Every year Harmony Week gives us a reason to stop and celebrate the diversity that makes Juniper such a special place to work, and this year we wanted to give the people that make up our team the chance to share their stories.
More than 75% of our workforce was born outside of Australia, and the cultures and traditions they carry with them show up in the care every customer receives and the team every colleague gets to be part of.
This week we visited staff at Juniper Residential Aged Care homes Carramar and Karinya to hear some of those stories firsthand about their cultural backgrounds, what strengths they bring from their culture, what their residents are most curious about, and what traditions they love most from home.
In so many of the cultures represented in our team across the Philippines, Bhutan, Bali and more, caring for elders is something you grow up doing. It’s part of family life, part of how you’re raised to treat the people around you, and for many of our staff it meant that working in aged care felt like a continuation of something they had always known.
Kaila, a Multiskilled Carer at Carramar, talked about kindness being at the core of what it means to be Filipino. “It’s one of the core qualities of what being Filipino is like and I feel like we bring that to our roles,” she said. Her residents tend to be curious about Filipino food and the different dishes she grew up eating.
Imi, a Registered Nurse at Karinya, spoke about the global reputation Filipino nurses have built for compassion and resilience, and recounted a conversation she once had with a resident who had been a nurse herself and told her that Filipino nurses are the best in the world. She talked about how her culture’s tradition of gathering together for feasts, celebrating family and kinship, shows up in the way she thinks about the residents she works with. “We consider our residents like our family,” she said.
Dwi is a Multiskilled Carer at Karinya who grew up in Bali watching her mum work as a nurse, and said that looking after family members was just part of how she was raised.
Jamyang and Phub are Multiskilled Carers at Carramar who both grew up in Bhutan, where looking after older people is a value passed down through families. Jamyang talked about respect for elders being central to how he was raised, and residents are often wanting to learn about Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness philosophy and the traditional dress, the Gho for men and the Kira for women.
Phub shared that residents love asking about the colours and patterns of Bhutanese dress, and they’re equally curious about Bhutan itself, a small and peaceful country that most Australians know very little about. “They ask me why I left Bhutan and came to Australia,” she said. In Bhutan, she explained, living with your elders is what families do, so caring for older people in her work feels like a natural extension of that.
Zuki, a Multiskilled Carer at Karinya, had a lovely story about taking a day off to attend her country’s festival and coming back to find her residents full of questions about where she had been and what she had been wearing. She showed them photos of herself in her Kira and explained how they are traditionally hand woven. Her favourite tradition is Tshechu, a celebration with family and friends where people come together to receive blessings and watch the masked dances that are so central to Bhutanese culture.
We feel incredibly lucky to have such a diverse and passionate team at Juniper.
Pictured from left to right, top row: Imi, Registered Nurse at Juniper Karinya, Zuki, Multiskilled Carer at Juniper Karinya, Dwi, Carer at Juniper Karinya. Bottom row: Jamyang, Multiskilled Carer at Juniper Carramar, Phub, Multiskilled Carer at Juniper Carramar, Kaila, Carer at Juniper Carramar.
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