Talk With Me, a national writing competition for secondary school students, is run by the Petone Settlers Museum in association with the Department of Labour and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It was first run in 2006 alongside a major exhibition Walk with Me: the Refugee Experience in New Zealand.This is Juliette Varuhas’s winning entry.
Never, Never
Juliette Varuhas, 14, Wellington Girls’ College
A dead sinking land
Written on history’s grains of sand
A country stained forever
Because of war’s endeavour
Music, of gunfire and drum beets
War’s melody haunts our rubble streets
But to this country my name is penned
Penned on my heart till my dying end
To see my home free at last
A hope of the distant past
Never, Never
A hemisphere of smoke, red and black
Light never escapes, not even through a crack
Which weapon will kill us faster?
From war’s pallet of disaster
Young and old slaughtered
Women and men, hung drawn and quartered
Dusty eyes fall forever
Trees that bleed, they sever
To be solved on the wings of negotiation?
No, in the fires of confrontation
Terror, Terror
Camps of sickness, stench and stale food
Accompany my emotional solitude
Survivors with limbs blown away
Live to suffer another day
Others like I believe
We will never leave
What did I wrong what was my fault?
That happiness should exclude me from its cult
Forever, Forever
Never equal, never right
Now I’m to merge into the plague of white
A new country young and free
No need to be afraid, no need to flee
But there is a price, my debt to pay
To be alive this day
People are polite but never warm
Happiness has never taken form
Will I be equal, will I be right?
Or will I just stain the white?
Never, Never
Check out the other two winners’ pieces: Kate Brooks’s ‘Kifah’ - struggle and Nosia Fogogo’s Happiness is Ubiquitous.
Have you ever felt like you’re being watched in a shop because it’s assumed that you’re “just a thieving teenager”? Ever felt hard done by because an older co-worker is being paid more money than you, to do the same job? If you’ve answered yes to either of these questions, then you have experienced ageism. Ageism can be defined as stereotypes or prejudice against people because of their age. It can manifest itself in a variety of ways and can apply whether you are young or old.
International Youth Day is celebrated on August 12 in countries all over the world, as an opportunity to draw attention to youth issues worldwide. In Aotearoa New Zealand we mark a whole WEEK in May, to celebrate the accomplishments of young people and the amazing contributions they make to our society. At the same time it is sad to note that in the media the same group is presented as a bunch of drunken, drug-crazed miscreants, arsonists and shoplifters, a group which society must protect itself from rather than embrace. Headlines such as Second cell break at Rimutaka youth unit’, “Concern about Youth Drinking Culture’ and Youth crime on the rise’ are common, and if this is the kind of journalism our parents and grandparents consume every day, then it is little wonder that a negative stereotype of youth has been established. Where are the stories about the vast majority of young people?! Those who go to school every day and work hard, take up part time jobs and participate in their communities.
Adolescence is a tough times in anyone’s life, whoever you are, wherever you live. Growing up is never easy and it has been made even more complex by the plethora of paths available for us. Drugs have never been so readily available, nor alcohol; violence has never been more mainstream, nor sex. Just as adults are exposed to bad press about the youth of today, so we are is exposed to this press about ourselves. Everyone is having sex so you should too. Drinking is cool’, right? Ditto smoking. And who cares if drugs are illegal. Remember the news? That’s just what teenagers do. And we are exposed to these ideas younger and younger. You may remember recent uproar over the use of dirty slogans on children’s underwear. Young children, especially boys, can be seen playing violent war games and hoon’-ie car games on gaming consoles. One might think we, today’s youth, are doomed to a life of unprotected sex, drugs and uncontrolled parties.
But consider this: never before have so many young people stayed in school, never have so many graduated from university. Never before have there been so many young people with part time jobs, working hard despite low wages. There is much to celebrate about our peers. You only need to look at the wonderful work of young people in JET magazine, to marvel at the awesome leadership of your head boys and girls, to appreciate the great contribution students participating in the Peer Support programme make to their schools, in order to see that young people have great value and that we are so much more than a bunch of P-crazed, STI-carrying thugs. The young people we read about in the papers are not all of us. And we know that. We just need society to realise that.
Being young doesn’t mean you’re useless. It doesn’t mean that a security guard should be following you any more closely in a store than any other shopper. It doesn’t mean old ladies should avoid you in the street. The best way to change negative stereotypes is to fight back, so it is our job to let society know how great we really are. Be proud to be young. Get involved in Youth Week this year and rubbish those bad impressions! In the words of a US teen-pride campaign: “Prove them wrong by doing something right.”
It is a Sunday and I am inside my first ever mosque. Today is a learning day where all the young people gather to learn about their faith. Happy laughing kids run around the corridors and burqa wearing women cook up a mean sausage sizzle. I am greeted by a pākehā woman (also in a burqa) who leads me to a group of teens willing to talk about growing up as Muslims in NZ. Where are all the terrorists, I wonder slightly disappointed by the obvious joy in the mosque. Clearly they are not all into blowing themselves up and abusing women. But I had to find out for sure. What is this thing called Islam?
The inaugural Pacific Youth Festival was a phenomenal gathering. Held in Tahiti from the 17th to 22 July 2006, it was a veritable showcase of cultural diversity, exchange, and open-minded enquiry. It was a vehicle for celebration, learning and sharing, and as ever with new learning, there was the challenge of stepping out of old comfort zones and seeing the world in a new light.
Tahiti. Sun, sand and… socio-political activism? This may not be the most likely combination, but for over 1000 youth from around the Pacific region, it seemed to do the trick. The inaugural Pacific Youth Festival held on the island of Pape’ete between the 17th and the 22nd of July, was a unique and thought-provoking experience for its participants. Over the five day period, we attended a number of conferences, workshops and seminars centred around the four festival pillars — namely fair globalisation, sustainable development, cultural diversity and conditions of peace. These ranged from the basic (what are human rights ?’) to the complex and challenging (”Recognition, Preservation and Protection of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property “), and provided a rare forum for youth from different countries and cultures to discuss issues concerning the Pacific Region.
Or the infamous “Dick Cheney Hunting Incident”? US Vice President Dick Cheney was out hunting for quails with Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old lawyer, when he accidentally shot Whittington! Since then, people have speculated on whether or not it was really an accident.
I boarded the tiny plane in Westport on July 14, nervous and unprepared. I hadn’t even read half of the information we’d been sent. I was excited to finally get a chance to go overseas, but by this stage I had convinced myself it was going to be terrible. They wouldn’t feed me enough (I like food), the people would be super brainy and super snobbish (how could a little West Coast girl ever compete?), not to mention old (I’m only 18 and the people going were aged from 16-30), and I’d get lost (the amount of youth going to the festival was more than the population of my entire town)!
I was immediately welcomed by the 16 other New Zealanders at our one-day workshop in Auckland on the 15th (they weren’t mean after all). And I soon realised I was the only one who was feeling nervous and ill-prepared. And I was one of the youngest people there, but it never became an issue. We all came from different backgrounds, and different parts of the country, but here we were all equal.
Another highlight was meeting three Moriori youth from New Zealand. I never learned anything about the Moriori people at school. All I knew was something about “the Moriori being eaten by the Māori”… It was interesting learning about how the Moriori were still very much alive and the efforts being made to resurrect their language and culture. Their fight to rectify the shame people felt in being identified as Moriori (even more than Māori, Moriori people in the past were looked down upon and forced to hide or forget their culture) was incredibly inspiring.