Migration Story - Social Studies

It is 1856, My name is Jade Frost. I am 21 years old and I came from a small family with one sibling, Christopher Frost. My family is from London. In London, the houses were small, cramped and made of cheap materials. During rainy seasons, the roof of our house leaks and it always floods inside. Unsurprisingly, houses in London are built very close to each other due to overpopulation. Living in London was like hell, every day we suffer from pollution, overcrowding, and the environment there is unhygienic. People suffer from diseases such as cholera, typhus and typhoid, also the diseases in London spread really fast due to crowds of people being in a small space.

At a very young age, I started working to provide help for my family. I was given dangerous jobs with no safety precautions whatsoever. During that time, I didn’t know that the factories I worked for were exploiting children like me, paying us a very little amount of money. I worked my life until I turned 21. Whilst everyone was working, I was already walking home, wondering what I am going to eat for dinner. As I was walking, my life suddenly changed when I saw a poster. In the poster, it asked if people want to migrate to New Zealand to try and have a new and better life. After deciding to take the poster home, I showed it to my family. About three days trying to convince my family to migrate to New Zealand, my family decided we need to leave the country and start a new life in New Zealand.

After deciding we want to leave London for a better life, we packed our things and headed to the port. Surprisingly, the fare for the ship was only 10 pounds per person. Before boarding the ship with my family, I stopped for a second and thought about what our life is going to be like in New Zealand. When we finished sorting our stuff in the cabin, I immediately ran towards the deck and took a last, long gaze of the shore before going to the kitchen to eat some snacks. The food on the ship was sometimes delicious and sometimes it wasn’t. We were given muttons, fish, and sometimes pork. Not too often, we were given foods that are very hard to eat because some of them went bad during the voyage. The food given to us are often the same thing but it was on rotation. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday our meal would be the same, bread for breakfast, potatoes for lunch, and if we’re lucky we’d get pork for dinner instead of fish. For the other days, we’d get oatmeal, biscuits, and porridge.

After a month-long voyage, the ship my family and I were boarding finally anchored at the coast of New Zealand. Delighted by arriving in New Zealand, I quickly took my suitcase and got off the ship along with my family. Everything was different here in New Zealand, the land, the air, the environment. Within two hours, my family and I found a decent place to stay in. Before arriving, the road we drove to the house was filled with a spectacular landscape. About a week of being in New Zealand, I felt relieved that my family and I are now in a safe environment. Where there is free public health care, better jobs, no pollution, a cleaner environment, and children are given a chance to have an education. Unlike London, the population in New Zealand is also low, which means that there won’t be diseases spreading fast and that there won’t be overcrowding. Therefore for these reasons, I think that migrating in New Zealand was a good choice for us.