Overseas Aid – Barbara Walker

Jim Newbigin: [Background audience chatter] It’s 9th March [2021] I’m at the Hastings Public Library; we have our guest speaker at Landmark[s], Barbara Walker, the Chaplain at the hospital.

Joyce Barry: Landmarks Talks’ll carry on through to November all being well. I won’t take any more of your time [other] than to introduce Barbara Walker. She’s a mainlander like myself, so we’re very connected, and she was born in Riverton which has become the Monaco of New Zealand, [chuckles] and she trained at Greenlane Hospital. She has worked a great amount of her time overseas. She also holds a divinity ordnance from the Anglican Church. She now works as a Chaplain at Hawke’s Bay District Hospital along with a team of six Chaplains. We’re going to cover mainly Thailand, Somalia, Pakistan and Zambia, and Barbara will outline her work there, but she has written this amazing book called ‘Purple Hands’. So in the meantime, please welcome Barbara Walker, and over to you, Barbara.

[Applause]

Barbara Walker: Well good evening everyone, it’s lovely to be here. I was in the South Island … came back on Sunday. I’ve been down in Central Otago doing a six-day silent retreat, but I can still talk. [Chuckles] But it was absolutely amazing; it was just wonderful to get back down to the South Island and I encourage all of you to go down there and go to Riverton. I’ve actually managed to arrange an appointment to take two services on Stewart Island in December, the 5th and the 12th, so I’ll be going down there, and I thought that if that works out well then I might sort of have six months in Stewart Island, six months in Hawke’s Bay. [Chuckles] But anyway, it’s lovely to be here and thank you for the invitation to come and share a little bit with this very amazing group of people who are working so hard to record stories of people who’ve made contributions in Hawke’s Bay. So I feel incredibly privileged to be here tonight.

I was born in Riverton, right down the bottom of the South Island, and my parents were school teachers. And we shifted all over New Zealand, every two to three years; Dad was always a headmaster. And so we started off in Riverton and we lived at the Riverton Rocks, and we were in rented accommodation so when holidays came we had to shift out of our crib down there and we kept moving around. I’m one of six children, five girls and a boy.

And then my parents decided to go to Millerton … does anybody know where Millerton is? Wow! [Chuckles] Millerton was a coal mining town; you go to Westport and you go up the coast to [coughing] Granity, and then wind up this terrible, terrible dirt one track road – but now it’s quite a big highway – and up to Millerton which was a coal mining town. So I started school there, and my Dad was my teacher.

Then after a few years Dad decided, “Let’s go to the North Island”, so we loaded up our Morris Oxford – no seat belts, no car seats, four of us in the front and three in the back – and off we went to Mokoia. Does anybody know where Mokoia is? No? Ah, we’ll have a geography lesson. Mokoia’s just outside Hawera in Taranaki, and Dad was the headmaster there. And at that stage there was [were] five girls; my brother hadn’t come then. So I spent a lot of time working on a sheep farm. Even though I was about ten at the time, I really loved getting out with this guy called Clarrie, and Clarrie’s daughter was a very good friend of mine. And I spent hours and hours out with Clarrie learning how to deliver sheep and all about sheep; and in the book you’ll read about how some of those techniques I learned to deliver sheep helped when I was working as a midwife in Pakistan [chuckles] delivering complex cases of women who’d come across the border from Afghanistan with prolapsed uteruses. So there’s a connection between sheep and my midwifery skills.

We then went up to Portland. Everyone know where Portland is?

Barbara: Near Whangarei, yes – up to there. And it was a cement town; again, Dad was the headmaster and at one stage there was [were] three Walkers in the class. And that’s when strapping was still in vogue, and Dad used to have a big strap about that wide, and for the first three weeks anyone who stepped over the line got the cuts; and then after that he put it away. It was really hard being the headmaster’s kids because we had expectations to … you know, a bit like the vicar’s kids or the police kids.

But while we were in Portland Mum and Dad got the combination right and my brother was born, and it was probably the first time I’ve ever seen my father cry. He took Mum into the hospital in Whangarei and then came home, ‘cause that’s what you did then. The phone rang about an hour later, and Dad started crying, and we thought, ‘Goodness, Mum’s died!” But no – his son had arrived. [Chuckles] So then I started high school at Whangarei Girls’ [High School], and then Dad said, “Right – no, we’ve got to move south”, so we moved to Ohaupo. You people must know where that is … just outside Hamilton, and I went to Melville High School.

