Do You Fear?

When you walk the streets
do you fear
the dark shapes?
Do you strain to hear
running moving closer?
Do you change your gait
feign confidence,
drop your weight
ready to fight, roll
swing in to the attacker,
away – Aikido.
Are you attractive to predators,
violent offenders?
Because you are different,
or female,
an obvious gay,
wearing a rival gangs colours?
Do you fear
when you walk the streets?

© PhD Mummy Nov 09

The day Casper, Wyoming crashed a sunny spring day in Auckland

the pestilent wind can not dampen
this new spring Saturday
sun fighting cloud
baby grape leaves, buds
time slows from the week gone
cruising we open our papers
glancing over the tastelessness
of that other world
strawberry jammed toast turns
salty with tears, the
pending summer is sucked to black
away from this horror
a world away in Casper, Wyoming
and oh so close

in the bathroom mirror we affirm
our safety, our existence (for now)
and cry in honour & fear for this new death
this kick-in-the-butt reminder
we are hated by some
they wish us dead
merely for our sexuality

“for Shepard, a 21-year-old [gay] student beaten to
death in an apparent hate crime…”
New Zealand Herald, 17-18 October 1998

p.s. Finally, over 10 years later, the US Senate passes the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
http://www.mercurynews.com/columns/ci_13628360?nclick_check=1

Mumbai in March: Hot Weather, Chilling Poverty

Travel articles about Mumbai focus on the exotic, the cliché. They don’t talk about the poverty, the families sleeping on the streets, the children begging. Sure, I watched Slumdog Millionaire before I went – but that was hardly adequate preparation for what I would see there.

I was only going for one week for the World Tobacco or Health Conference. I wasn’t going as a tourist. I wasn’t going to look around. So, I didn’t read any travel books. I didn’t know anything much about India. The November 08 ‘terrorist’ attacks on Mumbai had happened just three months earlier, with the Oberoi Trident, one of the venues for the Conference, targeted. Mum didn’t want me to go. Others questioned if it was safe. I naively assessed that the risk was over. Anyway, I wouldn’t be staying in one of those excessively expensive hotels. Many Americans decided not to attend the conference, putting it at risk of being able to go ahead. I made a political decision to support India, to support the conference being held in a developing nation and attend despite the terrorist risk.

You can see the slums adjacent to the airport, as you fly in and you pass them on your way out of the airport area. Anything I’ve ever seen about the slums, has been negative. But, on my way out of Mumbai, my thinking was that at least many of the people that lived in the slums had a roof and somewhere to put their stuff.

In the street my hotel was on, there was a family (man, woman and a baby, infant and or toddler) living on the footpath every 50 metres. They were there all day and night. They were there lying together asleep at 6am in the morning when my colleague and I went out for a walk. They lay seemingly in their one set of clothing, on a piece of cloth or cardboard, uncovered. One baby, naked from the waist down, had rolled off the cardboard and was sleeping on its back directly on the concrete paving.

Every day, the women and children would try to sell us their wares: flowers or blown up balloons. They weren’t begging. But, the travel guides, I had by now consulted said don’t give money to the beggars, don’t buy from them: because they’re run by gangs; because it supports their dependency on begging; because only more will come. None of these reasons made me feel any better about ignoring the pleading. In my stomach it felt wrong and all week I slept badly, not knowing what I could usefully do.

My Indian colleagues answered my questions which helped a bit. It was hot, humid and it wasn’t the rainy season – sleeping outside was quite normal in India. Okay, but the little babies and children living in the street dust, unwashed for I don’t know how long, with no toys – is that okay? As one conference organizer put it, “for Mumbai, accommodation is very expensive so living on [the] footpath is not exactly indicative of extreme poverty. And many such families and children consider persistent begging especially from foreigners as craft for easy money.” He said, “if you can get these children out of their mask, and get them engaged in an activity and conversation, they would seem like children anywhere else.” Oh okay, so they can afford to eat (cooked food at least could be found very cheap, though not at the places the tourists want to eat at). Still, I doubt they get to choose the pavement over the white-washed gleaming palace-like homes of the richest Mumbai residents. Maybe they have a suburban flat but they make a good living camping out for a week at a time outside tourist hotels begging and selling flowers and taking whatever the tourists will give them? Yeah, right!

