Jorge Sandoval at home in the Wairarapa. (Photo: Gemma Snowdon/NZ Red Cross)
Jorge Sandoval at home in the Wairarapa. (Photo: Gemma Snowdon/NZ Red Cross)

SocietyOctober 24, 2018

Kiwi Legend: The Chilean refugee who became a New Zealand cycling star

Jorge Sandoval at home in the Wairarapa. (Photo: Gemma Snowdon/NZ Red Cross)
Jorge Sandoval at home in the Wairarapa. (Photo: Gemma Snowdon/NZ Red Cross)

Our new series produced by the New Zealand Red Cross profiles people from refugee backgrounds who now call New Zealand home. Our first Kiwi Legend: Jorge Sandoval, who fled Pinochet’s Chile for a new life in the Hutt Valley.

It’s November 1988 and competitors in the Vuelta Ciclista de Chile (Chilean cycling race) are jostling for a position as they approach finish line for the 11th stage which ended up in the city of Concepción. This is a huge event for the region and massive crowds are waiting for them, along with journalists from all over the globe.

But at the finish line the journalists don’t gather around the winners, instead the camera start flashing at and focusing on the man who has placed 11th, Jorge Sandoval. He’s embracing a man and a woman and all three of them have tears streaming down their faces.

It was an emotional moment captured by international media, although few knew what they were watching.

Only 15 years earlier Jorge had been teenager attending Liceo de Tome, his local high school. He was part of a student movement at his college when there was a military coup and Augusto Pinochet assumed power, a position he’d hold for almost two decades.

“The military arrested a lot of people [after the coup] and killed and tortured people,” he explains. “I was arrested a month after the military took power in in a group of nine people.”

Jorge was arrested in his own house, in front of his little brother and parents. The date still sticks in his mind – 11 October 1973. For the next nine days he was held captive and tortured before being sent to a nearby concentration camp where he spent 12 months.

Eventually Jorge was released under house arrest but knew that if there was any unrest he would be among the first to be arrested and sent back to the concentration camp. Unable to face this he made a daring escape to Argentina, but it meant leaving his family behind.

“At the time it was one of the most painful experiences that I’d had in my life, having to leave for a second time my home and my parents and try to make it on my own in a country where I didn’t know anybody.”

Jorge Sandoval at home in the Wairarapa. (Photo: Gemma Snowdon/NZ Red Cross)

He approached the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Red Cross for help when he made it to Argentina. The then 18-year-old was registered as a refugee and accepted for resettlement in New Zealand two years later.

It was a bittersweet moment for Jorge who wouldn’t see his parents for another 13 years.

“I realised years later that for me it was more traumatic to come to New Zealand and try to live here than when I was in a concentration camp,” he reflects.

“For me to come to this country that I didn’t know anything about – I didn’t know anybody, I couldn’t speak the language, I couldn’t go to the shops, I couldn’t socialise with other people. It was very traumatic and on top of this not being able to have family around me was very sad for me.”

This isolation from his family was compounded by the fact that he and his wife at the time had two daughters of their own and Jorge couldn’t ask his parents for advice on parenting. He was determined to make a new life for himself in New Zealand though and soon found a job at a joinery firm in Petone, just outside Wellington.

“In the first couple of weeks I would catch the train [to work] and end up in Porirua because if you can’t speak the language you don’t know where trains go,” he reminisces.

“But then you start getting used to it, begin to speak a little bit of English, start meeting a few people. For us, as soon as I got a job it made things much easier for us.”

Jorge decided soon after his arrival in New Zealand that he wouldn’t tell people about his background as a refugee.

“I found that as soon as I said the word refugee, people reacted in a funny way,” he said.

“Over the years I’ve seen that the mentality has changed though. For me it was very rewarding when I lived in Hutt Valley, for example, to see new refugees playing in the parks and mixing with the locals and trying to have a go in a new country. I think a lot has changed since the 1970s.”