While I was up living in Portland I went to a Christian camp one Easter, and I really felt God was calling me to go overseas and be a missionary nurse. I’m the first nurse in our family; all our family are teachers. And so I remember going home and saying to Mum, “One day I’m going to be a missionary nurse”, and she said to me, “Yes, dear, that’s lovely. You’ll be an air hostess next week, and [chuckles] a hairdresser another week.”

But it was a call that really stayed with me, and in 1970 I applied and was accepted to train at Greenlane Hospital as a nurse. So I went up there, and that was the days that [Brian] Barratt-Boyes was working and it was a big heart hospital, and so we had people from all over New Zealand flown up to Greenlane Hospital. And I’ve actually had the privilege of meeting some people here in Hawke’s Bay who went up to Auckland for heart surgery as children. Yeah, it was a real privilege to work there, and they were also linked with Christiaan Barnard[’s] work in South Africa. So I did my training at Greenlane Hospital and then did my midwifery at St Helen’s [Hospital] in Auckland.

And then my friend said to me, “Well Barbara, if you’re going to go overseas and be a missionary you sort of need to get a bit of theology in.” So I went over to a bible college in Australia, and while I was there, as well as theology and church history I also learnt car mechanics, plumbing and carpentry. Came back to New Zealand and applied to a mission society to go to Thailand. I have dyslexia, and so the possibility of learning a foreign language was not in my … yeah, it was just not going to happen. So this mission society put me through six language tests; three at the university and three that they were doing, and they said to me, “Barbara, you will never learn a foreign language. Stay home; support your friends.” But being someone who’s quite determined I knew that God called me, and I knew that I would go. And ten days later I was driving home from work and Merv Smith – remember Merv Smith, 1ZB [radio station] – was asking for nurses and doctors to volunteer to go out to the Thai-Cambodian border. This was when Pol Pot was in power and was massacring thousands and thousands of people. Rob Muldoon was the Prime Minister so he spoke to Air New Zealand, and Air New Zealand flew up the first medical team and I was on that. There was [were] about five nurses and a couple of doctors.

So we left civilized New Zealand and flew to Bangkok, and then went up by bus to a place called Sa Kaeo 1. Sa Kaeo 1 was a refugee camp with thirty-five thousand people, all dressed in black. Under Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia anyone who showed any form of emotion was killed. So for years these people went through hell, and I remember walking into that camp and seeing all the … like, imagine everyone in in this room dressed in black, just sitting, staring, and that was children as well. There was [were] thirty-five thousand people, and these people had been traumatised. Many of them had seen their loved ones killed; it was just … it was unbelievable.

My girlfriend and I – I was working for World Vision at the time – we were asked to do night duty. We had a ward of about a hundred and twenty patients; the majority of then had cerebral malaria. Our interpreters that night were Pol Pot soldier girls. Now, these were girls that were soldiers in Pol Pot’s army and I’m sure as well as being soldiers probably many of them had … yeah, been soldiers; we won’t go into the details – I’m sure that you can understand what I’m saying. And it was really difficult; they were our interpreters – they didn’t speak English, we didn’t speak Khmer or Thai, so it was sign language. And that night we lost about thirty patients. That was the introduction for me into disaster relief nursing. During the evening we wrote a letter to Rob Muldoon to thank him for flying us up, but each time someone died we had to stop and go and attend to them. So in this camp there was [were] a whole lot of relief agencies. We had the Israeli medics next door, so the patients came and they were screened by them and then they came into our wards.

So I worked there for a number of months and then World Vision asked me if I would go with a group of others nearer the border to a place called Khao-I-Dang. Khao-I-Dang when we arrived was just like huge big football fields with a whole lot of blue plastic [and] [coughing] bamboo, and we had to build our hospital. It’s interesting working at Hawke’s Bay Hospital, and the discussions now about building a new hospital. We built a hospital there of fifteen hundred beds in a matter of about six weeks; they weren’t made of concrete and we didn’t have electricity, but we had bamboo and plastic sheeting. So in the time I was there the population went from zero to a hundred and twenty thousand people, so that would almost be the whole of Hawke’s Bay living in a refugee camp. As I said, our hospital was fifteen hundred bed[s]; we had teams of people flown in from around the world; the German Air Force flew in a complete operating theatre and set it up, and we had lots of other agencies that were helping. We used to get truck loads of people coming in from the border who were very, very badly traumatised and injured. There was [were] no helicopters, there was no ambulance, so they would come in the back of trucks and they would be triaged. Those that were likely to die within the next five minutes were just left. Those that, with some rapid intervention, were treated and those that maybe were relatively minor would have to wait. The German medical team set up this incredible operating theatre, and we had patients coming in who had stood on landmines; people coming in with no legs, no arms; people with cerebral malaria; people totally and utterly traumatised. Around our camp of a hundred and twenty thousand people was a barbed wire fence to keep the refugees in, and anyone who was caught escaping was shot. We saw a Cambodian person shot outside our ward of our hospital one day. So it was a pretty tough place to work in. We had a lot of celebrities fly in; we had a lot of kings and queens from around the world flew [fly] in to see what was going on. It was a crisis that was very near us, and New Zealand responded incredibly well.

