Families in crisis this Christmas
These are our clients, the people you help us support. They are just a few of the hundreds and thousands of people we will be caring for over the Christmas season. These stories are real. We are here for Christchurch people who need us, and we will always will be. Thank you for being with us on this journey.
Can I ask something,” says Dianne.
The 57-year-old has been talking for an hour, willingly sharing her story to help us at the City Mission tell our story of how we help families.
“Are there other people like me? Am I the only one?” she asks.
She is told there are thousands like her. The City Mission sees many, many families which are struggling under a burden of debt and depression. No, she is not alone and she’s not a failure.
And Dianne starts crying.
Most of our City Mission clients will tell you that falling into long-term extreme debt isn’t about simply waking up one morning and staring at the wall, wondering where the money will come from.
It is often a long, grinding process of becoming more and more vulnerable as financial resilience fades. It can include denial, pleading, shame, fear and self-loathing.
This stripping away of dignity takes a heavy toll and when the family incudes children, the damage can go wide and deep because children take it personally when parents are stressed and not coping.
We are seeing more families in desperate need of help who are failing to cope as the economic impact of Covid rolls across the country. Jobs are being lost at the same time as the cushioning of Covid benefits and subsidies is ending.
This glimpse of what Dianne and other clients are facing in the lead-up to Christmas shows why the City Mission is so important to Christchurch for the work we do.
Dianne is a trying to look after a granddaughter and an adult child, while suffering from enormous debt from loans to help support family members and she has significant mental health problems.
Many people like Dianne look like they are coping but they are overwhelmed and are slowly sinking into despair and shame.
“I’m usually a strong person. I played sport until I was 40. But I found myself this person who would be just sitting there talking about paying a bill and start crying and crying,” Dianne says.
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Craig is in his 30s and has been in fulltime work since he was 18.
When the Covid lockdown hit, work at his factory stopped and it never came back.
The bills continue and his cupboards are empty for complex reasons. Food worries have joined a long list of worries for him, including uncertainty about the future and how he will cope.
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Sarah rang us. “I don’t normally ask for help, but I have no food in the house and I don’t even have toilet paper,” she said. Her husband was sick in hospital. Her elderly parents were living with her and so were four children. Her car needed $1500 worth of work to get a WOF.
“I just don’t know what to do. I have got nothing. For me to ask for help has taken me a lot of effort. I don’t know what to do.”
One of our social workers called in to see how she was going, and a food parcel went in the car with him.
Later Sarah rang back saying: “Thank you, thank you, you don’t know how much this means to me.”
It was heartwarming how we could make a difference for this worried woman.
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Andrew is a father of five kids. He last came for help to the City Mission in January 2018. Now he is back. He’s a handyman who works on the fringes of the economy, doing whatever he can to get by.
His family is supported by a benefit that helped cover power and rent and his wages paid for the food and other costs.
But the work has disappeared and so have his savings. He’s exhausted all his means. He got the help and appreciated it.
We are seeing new people and people we haven’t seen for a while and this shows us the economic pain is going deep.