The conference organizers responded very kindly to my concerns. Another said, that whilst it does not condone the poverty, it might help to know that “the people who are poor and homeless do not blame anyone else for their lot. They just feel that the opportunity either did not come their way because it was not meant to or they did not use it.” And another said. “Everything is not exactly what it seems to be. For one thing, poverty in India does not inversely correlate that well with happiness as in many other countries.” So, because they don’t mind, I shouldn’t either? But, I do!

They said it was difficult “to advise others on what they should do with our problems. Probably one thing we can say is not to get overwhelmed by our problems.” Well I was quite overwhelmed and worried for weeks on my return. I felt ashamed by my behaviour whilst there: walking around like rich tourists ignoring the poverty of others. It wasn’t til the end of my week there, that I grasped how much our money could buy (lunch for four Kiwi adults for just $NZ4). I was leaving by the time I realized I should have just bought the flowers and balloons and decorated our hotel room with them. If that was their craft, their business – good on them. Seems like they’re creating opportunity where best they can and that’s what I’d be supporting - poor peoples’ enterprise, not their dependency on tourists.

The book I found that helped me understand what action I should have taken and what I could do now I am home was: “The life you can save: Acting now to end world poverty” by Peter Singer. www.thelifeyoucansave.com

Whilst I was not able to donate to help the babies living homeless in Mumbai (because no charity in New Zealand does that), I am the 3849th person to pledge to donate at least as much as required by Peter Singer’s recommendations to appropriate organizations, which in New Zealand is Oxfam www.oxfam.org.nz. I also have increased my donations to ECPAT (who work to eliminate child prostitution and child pornography and the trafficking of children for sexual purposes) www.ecpat.org.nz.

Mumbai has given me a greater appreciation for the privileged life most of us in New Zealand enjoy, and because I think it’s healthier to stay aware, I’m going to hang on to my guilt and shame about how I come by such a comparably rich and easy life - at the expense of the poor in other countries.

Fellow women writers by chance

It was nice to meet Joy MacKenzie yesterday, a fellow woman writer. It was a chance meeting, via a Trademe sale and purchase. I was the purchaser. I tried to pay her twice. She invited us in (I had my daughter with me) while she went to check on her computer. Standing just inside her door was a bookcase. I recognized authors, New Zealand poets, short story collections and novels. Upstairs were more. It was like my bookshelf, a bit. I also have lots of books by New Zealand authors – it’s a commitment I hope we all make to each other – to buy and read each others books.

I applauded the woman I didn’t know yet, for her support of New Zealand writers and asked her if she writes and she said yes. She told me her husband writes and his name, but I didn’t know him. Then she told me her name, which is different from reading it in an email. Told to me, I recognized her name. She said she recognized my name too and we figured out we’d been published in the same anthology of short stories many years before: Me and Marilyn Monroe, edited by Cathie Dunsford.

For a short time we traded reasons for our writing trailing off: all my creative energy going in to my daughter and all my writing was academic; and Joy had been busy studying and teaching. But, thinking about Cathie again – she put a lot of effort in to encouraging women to write – she ran workshops, retreats and best of all she pulled together a few collections giving us a place to publish. If that kind of support is still around I’ve been missing it.

It was nice to meet a fellow woman writer. It’s been a while.