After my time there World Vision asked me if I would go down to Singapore and go on the boat ‘Seasweep’ round the South China Sea rescuing boat people who were escaping from Vietnam. So I went on this boat and for six weeks we sailed around the South China Sea rescuing people who had basically got into fishing boats that normally went up the Mekong River. And they were escaping because of the fighting that was going on in North and South Vietnam, and they were getting onto these boats which probably legally probably held ten people, but up to a hundred people got onto these boats and they headed out into the South China Sea – no radios, no life jackets, just basically nothing – escaping! A lot of them died … nobody knows how many hundreds of thousands of people drowned, and also how many the pirates got and killed. I had the privilege of being on the boat during that time and we rescued two hundred and fifty-two people, going alongside these fishing boats and then reaching down and helping these people climb up rope ladders onto our ship. We took them down to the hold of the ship and we gave them food and water and medication. And to me it was one of the most moving things I’ve ever done, was to rescue these people. If we hadn’t found them then who knows what would’ve happened. These people went to islands in Indonesia where they were screened and then they went to different countries around the world; some came here, some went to Australia. This was the beginning of the boat people.

Then I came back to New Zealand and spent about four weeks at Greenlane Hospital, but got severely told off by the Night Supervisor because one morning we had a cardiac arrest, and the doctor came and was doing mouth to mouth and the Supervisor was doing cardiac massage. And the doctor yelled out, “Put a drip in”, so I put a drip in. And the next night when I went to work the Supervisor said to me, “Staff Nurse Walker! Staff nurses do not put drips in. Where did you learn this?” I said, “Thailand”, and she said, “Well this isn’t Thailand.” [Chuckles] So I went home and thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ But I got a phone call in the middle of the afternoon, it was from World Vision asking if I would go to Somalia.

Now I’m sure there is no one in this room who’s ever visited Somalia. Somalia is in the Horn of Africa, and it’s a country that often has no government, it has no tax, it has no immigration, it has nothing basically except warlords and guns. And it makes the news every now and then when they hijack the oil ships that are going up and down outside. So I flew to Somalia, into Mogadishu which is the capital; and at the airport there … there is nothing in any of my passports that said I’ve actually been there, ‘cause there was no one to stamp my passport. And when you arrive there you are met with utes with AK47’s on the back, and you are escorted to wherever you are going. It’s a bit more exciting than landing at Napier airport, [chuckles] I haven’t seen any AK47’s here.

So I joined a team; we were working in a place called Haigesa. Haigesa was out in the northern part of Somalia, and we drove for a few hours out into the desert and set up camp called Las Dure. And over the next months and months I worked there we had a camp with eighty thousand people, all living under blue plastic sheeting. We had twenty-six thousand children who were incredibly malnourished, and we had to set up a feeding programme. So to set up a feeding programme you need to get water, and unfortunately, not like Hawke’s Bay where you can go and turn on the tap, you have to go to the river, and you have to dig down. And when you do find water it’s brown, and the river’s there and the feeding centres are there, so how do you get your water from there to the feeding centres? I mean, there’s no pipe, there’s no generator; you had donkeys, so we had donkeys with kerosene tins and we had men who got the donkeys to walk up. And then we had to build feeding centres so these kids could sit and be fed porridge and high energy biscuits and milk, so my skills at Bible College about building came in handy. During my time there, at one stage we had five nurses and no doctor, but gradually as word got out that the situation was really in crisis, they managed to send some paediatricians from America and Germany and gradually we began to build up a team.