A cycling career

Jorge grew up in a town called Tomé, 30kms south from Concepción. He remembers his childhood fondly, both his parents were factory workers and although they weren’t rich, they never went without food.

“We had a lot of love from our parents, my father was always with us doing things that we liked to do,” says Jorge with a smile. “We were four brothers going fishing, hunting, going to the farms.”

It was during his childhood that Jorge first became interested in cycling. The Vuelta Ciclista de Chile would pass through his town each year and he remembered running down to the square to see the cyclists.

“What really impressed me as a young boy was to hear accents from all over the world, that was the only time of year we’d see people from another country and then the next day we’d go and watch them get ready to take off for another town. That stood with me for many years.”

He joined a cycling club in Wellington and as his cycling improved Jorge began racing in other cities, meeting more people, and becoming much more involved in the scene.

“Cycling is one of the sports that gives you the opportunity to race against the best in the country,” he says. “I was very privileged to start racing in New Zealand and eventually that’s what got me back to my own country many years later.”

Jorge’s referring to 1988 when he went to race in Chile, representing New Zealand. The South American country was still under military rule and leaders believed that hosting the international cycling race would improve the image of the country.

It was at this point that the media managed to capture his emotional reunion with his parents, more than 13 years since they’d last seen each other. It wasn’t long before journalists realised he was Chilean and began asking why he was representing New Zealand.

“I never told them why, I was scared.”

These days Jorge is the best known cycle promoter in New Zealand and organises the Tour of New Zealand, a five day race over 670kms. He has three grandkids who he absolutely adores and who regularly visit him in the Wairarapa.

Jorge Sandoval. (Photo: Gemma Snowdon/NZ Red Cross)

Although he says coming to New Zealand was the best thing that could’ve happened to him, Jorge says there are still moments of sadness at everything he lost in the process.

“Sometimes I get frustrated because I’ve never been a Chilean in my own country. Yes I grew up there but I would like the opportunity to get up and go to work and be around my family and just be a Chilean in Chile.”

He empathises with refugees around the world today and feels far more comfortable sharing his story now than he did in the 1970s.

“I don’t think anyone grows up wanting to be a refugee, unfortunately it happened to me and thousands of other people and it’s still happening today. I don’t think anybody in their right mind would like to leave their country, their children, their family, just because they want to go away.

“Refugees are people in need, people who need to be supported – especially when they arrive in another country, they need to receive the basic support to survive. As a refugee, I have nothing but respect for refugees around the world.”

Kiwi Legends is a regular series profiling people from refugee backgrounds who now call New Zealand home. Find out more about the Red Cross’s work with New Zealand refugees at redcross.org.nz.

Keep going!
Scrabble feature 2

SocietyOctober 24, 2018

War of the Words: why the new Kiwi Scrabble edition has Scrabble fans furious

Scrabble feature 2

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time to produce a local version of beloved board game Scrabble, featuring Kiwi slang and te reo words. But then the Scrabble diehards played it.

New Zealand is a country with a proud history in competitive Scrabble. At this year’s Alchemist Cup, the world’s richest, most prestigious teams Scrabble tournament, New Zealand enters as the fourth seeded country.

Anchoring the side will be Christchurch’s Nigel Richards, widely considered to be the greatest Scrabble player of all time. He’s a three-time World Champion (the only person to win more than once), and famously won the French-language World Championships despite not speaking French (he memorised every word in the French Scrabble dictionary in nine weeks).

So it seems only appropriate that the current flagship product of The Warehouse would be Kiwi Scrabble, a fitting homage to our nation’s success in what players call the “mindsport”.

But all is not well in the Scrabble world. Competitive players are furious with the new version, and with its creator, Mattel, who they see as a money-grubbing, heartless machine with no appreciation for our country, te reo, or the people who love the game.

New Zealand’s Nigel Richards competes in the Francophone Scrabble World Championships in Louvain-La-Neuve on July 21, 2015. Richards went on to win the competition, despite not speaking a word of French. (JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images)

Kiwi Scrabble was launched in September with a huge marketing push across TV, radio and online.

