Jan Hugo: Today on The Relocated South African podcast, I’m joined by Jenny Forest Angel from Wellington in New Zealand. Someone who made one of the biggest life decisions possible: moving countries with young children long before it was easy to stay connected. Nearly 30 years later, her children are thriving, the family’s rooted, and she says she would do it all again. Welcome, Jenny.

Jenny Forest Angel: Hello.

Jan Hugo: Good to have you. So you moved to Wellington in 1997, you said, with a 20 month old and a three year old.

Jenny Forest Angel: Yes, I did. That’s right.

Jan Hugo: No internet, just the expense of phone calls and fax machines.

Jenny Forest Angel: And a fax machine, that’s right.

Jan Hugo: So what prompted the decision to immigrate in 1997?

Jenny Forest Angel: Well, we knew that it was going to be better for our children to move. We knew that it was quite possible that they wouldn’t have too much of a future left in South Africa. And the safety: we had five burglaries in between the time my younger son was born and when he was about 18 months old, 17 months old, and it just felt worse and worse and worse and worse.

My husband was contracting in South Africa and his contract was coming to an end. We’d looked at coming before my second son was born, we’d looked at the point situation: back then you had to get a particular number of points. I’ve got no idea what it’s like now, but anyway, we had to get a particular number of points and we’d considered it. Then our second son was born and we decided yes, we actually needed to start making plans. He was about six weeks old and I came home and I knew the burglars were inside my house.

So I drove out of the garage. I had a six week old and a 16, 17 month old in the back of the car. I drove out of the garage, I sat outside, I dialled the flying squad, and the reply was: ‘we’re too busy to take your call.’ I phoned my husband, we were in Johannesburg and he was in Randfontein, so a good half an hour away, and he arrived before the flying squad.

Jan Hugo: My word, okay, yeah.

Jenny Forest Angel: So that was kind of… at that point we already had the paperwork, because we had to work through the embassy in London. So we already had our paperwork in, and we just kept… we decided we were going to go. My parents said: ‘you have to get out, take your boys out.’ So we did that. So we arrived here.

Actually, my husband arrived at the beginning of July, I stayed behind and sold the house and got every last possession packed into a truck. What a mistake, I wouldn’t bring all that much stuff if I did that again.

Jan Hugo: That story comes up every time, everybody says the same. I think I’ve had one interview where somebody said they were happy to take their stuff, but everybody else has the same story.

Jenny Forest Angel: Yeah, and then we arrived here on the 31st of August 1997, and some people might remember it’s the day Diana died.

Jan Hugo: Wow, that’s amazing. Jenny, just take us back a little bit. So you said you were living in Johannesburg, in which part of Johannesburg were you? Okay, you also mentioned that you worked through the embassy in the UK. Is that the New Zealand embassy?

Jenny Forest Angel: Yeah, yeah, so we had to send all our paperwork to London. That’s what we did back then.

Jan Hugo: That is amazing. And if you think back now, obviously you left parents behind: did you leave siblings and other family behind?

Jenny Forest Angel: No siblings. My husband had his mom, brother, and sister in law in Durban. But I had no family other than my parents. But you know, we were the lucky ones, all right? We got here early and it wasn’t hard to bring parents across. So a year later, my parents followed.

Jan Hugo: Okay, that… I mean, that obviously makes a massive difference, because everybody talks about the reality of leaving family behind for a better future, for their children, and that is incredibly tough. So you were extremely lucky. And how did they adapt to living in New Zealand?

Jenny Forest Angel: Hard, very hard. It’s very hard to move. I keep having to work out how old they would have been: my mother would have been in her late sixties, and my father in his early seventies. Really hard to move at that age because you’re leaving everything behind, all your friends. But as my mother said to me: ‘it’s your family who buries you, not your friends.’

Jan Hugo: Wow, that’s a very good…

Jenny Forest Angel: And they struggled, they struggled. Look, we thought the exchange rate was terrible in those days: we were getting one New Zealand dollar to every three rand. Now it’s something like 11 to one. So of course they struggled to start with, but they soon found their place and settled down. They made a few friends. And my children, my two sons, just loved being with them, absolutely loved it. My parents would fetch them every afternoon after school, take them home, and then I’d come and fetch them later when I finished work.

Jan Hugo: My word, that was amazing. I think you are really lucky. There are so many conversations about how difficult it is leaving parents behind. Just from a financial perspective, I assume you and your husband had jobs, or was it easy to find work in New Zealand?

