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Children outside a West Auckland home ca. 1970. Image: National Library
Children outside a West Auckland home ca. 1970. Image: National Library

ĀteaOctober 9, 2019

Fixing 30 years of substandard housing: Mere and Ngaro’s story

Children outside a West Auckland home ca. 1970. Image: National Library
Children outside a West Auckland home ca. 1970. Image: National Library

Grandparents Mere and Ngaro Pita spent decades in a run-down home. A West Auckland programme for elderly residents helped fix that. 

Mere and Ngaro Pita’s West Auckland home is literally a labour of love. The proud grandparents live about five minutes’ walk from Kelston Boys’ High School with their four mokopuna. Originally from the Far North (Ngātiwai and Ngāpuhi), they bought their weatherboard villa after moving to Auckland to work in the 1970s. 

Since then, upkeep of the whare has been tough. A bad two-year leasing experiment in the 1980s resulted in it being close to condemned. Damage included holes in the ceiling, missing windows and ripped carpet. At the time, the couple were unable to afford repair costs. Failure to fix things initially made it more difficult, and the couple fell behind in upkeep over the years. 

Four months ago, they received a phone call from the Waipareira Trust which changed things. The trust, which provides social and health services to West Auckland residents, had recently launched a Whānau Ora pilot programme providing repairs to homes of elderly people. It’s part of a growing investment in the unique needs of an older generation of Māori. Ngaro, 72, and Mere, 69, were asked if they wanted to participate. 

Sitting at his kitchen table, Ngaro admits being sceptical about the programme and embarrassed by the stigma associated with substandard housing. “It’s been amazing for us though, absolutely amazing.

“All the windows, the wires they fixed so we don’t get electric shocks from the light switches, and fixing up damage to the walls and ceiling, and the plumbing They just set up outside and went to work,” Ngaro says. 

Today, the house is warm with morning sun streaming into the lounge. Pictures of their grandchildren – 14-year-old twins Kyron and Chelston, their sister Te Arohau, 13, and nine-year-old Jahkahya – decorate the lounge. 

After offering me an apple from the fruit bowl, he recalls how problems with the home began when his father fell ill. “We had to go back up north for a few years because my dad was sick. When we came back, it was like there was nothing left of our house.

“The guy who was supposed to live in it and look after it, didn’t. They basically trashed the place – there were holes in the ceiling and about 10 people living here. Heaps of the windows were gone… and the new carpet and furniture and all our linen were ruined.”

Mere, 69, shakes her head. 

“It was so bad,” she says. “When we first got back, we’d be sleeping and people would just walk into the house looking for someone. 

“Ever since then, we just couldn’t catch up.”

Mere and Ngaro Pita with their twin moko, Kyron and Chelston. Image: Teuila Fuatai

Repairs to their home occurred sporadically, and only when they could afford it, she says. Ngaro quietly adds they remortgaged the property to help with costs, but it was never enough. 

They both lament the difficulties of having a home that stood out for all the wrong reasons. Ngaro recalls a visit from one of their neighbours a while back. 

“It was this fella from up the road and he was selling his house,” he says. “He asked me if he could paint my house because he wanted to make it look nice for people coming to look at his place and the neighbours.”

Ngaro says he woke on a Saturday morning to the neighbour and his wife scraping and painting outside. He admits being both bemused and embarrassed. “Well, they did it and it looked good after. So that was how it got a coat of paint.”

Fussing over the boisterous twins Kyron and Chelston who have emerged from their rooms to listen to their koro’s tale, Mere says the couple’s close connection with the Waipareira Trust helped overcome their reservations around the house repairs that came later. Familiarity with staff at the Trust made it easier to discuss what the property needed, she says.

“We’ve been involved [in the Trust] from the beginning, since it was just small – even before we had Hoani Waititi marae. It’s pretty cool to see where they’re at now,” Mere says.

She says it’s about talking to someone in person, otherwise it’s difficult to be comfortable and understand what is happening.

Ngaro adds he still had concerns even after the process was underway. “I just kept waiting for them [Trust] to tell me how much it was going to be,” he says of the repairs. “They had to keep telling me it was no cost and it took ages for me to believe them.”

