6 minute read
President's Report
Tena koutou katoa. Nau mai, haere mai! Welcome everyone!
There was a meme circulating a while back in lockdown. It said something to the effect that if you’d been asked in 2010 where you’d be in ten years’ time what might you have answered? It’s a typical job interview question by the way, and the internet is full of ghastly sample responses, very few would fool an interview panel. But none of those responses ever suggested the possibility that one might be hunkering down in a Level 4 lockdown during a global pandemic, hemmed in by something that wasn’t alive and that you couldn’t see.
‘How are you?’ said the surgeon about to perform a smallish procedure on my finger once we’d moved to Level 2.
‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘I loved Level 4, the world stopping from its ceaseless angry activity –
He raised an eyebrow.
– the fact that Papatūānuku gave us the flick,’ I continued earnestly.
The surgeon was concentrating on the ultra sound image. ‘Papatūānuku,’ I explained. ‘Earth mother and wife of Rangi-nui from whom all living things originate.’
He plunged a large blunt needle into my finger, I yelped, and the conversation dwindled away.
I acknowledge the huge irreversible hardships COVID-19 has caused many New Zealanders.
But here’s the thing. Because. Just for a few brief weeks, our pressing concerns to one side, the planet was allowed to be.
‘India’s coasts witness bumper hatching of rare turtles’ Millions of endangered Olive Ridley turtles were seen hatching near India’s beaches, amid nationwide lockdown.
Recently, Odisha’s Gahirmatha Beach and Rushikulya Rookery, the most preferred nesting grounds of the Olive Ridley sea turtles, witnessed lakhs* of them.
According to a news report published in The New Indian Express, around 3.7 lakh Olive Ridleys have laid eggs at Rushikulya Rookery till now, while 4.2 lakh Olive Ridleys have turned up at Gahirmatha Beach for laying eggs.
The report added that over six crore** eggs will be laid this year.
How exciting is that? And it’s only one of many such stories.
Who was in your bubble? Probably not a turtle. How did you spend your lockdown? Probably not on a beach in India. Thank goodness the Olive Ridley mama turtles had it all to themselves for once.
You were reading, gardening, relaxing, working remotely, working. Fortunately for RROGA, after a highly successful reunion weekend with record attendances, this time coincided with writing articles for our magazine. For compelling COVID-19 related reasons it was decided the delivery would be via digital means this year, with a very small number being printed for Gibson Girls and archival records. From a sustainability point of view, the committee thinks it’s good progressive step.
Our meetings became digital; once again, sustainable and efficient, both time and energy wise; we intend to keep doing it as much as we can.
You can read about everything we did over the past year in the magazine. Philanthropy, fostering social connections and more. It’s a great hardworking committee. I thank them all.
But back to Papatūānuku. Last year I spoke about interconnectedness. This year I’m talking about the need and value of isolation. Because regeneration happens when we allow space. Space for questions.
What is our place on the earth? What are our responsibilities? To the turtles. To trees, to butterflies. To other humans. To this school we love. How do we morally respond to our privilege?
I remembered a book during lockdown, that I’d read many years ago. I couldn’t remember the title, but after some searching I tracked it down and I’m going to read you the extract which had such a profound effect on me both then and now. In this extract of ‘Six Clever Girls Who Became Clever Women’ by Fiona Farrell, a Christchurch author, Margie’s story as a mountain climber is continued in middle age.
She had climbed up carefully enough, with due respect, with absolute attention. A steady ascent, along ridges where the slopes dropped off on either side thousands of feet down to the glaciers, through loose snow and across walls of blue ice, pitch by pitch, inch by inch, kicking in hard, finding the places where she could take hold, fix the screw, the snow stake, breathe, concentrate. Then the slog along the summit ridge, six breaths to each step up here in the thin air and the dub dub of the oxygen balloon and then the summit beneath a high pennant of wind-driven snow and the other mountains – peaks seracs and glaciers stretching away on all sides below them to India, to China, sea-wrack and billow. She was being careful.
But midway down a delicate traverse, heart pounding lungs burning, their tents three tiny bright balloons a few hundred metres below, she had reached to her left and there was a butterfly.
A tiny blue butterfly, its wings trembling as it stood tiptoe on the ice and it was so astonishing, so beautiful, so unlikely at 7800 metres that she had paused, just for a second. Held her hand back, just for a second, and in that second, she had slipped.
“I’m sorry,” she tries to say to the black bird flying with her, the two of them linked by a red rope which swings between them in loops and tangles.
Like skipping, she thinks. Like skipping at school when we were little. All in together, girls. Never mind the weather, girls. Jump and clap, jump and clap, plaits bobbing and the rope swinging over and under.
“Sorry,” she calls to the black bird but she has fallen away and the sun catches in Margie’s eyes, a brilliant dazzle as she feels herself fall and rise into that golden eye. She flies up and up through that little round hole and looks down on it all: on the frozen press of mountains, at the tiny pinpricks of scarlet and yellow which are their tents where the others lie in soft downy bags, sip their sweet milky tea, read, eat mint cake and macaroni, chat, squabble, laugh, all funny lovely little humans with their warm skin and their framework of bone and their soft hair, doing funny little human things in this fearsome place where only a scattering of holy rice holds back the avalanche. And she calls out to them too: “Sorry, I’m sorry.”
But maybe it’s pointless to apologise. Maybe it wasn’t her fault entirely. Maybe Parbat simply shrugged her cold shoulder and flicked aside the mildly irritating little insect that was Margie. Off you go, she had said. That’s enough.***
Like Mount Parbat, Papatūānuku also gave us the flick, but unlike Margie, our flick was temporary, we got to start over.
Will you start over? Can we attempt to tread more carefully and respectfully, wedged between Papatūānuku and Rangi-nui. Might we have a clearer sense of the bigness of them, and the smallness of us? The richness they allow us? Might we, no matter our age or stage, might we just try?
*A lakh is a unit in the Indian numbering system equal to one hundred thousand (100,000; scientific notation: 105). In the Indian convention of digit grouping, it is written as 1,00,000. **A crore denotes ten million and is equal to 100 lakh in the Indian numbering system. It is written as 1,00,00,000 with the local style of digit groups eparators. ***Reprinted with permission from Penguin Random House. © Fiona Farrell, Six Clever Girls Who Became Famous Women, Penguin Books, Auckland, 1996. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/india-s-coasts-witness-bumper-hatchingof-rare-turtles/1842200
RROGA Branches:
Hawkes Bay/Poverty Bay Bindy Headifen p.headifen@outlook.co.nz Wendy Cookson
Waikato/ Bay of Plenty Sue Milner randsmilner@gmail.com Mid Canterbury
Nelson/Tasman/West Coast Barb Hay tricroft2@gmail.com
haybarbaraann@gmail.com
Auckland Annette McGrevy South/Mid Canterbury Denise Kenny kennydl@xtra.co.nz
colinandwendycookson@ gmail.com
Philippa Yates yates_family@xtra.co.nz
Jenny Williams aamcgrevy@icloud.com
