With heart and soles

Rowena Orejana | 9th March 2010

A student teacher took a life lesson to heart and extended a helping hand - or foot - to pupils at an Otara high school. Rowena Orejana reports.

The boy in his class was up to something. Carl Rein, a student teacher on assignment at Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate, in Otara, was a bit annoyed.

The boy had taken off his shoe and was stuffing folded paper inside it.

"I said, 'What are you doing?', thinking he was just mucking around," says Mr Rein. "Then he held up his shoe and there was a hole the size of a 20-cent piece. It was huge." He was stunned.

Mr Rein grew up on the North Shore. Teaching at Sir Ed was a real eye-opener for him.

"It's a bit like going to a different country. It has a very different feel.

What bothered him was the lack of basics. "Some kids here just don't have the stuff for school because they can't afford it. The kids make do with a lot less than the boys in the North Shore might."

Mr Rein says his first instinct was to get the boy's size and buy him a pair of shoes. "But I started thinking how many more kids are out there who need the same thing," he says.

He hit upon the idea of holding a shoe drive and remembered his old school, Westlake Boys, on the Shore, was changing its shoe policy. "I thought there would be a lot of shoes that they would have no use for," he says.

He contacted Westlake's headmaster, Craig Monaghan, who was happy to help. Mr Monaghan also got Westlake Girls High involved.

Within a fortnight, they'd collected about 70 pairs of shoes. "The students like the fact that they are giving service to people outside of their community," says Mr Monaghan.

Karen Douglas, principal of Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate, has invited both of them to morning tea to express her appreciation.

Mr Rein says because of his plans to go abroad this year, this might be just a one-off project. He hopes that others may pick up where he left off. "I don't think you can tell people to do something if you don't do it yourself," he says. "The reason I've done this is that I have a belief that people need to help out. We need more people to just stop and give other people a hand."
 
Growing community

Based on the 2006 census, Otara has the youngest population in Manukau, with 40 per cent of residents under 20 years old. Pacific people make up 68 per cent of the population.

It also has the highest level of unemployment at seven per cent and the lowest personal annual income median at $19,200.