Needy camp overnight at Auckland City Mission for Christmas food parcels

Wednesday, 20 December 2017

Auckland City Mission is being stretched to its limits, with 400 people now queuing for food parcels each day.

Needy Aucklanders have started camping overnight outside the City Mission to ensure they receive a Christmas food parcel.

At 7.30am on Wednesday, there were 200 people queueing on Hobson St, with that number expected to double by 9am.

Volunteers putting together food parcels, which typically contain bread, meat, vegetables and toiletries.

One of them, Marietta, had been camped out in a deck chair since 10pm the previous night. She was first in the queue, right beside a doorway manned by a security guard.

Marietta said she'd chosen to stay overnight to ensure she could give her five children a better Christmas.

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'I don't have much to have a Christmas with my kids, and I heard the City Mission was able to provide something little for families,' she explained.

There was a time when Marietta was working, and wouldn't have needed to fall back on the services of the Mission. But she had to travel to the Pacific to look after her mother, and on her return, she has struggled to resume her job as an educator.

'I'm a solo parent, unemployed. I do have a degree, but the downfall is that my teacher's registration has expired, and to do a refresher course costs $4000, which I can't afford. At the moment I do voluntary work at my kids' school, but I would love to get back into the classroom.'

'I'm so grateful to the Mission,' she continued. 'Honestly, it helps. Especially during Christmas time, because it's a time where I feel depressed, because I can't give what I want to give my kids.'

Alexis Sawyers, the Mission's team leader of fundraising, said the organisation wanted to 'avoid people waiting overnight' if possible.

'But we obviously can't stop people doing that if they're concerned that they won't get it, and want to turn up then.'

Sawyers said five days out from Christmas, the Mission was now working at capacity.

'This week it's really ramped up. Yesterday, we had just under 400 people. And that really is the limit of what we can get through in a day.'

A family food parcel typically contains bread, sausages, vegetables and toiletry items, but each parcel is different depending on what's been donated.

'We still definitely need food donated to us, but our priority is to try and get in financial donations which help us do all of this, because it continues - the Mission is open every day, so we get a lot of people who come to us in the weeks after Christmas as well.'

Sawyers said donations had been 'slower than we'd hoped'.

'It's not too late for people to donate. Just a few dollars make a big difference, and that allows us to continue to be there each day for people.'

The parcels are packed by teams of volunteers at a warehouse in Grafton, then trucked in to the Mission building on Hobson Street each morning. On-top of the food parcel service, the Mission still provides its perennial community drop-in: daily coffee and morning tea for the city's rough sleepers.

About 80 per cent of the food parcels go to families, with 20 per cent going to individuals.

'The single people are often pensioners, or they're previously homeless people that have been housed, or single people that do casual work and with Christmas they run out of hours.

'It's a lot of women as you can see in the line, and they're coming because they need to feed their children.'

Donated books and toys are sorted into age and gender and given to families as part of their Christmas package.

Sawyers said people like Marietta didn't choose to be in the position they were in.

'Every person in that line has a slightly different reason for being there,' she said.

'It's really easy to look on the outside and say, 'Well I know why people are there.' Actually, you probably don't. Christmas is hard for heaps of people, and you're just really lucky if you can manage to scrape things together and do it.'

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