12 March 2010
Piki mai rā, kake mai rā,
Tukua mai rā te kaha, te māia, te manawanui,
Tihei mauri ora.
E whakawhetai ana mātou ki tō tātou Matua-nui-i-te-Rangi,
Kia tau mai rā, kia tau mai rā,
Ōnā manaakitanga, ki runga ki a koe, ki a tātou katoa.
E koro mā, e kui mā,
Pakeke mā, tamariki mā,
E ngā hau ahi kā, e ngā hau kāinga,
Ngā marae o te motu, ngā pā o ngā iwi,
Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
In this issue of Te Hotu Manawa Māori news, Sharing the Vision, Training Dates for 2010 and an update on the Toiora, Toi Tāngata project with Kōhanga Reo. Also in news from the Community, a Hākinakina Day held in Taranaki plus a 12 week whānau weight loss challenge with great results. And finally some feel good tips in our He Tongi Rerehua section on cooking with herbs plus some sage advice from our tūpuna. KAWEA AKE TE WERO!
Te Hotu Manawa Māori - Sharing the Vision
Kia ora koutou katoa.
E ngā kaimahi me ngā tumuaki o ngā rōpū hauora Māori , ngā mihi atu ki a koutou katoa!
We have had a whirlwind start to the year and I am excited to say that Te Hotu Manawa Māori have a number of new projects well underway.
Hope you enjoy the read.
Moana Tane
Tobacco Control
Our ABC for Māori Communities project has started in Te Tai Tokerau, and we are working with Kia Ora Ngāti Wai and Te Hauora o Kaikohe kaimahi, to support them to help our whānau quit smoking.
The Bay of Plenty District Health Board, have been working with us to encourage kaimahi hauora Māori to train to become quit card providers, as part of their Tobacco Control Strategy.
Looking ahead, we are working with the National Tobacco Control Working Group to plan for the next Tobacco Control Conference, scheduled for later in the year. More on this date later. We encourage you all to submit your abstracts to be presenters at this conference.
The national training for new kaimahi coming into the Aukati Kai Paipa whānau was held in Wellington in February with our trainers bringing the new workforce up to speed on Māori, tobacco, and smoking cessation. These hui are inspiring as young Māori men and women take up the challenge of working toward an Aotearoa, that is Tupeka Kore. Ka mau te wehi!
As we come to the close of our contract for the Aukati Kai Paipa training, it’s appropriate that we pause and reflect over the many years of working with kaimahi and express appreciation for all that we have been involved in, which has included some key roles.
Looking back, Te Hotu Manawa Māori has contributed to tobacco control in unique ways: the Hapūnga Auahi Kore social marketing campaign, the Auahi Kore Role Models campaign, and the Auahi Kore Marae programme which we are still very proud of. We continue to provide resources to the many kaimahi around the country who support whānau to quit smoking.
More recently, we were advisors on the New Zealand Smoking Cessation Guidelines, the Smoking Cessation Competencies for New Zealand, and the National Training Framework for the smoking cessation workforce.
We coordinated the first National Tobacco Control Hui in 2008 with a workforce of 300+ people, and this bilingual hui gave kaimahi from all over the country the chance to get together and share ideas and knowledge.
As an organisation, we continue to be a part of the Quit Group governance, the Smokefree Coalition governance and the National Tobacco Control Working Group; and we are very conscious of our position as the only national Māori non-government organisation in the Tobacco Control sector.
We gratefully acknowledge each and every person who has attended our training, and know that we have a unique place in history – as New Zealand’s first and only, national kaupapa Māori training organisation for smoking cessation practitioners. We thank the Ministry of Health for their support and manaakitanga over the years – ngā mihi nunui ki a ratou.
Thank you to all the kaimahi who recently attended our cluster hui rounds throughout the regions – your confidence and support for our team is much appreciated!
Nutrition and Physical Activity
The team continue to provide a very good service under a shadow of uncertainty in the field of public health nutrition and physical activity. They are also focussing on what the future holds for this unique kaupapa Māori nutrition and physical activity service. Three key themes have been identified by the team to shape the future and these are excellence, sustainability and leadership. Excellence in becoming a best practice service, sustainability in creating innovative programmes that enhance effectiveness and reach of the service and leadership in being a national voice on issues affecting Māori.