We had a real problem in the camp with trachoma; that’s when eyelashes go in on the eye and rub up and down, and you can go blind. So a guy called Jock Anderson who was an eye surgeon in England came out to Mogadishu and sent a message on a plane – this is before text, before emails, before cell phones, before satellite phones – to say that he was running a training centre. So Julia, one of the Australian doctors, and I went down and learned how to do this operation. So we came back and thought, ‘Okay, we need to start operating.’ Now again it’s interesting working at Hawke’s Bay Hospital ‘cause at the moment they’re putting in a brand new theatre. I think it’s taking two to three years and it’s going to cost $20 million. We put up a tent; we had a table a bit like that … bit longer; we had a primus to cook the instruments, we had a book on how to do it, we had local anaesthetic. And we needed two interpreters, so we found Anthi and Abdi – they were young Somali guys probably around thirteen, fourteen years of age who had basic English, so they were our interpreters. We used to operate regularly during the day, and they began to say to us, “Would you be able to teach us how to do this operation?” Julia and I looked at each other and thought, ‘We’re going to leave here; they’re going to stay.’ So we trained them to do it, and I often think when I tell that story, if I went to Hastings Boys’ High School tomorrow and selected two fourteen or fifteen year old guys and took them up to the theatre at Hawke’s Bay where cataracts and eye operations are happening, I think the news item would be a wee bit different than maybe our current ones. [Chuckles]

After my time in Somalia World Vision were going to set up a disaster team to respond to emergencies, so they asked me if I would go to England and do some courses in tropical medicine, disaster management, refugee health. So I did, and I went to Liverpool and did tropical medicine. And while I was there, one Sunday at a church service the vicar stood up and said, “Say ‘hello’ to the person beside you.” So I stood up, said, “Hello”, and this was a girl, Joan, who had come back from Pakistan. She was a midwife, she’d caught typhoid and come home. And she said to me, “Barbara, what do you do?” And I said, “Well I’ve just done tropical medicine, but I don’t have a job.” She said, “Why don’t you go to Pakistan?” And I said, “I don’t have any money.” She said, “Don’t worry – three phone numbers … when you get down to London ring the number.” So I got down to London – at that stage in the world there was [were] almost no disasters, so World Vision delayed in setting up the emergency team, so I was literally out of work. So I went to the Church Missionary Society in London and they said, “Yes, we desperately need a nurse in Pakistan, on the Afghan-Pakistan border.”

So out I went. In 1979 the Russians had invaded Afghanistan and the Americans were supporting mujahideen; the Taliban hadn’t been invented. So I spent five and a half years working in a mission hospital on the border between Pakistan, [then] tribal area, [then] Afghanistan. And during my five and a half years, three and a half million refugees poured out of Afghanistan across into Pakistan. So I worked in this hospital, we had the most amazing gynaecologist/obstetrician from England, a lady called Ruth Coggin. When I got there I said to Ruth, “Could you please teach me everything you know about obstetrics?” And she did. And as I said earlier, we had women coming in on the back of Land Rovers; in the back of Datsuns; we had Afghan women walking across the border with ruptured uteruses, prolapse arms. If any of you are nurses or midwives there’s a famous book called ‘Maggie Myles’, [Myles Textbook for Midwives] and in it Maggie says, ‘You can do this, this and this, and then you need to call the flying squad.’ Well out in Pakistan, we were the flying squad.

Yeah … I loved the work, but I found it really hard working in a very conservative culture. Our nearest city was Peshawar, and then from Peshawar you go south to Bannu. Yeah, it was an amazing place to work in but it was very hard. But I learnt [a] huge amount doing obstetrics. I did my first and only craniotomy in Bannu; Ruth was on holiday, and this lady came in in very advanced labour. I examined her and realised that the baby she was about to deliver was a hydrocephelic which meant it had a very large head. Now in New Zealand you wouldn’t get babies like that now because they would’ve had scans, but in Pakistan, we didn’t. So I asked a couple of my colleagues who were there, could they examine her and they said to me, “Yes, Barbara, your diagnosis is right.” So my choice was to do nothing and to lose the mother with a ruptured uterus and the baby; the other choice was do a craniotomy to release the pressure in the baby’s head, which would kill the baby but we would be able to deliver the baby and the mother would be fine. What a choice to make! We chose to do the craniotomy and the baby died; and a few days later the mother walked out and walked back to Afghanistan.