A Heavy Seven Pounds

I’ve just watched the movie Seven Pounds. It was way too heavy for me and I couldn’t hold back the grief that I’ve been trying to stifle. Triggered grief. The grief that’s always there, though revisited less with time. Grief for what I missed out on. Not just grief though, anger, disappointment down to my marrow, that runs in my veins: disappointment with us - human beings. All that bad behaviour – violence, yelling, broken glass, my mother’s tears, my sisters crying - afraid; later - the sexual predators swooping taking; partners raging. Forty years of running from it, trying to dodge it (unsuccessfully).
Now, safe. Cacooned. I try to stay away from violent and sick people (I think I’ve finally learnt to recognize them in time). I try not to hear about the ongoing suffering of other women and children. I don’t watch the news. I rarely read a newspaper. I fight on against the Tobacco Industry, the biggest drug pushers ever: responsible for more deaths than small human minds can comprehend.
But, the biggest most important thing to do in this world, for me, is to stop the sexual and other violent abuse of children. I wish I was stronger so I could do more, like Kim McGregor. But I hate being triggered. I hate the pull down in to that pit. This latest slip started with reading two articles on how health professionals can be more sensitive to Child Sexual Abuse survivors. Women’s stories of the trauma they can be thrown in to at the clumsy handling of hospital staff. Then, I remember my own stories.
Like book ends to my day, I read one article in the morning and one at night. During the day I attended a meeting where I learned that over the years 2003-2007, in New Zealand, 334 children (aged 4wks-4yrs) died as a result of Sudden Unexpected Deaths. That in 2007, about 43% of Maori mums are still smoking when they first register for pregnancy care – a major risk factor associated with babies dying of SUDI. There’s no puzzle as to what we need to do to stop these deaths occurring but, how can we get the message through to these poor mums – literally poor; living in poorly served communities, communities where drinking, partying, bashing, drugs is day-to-day normal.
I have one very wanted treasured precious child. I can’t have any more. It’s hard to empathise with people having children accidentally, resentfully, neglectfully and with those who don’t put their babies first, who don’t do everything they can possibly do to ensure their child sleeps safe. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be driven by an instinct that supports that baby is dispensable – given the circumstances of the family at the time, sometimes just one baby, or one more baby just tips the balance of what’s sustainable and if it’s not man-slaughtered, it’s neglected just enough to die. I understand why it happens – and it is all of us as a human race that helps create those miserable parents living in their miserable child-unfriendly circumstances.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless and then depressed, but in the next two weeks we’re being given the chance to contribute to the solution, if even in a very small way. Every eligible voter in New Zealand can help make this country at least, more child-friendly. Just Vote Yes in the upcoming referendum.

Bullying - The morning after

Saturday 8 o’clock
I can’t tell if it’s raining
Ranginui and Papatuanuku
have come together during the night
Her mist, his cloud – one
The sons have not woken and pushed them apart
(Unlike our daughter who pulls me up to get
chocolate milk, cornflakes, turn on the TV)
There is no lagoon to be seen
Until I am at its edge
Everything is wet
Even the air
But it is not raining
I am happy to have the world
and me
removed from view this morning
Be pushed inwards
to focus only
on running
home

© June 2009

Stopping Smacking: A Small Step Towards Peace

A proponent of the Referendum on Child Discipline 2009 was being interviewed on the radio. My mouth fell open in shock as I listened to him expounding upon the harmlessness of smacking and the trauma that’s being imposed on perfectly good parents who occasionally smack their children. He made it sound like smacking was a necessary part of child-rearing.

I felt like ringing in to say ‘I have never had to hit my daughter. She has never done anything that would warrant a smack, even if I believed in smacking. What’s wrong with you people?!’ I felt my self-righteousness and checked myself. There I found a few spots of shame: times I’d rather forget, when the frustration or worse, anger had escalated and won expression. I don’t remember what my daughter did, just my bad behaviour, regret and tears. It’s true, I have never hit my daughter – but, when she was a baby I did once plonk her quite roughly back on to her cot next to me. Once, I gripped her upper arms hard when I lifted her from something to put her perhaps on to her bed; I did reach out and grab her pony tail as she ran, against warnings, towards the street curb; I have raised my voice or gritted my teeth and growled under my breath. I also knew immediately what I’d done was not okay and I apologized to her.