New innovative developments have begun in the community training programme with a shorter 3-day ‘healthy eating basics’ wānanga now available for community leaders to attend. The 9-day ‘Kai Tōtika – Korikori Tinana’ wānanga (Level 4 Accredited) now has an online tool added to its delivery ensuring all kaimahi, who participate in Te Hotu Manawa Māori training, have ongoing access to Te Hotu Manawa Māori expert advice and are able to connect with other kaimahi around the motu.
Our newly developed Te Kōhanga Reo training programme ‘Toi Ora – Toi Tangata’ will be piloted in two sites this year. This project has been a highlight for Te Hotu Manawa Māori staff as it has allowed us to work collaboratively with The National Kōhanga Reo Trust toward shared health and education outcomes.
The release of the weight management guidelines has alerted the team to cast its public health nutrition and physcal activity net a little wider within the spectrum of health care in Aotearoa New Zealand with potential developments here being discussed with key partners.
Māori Affairs Inquiry Committee on the Tobacco Industry and the Impacts on Māori
Tobacco remains the greatest challenge to the physical, economical, spiritual and cultural wellbeing of Māori.
Why is this?
Smoking has taken the lives of tens of thousands of our people prematurely and as long as people continue to smoke tobacco, we will continue to bury them in our urupa around the country. We have lost so much knowledge, wisdom and experience with the passing of generations of our people, and such loss can never be recovered.
Smoking is an evil we can do without – as Māori we are already in a vulnerable position – more unemployment, less education and poorer health, evidenced by the higher mortality rates of our men and women.
Our smoking rates are double those of our pakeha neighbours – and we suffer a greater burden for smoking related diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and respiratory diseases.
Despite the enormous inequalities in health between Māori and non-Māori, we seem content to maintain the status quo.
In 2008, despite the jaw-dropping mortality rates of lung cancer in Māori women (second highest in the country, highest in the world) we lost the only Māori focused, hapunga wāhine programme when the Auahi Kore contract with the Ministry of Health was cancelled.
Sadly, we continue to lack government resource and support (not the passion and vision) for a coordinated and strategic approach implicit in a National Māori Tobacco Strategy. The last document expired in 2007, and has yet to be replaced.
As an organisation, Te Hotu Manawa Māori has spent over a decade working with the Māori health workforce, to help our people quit smoking – but the task ahead of us is formidable.
Māori women have the highest rates of smoking in the country and correspondingly, the worst mortality rates for death by lung cancer in the world.
Our submission is about Māori women – the backbone of our whānau, the bearers of our children – but at the same time, the greatest risk to our future.
Maternal smoking has been strongly linked to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – and children who live with smoking parents are at greater risk than anyone else of having asthma (and other respiratory problems) and of becoming a smoker.
This is not the heritage that our tūpuna had in mind for us!
Te Hotu Manawa Māori fully supports those working in the tobacco control sector, to increase taxes, particularly on loose tobacco, and to ring fence funding from tax excise, to fund Māori focused, practical solutions, to help our people quit.
The burden of tobacco on my whānau by Hiria Minnell-Rolleston
I was 8 1⁄2 years old when my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was a heavy smoker. Three packs a day was her regular. We were told that my mother wouldn’t have long to live.
At 8 years old I did not understand exactly what that would mean for me and my whānau, especially my father.
Gradually mum’s sickness worsened and Dad had to quit his job to stay home and look after my Mum. Again, I could not fully understand the impact of this till later on in my life.
Dad was forced to go on the DPB to support my mum.
We lived in Ruatōria, a rural town on the East Coast of the North Island. Ruatōria was very isolated and we had to make a two hour return trip to Gisborne on a fortnightly basis to do grocery shopping. The nearest hospital was in Te Puia Springs, a 40 minute drive from our house.
As time passed my mother’s cancer spread and eventually she passed away two years later when her heart finally gave up. I was eleven by this time. The time from her death to the completion of her tangi was the hardest thing I have ever had to experience in my life, and as a child.
