‘Mixing Bowl’ is bringing a lot of smiles to the faces of the otherwise isolated women from Kiwi-Indian and the wider migrant communities in New Zealand’s southernmost urban centre, Invercargill.
Southland Hindi school, which started in February 2019 as New Zealand’s southernmost Hindi language school, has started another initiative, ‘Mixing Bowl’, to provide a platform for women from migrant communities to share a plate (or bowl) at a common platform and feel supported and connected.
Speaking with the Indian Weekender, Himani Mishra Galbraith, the founder of Southland Hindi school, “This is another initiative of fulfilling a key gap in this part of the country – providing support network and structure to women from Kiwi-Indian and the wider migrant communities.”
“Our purpose is to create a platform for women, where they could visit along with their children to make new friends, to talk, to discuss and to learn things, which will help them in connecting with their fellow kiwis, by bridging the cultural gaps and differences.”
“We have a small size of the community here in Southland with families often living in an isolated environment with limited opportunities of interacting, especially in their own languages,” Ms Mishra said.
“Women, in our communities often feel lonely and disconnected as they remain thousands of miles away from their homeland and still struggling to integrate with the rest of Kiwi-society.”
“The Covid pandemic from early last year and its accompanied impact such as global travel restrictions have further enhanced the sense of isolation among migrant women as neither they could travel nor get their family members to visit them for any support,” Ms Mishra said.
“With this program, Mixing Bowl, we intended to give them a common place to mix, mingle, and support each other, along with sharing glimpses of different cultures,” Ms Mishra said.
Need for a common meeting place for migrant women in southern rural communities.
Himani Gailbraith also told the Indian Weekender that they have always felt a need for an appropriate place where migrant women could visit along with their children to share their views and problems.
“While we continue to work and hope for support from appropriate authorities, we just thought to come up with this special program at Southland Hindi school so as to give our fellow ethnic migrant women an opportunity to interact regularly,” Ms Gailbraith said.