KAPAI: Dare to dream - a child's God-given right

When ever I see the Ad on television showing Steve Williams living his dream of caddying for the world's number one golfer I always want to add my two bob's worth - "New Zealand where dreams come true and the man who makes the most money out of sport is a white man carrying a black man's bag."
Yes I know, not very PC, but sometimes we need to lighten up when it comes to carrying the burden of believing in someone or something in life.
Believing in one's dreams starts way back, well before we left school for the big wide world, and for most of us our dream weavers were our teachers who turned us into dream catchers without us realising it until one day we were living the dream.
How many of us had a teacher or teachers who dared us to dream and go for it? I am sure all of us had some one special in the teaching staff of our school who could see our pure potential.
I wonder who was Mahe Drysdales dream weaver at school? Who sowed the special spark in him that ignited the Olympic flame and took him to the top? What a dream team he had standing by his side when he received the country's highest sporting accolade, The Halberg Sportsman of the Year. I bet his Koro Bob Owens was bursting with pride that night, looking down on his grandson standing as tall as any kauri in the land.
I can see the conversation Sir Bob and his mate Tuti would be having in heaven right now. "Yes Sir Bob you know that Mahe in Maori means waka warrior so you fullas must have been part of our great migration eh bro" to which Sir Bob would have replied, "Tuti there would have been about as much chance of Mahe getting his medals via his Maori genes as there would be of me arriving in Tauranga on the tug Taioma, saluting to my ancestor Tangaroa as I entered the harbour!"
Well done Mahe, we look forward to seeing you pick up more bling bling in Beijing next year, and I am sure a front seat on the Waitangi Day waka could be organised through your koro's connections. And to your proud Mum Robin and your mum's mum Joyous, there is an old saying that should be said more in the schoolyards of today "The family that plays together _ stays together."
Coaches especially sports coaches are the silent heroes of society, much like teachers are the dream weavers of tomorrow's dream catchers and if we ever needed someone to feed our kids on a diet of dreaming and a kai of learning _ it is now.
Our recent report card was a sad read showing us we don't eat, play and laugh with our kids anymore, and we aren't good at talking to our kids. So where and when do our children get the chance to dare to dream? More and more the schoolyard is becoming the behavioural babysitter and our teachers say we are losing contact with our own kids.
Teachers were never trained to be saviours of the starving, that was something the Salvation Army took care of and thank god for the Sallys. Nor were they ordained as "awhi angels" for the sad and lost generation who come to the safe refuge of their class room, with no food in their stomachs today and no dreams in their hearts for tomorrow.
In my school days at Omanu Primary and Mount College there were a team of dream weavers who brought learning alive.
Like Harry Paniora who made one guitar sound like ten and taught us how to dance. Or the wonderful white haired Mr Waugh who could lay hands on a book and make it speak to us like a lost friend, while he sat outside the class window, puffing on his pipe. And the very cool Mr Crossman who took us to the four corners of the world with our eyes shut and our atlas open, daring us to dream about where it was we wanted life to take us.
These were my dream weavers and just like Tiger's caddy or Mahe's Mum, it is the parents, coaches and teachers of tomorrow's leaders who are the underpaid, unsung silent CEO's (Chief Educational Officers) of today's society.
For my two bob's worth the solutions could be as simple as putting a ukulele in every classroom along with the Edmonds cook book in every desk to teach our kids how to cook. Throw in a set of spanners so they can change a tyre or a spark plug, and a shovel to grow a garden and if we could make the Elms and our Marae the history lessons of life we may see a reversal in the rebellion we see today.
Teaching our kids the basics just might get them by in the big wide world, and if they are half as lucky as I was their teacher might see something in them no one else had the time to look for.
After all, look what a white man can do walking around the world with a black man's bag.
Pai marire tommy@indigenius.org