“You know, it’s just not something we would ever have been able to do without them. And, it’s also not something I wanted to tell everyone about. I was whakamā – having a house that was so bad. I didn’t want people to come in and see it.”

As the number of elderly New Zealanders increase, health and social services are under increased pressure to cater for the needs of an ageing population. This demographic shift presents an added challenge for Māori, whose needs are often ignored in mainstream service models.

Dr Tanya Allport, head of the Trust’s research arm Wai Research, is working on a project to identify what kind of service prototype would best suit elderly Māori like the Pitas. Her team is hoping to report on its findings by July, which looks at what kaumātua Māori want as they age, and how that should shape services and funding.

Research collected throughout the North Island shows organisations are not resourced to provide services specifically for ageing Māori. Part of this is due to a lack of funding, but there is also an issue around what information is available. 

It is crucial to address this as the number of elderly people continues to increase – both for Māori and non-Māori, she says. Notably, population forecasts show in the next two years, one in eight Māori will be over 65. In 2001, only one in 33 had reached retirement age. 

“While perhaps, in some places around New Zealand, Māori service providers have found a way to deliver services to elderly, it’s not because the government were giving them money to do that specifically,” Allport says. “Often, it was those providers making creative choices about the resources they had which translated to something in the community.”

Creating a framework which builds on these types of approaches so elderly Māori have access to everything they need is the next step, she says. “It definitely has to be aligned with Whānau Ora and be a holistic service. It also has to be flexible so that it can deal with the complexities and differences from one place to the next, enabling a dignified ageing process.”

Back at the Pita house, we discuss Allport’s research. Both Ngaro and Mere believe it shows a way to create security for their family and many others. Mere is particularly hopeful. 

“When we got our house done, I actually gave them the names of four other whānau who were in a similar situation,” she says softly. “They all got help with their homes because [the Trust] were able to track them down and see what they needed.”

She emphasises the need to promote community engagement and personal relationships when working with elderly. 

“I think that’s what is really important for us old people – making that contact. Because, otherwise, you just wouldn’t know how many people are out there that need help.”

This content was created in paid partnership with the National Urban Māori Authority. Learn more about our partnerships here.

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UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya backstage during the UFC 243 event at Marvel Stadium on October 6, 2019 in Melbourne, Australia. Photo by 3038150/Zuffa LLC/ Getty Images
UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya backstage during the UFC 243 event at Marvel Stadium on October 6, 2019 in Melbourne, Australia. Photo by 3038150/Zuffa LLC/ Getty Images

ĀteaOctober 8, 2019

Why Israel Adesanya’s victory was a win for me too

UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya backstage during the UFC 243 event at Marvel Stadium on October 6, 2019 in Melbourne, Australia. Photo by 3038150/Zuffa LLC/ Getty Images
UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya backstage during the UFC 243 event at Marvel Stadium on October 6, 2019 in Melbourne, Australia. Photo by 3038150/Zuffa LLC/ Getty Images

After rising up the ranks of the UFC, Nigerian-New Zealander Israel Adesanya became the undisputed middleweight champion on Sunday. Rapper and producer Unchained XL explains what Adesanya’s win means for his first generation Afro-Kiwi community.

The African community in New Zealand is still fairly small and relatively young. The first few of us trickled in during the 60s and it would be another 40 or so years before the country saw more significant influxes of Black African migrants. My own family migrated to Aotearoa in 1990, becoming one of the first Nigerian families to settle in the country. For first-generation African Kiwi ‘third culture kids’ who like me migrated to Aotearoa via the UK at a young age and grew up here, our challenge is ‘cultural architecture’, by which I mean the process of creating and defining our own identities from scratch.

Growing up, we didn’t really have any generational forerunners to show us what it meant to be Afro-Kiwi. There was no culture or collective identity already in place that could contextualise our experience and inform our identity. We’ve been doing it on the fly. A fundamental part of this process, I believe, is witnessing the rise of our own heroes, icons and legacy-makers. So far, we have looked mainly to diaspora in other countries, predominantly African Americans and British descendants of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans, who become cultural icons through success in mainstream music, cinema and literature.