Immediately our house was set upon by all the Aunties’ rushing around trying to organise preparations for the tangi. I didn’t see my Dad until the next day. I had feelings of anger at my Aunties’ because I felt they had no right to be there and boss everyone around, especially me.
Over the next three days my anger grew. Many people from all over the motu came to pay their respects to my mother. It was all just words to me. No one questioned her sickness or acknowledged it. As Māori we tend to focus on the positives of a person life. It was an emotional burial. I couldn’t cry, I had used up all my tears when we picked her up from the chapel in Gisborne.
My father and I were left on our own, Dad with no work, lots of bills from the tangi and having to organise money for her unveiling.
My teenage years were difficult. I lost interest in everything and started to rebel at school. During the last year of my mother’s life, a TVNZ crew came to document my mother’s life and eventually it was broadcast as a documentary of a Māori Women’s battle with Lung Cancer “July’s Legacy”.
I learned later in life that this documentary was used as evidence in a submission given to parliament for the Smokefree Environments Act 1990.
My mother was very proactive in our local community in the Tairawhiti but also around the motu. She had very close links with Ratana and Whanganui iwi. Her passion was to help our people to reach their potential by implementing various access schemes to support rangatahi. Her legacy of support continued with her documentary.
Ten years on, a second documentary was filmed as a follow up to “July’s Legacy”. This focussed on the life of my brother and me and what had become of us. I am happy to say that my brother had become a Black Belt in Taekwondo and was an Auahi Kore Role Model for Te Hotu Manawa Māori. I had moved to Australia and was a young mum, but smokefree!
This period of my life was a difficult one. I had many kēhua from my past on my shoulders and I had no identity. I felt alone and neglected, by my mother, my whānau, Māori. I was still angry at everybody!
Twenty years on and I am now back in Aotearoa working for Te Hotu Manawa Māori as a National Tobacco Control Manager.
My employment history has always involved a need to help our people and I am a qualified Secondary School Teacher. I have tried many different areas of work but eventually always ended up back in this type of mahi. As an expectant mum myself, this is my legacy for my unborn child.
I do not want my child to have to go through the struggles I did.
The impact is not just the loss of a loved one. At age 31 years I now see and understand the social, economic, and mental costs of tobacco on my whānau, the direct costs.
Because my mother passed so young, I have missed out on the opportunity to learn the whānau knowledge of our whakapapa, whānau tikanga, karakia to keep my whānau safe. Those are taonga that belong to my whānau, lost forever.
I now understand the huge financial struggle my father went through to support my mother in her final years and then the difficulty of being a single father having to put me through college.
My mother was a great woman. She was well educated, spoke excellent English and was fluent in Te Reo Māori. Many people looked up to her as a tuākana. She was a mover and a shaker. She knew how to get things done, and had a knack for mobilising our community into action.
Sadly I never got the chance to learn those important qualities from my mother. All I have is her memory.
I wanted to stop smoking by Tekau-ma-rua Ashby
I wanted to stop smoking, being around whānau, friends and work colleagues is supposed to make it easy, isn’t it?
I was raised rurally; however I would say I’ve had the best of both worlds.
Smoking was an all too familiar creature within my worlds; it was easier to pick out who didn’t smoke as opposed to who did, smoking being a normalised behaviour in my life.
I have seen my own grandmother die of lung cancer, seen 8 year olds smoke cigarettes, and currently in my role constantly see young people aged 14-17 smoke cigarettes who aren’t even of legal age to buy cigarettes, so why does society condone them smoking it?
A year ago I decided to stop smoking, I was sick of what it was doing not only to me but also to my people.
It was a difficult journey, breaking the habit, looking away from the counter of shops so that I’m not tempted to add a packet of cigarettes with the petrol, or carton of milk and bread.
A year has passed on and I am getting satisfaction when my whānau or friends would ask me for a smoke, I say, “I don’t smoke and can’t offer you a creature of death”.
He Wānanga kia Whakapiki Pūkenga, Whakapiki Mātauranga, Whakapiki Ora.