Jenny Forest Angel: It was, we were the lucky ones. Well, he was contracting in South Africa and his contract was coming to an end. He’d gone to his contracting house, the ones who employed him and sent him out to wherever he had to work, and he said: ‘I only want a contract for six months or whatever it was, because we’re going to New Zealand, we’ve been accepted.’ And of course we got permanent residence straight away.

So his contract was renewed for a while, but not many days later, somebody phoned really early in the morning in South Africa. My husband had already gone to work, and this man said he was phoning from New Zealand, from a contract house, and he wanted to speak to my husband to find out when he’d be arriving, because he wanted to offer him a job.

They had a conversation, and then we had a discussion, and I said to my husband: ‘look, a job in the hand is worth two at the employment agents, take the job.’ It wasn’t the best job, he was quite unhappy there and he didn’t stay very long, but he moved on to a much nicer working situation. And then we arrived two months later.

He bought a house for us, because I told him I wasn’t moving into rental accommodation, I wasn’t moving twice. So he bought a house for us and we lived there for just over three years, then bought a bigger house and moved on.

Jan Hugo: Awesome. And Jenny, when did the decision to bring your parents across happen? Straight away, before you left?

Jenny Forest Angel: Before we left, before we even left. Yeah, already then we were having conversations about it. And that was when my mother had said… because I mentioned to them about coming, and she had said: ‘yep, your friends won’t bury you, but your family would.’ So I already had the majority of the paperwork for them. And when we landed here, when the boys and I landed here, I had to fill in one more piece of paper. Then I sent all the paperwork to immigration here. That was in early September. And in fact, on the 15th of December that same year, 1997, which was my parents’ wedding anniversary, they got notification from the New Zealand government that they were being accepted as permanent residents.

Jan Hugo: That’s amazing, that’s a beautiful story.

Jenny Forest Angel: So, what was it: September, October, November, December. So less than four months after I sent the paperwork in, they got permanent residence, and then they arrived in early August 1998.

Jan Hugo: And Jenny, that first period, the first years, normally people say the first six months to a year is really hard on you. And practically, I would imagine in those days you didn’t have all these Facebook groups of people living in New Zealand connecting and helping. How hard was that?

Jenny Forest Angel: Very hard, because you don’t know the good areas to live, there’s no contact with people. I cried every day for the first three months that we were here, and I just cried because I didn’t know what kind of cheese to buy, I didn’t know what kind of laundry powder to buy. I always tell the story of our first Friday night here, where I went and bought fish and chips and made a complete mess of the order. Here, fish and chips is a scoop of chips. Now, I’m sorry, a scoop is ice cream, not chips. I was listening to all these people ordering two fish and a hot dog, and this and that, and five scoops, and I’m thinking, scoops? What? So I made a complete mess of the order. Walked out of the fish and chip shop sobbing, because I’d done such a stupid thing.

But it was really hard. Fax machine, Monday and Thursday morning, when the phone rang nobody answered it, because it was my parents sending a one page fax. And then I’d fax back after that, same thing. So all we had was a fax machine and expensive telephone calls, that’s all. No Facebook pages to say what’s the best cheese to buy, what’s the best baby formula to buy, nothing like that at all. You just got on and did it.

Jan Hugo: That’s amazing. Just again, back to your parents, in this four month period they had to pack up and sort their lives out. Were they on their own doing that? That must have been pretty tough for them as well.

Jenny Forest Angel: Yes, yep, and my mother did most of it because my poor father just didn’t feel capable of it. So she did it all. She worked, she must have worked so hard, because they would have been in that house for about 40 years and he had a garage full of tools and this, that, and the next thing, but she did it.

And when they arrived, it was just so exciting, because now the boys were four and two and a half. We had to go to the airport. My husband bought a car here when he landed, but we also sent one of our cars from South Africa. Never again, I’d never send a car, ever, ever, ever. So we had to go to the airport to fetch them in two cars. I bought a little bunch of flowers for my one son to give my mother, and a bag of chocolate covered ginger for the other son to give to my father. My father and that son and my husband were in the same car, and my younger son was so excited about his Oupa being here that apparently he was throwing this chocolate ginger like confetti in the back of the car.

Jan Hugo: That’s a beautiful story, my word, that is amazing. Just last question around the parents: financially, it is expensive to immigrate, and they were basically retired. How hard was that? Were they okay financially to come and live there and make a new life?