We also had a number of babies that were bright yellow and we needed to do exchange transfusions on them. This was when Prof Liley [Professor William Liley] and some of the others were doing inter-uterine transfusions on the babies at Auckland Hospital. I’m O Rh-Negative – the universal donor – so I’d donate the blood, and then with Ruth, the obstetrician/gynaecologist, we would put a catheter into the baby round the umbilicus, take blood out, give them my blood; take blood out and give them my blood. I donated quite a lot of blood in Pakistan. It’s interesting – I could donate blood in Pakistan, but I can’t donate blood in New Zealand because I was in England during the Mad Cow disease.

During my time in Pakistan Ruth went on leave, and World Vision contacted me and asked me if I’d go to Ethiopia. This was the big famine in ‘84-’85, and again, [I] went out to a place called Ibnat. It was a camp that had been burnt down by the Marxist government and the people escaped up into the hills, and when they got up there cholera broke out. So I arrived in that camp with all these people coming down out of the hills, into a cholera epidemic outbreak. We had a thousand people; we had no gowns, we had no gloves, we had no PP [personal protective] equipment. And it was really interesting last year working at the hospital during Covid and seeing all the gowns and gloves and masks which staff needed; and we needed, but just to think what we did in Ethiopia all those years ago, and none of our thousand patients died.

After my time in Ethiopia I went back to Pakistan, and then I was asked to go down to Zambia, to the copper belt, a place called Mpongwe. It was a mission hospital funded by the Swedish government, but the money was given to a Swedish mission, so the hospital was pretty well equipped; [a] hundred and twenty beds, and sometimes we had doctors from Sweden and England and sometimes we didn’t. It was during my time there that I came across HIV/AIDS. We had [a] hundred and twenty beds as I said, mainly adult patients, and probably ninety-two percent of them were HIV positive or had AIDS. So it was a very tough place to work, because … this is pre anti-retroviral drug time … so basically if you were diagnosed as being positive with HIV or you had AIDS, your life expectancy was probably two to three years. We had surgeons coming from Sweden and doing surgery, and we had one guy came once and he said, “Barbara, I want to do some surgery to amputate someone’s leg; we need to do a mastectomy on somebody else, and we’re doing a caesarean.” I said, “What’s the anaesthetic?” ‘Cause I was only used to spinals in Pakistan, and he said, “Ketamine.” I said, “What’s ketamine?” He said, “Here you are, here’s the book – read it.” [Chuckles] “Be in the operating theatre tomorrow, you’re my anaesthetist.” [Chuckles] So in true Kiwi fashion I stayed up all night, read the book, thought I knew what I was doing, went into theatre; and we were going to amputate this old man’s leg first, and so [I] put the drip in and I think that I probably gave him a bit too much ketamine, and he had a respiratory arrest so we had to stop. He recovered, so that operation was cancelled. Then we started the mastectomy, and probably about ten minutes into the operation I just noticed that the lady was just moving a wee bit. I said to the surgeon, “Let’s stop”, and the drip had tissued; put the drip back in, everything went fine; the operation went well.

And then we had to do the caesarean; now that was really tricky because you need to make the mother sleeping unconscious, but you’ve also got a baby inside. So much prayer went up, and it was sort of a bit of a balance. But anyway, we managed to sedate the mum, got the baby out and then gave the mum more sedation … probably a wee bit too much, because normally you wake up sort of about half an hour to an hour afterwards. She woke up about three hours later, but she had a lovely baby boy so she was delighted.

Then we had a doctor who was pulling teeth, because out there there was no dentist so basically the people had a lot of broken teeth and roots, and these people were also HIV positive. So Antony, the doctor, was going home on leave; there was no one else in the hospital and he said to me, “Barbara, you need to learn how to pull teeth.” So, true Kiwi fashion, we [coughing] learned how to do anaesthetic in the top and the bottom, and I spent many, many, many afternoons digging out broken teeth, digging out roots on patients who were all HIV positive. I had like a crash helmet on – the same sort of plastic screen that we were using at Hawke’s Bay Hospital; this was back in 1991 we had these plastic helmets in Zambia. They had them in Hawke’s Bay and all round the country … all round the world … everyone had these plastic things on during Covid.

So during my time in Zambia a friend said to me, “Barbara, you’ve got all this experience – you need to go and do a degree.” And I thought, ‘No – I just scraped through School C, [Certificate] I got UE [University Entrance] because they wanted me to be head girl, and [chuckles] I said, “No, no, no.” So I had a bit of time, so I went to England and spoke to Brunel University about doing a degree in medical anthropology. And they said, “Yes, yes, yes” – I think it was because I was a foreign student and I was going to be paying a lot of money.