Training and events dates for the nutrition and physical activity team are filling up fast for 2010. Contact one of the team to find out more about our 3-day and 9-day training options:
- Non-accredited 3-day ‘Healthy Eating Basics’ course:
- Mid central: Wanganui / Palmerston North 23rd - 25th March
- Waikato: Dates to be confirmed
- AUT accredited 9-day training. ‘Kai Tōtika – Korikori Tinana’.
- Auckland: MODULE ONE 20th - 22nd April
MODULE TWO 4th - 6th May
MODULE THREE 25th - 27th May
- National Hui - 18th - 20th October (tbc). Venue: Wairarapa
 Toiora – Toi Tāngata hits Kahungunu in April 2010.
Te Kōhanga Reo National Trust and Te Hotu Manawa Māori are extremely pleased to announce that two sites have been identified to participate in the pilot programme ‘Toiora, Toi Tāngata’. Kahungunu and Ikaroa will be the first to participate in the programme following presentations and development meetings late last year and early this year with purapura in these districts.
Toiora, Toi Tāngata is a comprehensive 3-day wānanga for Kōhanga Reo whānau to learn about Māori health and wellbeing with a strong emphasis on healthy eating basics for whānau with tamariki, mokopuna aged 0-5years. If you live in these districts and are passionate about supporting your whānau and your Kōhanga, ask your local Kōhanga Reo District Manager about attending these wānanga.
Those dates are:
- Kahungunu: 7 - 9 April 2010
- Porirua: 13 - 15 April 2010
Mai i te Hapori
We love to hear about what's happening out there in the communities around Aotearoa, so send us your stories to inspire and motivate us all. Here are a couple of kōrero from Taranaki and Tamaki Makaurau. KAWEA AKE TE WERO!
Hākinakina Day Proves Popular
Te Kura Kaupapa o Ngā Ruahinerangi, hosted their 2nd annual hākinakina event, which is growing each year in its popularity, for Māori tamariki throughout Taranaki. Held in November 2009 the event attracted over 200 tamariki all keen to participate in traditional and contemporary sports activities.
Co-ordinator Kim Hiroti, Health Promoter for Toiora – Healthy Lifestyles and Te Hotu Manawa Māori training graduate was extremely pleased with the day’s event saying “we want tamariki to have fun and understand the importance of regular activity and healthy food choices.”
“This year saw the introduction of some traditional Māori games, including Ki O Rahi, which is increasing in popularity especially among tamariki” said Kim. ‘Ki O Rahi’ is a game that is played in remembrance of a Māori myth. Also during pre-European times, Ki O Rahi was played to celebrate Matariki (Māori New Year), with the layout of the field depicting the seven Matariki star constellations. The extra bonus Kim added “was having strong support from parents and whānau supporting the day.” Ka mau te wehi!
Whānau Weigh In & Accept the Challenge
Obesity is one of the most serious health risks to Māori, and last year Mana Whenua i Tamaki Makaurau came up with a unique way to encourage Māori living in their area to lose weight.
Mana Whenua i Tamaki Makaurau is a consortium of iwi who encompass the same geographical territory as the Counties Manukau District Health Board. Their Project Manager Tahuna Minhinnick came up with the idea of a weight loss challenge that would focus on whānau – rather than individual – weight loss.
Whānau teams of between ten and twelve members were invited to enter the competition with the biggest prize being awarded to the most weight lost by a whānau. At stake were cash prizes of $21000.
Tahuna expected around six teams to enter but the numbers soon swelled to 40 teams, which meant that almost five hundred Māori from around South Auckland and Counties Manukau were competing.
The 12-Week Whānau Weight Loss Challenge ran from the beginning of August until the end of November 2009.
 Florence Hoeta of Waiuku took the prize for most weight lost by an individual. Florence once weighed close to 200kgs and at the beginning of the Challenge clocked the scales at 159.8kgs.
Over the course of the competition Florence lost an impressive 31.8kgs – and she says it was a stern lecture from her doctor that motivated her to begin her weight loss journey.
