John | Auckland CBD
“My name is John and I’m home. I started as a local here, but homeless at Auckland City Mission.
What keeps me up at night? What keeps me up at night is because I’ve got to keep an eye on all the imports to Ports of Auckland, and now and again I go and check if certain items have arrived from the United States, because there’s Land Transport and other items coming in on sea merchants, United State to Ports of Auckland. I always go down there, see certain items that I want, and I go and contact certain people and hopefully go and pick them up, take them home.
I grew up in a small country town called Te Puia Springs. That’s East Coast, Gisborne district. I’m a relation to the people there, Tū Tangata as well, because I have a bit of a dark past and a background involvement with criminal courts. So I had acriminal Justice of the Peace. Reparation or criminal Police, and so I tidied up my backyard, due to auto grand theft, because I had a few personal issues there, so I had to come to Auckland to tidy it up. The terms and conditions by criminal Police, it had to be straight up on the table pay-off, payback and reparation. They only gave me one week, otherwise, I would have been back to prison, serving time in reparation. That’s the prison, eating Government food there. So, there are some repercussions there but for some marvellous reason I came up with the bunny out of the hat in three days, and so just started up and paying my tax-free Inland Revenue Department, yeah because I used to be a, used to be a beneficiary so I no longer live off tax-payers or Labour Department, I still continue to work but I’m waiting for my dream home, dream motorhome to arrive on Ports of Auckland, then I guess I’ll be on my way with my new-found lady. We’ll head off.
Stress means some sort of hypo-tension like anger building up, so to ease that I’d suggest yoga, meditation, stretching. Due to the pain with that sort of stress. I suppose it would be some gymnastics type of aerobics, musical aerobics, some cardio-burner to let off that fire within your spirit. I guess just some type of exercise because stress means anger. Normally I’d probably have a joint or something, or go away from the argumental debate, and go and relax somewhere else.
Maybe it’s where I am because to my hardship on the street, I thought of an idea. I found these umbrellas in the rubbish, so I thought I’d pull them apart and make myself some wet weather protection for my jeans. Just creative thinking and survival to do with the wet weather conditions. I thought I’d just pull out my magic scissors and just cut up some umbrellas and cellotape it on my jeans so that I don’t get wet, to stay warm. I don’t know what the hell stress is. It could be the weather. Everybody getting too wet from the rain, umbrella busted up. Could be the weather that brings all that stress on . They’re going to see me walking around just with some duct tape and umbrella wrapped around my legs. I think I have some ideas. Well, living on the streets and living on the benefit – I’m living on the street and I don’t live on the benefit, see? But living on the streets is something else with the Government and WINZ.”
