By Jared Lutu, Special Olympics New Zealand Athlete
Jared has been a part of Special Olympics for 7 years so far! Watch the video message below Jared recorded about his time with the Māngere club and how he is building his confidence.
Transcript:
Kia ora, kia orana, mālō e lelei, fakaalofa atu, nǐ hǎo, namaste, and greetings to you all.
Some of yous don’t know me or some of yous do know me.
My name is Jared Lutu and I’m from the Special Olympics Māngere Club.
And I am one of the team leaders of the Māngere team.
I am 20 years old and my favourite hobbies are drawing, colouring some pictures, mowing the lawns, watching wrestling on YouTube, and exercising. And also sometimes cooking food and gardening.
I’m a groundsman at Southern Cross Campus, which is in Māngere East. So I help out to clean up the school grounds, like picking up rubbish, vacuuming the leaves with the billy goat — the leaf litter.
I also do painting, landscaping and gardening. All sorts of different jobs we do for caretaking.
I have been in Special Olympics Māngere for nearly 7 years. So one of the sports I participate is athletics, bocce and tenpin bowling.
But I used to do basketball back in my young days when I was like 13 and 14. Now I am learning to become a coach in basketball but right now I’m an assistant coach for basketball.
I have low-functioning autism so I have lost memories inside but I will get there. So I’m starting to build up my confidence to express myself and to give the best that I can be.
So one of the things we do in our club is we do agility, ladder skills, skipping, hurdles and zigzags for training and this is part of our athletics.
In our fundraising we do discos, barbecues, landscaping. We go to the club members’ houses. And also we do Polynesian nights.