I remembered that I have been triggered many times. Some of those times I was teleported to the dimension of strikers and smackers. Momentarily, I hung on the edge of joining them and I understood. Then, I would catch and change the way I was reacting. No wonder people hit children, I would think. How can a world of people, who were hit themselves as children, who have been filled with senseless rules and dictates about what children should and should not do, exactly when they’re told to do it – how can they, with minimal education, low emotional intelligence and little insight, raised in a world where violence and conflict is normalised, swearing, road rage, disdain, jealousy, belittling a part of every day family life – how can they be expected to recognize in an instant an irrational thought and find instead their own cognition at fault, their own behaviour playing out in their child?

And this is where we’re at in New Zealand. There are people like me and my sister who as children, were smacked and whacked, yelled at and put down; who have lived hard with the damage of it, and worked hard to overcome it; who have vowed not to be like our parents. There are no doubt people who had loving supportive childhoods and violence against their children is not an instinct they have to fight against. And then there are those who don’t even know how they are damaged and how damaging their violence is to the next and future generations.

Whilst they fight for the right to smack their children, some humans at the cutting edge of a better future recognize that smacking is just one small act on a continuum of violent behaviours; that a peaceful world, the eradication of poverty even and achieving harmonic living with the environment is dependent upon individual acts of parenting. This is brilliantly explained, for those academically minded, by Robin Grille in his 2005 book ‘Parenting for a peaceful world’ (published by Longueville Media, Australia). For those who would struggle with a 394 page text, let alone comprehend it - we have laws. Let the law stand to protect the children – Vote Yes.

New Zealand's Smokefree Future

Some time in the not too distant future... every time adults book in to see a Health Professional (HP) their smoking risk will be assessed electronically based on their health record and, if necessary, the HP will be alerted to ask about and update smoking status data. This will be uploaded in real time to a national register. The register will return immediately, a brief report detailing years smoked, risk factors for smoking-related illness and premature death (such as, genetic predisposition for lung cancer) and any alerts for the HP to action, such as conducting a lung function test and/or prescribing cessation treatment.

There will be a wider range of faster-acting nicotine replacement products and highly effective pharmacotherapies for the HP to discuss with clients. For instance, there will be a vaccine that will be used for cessation, prevention of relapse and for prevention of uptake among adolescents at high risk of uptake.

The register will send automated (electronic) reminders (via txt, email and other online networking systems) to quit at opportune times (i.e. times determined to be linked with increased quit attempts, such as in the weeks leading up to a birthday, or in the lead up to New Year); and short communications about new cessation treatments, Quit&Win competitions and local treatment programme offers.

This will be possible to do because smoking will be confined to a minority of the population and that minority will belong to a number of discrete sub-sections of the population: (mental health and addiction treatment service users; non-English speaking migrant males and, to a lesser extent, females from countries with high male (and female) smoking prevalence rates; lower socio-economic Pākehā and Māori; some lower socio-economic Pacific Island groups (including Cook Island & Nuiean men and women, Samoan and Tonga men). Smoking prevalence will be higher among people who belong to more than one of these groups.

A national register was warranted, since half of smokers die from a smoking-related disease, and many more suffer debilitating smoking-related illnesses, thus health gains could be pursued and achieved for well over half of the registrants.

Smoking in all public places is banned. Police can issue on-the spot fines for smoking in vehicles when children are in the car, but voluntary compliance is high.

People who smoke can only buy smoked tobacco online from international supply sites or from a diminishing number of local licensed retailers. They are diminishing because if they are found in breach of tobacco supply and display laws (displays of tobacco advertising of any kind including of the product is banned) they lose their license for good. Tobacco products are not sold duty free coming into New Zealand.

The price of smoked tobacco products is relatively expensive and is pegged to continue to increase at regular six-monthly increments until tobacco smoking is eliminated in New Zealand. Nicotine replacement products and some pharmacotherapies are cheaper. There are locally accessible face to face nicotine dependency treatment services and counsellors available via a national free phone and online treatment service.