Resembling us physically and having a cultural experience similar to our own as ‘Westerners’ – more the case with those who are British – these are the people who unwittingly have been carrying the mantle of our representation. However, and through no fault of their own, they cannot truly represent us. They aren’t Kiwi. What we have really needed to see are black individuals who share our specific experiences and embody our own complexities; Black Kiwis who push the boundaries of possibility, who can inspire us and our children to do more and be more.

Israel Adesanya is one of these heroes. Like me, his family migrated to New Zealand years ago, back in the days when we used to play ‘spot the black person’. He grew up in a Nigerian household similar to my own, with Nigerian parents who had very Nigerian expectations. He was also thrust into a double life, figuring out how to be Kiwi in an environment that took every opportunity to tell him that he wasn’t.

Israel became our hero long ago, but now the world has finally seen it. For us as Afro Kiwis, we saw more than a New Zealander defeating an Australian on a global stage to become number one (something we will never get tired of seeing, by the way). We saw someone who would have navigated competing expectations from African parents and New Zealand culture; struggled to feel acceptance as someone perhaps too ‘Westernised’ for Africans and too ‘African’ for Westerners; dealt with the constant challenging of his Kiwi identity from other New Zealanders; faced criticism for being influenced by other African diaspora cultures in the West; simultaneously felt camaraderie and a difficult-to-explain separation from his Māori and Pasifika friends; been told to ‘go back to Africa’ in an argument with a Pākehā; felt embarrassed when school mates mocked the ‘weird’ food in his lunchbox; been told ‘look at your cousins, G’ on television whenever a World Vision or Tearfund ad came on; found trips to the beach with friends a bit awkward and for so many other reasons probably longed to feel like he truly belonged somewhere in both worlds. We saw one of our own win. To us, it reaffirms the fact that we can win too.

Unchained XL

Over the past couple of years, I have realised that we are in a position to craft a uniquely powerful legacy. There will never be another first generation of Afro Kiwis. We’re it. And as more of this generation enters adulthood and starts bearing the second generation, our stories start becoming their history. Our own history as ‘first genners’ is informed by our parents’ stories of a proud culture, challenging upbringings, the survival of war and conflict, the traversing of oceans and the struggle of assimilation. Revealing the depths of that struggle isn’t always easy for our African parents; I believe most of us have only scratched the surface of these stories.

It’s these experiences that have shaped our parents’ desires for us to choose for ourselves from a narrow selection of professions; medicine, law, engineering, accountancy (pharmacy and architecture are acceptable too). Although culture and status both play a huge part in this, it’s also about simply wanting us to succeed and not have to endure the hardships they had to. From their perspective, it’s risk minimisation, and I understand and respect that. Nevertheless, we migrant kids can’t continue to shoulder the burden of this expectation at the expense of our true passion and talents. Some of us legitimately want to enter these professions, and that is awesome, but I shudder to think how much untapped athletic skill, musical virtuosity, tech ingenuity or literary prowess will be locked away, never to bless the world with its light. We owe that light to our kids. Our parents gave us amazing stories, and now it’s time to write ours for our own children. So, what will they be? Israel, at the very least, will write that he became a sporting world champion. And in doing this, he has paved the way for us to write our own odds-defying stories. He won, and now we must go and win.

To say we feel proud of Israel Adesanya is a massive understatement. Right now we feel untouchable. As a music artist, I see fellow heroes in the making like Raiza Biza, JessB, TAPZ, Estère, KVKA, Mo Muse, Mukukā, Gino October, Thabani Gapara, Phodiso and many more, and I say hell yeah, we’re pushing these boundaries and we’re gonna win too. I see my fellow Black Kiwis killing it in other fields and I know they’re gonna win as well. As a board member of the Association of Nigerians in New Zealand, I help recognise and celebrate young Black Kiwis excelling in academia, sporting, fine arts, literature etc and trust me, they’re definitely gonna win. We’re all gonna win.


Read Don Rowe’s profile of Israel Adesanya from August 2017: ‘I want to be immortal’: A few beers with prizefighter Israel Adesanya