Childhood poverty and the real New Zealand: Glenn Colquhoun from a doctor’s view

Glenn Colquhoun, pictured at Waikawa Beach near Levin. Photo / Mark Mitchell

It’s not just people who get sick. Cultures and societies get sick too, says Glenn Colquhoun, a poet and doctor who works at Horowhenua Youth Health Service. In an essay, he explores the role adverse childhood effects (ACEs) play in the lives of the young people he works with.

I live in a beautiful country. That’s what people say. You know, the Milford Track, Bay of Islands, the fiords. Then there’s the mountains of course. Cook piercing and Sefton cracking, Taranaki out there all on its own Fire country, I suppose. One tectonic plate smacking into another. Mud, pools, volcanoes, hot springs. People call it a fish. A woman. A waka. The land of the long white cloud. God’s own country. 100% pure.

Aroha tells me she wants to die. She is 14. She has it figured out. The when and the how. She lives on the other side of Pluto. It’s dark there. I tell her about my world as though it’s a cruise in the Whitsundays. For the first six years of her life she lived with her mum who was addicted to methamphetamine. The void got into her. Marama’s mum struggled with the same addiction. Now she thinks her teachers and classmates are trying to poison her. Both of them remind me of Monty. His mother used methamphetamine during her pregnancy. He spent most of his life in hospital, his heart plumbed up all wrong. His aunty, Paige, found him blue in his cot. She gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. And pumped on his chest until the ambulance arrived. He died when he was 14 months old. Paige still wakes up in a sweat. Her daughter sleeps in the same room now.

***

The tensile strength of limpet teeth is somewhere between 3.0 and 6.5 GPa. The elementary particles of matter include six flavours of quarks, six letpons, 12 gauge boson and the Higgs boson. We can fly around the world in 24 hours. Land on the moon. Take out our hearts and replace them. We can even wash our clothes in a machine without getting our hands wet. Push a button and it goes woosh … woosh … woosh.

Rosie wooshes too. Put your head to her chest and you will hear it. Her heart sounds like a fat guy doing push ups. This is what rheumatic fever sounds like after it’s buggered your heart valves. It leaves you with a thick old scar down the middle of your chest too. And a shot of antibiotics in your bum every month. Pills. Blood tests. Scans. Those are shitty things to go through when you are a teenager.

Rosie’s family live in another New Zealand. You can see it from medicine-land sometimes. Out there in the haze. There’s a view from teacher-land too. And cop-land. Māori have always had overworlds and underworlds. Rosie is one of these. Generous. And chill. Alternatively legal. People will give you the shirt off their back. Or a hiding. It lives from week to week. Addresses change. Cellphones die. Cars are never a sure bet. It swaps. Deals, borrows, bakes.

It can be a mattress soft or broken windowed. Cashed up or full of empty cupboards. No one votes. Or listens to National Radio. When Rosie is there she doesn’t get the jabs and the scans and the blood tests. Her doctor walks back and forth in front of the gate. He’s scared of the dogs.

Rheumatic fever is a New Zealand landscape too. The opposite of mirror lakes and snow-capped mountains. First world countries don’t get rheumatic fever. It thrives in overcrowded houses. Or houses that are cold and damp. In New Zealand it is a disease that overhwelmingly occurs among Māori and Pasifika.

The grand old ship of state has a list. Perhaps we should call it the “land of the long shite valve”.

I live on a beach. It’s wide and stretches. All sorts of things wash up there. Me especially. On a good day I can see Ruapehu, Taranaki, the Tararuas and Kāpiti. The dead wander by, noisy and full of chat. They stop me being scared. The living are another kettle of fish. Next door is a small town. The mayor runs a bookshop. Old guys wear socks and sandals. Kids say “Not even”, “Sweet”, “Hard”, “Matua”, “peeps”, and “Too much”. The houses squat, full of backyards, fruit trees, stags sandblasted onto glass doors. Inside the TV is on and the news at six. There’s a youth health clinic there too. That’s where I work. I am a doctor. Young people tell me their stories. Around the corner there’s a movie theatre and a couple of cafes. Two supermarkets. An adventure park A commerce of dairies. And somewhere in all of that something awful is going on.

***

I have favourites at the clinic. Sarah is one of them. I know because she asks me whenever we meet. She draws me pictures. There’s one of a cat. And one from the movie Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs. She has an intellectual disability. Usually she comes to me because her skin is dry. Cover it in cream and her pores will drink it down. Kindness, Mickey Ds, a birthday card, are soaked up even quicker. She is used to being dismissed. Eye-rolled. Kicked out. Kicked on. Picked on. Worse has happened. Much worse. Recently she’s been living in a motel, one of those ones used for emergency accommodation. They’re not in the brochure. Neither is Sarah. But they are both part of our landscape too.

Holding The ACEs - Adverse childhood events in New Zealand, by Glenn Colquhoun, is available at Unity Bookshop, in Wellington.