Smoking is widely understood to be a symptom of nicotine dependency, at last recognised as one of the most insidious and treatment-resistant addictions.

A Ministry of Health funded Tobacco Control Authority (TCA) oversees and co-ordinates the monitoring of deaths to smoking, tobacco products sold, tobacco consumption, smoking prevalence rates, smoking initiation rates, licensed retailer numbers and smokefree laws breaches, and the reduction of Māori smoking. It has clear objectives to reduce smoking prevalence rates, by: preventing uptake of smoking, reducing the supply of smoked tobacco, and increasing the cessation success rates. The TCA co-ordinates the national Tobacco Control Strategy, which includes a fully developed research and information strategy, uptake prevention strategy, treatment strategy, and compliance strategy.

There are no mass media campaigns promoting auahi kore/smokefree or promoting quitting – any tobacco control social marketing is directly targeted at the high risk sub-sections of the population and by direct communications to registrants with a current smoking status. This way, tobacco control avoids unintentionally educating and promoting tobacco smoking to the majority of children who largely do not see smoking on a day to day basis. Children learn about smoking in the context of school based learning about mental health and addictions.

Children at high risk for smoking uptake, i.e. children whose parent/s smoked and whose trajectory predicts future membership of one of the ‘smoking’ sub-groups, are targeted for special interventions offered through schools. There are no dedicated health promotion workers who promote smokefree as such. Instead, all HPs and school counsellors are skilled to offer cessation support or referral to addiction treatment specialists.

THE PANMURE LAGOON

Third morning in a row, out for
a run around the lagoon
which is a misnomer
– it’s actually a volcanic crater
we live on
& run around the rim

You can’t help feeling morally superior
being right there when the sun eases up
& lays her golden sight upon the frosted grass

The crater, now at sea level
fills and empties with the tide
full this morning
the water lies like solid glass

it’s good to be reminded of the age of the earth
& how individually we are hardly here at all
except that we act collectively
(like graffiti vandals driven by their pointlessness)
to carve the deepest scar

© 2009

Fighting A War No One Seems To Care About

In the future I hope 'the people' will be more aware that the wars we need to be fighting are with the Corporates - Industries (eg. the Tobacco, Gambling, Artificial Baby Milk, Alcohol & FakeFood Industries). The Federation is here, but embryonic. I'm stuck in the Matrix. How can I get out and rewrite the program? Why wasn't I born next century or the one after that? The widespread ignorance is stupefying.

Why am I feeling so stunned – like I’ve been hit with a Tazer gun? Of course it's tragic that 243 people died here and 7 died there - but why doesn't the media ever say anything about the 4.9 million, yep 4.9 MILLION people who have died, are dying now, will die, this year from tobacco smoking?

LOSING THE PREGNANCY FLAB

One great benefit of breastfeeding is that I was able to eat like a pig. Problem is that when we stopped, after two and a half years, I probably kept eating for two. Combine that with pushing past 45 and before long I was over 70kg. It was when I was going to have to go up a size that I realized walking three times a week just wasn’t enough anymore. Lucky for me, I overheard two colleagues talking about doing a duathlon. “What’s a duathlon?” I asked. When I learned that I could walk and ride – not run and there was no swimming, I thought maybe I could do it. So, my partner borrowed a bike and February 08 I did my first REAL Women Duathlon.

The first one took me about an hour and a half. That was walking 3.5ks, riding 10ks and walking a further 1.5ks. It was hard, but I finished and that was the start of it. I did two more REAL Women Duathlons that summer and a Sarah Ulmer (SUB) Molenberg 5k walk. Then winter came and the events were over. I hadn’t lost any weight, but I did feel fitter and I’d started to try and jog a bit. Winter stews and short days with little hope of getting home in time to walk around the lagoon made the onset of winter that much gloomier.

