Christmas plans. The weather finally settles. The busy season is here with events crowding into the end of the year. Last year Jim Mary Peter and others volunteered their time to provide Christmas lunch at Te Aranga Marae. It was fun but also quite hard work. This year we will contribute and co-ordinate any donated goods through the Baptist Church Flaxmere with Jo and Andrew Reyngoud.
Christmas hampers and gifts will be distributed. Food, gifts for the children are much appreciated. So are toothbrushes and toothpaste for the children.
Gary, our contractor gardener, hopes to have enough potatoes to give away at Christmas. Unfortunately, despite signage etc, these are being picked too early - perhaps uprooted to be resown in someone's back yard. Our Kumara seedlings are also being picked too early. Frustrated, we decide to lock the gate in the evening. People are welcome to access the garden but maybe this will send a message.
Our plan is to design and install a waharoa and pou for the garden. Unison kindly look to provide the hardwood power poles to carve. My late husband Jono would have loved to have been involved with this project. Jono, a sculptor, was involved with many community projects over the years. His larger pieces, the rock carvings at Whakamoenga Point Lake Taupo, is one of the most visited tourist attractions and another piece at the entrance to Huka Lodge. These pieces for our garden may act as a guardian and deter bad behaviour. Our firewood has been taken, firewood we have stored for winter for the marae, tin is taken from our pile where we have removed it from the fence. We know it's a small minority that are doing this damage but we can't help but feel let down at times.
Anyway, there are so many positive things to focus on. Our calendar launch is planned. We just meet the deadline for our printers as someone notices the wrong student from one of the schools is in one of the photos. We also welcome Directions Youth Health Service to Flaxmere. Directions will be delivering its clinical services one day a week from the Totara Health General Practice Flaxmere site. Our first clinic is booked out. Free and confidential, accessible for Flaxmere's young people.
We plan our Takitimu Ora first workshop for December 1. The launch, a great success, raises the profile of who we are and what we are about. Our website is also launched the same day. Our focus is young people not in employment education or training. We target community champions Kevin Atkinson and Levi Armstrong to support us. Among all this Goobs and I manage to have one night at Mountain Valley Lodge. This time we go upmarket for my birthday and book a cottage. The cottage is for Goobs' 89-year-old mother, Pauline Lee, and 84-year-old uncle, Huia Randell. Goobs and I share a tent with three dogs. Very romantic. The weather is windy when we arrive on Saturday. We have organised our own dinner but have a glass of wine at the bar and catch up with our hosts, Julie and Doug. The place is busy. We meet a couple from Drury, Auckland, who are training for the Coast-to-Coast and are here to kayak. I am impressed - they are incredibly slim and fit. We wake to blue skies on the Sunday. We park up by the Mohaka river - fish, enjoy lunch, enjoy a glass of bubbly, read and snooze. Huia takes his fly rod and casts into a promising-looking pool. We hear lots of fish have been caught just where we are but today not even a nibble. Not the point anyway, we agree we are here to enjoy the river. I pick up a New Zealand Geographic Magazine and by chance read an article on the state of our waterways by Dr Mike Joy, PhD, Senior Lecturer Agriculture and Environment at Massey University. The article reads "the strongest indicator of the poor state of rivers and lakes is the 74 per cent of native freshwater fish species now listed as threatened. These fish are the freshwater 'miners' canaries' and this statistic reveals New Zealand is among the worst in the world."
I read on to learn the state of our rivers (according to Dr Joy) are in fact the worst in the world. I put the magazine down, gaze at the river and think to myself "How depressing."
-Ana Apatu is chief executive of the U-Turn Trust, based at Te Aranga Marae in Flaxmere.