What does safety look and feel like to you?

Josh | Whakatū

Josh describes how it felt reconnecting with te ao Māori and his whakapapa.

“I just started a brand new mahi which is in the attendant service, the local attendant service. I’ve never felt so welcome or never felt like, I am that thing. When you know it, you know it. And I’ve joined a really interesting group of people and I’ve been able to express myself in this environment really easily.

And connecting for the first real time, with te ao Māori and my whakapapa and I guess that’s kind of the education industry at the moment. It hasn’t always been that way but I was really surprised, how in everyday language, te reo was used. It’s changed massively.

I guess with that kind of safety, there’s this sense of being, your sense of who you are. I’m in the later shades of the 40s now, and to have that kind of only come up in this time of my life, is interesting as well but both hands on right now. My father and my brother, we have a little te reo evening on Mondays, we’re just connecting over WhatsApp, just video calls and now there’s a time for that to grow. We’re just promoting it where we’re doing it.

And there’s a whānau hui coming up at the end of the year in Whakatāne so we’re all looking forward to that. I guess there’s like a spark, something kind of happens in your life and all of a sudden a doorway opens and then the next thing kind of… And then all of a sudden there’s many doorways open. And that’s kind of where I am and probably, my brother and my father as well.”