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Empowering Community

In February 2024 Cyclone Gabriel devastated Hawkes Bay alongside many other communities and regions in the East and upper North Island. We were adrift in water and mud and isolated. Land, houses, power, roads and communication were gone. Many faced life and death situations and there were fatalities. Help took many days to come for most, weeks for others. Communities had to rely on themselves and their own resources.

We all know that we live now with uncertainty at every level including natural disasters. What can we do to meet this?

As anthroposophic nurses it was clear that we needed to stand up a response. The new imperative was care and support in trauma for people in the community. This has been part of a large multi-faceted trauma response by other organisations as well. The new imperative was care and support and is ongoing as we continue to see the impact of the shock, loss and ongoing stress years later

We set up a series of free pop-up nursing clinics, each spending a day in a different location across the region. Nurses came and worked voluntarily. We found key community leaders and through them accessed community halls, wharenui or meeting houses on marae, in schools and at Hohepa Hawkes Bay. Community members were invited to attend. 

The Weleda Charitable Trust gifted substances and staff at Weleda New Zealand donated their personal annual budgets to supplement the Hypericum oil, Aurum, Lavender and Rose cream and bath milk we needed. 

Each person was welcomed, no questions asked except their first name, and were offered a 40 minute session including a lemon footbath, a hypericum lower leg oiling (RE), wrapped in a warmed bed and a 20 minute rest with a heart cloth. This nursing intervention offered skilled, warm care and the gift of our nursing substances. It provided respite from anxiety, warmed and offered hope and the chance of a new way of being in their situation.

From this work we have deepened our realisation that everyone needs to know more about real care for each other. We have developed and provide a three-day workshop teaching all that is required for this care process, so that anyone can step up with this support. The power and capacity lives in the community, as it should and as it is needed.

As the reality of our lives change and resources become less available, the need for the capacity to help and care for each other and indeed the future for humanity becomes more imperative. The economic concepts and practices of our times don’t recognise the intrinsic value of care, the basis of transformation from love and that space and time can be re-found. Our initiatives out of compassion, goodness, truth and beauty will be the peacemaking in our world, for the world.