Jenny Forest Angel: Well, my dad had a very, very good pension from South African Railways, so they got that here. After they had been here for a good number of years, I want to say five or ten but I can’t remember, they then qualified for the New Zealand Superannuation. That really helped them. I mean, no one can actually live on the superannuation alone, but with the pension they were getting from South Africa and the superannuation, they were fine. They weren’t rich, but as my mother said to me: ‘we don’t have to travel anymore.’ We travelled a lot after my dad retired, they did a lot of travelling around the world, and she said: ‘we’re here, we’re here for our grandchildren, and you, and you too.’ So they were very happy to be here.

Jan Hugo: Okay. And the children, you said they were happy with your parents there. Did they adapt very well to life in New Zealand?

Jenny Forest Angel: My children, absolutely. I mean, they were little when we got here, so of course they started school here and just went through the school system. My oldest son went to uni straight after school and did an actuarial science degree, and he ended up winning the prize for the top actuarial student. My youngest son took a while to sort out what he wanted to do, but after a while he decided he wanted to go to uni and ended up with a master’s degree in some really complicated topic that please don’t even ask me about, because it’s way over my head. They’ve both got very good jobs now, one’s married, the other one’s getting married, wonderful young women, and everyone, we’re all settled and happy here. They’ve both got houses here.

Jan Hugo: Excellent. What do you think was the key to having success in New Zealand? You said the first three months you cried every day, but what do you think made it work in the end?

Jenny Forest Angel: Don’t give up. Just don’t give up. We’d made our decision, and hard as it was, you just have to not give up. You just have to face each day. I decided after three months I was going to put green stars on the calendar every day that I didn’t cry. Why green? Because I only had a green highlighter, that’s all. And it was actually wonderful watching the green stars become more frequent on the calendar than just blank spaces. I reckon it took about 18 months to finally settle down and be comfortable here. I wouldn’t go back. I’m here, I’m a Kiwi, I’m here, not moving. And I’d do it all again.

Jan Hugo: Yeah. And you said it took 18 months: after the expiry of the 18 months, did it then start feeling like home, this is where I’m staying?

Jenny Forest Angel: I just felt like, financially, we started being on a little bit of an easier footing, because you move this far away and you have to replace everything: the bottle of oil, every last spice that you had, that came from South Africa, and you’re used to making bobotie with all those different spices, every single one had to be replaced. It’s expensive, it’s expensive to start again, it really, really is.

So after about 18 months I just felt we were financially starting to cope, finding our way around. I got a very funny job about a year after we got here. I ended up working for a marketing company, and I had to go around all the big supermarkets and petrol stations in the Greater Wellington region and count how many rows of particular brand biscuits and particular brand chippies, and measure on the shelf how much space they had and how much the competitors had, and then come home and do a big percentage calculation. It was a fantastic job because I had to find my way around the Greater Wellington region with a paper map, no Google Maps. That made me become very aware of where we were in Wellington, the Greater Wellington region, I saw places that I didn’t know. So it meant that we as a family could then go and see these places as well. Sometimes I took my parents and my children with me when I was doing a job, especially if we were going somewhere where there was going to be a beach, I’d take them with me, I’d go and do my job, my parents would entertain the boys, and then we’d go and have a picnic on the beach. It was a fantastic job, it was just so low paid. But what I learned about Wellington and finding my way around was fantastic. So you just take everything offered to you, so you can find your way around and learn things.

Jan Hugo: Yeah, yeah, sometimes I think South Africans have some pride in saying ‘I can’t do that job, that’s beneath me,’ and you can’t do that overseas, when you leave you have to do that, absolutely. Yeah, I can imagine meeting people, it must have been really interesting.

Jenny Forest Angel: No, yep, it was a rather fun job actually, talking to people, because people in the shops would want to know what I was doing, and I’d explain to them what I was doing.

Jan Hugo: That’s amazing. Jenny, obviously this is almost an obvious answer, but if you think back, say you’d stayed in South Africa, you wouldn’t have had this outcome, I assume.

Jenny Forest Angel: I’m not sure my boys would have been accepted into uni. They may have. They might have decided they would have had better opportunities overseas and one could have gone east and one could have gone west, and then what? Yeah, I’m never sorry, I’m never sorry we made the decision. As hard as it was in the beginning, I’m not ever sorry.