Facebook and Youtube have been plastered with ads starring an annoyingly cheerful grandmother (played by celebrity chef Jo Seagar), who beams about it being “Chockablock full of Kiwi-isms”, while an eerily quiet David Tua plays the word OWESOME on two double letter spaces for 19 points.

To celebrate the launch, the Manakau branch of The Warehouse changed its storefront signage to spell out ‘The Warewhare’ in Scrabble tiles, and stores across the country now feature cardboard signs in random aisles which all point you in the direction of the board game.

The Warehouse head of marketing Becki Butler said the new version of the game “gives us a chance to shine a light on our inimitable language, and do it with purpose and reason.”

But to Howard Warner, president of the New Zealand Scrabble Players Association, and the #2 ranked Scrabble player in New Zealand, it’s an atrocity.

“It’s a very cynical ploy to sell more sets in a saturated market. It’s not a new game, no one who plays the game seriously would want it” he said. “The words you use are irrelevant, it doesn’t alter the game. It’s a con.”

There’s serious bad blood between Mattel, which owns the licence to the game outside of the North American market, and the competitive Scrabblers who devote their lives to the sport.

“They hold our sport back a lot,” said Warner. “We consider the players to really own the sport; Mattel just sells the equipment. It’s like if Nike owned the rights to all of world tennis.

“[Mattel] does nothing for the sport. They used to sponsor the world champs, but now they don’t even do that. We have a players’ body, but Mattel are constantly putting up barriers, it’s awful.”

The new Kiwi Scrabble is clearly aimed at the regular kitchen table Scrabbler, not experts, but for some it’s a matter of principle.

Anderina McLean, the editor of Forwords, a quarterly NZ Scrabble magazine, and herself a Scrabble Grandmaster who represented New Zealand at last year’s world champs in Nairobi, Kenya, said the game is “fine as it is”.

“I’m in favour of anything at encourages new people, but if you’ve already got the game then there’s not a lot of point,” she said. “Scrabble already exists, we don’t need to keep reinventing it. The game hasn’t been changed since it was patented 70 years ago, it works fine.”

Warner agreed. “It’s fabulous as it is. Nothing needs changing except to get the malicious influence of Mattel out of it.”

But The Warehouse and Mattel clearly think there’s a market for a ‘Kiwi-fied’ version of the game.

They’ve added some cards to spice things up. Each player gets one ‘Kia Ora’ card, which they can play at any time, and certain tiles give you the right to pick up a ‘Yeah Nah’ card. The cards give you certain bonuses like extra points, the ability to steal other players tiles, and the chance to change tiles without skipping a turn.

The cards are the aspect that pisses McLean off the most. “I’m going to be scathing about that. It’s not Monopoly, you don’t need a community chest. Scrabble has enough going for it, it’s not a card game. I’ve got card games, Scrabble isn’t one of them.”

You also get 10 bonus points for playing any word from their ‘Kiwi Words List’, an idea that garnered a derisive laugh from Warner. “Big deal. Ten points is nothing. There’s no way any serious player would go out of their way for that.”

Kiwi Scrabble

The ‘Kiwi Words List’ provided in Kiwi Scrabble features 300 words including slang, te reo, and words that are just particularly common in New Zealand, such as MATE, BRO, and MULLET.

But according to a quick cross-reference I did, 251 of the 300 words are already in the Collins Official Scrabble Words list, including CHOCKABLOCK, which Seager emphasises in the ads, and all five of the words featured on the front of the box (CHOICE, DAIRY, TA, BACH, and HONGI).

And of the 49 new words added, many of them are controversial among purists because, well, they’re not words. Fourteen of the ‘words’ on the list are actually phrases, including SWEETAS, BILLYT, ONIT, and THEWAREWHARE, all of which anyone with a grasp of the English language will notice normally require a space in the middle of them, and therefore are two words, not one.

“There’s no way in the world that any form of Scrabble should have phrases. It’s stupid, it’s just plain dumb.” says Warner.

