope on the faces of those whose lives you have made a difference in.”  Lewis Fry, Head Boy 2010