Akaue’anga (Duty of Care) – Every Turanga, Pirianga has Akaue’anga. This is the acknowledgement and fulfilment of individual and collective duties. This is a “Duty of Care” that is tied to each role we have. As a son, my brothers turanga means he often checks up on my parents, making sure they’re watching what they eat or exercising in the bubble and in return they ask him how his day has been especially after a shift as an essential worker.
It’s day seven of lock down in New Zealand and after the rush of last week’s announcements and the pace in which everything has happened, I’m still trying to make sense of what it means to be in lockdown and why, even with everything that I know – I still feel a bit anxious.
The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples falls on the 9th of August each year in an attempt to promote and protect the rights of the world’s indigenous population. The year 2019 also marks the International Year of Indigenous Languages.
It’s been seven years since I sat in a room with Tongan mothers, desperate to kick their addiction to P, pleading for help so that they could be reunited with their children. Their pleas still haunt me today. Like each of the ministries represented in this country, it is not in good practice to work in silos, because “issues” cut across. In the same sense, while we tackle the drug issues in Aotearoa we cannot turn a blind eye to what is happening in the Pacific on route Aotearoa and Australia.
This year, I put my hand up to write a blog for International Family Day. I did what most people writing a blog does, I took to google to find out what the theme was and learned that this year, the focus is on “Families and Climate Action.”
So you’re approaching your son/daughters birthday, you’ve spent hours in the mall trying to find the perfect gift. Paid an arm and a leg, only to find that when they get through the wrapping paper, they’ve ditched the toy to play with the box.
In 2017, prior to the commencement of the Tongan Family Violence Training Programme (Fofola e fala kae talanoa e Kāinga), a group of “cultural experts” chosen by the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) and/or Alliance Community Initiative Trust (ACIT) were tasked with the responsibility of writing the Tongan Family Violence Training Manual…
“Postnatal Depression” – it is a term that has gained momentum over the decades in the arena of research, but one I, as a Pacific woman, “still” struggle to fully understand and while we have terms to describe symptoms, we have yet to create Pacific translations that define what it means or capture the essence of what our sons and daughters of the Pacific go through. So, here is my attempt at asking questions that will hopefully start us on a journey of better understanding.