Then I found the XTERRA Auckland Trail Series. It was a leap to commit to a running event and one that was mixed gender, but I had to do something. Walking and even riding wasn't bringing the weight down. I decided to try one. I registered for the short course, of course, which was to be about 5ks. I knew I could do that. What I hadn’t foreseen was how hard it would be to do hills. But running through the bush, on my own (because everyone else had taken off) was great. The bush has always been a healing place for me, so it sort of offset some of the physically hard part of it. I had to walk a lot still, up the hills, but I finished and was hooked. One event a month seemed manageable with fulltime work and a daughter and very little time to train. I kept going all through winter and did all 6! To celebrate, I capped it off with a mid-course 11k XTERRA Rotorua in December.

But I still had only lost 1-2kgs! People kept telling me ‘but muscle weighs more than fat.’ Was this how it was going to have to be from now on? Was I going to have to keep up the running, keep on doing these events and training for them?

HEBE IN THE DAWNING LIGHT

Came over all photographer this morning
struck as I was by the nonsensical isolation
of My Auckland, so–called ‘big’ CITY (in the country)
You can run out your front door & be
engulfed in the warmth of the ice cold winter bush
Why do people sleep (in their heat-pumped homes)
when there’s this to break their fast:
hebe in the dawning light
pukeko unafraid stripping soft flesh from a piece of straw
pohutakawa bud, dormant promise
roped off paths slipping in to the sea to defiantly run along
the haunting call & flap of hurried flight
birds disturbed by my running feet
on gravel, shell, clay
the echoing horn of the Half Moon Ferry
as it leaves its dock across the bay
a few horses coated, one stretches over the fence to lick dew
a paddock of cows, toadstools
forefront Maungarei, standing roughly round
like an undiscovered passage tomb
This is what fitness is
Hauora
Auahi Kore
appreciating the survival of indigenous toanga
living on
despite colonization, urbanization
the pukeko, hebe, the Maori man line-fishing off the rocks
carrying on ways from the past
carrying on

©

FINDING A BREATHING PACE

Boxing Day 2008. A stupendous morning – marking an amazing achievement. I managed to jog right round the lagoon without stopping (except to tie up a show lace)! I don’t know how this is possible. Maybe it’s because I’ve had a rest. Since the XTERRA Rotorua race, I’ve only managed to walk around the lagoon. The 10k run was twenty days past. Haruki Murakami talks, in his book What I talk about when I talk about running, that when he’s training for a marathon he has to build to a peak and then drop off the intensity a few weeks before the event. And after, the motivation drops away.
Maybe it was the Raw Food. Renata, who ran the Raw Food workshop (our work xmas do), went on about the benefits but I listened like she was a preacher, letting it wash past me blah-blah-wild-claims-&-exaggerations. But, our Christmas fare this year was Raw: stuffed mushrooms, cucumber bites and the surprising tri-colour cake. And then there was the beetroot martini – a wondrous cocktail of fresh beetroot, pear and apple juice mixed to proportion with sake. It really was a trip. It was like drinking moral superiority – that feeling that comes with doing something good and healthy beyond the norm, but then like a scorpion’s tail the alcohol undermines it all with a sliver of guilt. Still, it was a revelation to sit eating dessert on Christmas night and not feel totally stuffed with stomach groaning dissent as yet another spoonful of saturated fat passes the tongue.
We all slept heavily. I didn’t wake up with a burning intention to run right round the lagoon. I expected it to be the usual struggle: jog, burn, puff, slow to a walk, cajole myself up to a jog again, go into creative writing mode to distract from what’s happening in my feet, back, breasts. Run on despite passers-by (which would usually put me off as I imagine their sight of me: fat jiggling, crimson with effort).
Maybe it’s the new running shoes, which so far have been hurting – leaving the callous’ on the balls of my feet rubbed and painful and my heels aching.
Breathing makes a big difference. Finding a breathing pace, a speed (which is not an accurate reflection of my jogging since there’s hardly any speed to it. I used to call it a shuffle). But, I’ve finally found a set distance to move each foot, a comfortable height for lifting each foot off the ground and a rhythm upon which to breath in and blow out. Surprisingly, my heart can cope if I give it enough wind and I can keep going.