“I was on the borderline of so many diseases it wasn’t funny. It’s about life and death. If I’d kept going the way I was I may not be here today,” Florence said.
She liked the focus on whānau at the centre of the Challenge. According to Florence whānau can be the biggest supporter or worst enemy when you are trying to lose weight. “We need to claim our mauri and keep going. You have to stay positive and at the end of the day you have to want to maintain it.”
The winning team was the 12 Disciples who represented Raukura Hauora o Tainui. Their overall weight loss was 133.5kgs. Speaking on behalf of the team Vance McPhee says that they all set a goal to lose 10kgs each.
“80% is about diet, and we had to resist the normal temptation of food. Our biggest learning was seeing something through to the end. We all aim to keep the weight off for good.” Vance said.
The competition concluded with a celebration at the Telstra Clear Event Centre in Manukau on 30 November attended by around 1000 people. Tahuna Minhinnick is already planning the modifications to next year’s Challenge, which will see many of the same people entering as well a host of new comers. Kia Kaha Tonu!
He Tongi Rerehua
Some tidbits, tips and general, all round feel good advice coming your way! If you have some pearls of wisdom, keys to your success or even something your kuia always told you thats been empowering, tukuna mai, send them our way to share with the whānau hauora whānui. KAWEA AKE TE WERO!
Roll Out Realistic Resolutions
With the new calendar year underway those resolutions we set in January will either be going strong or fading out at a fast rate! It’s tempting at the beginning of the year to make a bunch of unrealistic resolutions, so set yourself up for success for the next few months by following a few simple tips from the team at Te Hotu Manawa Māori.
It all comes down to good planning, being organised, being real and making sure it’s fun. Our tūpuna were adept at setting themselves up for success and we have drawn on a couple of whakatauki to highlight how you can follow in their footsteps to achieve wellbeing.
‘He rākau morimori, e kore e taea te piki’
‘A tree shorn of branches cannot be climbed’.
A goal must be approached step by step without trying to find a shortcut. It’s tempting to make a bunch of resolutions. Don’t, it can be overwhelming and self defeating. Write down your goal and stick it somewhere you can see to remind yourself. Keep a diary, tell your friends about it or even broadcast your progress on facebook, bebo. Reward yourself at each step by pampering yourself or buying a music CD perhaps?
‘Iti te matakahi, paoa atu anō, nā, potapota noa’
This whakataukī refers to the use of a wedge or axe on timber and once again promotes the idea of success following repeated application of a small effort. Choose one small change to make for the rest of the week and see how you do. It can be switching to light blue milk in your coffee instead of full milk. The smaller, the better! Try to stick to it for the rest of the week then add another change next week.
Herbs for Hauora
Growing your own herbs and using these in your cooking is a great easy way to create flavoursome, healthy meals. Herbs we buy in the shops are usually quite pricey, so it’s much cheaper to grow your own at home and surprisingly easy. Even if you don’t have much space for a full vegetable garden you can grow herbs in pots on a sunny deck or balcony. Good herbs that will reward you all year include parsley, mint, thyme, rosemary, sage, marjoram and oregano. Basil and coriander, the essential ingredients in Italian or Thai foods, are both annual herbs, so plant them every spring around the same time as you plant your tomatoes. Yum - basil and tomatoes being a great Italian combo in salads on a pizza.
Did you know there is new evidence about the health benefits of herbs? Apart from the obvious fact that if you use fresh herbs in your cooking you will use less salt and fat, herbs are also rich in antioxidants - chemicals found in plant foods that are good for our health especially for preventing heart disease and cancer. Herbs rich in antioxidants include oregano, thyme, marjoram, mint, sage and rosemary. (Healthy Food Guide, November 2006)
The following link has a table that gives lots of hints of how you can include fresh herbs in your cooking. Print it off and stick it to your fridge door for inspiration.
Below is a link to a delicious recipe using fresh herbs. Kia reka rawa te kai. Mauri ora!
© Reproduced with permission from Healthy Food Guide magazine - on sale in supermarkets & bookstores for $5.50 or go to www.healthyfood.co.nz
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