Jan Hugo: That’s excellent. Yeah, one cannot have regrets about these things, that’s a big thing. I have to ask the question: you’re a Kiwi, but are you an All Black or Springbok supporter?

Jenny Forest Angel: I’m an All Black supporter. Go the mighty All Blacks!

Jan Hugo: Okay, so you’re a proper Kiwi. Even if they play against the Boks?

Jenny Forest Angel: Yep, yep. Well, funny story: we had the World Cup here in 2011, and I was determined I wanted to go for the atmosphere. A colleague of mine was very into rugby, so as soon as the tickets opened I was online to book, and I didn’t even know who I’d booked for, didn’t even know who was playing, and I discovered later it was South Africa against Fiji. I booked the cheapest seats I possibly could. Some months later, whoever was selling the tickets came back to me and said: ‘no, you can’t have those tickets, they’re terrible, you won’t see anything, so we’re actually upgrading you.’ What happened was we sat in the middle, just below the coaches’ box. My colleague came, we both found South African shirts from somewhere. Kiwi as she is, she learned the national anthem, and there we stood, the two of us, singing both the New Zealand national anthem and the South African national anthem in all the languages.

Jan Hugo: Wow, there you go, that is just absolutely…

Jenny Forest Angel: It was fun. We’ve had fun. We’ve done some fun things here.

Jan Hugo: And friends: did you meet a lot of South Africans, or mostly New Zealand friends?

Jenny Forest Angel: It’s quite hard to make friends when you’re older, and people came here and then sometimes they went to Australia or moved to a different part of New Zealand and you lose contact. I’ve got friends here, it’s great, I see them, my children are here.

Jan Hugo: Okay, a lot of South Africans call it a soft landing because they meet other South Africans. But my view is that the fact that a person has immigrated and comes from the same country doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be friends with them, because people have different values. Would you agree with that?

Jenny Forest Angel: Absolutely, absolutely. And that happens, you meet people, especially when you first arrive, and think ‘they’re South African, I’ve got to be friends with them.’ And then you realise your values don’t align, that you don’t have much in common, and so you just drift apart. I think that happens normally, but you don’t have to be friends just because they’re South African.

Jan Hugo: Yeah, great. Jenny, you said you’d do it all again. You’ve mentioned the car and the furniture, what would you have done differently knowing what you know now?

Jenny Forest Angel: The car would have been left behind. The huge eight seater oak dining room table would have been left behind. We didn’t bring any beds with us, we bought all new beds here.

Jan Hugo: And when your parents moved shortly after you, did they make the same mistake, did they also bring their stuff, or did they sell everything and start afresh?

Jenny Forest Angel: They bought some stuff, some stuff they brought. A fair amount was stuff that was my grandparents’ and my great grandparents’, like that dining room table, it had a leaf in it which my son now has at his house. Did they bring beds? I can’t remember. They did bring their lounge furniture, but it was smaller than what they got, stuff that they brought with them. They only brought one suite, because at their house in South Africa they had two dining room suites, because they had two areas. They left a lot behind as well. They bought a lot here: a new washing machine, a new TV. Don’t bring the TV. They bought a new washing machine, tumble dryer, TV, and two recliner chairs, not actual La-Z-Boys, they bought that here. They bought a lot when they came here, they didn’t bring very much at all.

Jan Hugo: Jenny, one of the things we always talk about is that some people probably shouldn’t immigrate, because we hear so many stories. The South African press loves to talk about South Africans who have gone back from overseas and it didn’t work for them. But what would you say is the personality trait that makes immigration successful? What do you need?

Jenny Forest Angel: You have to be prepared to stick it out, to face the hard times head on. You have to be prepared to adapt. Nothing’s like where you were, you have to change. You have to be prepared to adapt. I mean, your deep down values aren’t going to change, but you have to be accepting of different kinds of people, accepting of the fact that they do things differently here, you can’t do it the same way anymore. When I was very concerned about my children going to school when they were five years old, because in South Africa they went to school at seven, my mother said to me: ‘you can’t swim upstream.’ And that’s so true. You have to do it like they do it here. My children went through the whole school system, they were absolutely fine, they got into uni, they were like everybody else, everybody else was learning the same. You have to adapt, you have to be prepared to accept that things are not the same as they were, they’re not going to be the same as they were. Just go with the flow. It’s like a big rock on the beach, and the sea is coming in, and the rock is there, and the waves just flow over the rock, they’re not killing the rock, they’re not doing anything like that. The rock is just taking it. Just take it as it comes, and stand firm.

