Rez Gardi recalls being pulled across the floor of her classroom by her pigtails when she was just five, her teacher furious that she had mispronounced an Urdu word. Rez was growing up in a refugee camp in Quetta, Pakistan, where she had been born in 1991.
Despite the abuse and frequent beatings – or perhaps because of them – education has become her passion and the charity she founded in Auckland to help refugee kids bridge the gap between high school and university is now expanding around the country.
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At a Social Change Collective Workshop held at Biz Dojo in Wellington, Rez is one of two guest speakers inspiring other youth. Rez is currently a legal officer with the Human Rights Commission, her own journey through higher education inspired by her parent’s struggles. Rez is telling her story to the group of around 100 young people.
“I am Kurdish. We are the world’s largest nation without a state and one of the most oppressed people of modern history. There are approximately 40 million Kurds around the world with no country of our own.”
Rez started Empower early last year, shortly before she was named 2017 Young New Zealander of the Year.
Empower enables higher education for refugee youth here and is mentored by community leaders and former refugees like Rez. She founded Empower after attending the United Nation’s 2016 global refugee youth forum. “Time and time again these refugee youth were raising education as a key concern.”
Rez hopes that Empower’s workshops help to fight negative stigma around label ‘refugee.’
“So many were told that they didn’t have potential.”
Empower programmes currently held in Auckland aim to set up programmes in all main centres with refugee resettlement communities, starting with Wellington.
“The way Empower works is that we have one-on-one peer-to-peer mentoring and they meet twice a month.”
The young people are paired with an older university student, graduate or someone working professionally.
“That mentoring relationship is the heart of Empower, in that role-model.”
“The second aspect are the monthly workshops, aimed to strengthen the capabilities of these young people.”
Partly funded by the Ministry for Youth and The Office of Ethnic Communities, Empower continues to be voluntary based with its mentoring programme.
Rez recently decided to donate all of her guest speaker fees into Empower to keep it sustainable and to help with its expansion. To date she has invested over $20,000. Almost half of this was in speaker fees.
And it’s all about access for Giselle, who attended the Wellington event. Giselle, a former refugee from Rwanda tells me her family were resettled in 2007.
Currently in her third year of study at Victoria University, Giselle is very keen to become involved in the Wellington Empower programme.
“I had to do it all on my own. It was only me and my family. Empower would have been amazing. Actually hearing there is a space, and organisation involved in this service, I’m so happy.”
However it will take more than the thousands of Rez's own donations to keep it going. Why the altruism?
Rez Gardi at Social Change Collective Photo: RNZ Lynda Chanwai-Earle
Rez's story
At the age of ten, Rez’s mother fled her village after chemical attacks. Her mother and two siblings were killed and her father was disabled. At ten, Rez’s mother left school and stepped into the role of family leader. Any hopes and dreams of being educated and one day becoming a lawyer were destroyed.
Rez’s parents met and settled in Iran to escape persecution.
Her parents became outspoken political activists, fighting for Kurdish rights and independence. When the Halabja chemical attack happened in 1988 and tensions escalated in Iran, her parents fled with Rez’s older sister and brother, to live for the next nine years in the refugee camp in Pakistan.
Rez and her family resettled in New Zealand in 1998 when she was almost seven.
Her childhood started happily but it became a different kind of struggle after the events of 9-11.
She was ten at the time but when news spread she was bullied about being a ‘terrorist.’ The bullying drove Rez to deny her own ethnic and cultural heritage.
At the age of 13, Rez travelled to Kurdistan for the first time to meet her grandparents and wider family.
It was a trip that opened her eyes to her own privileged upbringing. Cousins her own age had little education.
“This trip to Kurdistan really triggered a change for me because I was exposed to how people were living. My cousins who were a similar ages to me had to drop out of school and get married at very young ages. There were very few people who could go on to university.”
After finishing high school in Auckland, one career advisor told Rez that given her refugee background she should lower her aspirations and not follow a career in law.
Luckily Rez ignored that advice.
“I was shocked to hear from so many other young refugees saying that they had similar experiences from career advisors that told them they were not good enough or that they should be more realistic in their planning.”
Rez points out that the right to an education is part of New Zealand’s bill of rights, but the access to higher education seemed to be blocked by other more subtle obstacles such as institutionalised racism.
“It’s all the barriers that prevent them from accessing that right.”
And Rez has proven her point by breaking down these barriers, she's just been accepted into Harvard University to do a Masters in Law.
It's a dream Rez's mother can finally see come to life through her daughter’s extraordinary achievements.