So anyway, I had about six months to fill in before I started at this Brunel University in London, so I went and worked on the Tanzanian-Rwandan border, setting up an HIV/AIDS programme for World Vision, and then went to university and started my … I did a Masters; I thought, ‘I’m not starting with a Bachelors, I’ll just start with a Masters.’ And I remember my first day going to a lecture on social anthropology, and I didn’t understand a word they were saying, [chuckles] and so I thought, ‘I’d better go out and get a dictionary.’ So I went and got a dictionary, but I got the wrong dictionary – I should’ve got an anthropological dictionary, not the Oxford dictionary. And at this big university we had a library and they had computers; I’d never seen a computer, because you didn’t have computers in Somalia or Ethiopia or Pakistan. And so after about three days the librarian said to me, “Barbara … where do you come from?” [Chuckles] And I said, “I’m from New Zealand, but I’ve been working in the bush”; so she was very patient.

So during my time there I went back out to Tanzania to do my research. I was looking at the impact of AIDS on a community in Tanzania, on the Tanzanian-Rwandan border … so Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania … and I visited families who had been absolutely devastated by AIDS. So many of the parents of these children aged say, from eighteen to forty-five, had died of AIDS, and suddenly the grandparents – now probably most of you in this room are grandparents. I know you love your grandchildren, but would you like to get a phone call saying that your children had died and your twenty grandchildren are coming to stay with you, forever! ‘Cause this is what happened in Tanzania; the parents had died and these children aged from babies to maybe teenagers, suddenly had nowhere to go so these elderly people were suddenly looking after all these children – hundreds and thousands of children.

Also while I was in Tanzania we had, we tried to set up HIV/AIDS programmes. We didn’t have a hospice, and people who were dying of AIDS were nursed at home, on the floor with banana leaves – no pain relief. And I remember going one day to visit this house, and we knocked on the door and a five-year-old daughter came to the door; she was the carer for her dying father. The mother had left, and there was about an eighteen-month-old baby, and this five year old girl was looking after her dad. She couldn’t, you know, she wasn’t strong enough to even sit him up. We were able to give some help to the neighbour who sort of looked after this really … dying man and these two little kids.

While I was there in Tanzania – this was the beginning of the massacre [cough] in Rwanda between the Hutus and Tutsis, and thousands and thousands of people came across the border into Tanzania. And one day we went down to the Benaco camp; eight hundred and fifty thousand people poured across the border … across the bridge … into this camp. And as we drove through the camp, here were the people walking, carrying everything they owned – people who were so tired and so sick they just lay down in the road. Women who were in labour sat down, squatted, delivered, got up. Eight hundred and fifty thousand people, and probably, of those, twenty or thirty thousand were children. You know, you might think it’s hard when you go to Kmart on Christmas Eve with your grandchildren, but you try walking through these huge, huge camps.

So I said to the Tanzanian staff, “Let’s go near the …” There was a bridge; Tanzania – Rwanda. The Tanzanian guards were on this side, the Rwandan guards were on that side. So I went up to the guard with my interpreter and said, “Could I go and stand on the bridge?” So this is a bridge which [the] Kagera River flows under and flows into Lake Victoria, and I stood on that bridge that day and looked down into the water, and here were bodies tied together with spears in them – they’d been killed – floating down the river. And there was this body of this probably only two or three year old kid, naked, jammed into the rocks. And I said to my interpreter, “We have to get that body”, you know? He said, “Barbara, you can’t.” So I stood on the bridge that day and had a conversation with God, saying, “How come human beings can do this to each other?”

During that time of the massacre, forty thousand bodies floated down the Kagera River into Lake Victoria. Lake Victoria is huge – it makes Taupo look like a drop in the bucket – I mean it’s an enormous lake. And round the lake Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya have fishing companies because in Lake Victoria you get Nile perch that are this big, and they get filleted and sent to Europe for people in Europe to buy. When forty thousand bodies floated into Lake Victoria, nobody wanted to buy fish. The hostel I stayed in was on the shores of Lake Victoria, and it was pretty devastating to be there.

I finished my degree and then went and worked in Tanzania as their HIV/AIDS consultant, working with truck drivers and prostitutes in the middle of the night, talking to them about HIV and AIDS with the World Vision team.

