Yesterday I went to a special assembly at the girls' school. There was a powhiri (welcome ceremony) for all new students and their families. We who were the manuhiri (visitors) met in a classroom to practise a waiata and to have the protocol explained to us, and then we walked around to the school hall and gathered at the door. Inside the entire school was lined up facing us, with the Kapa Haka group in full costume at the front. One of the eldest girls called us, "karanga mai, karanga mai, karanga mai" and then the
whole school welcomed us in with a haka.
Isobella has been in the Kapa Haka group since the first week she started at this school. I went along as parent help last week when the group performed at a multi-cultural concert in West Auckland. The kids were beside themselves with excitement. We negotiated crowds, ate lunch, got ready and had a quick practice, and in the end we were left with only a few minutes to get all thirty-something of the kids down through the hall and onto the stage. They did really well, considering there was no adult in the background to coach them. It's a pretty white group, and they didn't have the same volume or feistiness as some of the other groups, but they did their very best, and you could tell they loved every minute of it.
One of the other schools performing that day was one of the local schools in our old neighbourhood. This was a small school, one of those schools that some how along the way becomes the second-choice school for families who have the resources to choose something other than their local school. The roll at this school is tiny compared to the school up the road with the "excellent reputation", and has a high percentage of Maori and Pasifika kids. Is this the cause or the effect of the "white flight" that has gone on around it, who can say, but the result is undeniable. Still, it's a big-hearted school doing its best with limited resources and support. And the school's presence at the festival was hard to miss. They had just about the whole school involved, the kids were brimming with pride, and very happy.
We were able to watch this school performing on stage just before we went off to get our kids ready. It was their Kapa Haka group, a big group of kids in full costume, with piupiu skirts and the girls with moko face- painted on. They looked fantastic, they were loud and proficient. Then just behind me a man who seemed to be one of the dads of the group stood up and started a haka of his own from the audience. He was loud and passionate too. By standing and doing this he was offering the highest honour he could give the kids in that moment, and giving them his sincere and tangible support. I looked at the man, a wild looking Maori guy with a woolly grey beard and tats down his arms, and I could see that he was bursting with pride for those kids up on stage. In a moment I realised how incredible it was for him to see his child up on stage, belonging and succeeding at school by celebrating being Maori. I cried. I couldn't stop the tears rolling down.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, Maori kids got the strap for speaking Maori in class. Not so long ago, Maori children were likely to grow up ashamed of their Maoriness. Whole generations have passed without having seen their culture and traditions valued. Who is crying for that now?
I was down at mum's last week when she was watching a TV programme that follows families with missing members and helps them find them. An elderly Maori had discovered he had fathered a son without his knowledge, and that son had been adopted. The programme tracked the son down in Australia and I watched the father and son's emotional reunion. It was a grey day, and the family had set up a welcome party underneath the carport at the end of the driveway. I watched as the family welcomed the son, assembled together just as the girls' school had been at our assembly yesterday. The wife of his father, his soon to be step-mother, led the call. "Karanga mai, karanga mai, karanga mai" she called, tears rolling down her face. The son walked towards them, his tears welling up too. The father met him, they shared a hongi, and then held each other in the tightest embrace, sobbing. The father whispered in Maori in his son's ear, over and over. I couldn't understand the words, and neither could the son, but they were like a soft song that washed over him. In that moment, no other language would do.
It's election day next Saturday. Politics was kept back stage while the Rugby World Cup was on, so it's felt like a very short lead-up. I've been more unsure about who I'll vote for than I have been for any election previously. I'm a left-leaning kind of girl, but I wouldn't call myself "left". I have some very "right" tendencies, but I'm definitely not "right", and even "centrist" doesn't describe me either. If I could dial up my ideal government it would be like an icecream cone with several scoops, each made of different flavours. I'd choose a policy from here, a policy from there, an ideology from one end, and another from the other end. Meanwhile, in the real world, a bleak financial outlook combined with some very desparate needs mean that I'm basically stumped. I can't see any one party that has the big picture covered.
I've been reading some sobering facts about our nation.
The UN recently released a paper on child welfare entitled "Doing better for Children" and New Zealand doesn't fare too well. We have some of the worst statistics for children's health and well being in the OECD. Overall, our child mortality is higher than the OECD average. Twenty percent of our children are living in poverty. Maori children under 15 are six times as likely to be living in an overcrowded household, and Pasifika children are twelve times more likely. This has led directly to high rates of diseases that have completely disappeared from most developed countries.
Margo White in the Listener notes that rheumatic fever is taking its toll amongst some of our children. This disease, which shouldn't exist, can leave children needing immediate heart-valve replacement surgery, and then monthly penicillin injections. Dr Norman Sharpe, the medical director of the NZ Heart Foundation, says that there are a thousand children on the Auckland register having monthly penicillin injections to prevent rheumatic fever re-occurring. Lance O'Sullivan, a Northland-based GP, regularly sees children who are "walking around with the heart of an eighty year old." His stark indictment; "this is a disease of poverty, and brown kids... this is a race-based problem."
There's been plenty of political rhetoric thrown around recently about race-based policy. There are a few politicians who use it to fear-monger and to get attention. They want us to believe that race-based policy is morally repugnant, that it's a form of racism itself, and that it benefits some, only to leave the rest out in the cold. It's an easy position to hold when your culture is in the majority wherever you look, and when you live in a warm, dry, and comfortable house, and don't need to know where your nearest food bank is. But to believe it you have to be in some measure of denial about the reality of life for those on the other side.
At the end of the welcoming ceremony at the girls' assembly, the group of us who were being welcomed filed across the hall and greeted the front row of adults and children on the other side. Some of us shook hands, but most of us shared a hongi. That beautiful pressing of noses symbolises the oneness of shared breath. For a moment, the visitor and the host are one. Once the greeting was over, we the visitors were given new seats, right next to our hosts. I looked back over to the other side of the hall where the visitors began the ceremony, and the seats were empty. The meaning was clear. There were no more visitors, everyone now belongs.
That oneness is exactly what we need. We could all do with more opportunities to walk in each other's shoes. It's too easy see people as either "them" or "us." But what sort of future is that?
Posts
