Wairoa: EIT’s Learning Centre building a future after Cyclone Gabrielle

New EIT Wairoa Learning Centre building course tutor Campbell Hale showing how to use the circular saw. Photo / Warren Buckland

Career joiner Campbell Hale is turning out to be one of the gifts from Cyclone Gabrielle as a new building skills course develops at EIT’s Wairoa Learning Centre.

Centre manager Marae Wesche recalls he came to the Paul St office one day on unrelated business, and, in the friendly way that reception duties take place around the town, it emerged he wanted them, and they needed him, after an 18-months-long hunt for a tutor.

There was demand for the course, but they hadn’t been able to start without someone to take charge, and Wesche said: “We’ve been trying to find one for a year and a half.”

Hale said his involvement started with his wife’s need to move back to Nuhaka to help her mum, which was never supposed to be permanent, but as the realities of Cyclone Gabrielle and its aftermath sank in it became obvious something would have to change. Moving to Wairoa would be the answer if there was only the right job.

A father of three, he said: “I’d stayed in Napier, and then cyclone came along. I was stuck in Napier – and they were up here.

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“I came in one day to get my boys on to a welding course and [after the friendly chat in the office] they said: Have you thought about being a teacher?”

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Within weeks Hale had moved up from “down in the Bay” and after a four-week teaching crash course in Gisborne was on the job showing them how to measure, saw, sand, plane and nail.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” said Hale. “And there’s such a huge age range of learners - from school students to grandmothers.”

The course started on May 27, and Wesche said its initial success is highlighted by the fact that of the 15 on the first course there are almost no days when any more than a couple are away.

They cover the full range of students, from younger people considering the possibility of a career in building to older people wanting a few skills for the handy jobs around home.

As it happens, there is a big and growing need in Wairoa for builders. There is a guaranteed work-stream the district council and Treaty post-settlement entity and housing provider Tātau Tātau o Te Wairoa Trust have identified as they try to overcome a significant shortage of dry, warm and affordable homes. It was a problem evident long before Cyclone Gabrielle made it even worse.

Wesche led us through the campus for the introduction, and said, “this is the workshop”, which is actually outdoors, with a shed, and some of the fruits of success visible in some picnic tables made by those on the course.

But the course has established the need and more space is being made available nearby, in conjunction with the Wairoa Achievers Trust.

“We are totally community-driven,” said Wesche.

“We all work together, and we’ve just got to use what’s available. That’s Wairoa. That’s us.”

Doug Laing is a senior reporter based in Napier with Hawke’s Bay Today, and has 51 years of journalism experience, 40 of them in Hawke’s Bay, in news gathering, including breaking news, sports, local events, issues, and personalities.