I was then asked to go down to Mozambique. Mozambique had just come out of seventeen years of civil war, and it had just joined the Commonwealth, and so I went down there and headed up a medical programme in a place called Tete. I’m sure no one here has been to Tete – it’s not exactly on the tourist map. So I worked there on a World Vision team, and we were incredibly, wonderfully supported by the people of New Zealand who gave money to World Vision for the projects I was involved in. I’d been there seven months, and one day there was a knock on the door and our armed guards bought a note on a piece of paper. [Coughing] And written on that note [was], ‘If I and my senior Mozambiquan staff didn’t raise the salary of our general Mozambiquan staff, I and them would be killed by the end of the year.’ Now I don’t know if any of you in this room have ever received a death threat; it was incredibly scary because you don’t know who wrote it. So we went to the local police, who were trained by Eastern Europe governments, and we were told to bring a piece of paper, a light bulb and a pen because they didn’t have that. So we went down and spoke to them and they said, “Well, what we can do is we can arrest all the people, Barbara, that [who] you work with.” That was the whole of the medical team, so they were interviewed and the chief policeman said to me, “Make a list of who you think did it.” [Chuckles] After interviewing all the team I refused to give a list because that would put me in more danger, so he said to me one day, “Well I’ve arrested everyone; I’ve spoken to them and the only way I can find out who did it would be to beat it out of them” – ‘cause that’s what they did there. So I said, “No, no.” He said, “Well you need to come down ‘cause I need to interview you.” And I’m thinking, ‘What is this?’ So I refused; and then it got nearer and nearer to the end of the year.

Probably in about August I went down to Zimbabwe and spoke to the New Zealand High Commissioner there – walked into his office, said, “This is what we want to do – we want to set up a programme to educate women and feed the children when the women come for classes.” And I walked out with a large sum of money, and we set the programme up. But as the year went by and as each month passed by, it just got more and more difficult for me to be there. I didn’t want to let the people of New Zealand down; I didn’t know what would happen if I left, but I also knew that I couldn’t carry on working where everywhere I went I had armed guards, and I just … yeah, it just got untenable for me to stay. So I rang the World Vision boss here in Auckland, and he arranged for me to fly down to South Africa where I met the big Southern Africa boss, who basically said to me, “Barbara, we’ve got to get you out.” So I went back; he said, “Go to work on Monday; say nothing to anyone, and then the car will come and pick you up in the morning and we’ll take you to Harare and fly you home.” So that’s what happened. So I left Mozambique with one suitcase and came back to New Zealand pretty traumatised. There was no such thing as post traumatic stress.

[I] came back to New Zealand and thought, ‘What am I going to do? Where am I going to work?’ I wanted somewhere where I could make a difference. I wanted somewhere that was sort of ‘third-world-ish’, so I applied for a position in the Hokianga in Northland, and spent three and a half years working up there with the local people in their community; then down to Milton in Otago, working in a health trust there. And then I managed Redroof’s retirement home in Dunedin. But I’d lost my passion for nursing, because in New Zealand you’ve got to abide by the Nursing Council, and the Midwifery Council, and …

So I was driving to Te Anau one day with Bishop Penny [Jamieson], and Bishop Penny said to me, “Barbara, what are you going to do when you finish nursing?” And I said, “I want to become a hospital Chaplain.” So that began a long process of going through ordinations into the Anglican Church; and [in] 2009 I started working as the lead Chaplain in Hawke’s Bay Hospital.

So I’ve just completed twelve years; it’s the longest I’ve ever lived in my life. I’ve spoken at many, many groups, many, many conferences around New Zealand and people said to me, “Barbara, you need to write a book.” So just think … full time work, having dyslexia … I thought, ‘I’m going to do it.’ So for the last probably six years, working with some very good friends, through blood, sweat, toil; every time I had holidays, every time I had a weekend, this book was finally birthed, and in July last year I launched it at Toitoi. [Hawke’s Bay Arts & Events Centre] And yeah … it was an incredible day. I remember when it arrived at my house, all these boxes of my books; and I picked it [one] up and burst into tears, and thought, ‘Man!’

