Overview
July, 2023
Arya Naidu is fourteen years old, and lives with her parents Vijay and Archana in Auckland. She has one older sister, Aanya.
School
Arya attends St Cuthbert’s College, a private girl’s school in Epsom. She studies French and Business in addition to the compulsory subjects of Maths, Science, English, Social Studies, and Physical Education. She also does rotations each term of Worldviews, Careers, and Technology. Next year, in Year 11, Arya is planning on taking Year 12 Calculus, English with Writing, all three sciences, French, and History. She doesn’t like Maths very much, as she is taking a year above maths and finds it quite difficult. Her favourite subjects are French and English. Arya has won an academic award every year.
St Cuthbert’s has dropped NCEA Level 1 and are doing their own Year 11 diploma to help students get more prepared for NCEA Level 2 and International Baccalaureate qualifications. The diploma involves an altered curriculum and a service component, and students are required to have an attendance record of 95% in order to achieve it.
Arya wears a uniform at school but would rather wear her own clothes. She loves non-uniform days. Arya likes the Junior Uniform and is excited to wear the Senior Academy uniform, as she will progress into Year 11 which is a longer tartan skirt with a white blouse. Arya will be able to wear one pair of earrings to school and in Year 13 will be able to wear her hair out. The school is quite strict about how you wear the uniform.
Initially Archana and Vijay chose St Cuthbert’s College for Aanya, their older daughter, and Arya joined her sister there. They asked Arya to try the school out, and if she did not like it, she had the option of going to a co-ed school. But Arya loves going to St Cuths and feels that it is a good learning environment for her.
Transition to high school
Arya started at St Cuthbert’s in Year 7, and because she remained at the same school for the transition to high school in Year 9, it wasn’t too big of an adjustment. Arya says she has learnt quite a bit about herself since starting at St Cuthbert’s, and has closer, better friendships now. She also has more a lot more schoolwork, and therefore more stress.
In Year 7, all the new girls sat together so it was easy to make friends. The school was good at helping students get to know each other, and the students’ core classes and home room classes were all Year 7 only. In Years 8-13, they have a tutor class with students from a range of year levels (vertical learning). The older students give younger students advice and tell them what to do. Arya likes the vertical classes because it gives her the chance to get to know and interact with older students. She has made some very good friends in her tutor class.
Other activities
After school, Arya does debating, choir, St John’s, and Speech and Drama. She started debating last year and is a good third speaker.
On the weekends, Arya likes hanging out with her friends, sometimes at the mall in Newmarket, at a restaurant, or at someone’s house. When she is with her friends Arya likes going out to lunch or dinner. They sometimes like to get dressed up and put on makeup to go somewhere nice.
Arya loves reading. She used to be into dystopian and mystery books but now reads a range of genres. Some of Arya’s favourite books are Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Song of Achilles, The Outsiders and A Little Life. She gets recommendations from friends and teachers. Archana would like her to read more non-fiction. Arya dislikes graphic novels. She prefers to read physical books, which she sometimes buys, but usually borrows from friends or from the library. She also sometimes reads online, as the school has an ebook library subscription.
Arya has been in an Indian dance group, Desibeat, since she was 8 years old. It is a Bollywood class, and they learn three songs each term. They compete in a Diwali competition in Term 3, and in Term 4 they perform in a showcase with all streams in the dance school, which Archana is in too as she is in the Ladies group. Arya is in the intermediate group. She used to also do traditional dance, Bharatanatyam, but she didn’t enjoy that as much.
Arya is learning French and can understand Fiji Hindi as they speak it around the house (with English). She has been chosen to go to France for a school trip in July 2024, which she is very excited about.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic Arya had travelled to Thailand, Bali, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore, and visited her grandparents and other family in Fiji. She had also been to the Gold Coast and Brisbane a couple of times.
Arya is doing the Duke of Edinburgh programme and has a volunteering job at Mercy Hospice for 3 hours every week. This involves working at the till, tidying the store, helping organise donations, and helping customers. For the Bronze Duke of Edinburgh award, Arya had to do an adventurous journey (Kahunui), learn a skill (reading), do some volunteering (Mercy Hospice), and exercise (dance). She isn’t into sports that much, but did play hockey, netball, and tennis.
Arya loves to go out for dinner and her favourite cuisine is Italian food. At home, her family eats a range of different foods such as pastas, curries, stir-fries and more. She has a sweet tooth and loves chocolate.
Clothes
Arya usually wears tank tops with jeans or shorts and often shops at Glassons and Cotton On. She also goes to Dressmart for shopping sprees with her sister. Arya likes to wear nice dresses and skirts as well.
She doesn’t usually wear make-up, although sometimes she will do her lashes and put on lip gloss. That said, she does have a lot of makeup which she uses for dance shows and special occasions.
Money
Arya has a debit card and will usually get a bit of money when she goes shopping. She is expected to do jobs around the house without getting money in return. She also has savings and is a good saver - she doesn’t like to spend too much. If she is going to make a big purchase she will tell her parents first. The girls’ grandmother does like to spoil them and gives them money when she is here.
Digital Technologies
Arya got her first cell phone, an Oppo, towards the end of Year 6 (2019). During the 2022 lockdown this phone broke, and she got the iPhone 13 when it came out, which she uses to text a lot. She doesn’t use Tiktok (her mum doesn’t want her to have it), but she was allowed to join Instagram when she turned 14 and now uses it a lot. She also uses Snapchat. Arya isn’t into gaming, but she does sometimes play games on her phone, such as Crossy Road.
