Bridget has been living in one of Compassion Housing’s units in Upper Hutt for almost eight years. “I’m on a pension, I was looking for affordable accommodation while I was taking care of my mother at the time.”
“My mother died two and a half years ago. She was 92 years old,” says Bridget, who recalls the relationship she and her mother formed years ago with the Sisters of Compassion.
“I used to live in Island Bay, where we also ran a dairy, and we used to go up to the Home of Compassion. There were children there, this is in the 1970s, and it was the orphanage. I remember we used to buy a big box of ice cream and cones and take them to the children and the sisters.”
“One day, a child asked me: ‘Have you seen my mother? I told him, ‘One day she will come’. It was so sad,” she recalls her visits to the orphanage at Our Lady’s Home of Compassion.
As fate would have it, she would later be the one to receive visits from the Sisters of Compassion in her current home. “I remember a very nice lady. Sometimes she came and stayed for an hour,” says Bridget.
At 74, she is happy to live in her quiet home which is well looked after by the management, and with many services such as pharmacies, supermarkets, and health services close by.