Compassionate surfers

OLD MATES: Steve Hathaway, Phil Dreifuss and Dave Jenkins are three lifelong friends who share a love of surfing and living on the eastern fringes of New Zealand. They were also the driving force behind Surf Aid International. Picture by Liam Clayton

Dr Dave Jenkins is described as the big thinker. The motivator, instigator, a visionary.

Phil Dreifuss and Dr Steve Hathaway are the stabilisers. They mop up after Dave's exuberance and bring structure to the table.

The combination of skills from these life-long friends and surfers created Surf Aid in January 2000 - .

They didn't just want Surf Aid to succeed.

“It had to succeed,” said Dr Dave.

He came up with the concept of connecting the travelling surfer, and their wallet, to help women and children on the remote Mentawai Islands in Indonesia who were experiencing extreme poverty and preventable illnesses.

They compared Surf Aid in the early days as being like a garage band, fuelled only by passion and persistence and mostly broke.

Steve says Dave is a great communicator.

“We call him the dancing bear. He has the ability to capture an audience with the Surf Aid story.”

“The Americans embraced him with open arms, ‘Look at this crazy Kiwi the surf community has coughed up'.”

Steve is the scientist, a strategist, whose skills can smooth troubled waters. He is the chief food safety scientist at New Zealand Food Safety.

Phil is the lawyer, a realist, whose attention to detail makes sure regulatory compliance is completed, and the legal backdrop is robust. He is a partner in a local law firm.

Over the past 20 years, Surf Aid grew from it's beginnings in Gisborne to have global reach.

And while Surf Aid International's “engine room” is now based in Sydney Australia, where there is a high density of corporate surfer donors and sponsors and is closer to Indonesia, the unique kiwi flavour brewed up in Gisborne 20 years ago remains.

“It has always been about passionate people just getting out there and giving it a go,” said Dave.

Their kaupapa - giving people a hand up, not a hand out - has improved the lives of women and children in remote areas around the world.

“You can't do for people, something they can and should do for themselves, you don't power them that way - in fact you take power away from them and do them harm,” said Dave.

In 2007, the World Association of Non-Governmental Organisations (WANGO) awarded Surf Aid the 2007 Humanitarian Award, recognising its unique mission and can-do attitude. They won out of 40,000 NGOs.

A fellowship for three years valued at $100,000 was given to Surf Aid by Mulago – a community development programme that finds the organisations best able to create change and give them what they need to do it. This was an important launching pad - Surf Aid was chosen because they had an existing model that could be adapted, monitored and was scalable – which means it could expand if needed – and it has.

The trio are quick to point out a large measure of their success is employing the right people to provide expertise. As Surf Aid has evolved it has strived to build national capacity and now they don't have Europeans or ex-pats working in Indonesia, they have Indonesians.

In the early years there was very little money. Dave worked without pay, sold his Muriwai home two years in and moved to Bali where he lived for 15 years before returning home to Makorori this year.

An Australian doctor and his partner lived on one of the most isolated villages for one year, with no payment.

“We were so short of funds, we couldn't even afford to help them with food,” said Steve. The couple lived off local chickens and rice, sleeping on the floor.

Surf Aid International came about through the passion and persistence of every individual who helped, and there have been many.

Phil says one of the things which impressed their NZ business cohorts was the access and trust they had with their donor base of surfers.

“Surf Aid became this opportunity for surfers to give back to the communities whose surf they had enjoyed,” said Phil.

Today, it contributes to the well‐being of people who live in the Mentawais, Nias, Sumba and Sumbawa Islands in Indonesia, Baja in Mexico, and the Solomon Islands.

These geographical locations are linked because they are world renowned surfing destinations. Remote places western surfers visit and central to the Surf Aid mission.

Donors are surfers from all walks of life who want to contribute to the people who live on the land of the beaches they surf.

Over the Surf Aid years, several million dollars in grants have been provided by the New Zealand Government - matched dollar for dollar by their strong network of surfers and corporate donors.

“We continue to see a high level of funding through the NZ Government (MFAT) and NZ Aid, which is unusual for a private NZ charity,” says Steve.

The Government trusts Surf Aid to deliver because it has.

Phil says Surf Aid is a lot bigger than he ever thought it would be.

“It has global reach. I never thought we would operate on this scale.”

The unsung heroes are the surfing community themselves, largely from Australia and America. They are the global citizens who support Surf Aid's quirky approach.

For example, the community led total sanitisation programme brought to the Mentawais by Surf Aid.

To introduce the programme Dave asked at village meetings, ‘Who wants to stop eating other people's shit?”.

People would defecate anywhere. The faecal matter contaminated their food and drinking water.

Surf Aid secured funding, and organised local engineers, to teach people how to build latrines and provided the materials and plans.

Through awareness that it was a lack of hygiene making them sick, what had been happening for 3000 to 4000 years Dave saw transform in six weeks.

Neighbouring villages began to notice the village next door was doing well, had less sick people, and a dramatic reduction in diarrhoea.

The men had pride, the women and children were healthier.

The villagers asked - ‘now what else can you help us with?'

Surf Aid also invested in clean water sources.

They brought taps to originally fortified hilltop villages so the children did not have to work all day collecting water from the valley below and carrying it uphill in buckets to feed the few but highly prized livestock.

