Westfield Albany -Temepara George!

Note: This was written on Wednesday so if I wrote “yesterday”, you know I mean Tuesday…Confused? because I am.

Last week some time, Aunty Swee invited me to collect donations at Albany Westfield for Autism House New Zealand. I gladly accepted because this would be my first time seriously doing some charity! There was going to be a performance by Geoff Sewell who is a singer (no idea who he is) and I was even more excited when she told me we would meet Temepara George and Stefano Oliveri (from Dancing with the Stars 2008)!!! So after a 1/2 hour drive to Albany yesterday, we went to the foodcourt to get a bit of lunch and then walked infront of Pascoes where the performance was to take place! AND right infront of us were the celebrities themselves. Temepara & Stefano were just standing there and no one had noticed them because they were dressed so casually. I calmly pointed this out to Aunty Swee who went into a “Oh My God! Where is my pen??” Temepara and Stefano looked at us, smiling as always while Aunty brought out 2 pictures of them she had printed off in the morning. They asked to look at the photo and commented on how nice they looked. We told them we’d look for them later because we forgot our pen. And that was phase 1 of our brush with celebrities for the day!

After that excitement, we went to Columbus to look for the other collectors. Aunty Swee’s boss gave us these T-Shirts which were pretty cool and this is the back view of it!

We were handed a donation bucket each where we were to walk around
collecting the money. This painting was on display. It will be auctioned off at the Manukau Westfield on Friday where it’s expected to be sold for $10000!!!

Unfortunately, while we were collecting, we were too far back to
watch Geoff sing and Temepara & Stefano dance… but we got these photos with them!

Aunty Swee asked me if there was any way to edit Stefano and Temepara into the same picture. It looks pretty bad but hey, my digital editing skills aren’t THAT great yet!

This is Geoff Sewell. We caught him while he was packing up and ready to go home

Signing autographs!

Me with Stefano & Temepara

A scanned picture of their autographs!

Okay, after some time collecting money (believe me, it is not easy collecting money. It’s really hard when the people have their backs to you and it’s even harder to go up to a stranger asking them to give money to you. Sometimes when you ask someone, they’ll just respond “I gave some to the other collector” Just great.)

So, afterwards we went back to Columbus and got a frappe and took a drive back to Auckland.

Overall, it was a great experience and I’d do it again any day!