She uses Pinterest to look at photos and has pinned lots of photos of things she wants to do and experience in her life. She uses Viber to talk to her grandma who lives in Fiji.
At school Arya uses a laptop – a MacBook – which she needs for every class. The family had to buy it for school. In Years 7-9 she used an iPad.
Arya loves her phone and her air pods, which she stole from her sister. The air pods have Aanya’s name engraved on them because they were originally bought as a birthday present to her. She uses Spotify to listen to music and likes a lot of different artists including Billie Eilish and Harry Styles.
Arya streams TV and movies. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is her favourite show. She also likes Stranger Things, which Arya, Aanya and Archana first watched in the Covid-19 lockdown. The family like to watch things together, and if the girls want to watch something, they usually have to let Archana know.
Covid-19
The year Arya started at St Cuthberts, New Zealand went into its first lockdown, which she found scary, as she hadn’t fully settled into her new school yet. She found her online work really boring and usually too easy. She would often start her school day from bed – mostly with the camera off. Arya was unmotivated to do work and would wake up just five minutes before school started for the day. She got the necessary work done, though, and didn’t fall behind.
Most periods would start with a zoom call, then the teacher would send the work the students needed to do. Prior to the Covid lockdown a lot of schoolwork was done online anyway, and each student had their own device. But Arya found it difficult spending so much time on her screen.
Arya’s mother Archana is an essential worker, so she still had to go out and work. Archana is a pharmacist and was scared about getting Covid-19. At the start of the pandemic there was no PPE and people weren’t great at keeping their distance. Archana kept her distance from the rest of the family which meant they didn’t interact as they usually would – for example, there was no hugging. Archana remembers that when Jacinda Ardern announced the lockdown, the pharmacy was crazy. People didn’t know how to cope, but the staff worked and cried together.
Arya would Facetime with her friends during and after class but didn’t always want to be looking at a screen. She was glad to have her sister, Aanya, around so she didn’t get lonely. The sisters cooked for their mum, finding recipes online and surprising her with meals. One of their favourites was a baked pasta with cherry tomatoes and feta (which was a very popular recipe online at the time). Arya and Aanya did well during Covid – the air fryer came in handy!
Camp
In February 2023, Arya attended a month-long Outdoor Learning camp in Opotiki in the Bay of Plenty. The camp is called Kahunui and is owned by St Cuthbert’s. The students were not allowed any devices for 26 days, so wrote letters to their families. This was a scary thought beforehand, but Arya knew she would enjoy it as she had heard a lot of good things about it. She loved the camp and it is probably the most memorable and best experience she has had.
During the camp, Cyclone Gabrielle hit New Zealand and affected parts of the Bay of Plenty District but luckily missed them at the camp. They all gathered in the dining room, which Arya says was scary but fun. The instructors didn’t tell the girls how bad the storm was. They gathered all 24 students into the dining room to make a three-course meal and have a huge sleepover. The teachers communicated with parents via email.
The camp introduced a lot of new activities that Arya hadn’t done before. Activities included kayaking, wharf jumping, river swims, rat trap setting, walks, fire building, yoga, blow karting, gardening, and team bonding. Every day the girls had to properly clean their houses which Arya found stressful as her house was very messy, but they always got it done. The girls had to do lots of baking for their snacks. Her house loved eating ANZAC biscuit dough and making mug cakes in the middle of the night. They didn’t keep up with their baking very well, though, and often they resorted to snacking on brown sugar, dried coconuts, and dried cranberries.
Their first tramp, in their houses of eight girls, was in such heavy rain that Arya’s group had to sleep in the van shed. Despite having to tramp in the cold and rain and sleep on the concrete floor, this was her favourite part of the camp as she bonded with her housemates. The students also did a mini-solo each week, spending a few hours by themselves to relax. In the last week, they had an 8-hour solo with no entertainment where they had to make a bivvy and write reflections about their time at Kahunui. Afterwards, they all sat around the campfire and read out their reflections, and everyone was crying.
Health
Arya’s eyesight got really bad in 2020. She first noticed it when she couldn’t easily read the whiteboard in class, but it got a lot worse during the Covid-19 lockdown. She struggled to read subtitles when the family were watching Bollywood movies, which was when her parents decided to get her eyes checked. She started wearing glasses, but her eyesight continued to deteriorate, so in 2022 she started wearing corrective lenses. She struggled to put them in at first but got the hang of it quickly.
Arya was diagnosed with anaemia after feeling very exhausted all the time. When the results came back it was a shock, but it made sense as she often experienced tiredness, dizziness and chest pain, especially after exercise. She started to notice it in May 2022 after a fitness test at school, though only saw the doctor in November. She had to get two iron infusions and now takes iron tablets daily to raise her iron levels, which were undetectable in the original test.
Car crash
Earlier in 2023, Archana, Vijay, Aanya, and Arya’s grandmother got into a serious car accident while travelling to Kahunui to pick Arya up at the end of her camp. They were ten minutes from the camp when they went down into the river. Archana had broken bones, her mother had multiple fractures, and Vijay and Aanya had bruising. Archana was on medical leave for 3 months but is now back at work. She has ongoing pain as the fracture is still healing, and concussion.
Future plans
Arya wants to go to university and probably study something related to science. She doesn’t know what job she wants to have yet. She wants to travel a lot when she gets older.