The name Kusitina Colailgo in Fijian must mean one big welcome, wellbeing hug. 

Well, that’s what it means in Central Otago.

If there’s an initiative out there helping and connecting local Pasifika then ‘Tina’, as she’s known, has probably launched it.

She’s spearheaded many groups and events aimed at enlightening and celebrating Central Otago’s Pasifika community, always with her jovial laugh thrown in.

From workshops at REAP and ‘How to Buy a House in New Zealand’ seminars to Pacific Island-style Zumba classes and the Central Otago Multicultural Festival, Tina assures: “main motivation is people’s wellbeing. 

“The connections are important too.”

Tina at the Pasifika Central Otago Zumba.

Not surprising then that last year she was invited to be a panellist for the first ever Central Otago ‘Inspiring Wāhine’ event - she is one.

A kind of Mother Teresa to the migrants, Tina just notices needs. 

“I met some of the orchard workers from Vanuatu at the local Baptist Church about 2007 and they were wearing Island clothes, and said, ‘Yeah, we get really cold’,” she says. 

“I discovered they couldn’t eat a lot of the food here either and were living off bread and tinned fish,” she says.

“My cousin and I went down to the Oasis store and got them heaps of clothes for $20 on $2 bag day.

“We told our boss at Hintons Orchard we had to leave for a while ‘to help the Vanuatu guys’.” Confused, he said, ‘But they don’t work for me’, to which Tina insisted she had to go regardless. 

“I’ve always been like that, having to ensure that everybody’s taken care of,” she chuckles.

Tina, right, with Jo Ennion - community advocate for RSE workers.jpeg

That was her motivation behind launching Pasifika Central Otago.

“Pasifika people here need a place to belong where it’s ok to ‘be who you are – a Pacific person’,” Tina says. 

“Some of them have been here for years. I make sure they get to taste food from back home and look after their welfare,” she says. 

“I can ask questions that no-one else can as I’m from the Pacific.”

Tina believes everyone has ‘a job to do in this world’. “I just seem to find myself in these places. I’m authentic. What you see is what you get. I can never not be a Fijian woman.”

Tina, second right, front row, with the Fijian ladies meeting with the Ministry of Pacific People in Queenstown.

She admits she used to find it hard to accept her true identity. 

“I still sometimes stare in the mirror at my brown face and say, ‘I need to embrace this person’.”

It’s hardly surprising that this has been a challenge for Tina. 

She recounts painful memories of how nuns and teachers at her Catholic boarding school, where she was sent from age seven on another island away from her village, would punish the children for speaking in their native tongue in the playgrounds.

“It was all about learning English and they said, ‘This is the person you should be’. We were brought up to be proper little English girls. I wouldn’t look in the mirror for years and that was a big part of it,” she says.

As an adult living in Mosgiel Tina was asked if she’d had ‘allocution lessons’ as she spoke English so well. “I said, ‘Oh, that sounds painful. What’s that?’” she chuckles. 

“We just had to read for the nuns who were our English teachers.

“At high school if we spoke Fijian or the Indian girls spoke Hindi in the school grounds they’d put chili on the tip of our tongues.”

Tina, far right, with classmates during her third form year at Wairiki Junior Secondary School in Taveuni, Fiji.

However, a lovely Australian teacher, whose husband had arrived to manage Travelodge, would change all that.

“This lady gave me a love of English words. There were about three dictionaries in our whole class. I loved reading them and finding out the meaning.”

In the holidays on her home island - Vanua Levu, Tina was free, but everyone pitched in to help cut coconuts, collecting copra which her parents sold in town.

Sadly, Tina’s mum got cancer, hospitalised a lot in her fifth form year, the family staying at her uncles during these times.

Tina, right, with two of her grandkids, watching another family member compete.

An obedient student, Tina unfortunately got expelled for joining a dormitory strike. 

“My sister’s husband was assistant secretary of the Mineworkers Union, so I said, ‘We need a placard’, which we made from cardboard saying, ‘We are on strike’ and stuck on the school gate,” Tina laughs.

She successfully hid it from her mum for some time but island news travels fast. 

Tina ended up helping nurse her mother but missed the academic career that her sisters had before her.

“I stayed home helping until Mum and Dad died.”

Tina with Pau one of the babies in the new Pasifika Playgroup and Language Nest in Central Otago.

After a stint nannying for her sister in Suva, that sister - a physio, invited her to New Zealand where she was doing post graduate studies on a scholarship. 

“I’d never been on a big plane or had a passport! I was 23.”

She learned beekeeping from a beekeeper in Mosgiel who became her husband.

They eventually parted ways, Tina remarrying in 2009 after teaming up with her current husband while back in Fiji for her son’s wedding.

Tina, now a columnist for the Central Otago News, studied for a while and worked at Family Start in Dunedin, then Otago Pacific People’s Health Trust, Hawksbury Community Living Trust and as an IHC caregiver.

She then moved to Alexandra in 2006 to support extended family arriving on new seasonal worker visas just passed by Parliament and ended up working at Hintons Orchard herself.

By 2022 in the aftermath of the impact of Covid Tina was at a public Central Otago District Council community funding meeting. 

“I made my husband come along and I stood up and said: ‘We don’t have an organisation for Pasifika people, but I think there should be one’.” 

She handpicked her helpers and the day of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral they welcomed Pasifika families from all over Central Otago - Queenstown Lakes to Alpha Street Park for a barbecue and celebration.

Tina, far left, with the other initial Pacific Trust Otago staff.

Then in December everyone from seasonal workers to the Minister for Pacific Peoples came to a pre-Christmas celebration. 

“People are so far from their families, and they get homesick, so we said bring a dance and some food,” Tina says.

Pasifika Central Otago is now firmly meshed into the fabric of the local community, Tina and her joyous laughter always close by.