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Home-tutor schemes are short of 1100 volunteers to help new immigrants learn English.
The English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) home-tutor schemes marked International Volunteer Day yesterday with a call for 262 volunteers in Auckland, 272 in Wellington and smaller numbers in other centres to match a waiting list of 1100 would-be English speakers.
Tutors like Beach Haven nurse Jana Harrison, who takes her 2-year-old son Finn with her, spend an hour and a bit each week with their students with no payment except the satisfaction of helping another person.
"Previously, I was working three days a week, now I only do one day a week, so I had more spare time and thought it would be something I'd be interested to do," she says.
After six weeks, she is "enjoying it. It was a bit daunting at the first lesson. I thought, 'I don't think I'm qualified to do this'." But she has now established a pattern of conversation, lesson and more conversation.
Her student, mother of four Venasi Barumpozako Nabatesi, 28, fled her home in Burundi after a civil war started in 1993 and has been isolated at home with young children since arriving here last year.
Although her husband, Gerard, is studying English at Auckland University of Technology, Mrs Nabatesi has had only three years of schooling and her children have had none, all having been born in a Tanzanian refugee camp.
Until Ms Harrison came along, Mrs Nabatesi was enrolled in a social English group at the Birkdale Community Centre, one of about 200 groups established around the country to fill a gap left by the shortage of one-on-one tutors.
Chief executive Claire Szabo Larsen said the ESOL schemes had had to prioritise applicants, giving top priority to refugees (a quarter of the 3000 students) and to people who could not get to more formal English classes.
North Shore co-ordinator Birgit Grafarend-Watungwa said volunteer training courses were run four or five times a year. The next course starts in February.