When I was working in the Hokianga I received a letter from Sir Michael Hardie Boys. And I don’t know about you, but if I get anything official from the government or Government House I think, ‘Oh my goodness – what have I done?’ But it was actually a letter from Sir Michael Hardie Boys saying that Her Majesty the Queen wanted to give me a Queens Service Order for my work overseas. So on my birthday, 9th August 2000, I went down to Government House; got all poshed up and was there when I received my medal. And receiving it that day I received it on behalf of all the national staff that I’ve worked with, ‘cause if it hadn’t been for them I wouldn’t’ve been able to do what I did.

I’m working with my publisher at the moment about turning my book into an audio book because I have to confess today, I’ve read the chapters but I haven’t actually read the book; because for me to sit down and read it is really quite hard. But I will certainly be out in the garden listening to Purple Hands when the audio book comes. But at the moment I’m working with my publisher and a company in Auckland who are finding three actresses who will read part of the book and then I decide which one I want, and then we get it done as an audio book.

So my plan is to retire from Hawke’s Bay Hospital at the end of August because I turn seventy in August, and I’m very aware that none of us know how much longer we have on this earth. But having been to a friend’s funeral today who was younger than me, who was diagnosed with a tumour in December and I went to her funeral today … it’s like, it’s time actually to have some Barbara time.

The hospital at Hawke’s Bay, as you probably know, we’ve been pretty short-staffed for Chaplains. We’re not employed by the DHB [District Health Boards], we’re employed by the Interchurch Council of Hospital Chaplaincy in Wellington. But the DHB here are very supportive of Chaplaincy service, as are the Hastings District Council, so over the last year we’ve managed to employ three new Chaplains. It’s interesting, we’ve employed three basically to do my job; [chuckles] but that’s okay. That’s okay.

So that’s my story so far; that’s the first seventy years. I went to a friend’s hundredth birthday in Havelock North recently, and driving home I’m thinking, ‘My goodness, Barbara – thirty years’ time people will be coming to your hundredth birthday!’ [Chuckles] I nearly drove off the road – I won’t tell you what I said! But it was like, “Man!”

So what I encourage all of you here tonight to do is to record your story, because all of you have a story. That’s my story, but you’ve all got a story; all of you in this room have contributed something, and it’s too late when we gather around and there’s a coffin in front, and everyone tells amazing stories of all these people. But everybody goes, “I didn’t know that! I didn’t know that.” So I encourage you to get out and tell your story; tell your story to your children, get it recorded. Because this is history. So thank you, and I’m happy to answer any questions you might have, but I realise we’ve got to stop.

Joyce: I think we’ll have a round of applause first. [Applause] And I think we can see Barbara why you earned your QSM, and I’m pleased it was acknowledged ‘cause a lot aren’t. Do you want to know why the book is called ‘Purple Hands’?

Reply: Yes.

Barbara: You have to buy the book. [Laughter]

Okay. Someone else will tell you. So I just want to finish with asking any of you, before we let Barbara go, is there anything special you’d love to ask her?

Question: Do you think your faith sustained you through that? It’s quite a journey … how was your faith in that?

Barbara: I only survived because of my faith, and because of the call God put on my life. Without Him I wouldn’t have made it. I saw people who came and did AIDS, you know, relief and disaster – it’s a horrendous place to work in, and you’ve got to have something to hang onto. And for me that was my faith, which at times was pretty shaky because you see so much suffering, but you also saw the difference that you could make. Mother Theresa said … someone said to her, you know, “What you do is a drop in the ocean”; but she said, “Many drops make an ocean.” And if all of us set to make a difference where we are, then we could make a difference in New Zealand and the world.

Question: I’m just curious – I’ve read the book and I loved it. And I wondered what medical anthropology actually is?

Barbara: Medical anthropology is looking at illness, sickness and health in difficult cultures, and what’s important. So we did quite a big semester on the Inuit people and how their whole culture has been changed because they were sort of gathered up and taken and put into civilisation in towns. And we also studied quite a lot of the impact of colonialism on Africa particularly with western medicine. So it was a fantastic course. You can do anthropology in New Zealand, but not medical, unfortunately. But for me it was fantastic, ‘cause the lecturers would say, you know, “So-and-so in this book says this”, and I would say, “But my experience in Somalia was this.” I think they sort of got a bit … [Chuckles] ‘Cause they’d only go out for a few weeks and then they came back and were experts; I mean, I’d actually been there on the ground, and … yeah. But that’s what medical anthropology is.

They’re all very satisfied, Barbara, it’s been fantastic. Thank you on behalf of Landmarks for that, Barbara.