Jan Hugo: I always say don’t look over your shoulder the whole time. If you say ‘if it doesn’t work out I’m going to go back,’ then you will go back. So that mustn’t even be in your thoughts.

Jenny Forest Angel: As we left South Africa, as that plane took off, I knew that we were here, and we were here to stay.

Jan Hugo: Just a question: you talked about the burglaries and so on, everybody’s got reasons why they leave. How long did it take you guys to feel safe and adapt to not having to worry about safety? Because for us, that’s still a big thing after six years overseas.

Jenny Forest Angel: It’s hilarious, because the houses in New Zealand are usually not brick. My husband always used to say: ‘it doesn’t matter, you can just take a screwdriver and get into the house,’ well, not quite. But when we walked out of the airport I could feel the safety in the air, I could just feel it. It was one of those things. I always used to laugh at my neighbours when we moved into our first house, and she’d say to me: ‘when you go out you must close the windows, because otherwise people might come in the windows.’ And I used to think that’s hilarious, just leave the window open, they’ll think you’re there, it doesn’t matter, because there were no security doors on the windows, no security bars on the windows, no security bars on the doors. That was it. People would leave their shoes outside and the shoes stayed there forever. If kids left toys on the front grass, they were there the next morning.

Jan Hugo: A lot of people in Australia and New Zealand, because the weather is similar to South Africa, talk about kids being able to play in the front yard, walking to school, having no fear. It doesn’t mean there’s no crime, but having no fear is so, so valuable. That is amazing.

Jenny Forest Angel: Yep. When we went back to South Africa in 2001 for my mother in law’s funeral, my kids could not get over how many doors had to be locked and unlocked every time you came in somewhere. They wanted to go to the park and couldn’t, because at our first house here we had a park just down the road, and there were lots of little boys in the neighbourhood. It was fantastic, all these little boys, there was one rule they had: if we change place we have to tell her. So they’d be playing at this house, then they’d move to the next house, they’d have to come and tell me, they went to the park altogether, they had to come and tell me they were down in the park.

Jan Hugo: That is absolutely priceless. And Jenny, if someone is now sitting on the fence in South Africa thinking about immigrating with young children, what would you tell them?

Jenny Forest Angel: You’ve got to do it for the right reasons. You have to be certain it’s what you want to do. You have to be prepared to make a go of it. I think the younger your children are when you come here, the better for them, but it doesn’t matter, because I’ve seen teenage South African kids arrive and they thrive. People have to be prepared to do it and work hard at settling down, discover the country. Every holiday, and sometimes on long weekends, we’d go and see the country. My children have seen the country from top to bottom.

Jan Hugo: That is very important. I think the one thing I know is that today it’s very difficult for older people to move to Australia and New Zealand, because the immigration laws have changed. So I think that’s probably the biggest thing, where you had such a massive advantage being able to have your parents there.

Jenny Forest Angel: Yes, yes, absolutely, like I say, we were the lucky ones. We came in with permanent residence, there was no minimum salary or anything like that. As we landed at the airport they stuck our permanent residence visas into our passports. My parents were the same. We were lucky, we came here early. We came here in 1997, that’s nearly 30 years ago, and it was much easier. We were lucky.

Jan Hugo: Yeah. I think maybe getting to the end now, one of the things you said in our communication is that your parents are now buried not far from where you live. And maybe that’s what shaped your life in New Zealand, the fact that they were so close to you, and you had them till the end.

Jenny Forest Angel: Certainly, it helped with my children. It’s always great for kids to grow up with their grandparents. My mother was a very tenacious person, she never gave up. People say I’m very similar to her, stubborn, I won’t give up. So maybe it was just genetic, I don’t know, because she wasn’t giving up here either. They could have gone back, because it was hard for them, it was very hard for them, and I know that. Don’t give up, just keep going, it’s going to get better.

Jan Hugo: I’m so pleased for you that things have worked out so well. Thank you.

Jenny Forest Angel: Thank you. Thank you.

Jan Hugo: And to our listeners, if this episode resonated with you, please share it. And if you’d like more episodes, find The Relocated South African on your favourite platform or on our website, therelocatedsouthafrican.com. Until next time.

This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI and checked for accuracy.