That tap meant children now had time to go to the school - which was built years ago by the Government but had been unused.

They have helped more children in 20 years than they ever envisaged by, “giving them skills they didn't have to implement themselves into their own villages”.

Steve says the most telling statistics are around wellbeing and nutritional health.

“If you can prevent stunting in village children, it is lifting the overall health and wellbeing from an incredibly low base for the rest of their lives,” he says.

Stunting is the impaired growth and development in children from poor nutrition and repeated infection.

By bringing awareness to the villages of how to prevent disease, it allowed children time to build up their immune systems.

“We're identifying with them, what their needs are.”

The people of the Mentawai Islands would belly laugh, says Dave as village actors played out roles of a mosquito biting someone. It was a method suggested by the people themselves to spread awareness around villages about Malaria, and how to use a mosquito net at night.

Because, says Dave, if you can control malaria you can cut people's suffering and deaths by up to half.

Other countries have shown, when malaria is controlled - the economy is lifted.

The changes have far-reaching effects.

There was a lot of trial and error but as long as the ups and down were measured, improvements could be seen over time and reported back to the donors.

Surf Aid made support of village gardeners another priority by sharing skills around crops. A drip irrigation system installed in some villages meant crops had water all year round. Before it was water for only six months and then the other six months produced no crops and food shortages.

A strong feature of Surf Aid's community development plan, working with posyandu (a women's group like Plunket) that periodically meets in villages and is supported by local government who measure and weigh babies.

By working alongside village leaders and posyandu, Surf Aid has been able to socialise and implement a range of behaviour changes in hygiene, health and nutrition that have resulted in significant gains.

The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami catapulted Surf Aid into much larger orbit.

Phil says they never anticipated working in disaster relief.

But as an organisation they were already on the ground with the people. They had relationships with chiefs of the villages and could mobilise boats to get assistance to the islands quickly.

Surf Aid's approach has always been to adapt to events as they unfold.

They grew their staff from 22 to over 100 – made up entirely of local people.

Their credibility grew, they won large funding grants, and were getting international recognition for working in extreme locations.

They expanded into emergency preparedness for the coastal communities of the Mentawai Islands.

In 2007, two more earthquakes hit the Mentawais. Again Surf Aid visited and assessed more than 100 villages, launched relief boats with food, shelter, medical attention, fuel and building supplies to some of the 30,000 displaced residents.

Another earthquake in 2010 left unstable plates – jammed right beneath the Mentawai Islands – and a prediction of another big one still to come.

Dave describes in a Ted Talk how Surf Aid began.

He was working as a doctor in Singapore, and went on a surf trip to the “Disneyland of surfing” in 1999 - the Mentawai Islands.

But on these surf trips you stayed on a boat. He wondered what life was like on shore and how the people behind the palms were.

When he went to shore, he saw row upon row of small graves.

“What is happening in the perceived paradise?” he asked himself.

He met the chief, told him he was a doctor, and Dave was told he was the first doctor to go there.

Dave went and got his doctor's bag.

When he came back, more than 100 people were waiting to see him with treatable, and preventable, conditions.

He saw children weak and wasting away after endless battles with diarrhoea and malaria.

He described that day as going from being “intoxicated by the surf in the morning” to being sobered up by what he saw on land.

The tension on the boat that night was palpable, he said.

They were “just a bunch of surfers”, in a place so remote it had no phones, no roads. Dave couldn't speak the language.

He went back to Singapore, left his job, and called Steve and Phil - two mates he said had the talents he lacked.

They were on board - plus Phil had a mailbox - they could start.

Dave says when you engage the help of others they hold you accountable and they deepen your commitment.

Next, to become an NGO they needed 25 people to pay $25 each.

They “lured their cynical surfer mates” to a bbq at Makaorori with crayfish and beer.

They signed, they paid.

Dave lived in a village, beside the locals. He spoke with the village Shaman to understand their challenges.

“I have never met a group of people so consistently happy and seemingly free from worry.

“The irony was not what the western medicine could teach the shaman but what they could teach us.

“The true and deeply held service of others - holds easy joy and purpose - all of which deepen humanity and happiness.”

Meanwhile, Steve and Phil back in Gisborne would visit when they could. Steve wrote applications for funding, Phil ensured the legal side was covered.

Within two years the first small pilot malaria programme started in the Mentawais and small NZ government grants started to come in.

Dave says they learned when things are most grim, its that passion and persistence that are most critical.

And he quotes Winston Churchill - “Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm”.

Today they are looking forward to different partnership models, but being careful who they partner with,

They don't want Surf Aid International to lose it's quirky identity and be swallowed up by another aid organisation.

Phil says they continue to look for more locations where Surf Aid could be effective.

Steve says they would create hybrid models to be able to do what they've always done.

Even with Covid they have been able to continue contributing online from Gisborne.

They are also ensuring the safety of the villages from Covid by making sure it is locals who do they work - not people from other countries who could potentially bring Covid in to health systems that have improved greatly through Surf Aid but are still rudimentary.

One of the positive of border closures has meant it has provided a time for the three of them to reflect, and plan for the future.

“If there was magic sauce it's these two guys,” says Dave pointing to Phil and Steve.