06/08/2026
MOTHERS OF NEW ZEALAND
Path: The Echo (Roots, Values & Intergenerational Legacy)
"A migrant girl left Peru, 17,000 km from home, for love. Eighteen years later, she's still in Christchurch, welcomed by a family that made her their own from day one.
She looked fine on the outside. Inside, nostalgia was quietly eating her alive until she had to leave NZ just to find herself again.
Life made her choose: Peru or New Zealand. She still chooses, every day. She still wonders, sometimes, if she made the right choice, if her children will carry a small Peru within them, living so far from home, in such a different world.
Then came Joaquín, and later Rafael, and everything shifted. Her nostalgia didn't disappear; it transformed. Into her grandma's recipes, her mum's flavours, her dad's ways of cooking, life lessons and more. All of it migrated with her, into her home, her children, her community.
What she knows for sure is that her family here in New Zealand has shaped her, just as much as she is shaping her own boys, through her childhood stories, her music, and especially her food, carried down from her mother's, her father's, and her grandparents' roots, passed on now in a home 17,000 km from where those roots began. And that, she knows, is more than enough.
Now she's the founder of My Cultura Peru: educating Kiwis about Peruvian food and culture, one dish at a time. Small project. But it's hers. And that changes everything. That is my story." C. Ohoka
