Matua Tom Ngapera

My name is Tom Ngapera, I am Ngāti Paōa. I’ve lived in Glen Innes my whole life. My great-great-grandmother is buried on Waiheke Island, and my great-grandmother is buried in Makomako in Waitakaruru, where our family has a farm. My great-grandparents were the first shopkeepers in Auckland, back when Auckland harbour was in Kawakawa, because the big ships couldn’t come into the shallow waters. They had a boarding house behind the Oxford Hotel on Victoria Street, where I was born. Straight after the war, my parents would host members of the Māori Battalion, before they moved to a house here in Glen Innes on Torino Street, where I grew up.

I remember when I was 8-years old, I used to break into this church [Faith Family Connect]. Me and my friend used to stand on a hill across the road, and throw stones on the roof of the building. The elders used to come out and scream at us as we ran off laughing. Other times I’d come in here and eat the biscuits, although I was too scared to go into the Wharenui, so I’d sneak into the kitchen and get them there.

I’m a recovering alcoholic, but I never went to any [formal] organisation. I found God in the bush, where I found peace. I came home, stopped drinking and started going to church. I was about 25, and from that point on I turned whole life around. Up until then I was a bit of a ratbag. I grew up with all the dealers and gangbangers here in Panmure, long before the bigger, major gangs came. If you were in Glen Innes, you went to the “G.I. Hotel”, and it was all family until the big gangs arrived. Many years later, I invited the [now] old gangbangers that I grew up with here and we talked. Most of them spoke about how they regret their past lives, because they lead the younger ones down a dangerous path. A lot of them are my age [69-years old], and there was about 5 or 6 of us here. We all got down on our knees and asked God for forgiveness for being bad role models.

My wife Margaret and I have been doing this mahi in Glen Innes for over 40 years, guided by our Te Whare Io model. It’s not just a teaching, but a lifestyle. A way you can assess yourself without having a police officer, social worker, or psychologist assess you. This is a tool for social workers to help them engage with indigenous whānau. At the moment, Māori and Pacific are at the bottom of the barrel, and we can’t have social workers not able to engage with our Māori and Pacific whānau, otherwise we end up staying at the bottom. Hence, you see nothing has happened in the last 40 years, if anything it’s got worse. You can change the name from CYFs to Oranga Tamariki, but it’s still the same. So we’ve slowly been teaching our whānau over the years.

I want to see our families out of the system, which is starting to happen now because of what The HEART Movement is doing. That’s how Margaret and I got involved, and we loved it. We started off simple, just by having community barbeques in different streets in Glen Innes. It brought all the people out, and that’s how we all connected with one another. Then we started having Koru groups meeting here [at Faith Family], and it just went up. It became an element of help for our whānau. I think Margaret and I were the first Change Agents, and we were part of the “It’s Not OK” campaign that went around the country.

I’m of the understanding that it doesn’t matter what goes on in the community, or who’s doing it, as long as it’s productive, and it’s going to have a positive impact on our people, instead of feeding into negative stereotypes. Our people are very resourceful and resilient, we’ve been through centuries of heartache and difficulties.

I let scripture guide me, I mean we’re in a church. Jesus says we will always have poor people. Poor doesn’t necessarily mean financially unstable, but poor in knowledge, poor in spirit. “People perish through a lack of knowledge”, according to the Bible. We’ve got to bring knowledge, and HEART brings knowledge to our people by providing our community trainings.