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William: New Zealand won’t let him in, so he goes to Mexico to surf.
All my nephew William wants to do is go home. He can not. He is my namesake and my nephew. The child can cook. He is from New Zealand, but spends every six months as a private chef on the east coast. “When I left New Zealand in early June,” he says, “I had no reason to believe that I would not be able to re-enter, do that and do my two weeks in isolation.”
But the way this year turned out, he doubts he’ll ever leave. For starters, this time around his wife Sarah and 17-year-old daughter Grace stayed in New Zealand while he closed his contract. After five months, he tried to go home, but in a legally questionable move, the New Zealand government said no (although a citizen’s right of return is widely recognized). They put in place a quarantine system that limited incoming arrivals to the number of beds available – in tranches of 3,000 to be drawn through a lottery. Like everyone else, William sees months, possibly years, before his numbers are known. “We had another lottery last week,” he says. “I had a chance of maybe 1 in 10. There was 3000 between me and the winners.”
William is slim, fit, a fanatical skier and surfer, and is fortunate that his employers let him renew his contract. When the New Zealand government told him he could not come home, he did not face the money and family crisis faced by many of the 17-30,000 New Zealanders currently waiting at the gates.
Still, “It’s a strange thing to be told you can’t go home,” he says. “I’m entering my fifth month without my wife and daughter. If you only knew that a certain day was the day you would go home, you could say, ‘Folks, let’s just stay at this point and we’ll be fine.’ But it feels bad in this completely open situation. “
He says that when he talks to his friends here in America about the Great Kiwi Shut-Out, they get angrier than anyone else. “You know how Americans feel about individual rights. You can’t even fathom this thing! And I get that across the social spectrum of the people I know. I am a happy man. I have wonderful, wonderful friends in the States. I’ve been working here for a long time. And I have a great community and community support. I’ll take a trip to the south of the border, surf and wait! I’m not on Struggle Street. Not like some people who are in dire straits waiting to get home. I am not penniless, lonely. Yes, pending in a way, but I have a lot of loving people here. You are like my family. “
So what is he looking forward to the most? “Cuddle with my wife and child. I miss being with my family. And a good paua party [abalone], that’s for sure.”
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