26 June 2022
Stanmore Bay’s Man Nghi Luong is being recognised at this year’s Long Service Awards for 10 years’ service.
When Man Nghi Luong takes her position behind the counter at the Whangaparaoa Hospice Shop every Wednesday she has one thing on her mind: “To make as much money as I can for Hospice.”
The 59-year-old businesswoman decided many years ago that she would volunteer and “give back” to her community after she and her family entered the country as refugees in 1979.
The family had fled Cambodia, where more than a million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge communist regime during its brutal rule from 1975 to 1979.
Man Nghi was only 16 years old when she and her family arrived in Aotearoa. They’d spent the last six months in a refugee camp in Malaysia and before that they’d "hidden” in Vietnam, where Man Nghi’s parents were originally from. She felt scared and vulnerable, but also overwhelmingly grateful that she, her parents and two younger brothers were being given a “second chance” by the New Zealand Government.
“I will never forget how good New Zealand was to us,” she says. “We spent a month in a refugee hostel in Mangere then the Anglican Church in Hamilton gave us a fully-furnished house and our first two weeks’ rent.
“We moved in on Saturday and my mother and father started new jobs on Monday – Mum pressing clothes and my father in printing. They gave us bikes to ride to work and school and we worked very hard. We had zero, we didn’t speak English.”
Fast forward 43 years and Man Nghi is proud of how far she and her family have come. “We’ve never had to draw on the unemployment benefit,” she says. In fact, Man Nghi, who worked for many years in sales for Thai Airways, now runs a successful travel brokerage business, Aspire Travel Group. She shares a beautiful home in Stanmore Bay with her husband of 20 years and is a doting stepmother to three now-adult children.
Man Nghi began volunteering for hospice 10 years ago after opening her letterbox and noticing a large Harbour Hospice advertisement asking for volunteers in her local newspaper, which fell to her feet, ad side up.
“I took that as a sign,” she says. “This came to me. I didn’t have to search for it. It felt like it was meant to be.”
Two months after she started the shop burned to the ground when a mattress, stacked outside the shop, caught fire. But it didn’t deter her. “We found new premises and carried on.”
She loves her role and takes every opportunity to upsell to customers who speak Vietnamese, Cantonese or Mandarin by speaking to them in their language. “They love it,” she laughs.
We need more volunteers in our shops! If you’d like to join the team at your local hospice shop please chat to the manager in store, or click here to send us your details and our Volunteer Services Team will be in contact.
