Jessica Ducey has travelled halfway around the world and lived on several different continents, but she found her home in Wellington. She started researching residency a couple of weeks after moving here – without having ventured further from her Wellington city apartment than the seaside suburb of Eastbourne.
Ducey, 28, followed a job in Wellington, halfway round the world from where she grew up in Florida in the United States. Along the way she’s had stints living in Washington, the United Kingdom, Ethiopia, Jordan and the Marshall Islands.
She had heard good things about New Zealand from people who had travelled or lived here, so she’d always wanted to visit. And if she could live here, why the hell not?
When she arrived in June, she found Wellington to be incredibly welcoming. “I think part of that comes from moving my life around the world pretty regularly for the past seven or eight years, so I’m used to being new in a city and not knowing anyone and having to make friends,” she says.
But she found that easier here than it has been anywhere else, even without the safety net of ready-made networks, like her fellow students when she was studying in the UK.
Jessica thinks Wellington has such a transient population that everyone has been new to the city at some time, if not New Zealand. “People are very sympathetic to your being the new girl, and welcoming you, and that made me start researching residency within a couple of weeks.”
After years of wandering, New Zealand feels like a place Jessica Ducey could stay. It’s the first place she has thought “how can I stay here forever?”. Photo: Unknown
There are people she misses, dotted around the world, but a trip away for work helped Jessica to realise Wellington felt like home. After years of wandering from country to country on a whim, New Zealand feels like somewhere she could settle down. It’s the first place that has made her think, “How can I stay here forever?”
Wellington’s arty culture and progressiveness is part of it. Jessica grew up in the middle of the Bible Belt in the southern United States. Her work in the field of international health, and in particular, sexual health, was something she’d have to justify, or sugar coat. Here, she can say she works at Family Planning International on a date.
“There’s a culture here that is more in line with my values than I ever felt in the American south,” she says. And she likes that people are politically engaged. Having been here for the local government elections, she likes that people participate – or at least the people she has met do – and that they don’t find it odd that she wants to, even though she can’t vote.
The militancy with which Wellingtonians support local business is amazing. I think I accidentally found the one Starbucks.
It’s the little things she likes about this place, that makes New Zealand feel like home. Like it’s the version of America that she thinks the US should have to been. Or, at least, the America Aaron Sorkin wants it to be.
Without wanting to sound like an ad for the capital, Jessica likes the way New Zealanders support their own.
“The militancy with which Wellingtonians support local business is amazing,” she says.“ I think I accidentally found the one Starbucks here – the couple of American restaurant chains are kind of tucked in corners, and people go out of their way to support local breweries, local products and new restaurants. And people are polite, even when they’re not working for tips.”
Wellingtonians are open-minded, she says and want to try new things. “To someone who’s new to the country, that feels very welcoming – this idea that that you want people who venture out of their comfort zones I’ve always felt like that, and then I found a little tiny city on an island in the middle of nowhere, where that’s for everyone.”