It’s not just people who get sick. Cultures and societies get sick too, says Glenn Colquhoun, a poet and doctor who works at Horowhenua Youth Health Service. In an essay, he explores the role adverse childhood effects (ACEs) play in the lives of the young people he works with.
I live in a beautiful country. That’s what people say. You know, the Milford Track, Bay of Islands, the fiords. Then there’s the mountains of course. Cook piercing and Sefton cracking, Taranaki out there all on its own Fire country, I suppose. One tectonic plate smacking into another. Mud, pools, volcanoes, hot springs. People call it a fish. A woman. A waka. The land of the long white cloud. God’s own country. 100% pure.
Aroha tells me she wants to die. She is 14. She has it figured out. The when and the how. She lives on the other side of Pluto. It’s dark there. I tell her about my world as though it’s a cruise in the Whitsundays. For the first six years of her life she lived with her mum who was addicted to methamphetamine. The void got into her. Marama’s mum struggled with the same addiction. Now she thinks her teachers and classmates are trying to poison her. Both of them remind me of Monty. His mother used methamphetamine during her pregnancy. He spent most of his life in hospital, his heart plumbed up all wrong. His aunty, Paige, found him blue in his cot. She gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. And pumped on his chest until the ambulance arrived. He died when he was 14 months old. Paige still wakes up in a sweat. Her daughter sleeps in the same room now.
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The tensile strength of limpet teeth is somewhere between 3.0 and 6.5 GPa. The elementary particles of matter include six flavours of quarks, six letpons, 12 gauge boson and the Higgs boson. We can fly around the world in 24 hours. Land on the moon. Take out our hearts and replace them. We can even wash our clothes in a machine without getting our hands wet. Push a button and it goes woosh … woosh … woosh.