Also, CUZZY is on the list, despite there being only one Z tile in a pack.

But it’s the half-hearted attempt at incorporating te reo that grinds the experts’ gears most of all. There are 50-odd te reo or te reo-influenced words in the Kiwi Scrabble word list, but no change in tile design or letter distribution to reflect that.

For example, there is only one K tile in a standard English Scrabble set, and it is worth five points. But considering K is a very common letter in te reo, a genuine attempt at encouraging te reo words would need to adjust the set to include around six tiles, each worth two points each.

“It’s a bit of an insult. I care about New Zealand’s official languages, and they’ve imposed themselves upon the language in kind of a colonial way,” said Warner.

‘Ng’ and ‘Wh’ would also need to be their own separate tiles, because in te reo they are considered to be one letter, and a,e,i,o,u would need tiles with and without macrons.

As McLean points out, “You could argue that a word like KORERO should have a macron, so if you play it without, are you spelling it wrong?”

And while the addition of some te reo into the game may seem innovative, it’s not. Several hundred te reo words are already considered official Scrabble words, mostly place names, animals, and very common terms such as POI, HAKA, and HANGI.

It’s a nice advantage for New Zealanders in international competition, because it means they have access to a few more words that they know from everyday life. Aderina remembers a game in her first international tournament where KETE was on the board, and she was able to rack up big points by simply turning it into KETES, because her Australian opponent didn’t know it was a legitimate option.

A particularly popular te reo word in Scrabble (McLean and Warner both mentioned it independently without being asked), is the fish WAREHOU, which was first made an official word in 2012. It’s valuable because you can tack an S on and make the plural WAREHOUS (officially sanctioned by the word list, despite te reo not using ‘s’ to designate plurals), and then tack on an E and turn it into WAREHOUSE, creating three distinct scoring opportunities.

But there are some frustrations among players with the current te reo and kiwiana words available, and Kiwi Scrabble does actually offer some improvement.

There are several te reo words which are still not official Scrabble words, despite being a big part of the Kiwi vernacular – mahi, wharepaku, pukana and patero are a few. They can all be found in the Kiwi Scrabble word list.

And there are two Kiwi words that are currently allowed in Scrabble that some argue really shouldn’t be: JAFA (Just Another Fucking Aucklander) is one. “Acronyms shouldn’t be allowed, it’s just incorrect” said Aderina. The other is RONZER, (Rest of New Zealand-er), which is doubly blashphemic because it both an acronym and a term that no one has ever used, ever. They are not included in Kiwi Scrabble’s list.

So it’s not all bad, Kiwi Scrabble has added quite a few essential new words to the Scrabble universe. We can now go about our lives peacefully knowing that we are allowed to play JANDALS (15 points) or PINGAS (9) or CHEEYAH (18).

And McLean does admit the new black and white design isn’t too bad. “I suppose the silver fern packaging is alright, it might make a nice Christmas present or souvenir.”

Despite her issues with the game, she hopes it is a big seller, because at the end of the day more people buying Scrabble sets has to mean more people playing Scrabble, although “if someone went to the Warehouse to buy it I would still say buy the green one, not the black.”

The Full List of Words in Kiwi Scrabble That Aren’t Already Scrabble Words

Controversial words are marked with an * for phrases, + for brand names, and ^ for acronyms.

Algud

Arohanui

Ataahua

^BBQ

*Big Smoke

*Billy T

*+Buzzy Bee

+Caramilk

Cheeyah

Chillybin

Chocka

Chutty

Cuzzy

+Deka

+Edmonds

Faaa

Hundys

Hungus

Jandals

Kalega

*Ka Pai

Kaimoana

*Kia Ora

Laters

Mahi

Manu

Neph

*On It

Oosh

Pukana

Patero

Pakaru

Pingas

^RAZA

Recky

+Redband

Rousies

Scarfie

Skux

*Sweet As

Squizz

*Tiki Tour

Tangaroa

*+The Warewhare

Tumeke

Wharepaku

*Yeah Nah


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