David Letele and Pania Te Paiho at King Street Kitchen on Tuesday. Photo: Andy Campbell
TWO passionate and vibrant motivational speakers with street credibility were brought into town this week in an initiative that aims to make a difference among Te Kūiti youth.
David ‘Buttabean’ Letele and Pania Te Paiho spoke at the Te Kūiti High School in the morning and at a free event at the Les Munro Centre in the evening.
David markets himself as Brown Buttabean, or BBM (Motivation). As a person who has wrestled with substances and weight blowouts, the BBM approach is unlike anything else in the health and wellbeing sector – and it’s free.
“His story, his upbringing, is very similar to a lot of people that I know that live in this community. A lot of things he went through while he was growing up are a mirror image of what some people are going through in our community.” Erin Pye at No 12 said. She attended an earlier Ōtorohanga presentation and was deeply affected by what David was saying.
She said it was inspiring for people that had gone through something similar, to hear from someone who had been there, come out the other end, and was succeeding.
David’s family was Mongrel Mob. His dad was an Auckland mob president and a bank robber who, at one stage, was sentenced to six years in prison for armed robbery. His uncle specialised in armoured cars, and also spent a lot of time behind bars.
Pania Te Paio from Wahine Toa Hunting caught the imaginations of thousands of women after she started taking women hunting.
She found women around the country were facing the same barriers when it came to learning to hunt. They didn’t have the knowledge, and no one would teach them because they were women. The misconception that providing from the land was a man’s job needed to stop, she said.
She decided to show others how to shoot and fill their freezers and began taking groups of women into the bush to learn how to stalk and shoot.
Her humour saw her quickly become an online sensation, with a Facebook page boasting thousands of likes and videos that have a combined viewership of more than 2 million.
There was also a flood of young people reaching out to her because of mental health and abuse issues, asking for help and advice.
“I’ve always been that aunty, I can’t judge -– you have just heard my story,” she said last night.
“My nephew took his life, my niece took her life. They were coming to me for help, and I couldn’t get them in anywhere. Our babies are saying ‘I’m going to kill myself’ and I, as an adult, I can’t get them any help. How much of a failure of a system is that?
“My inbox explodes, they come to my house and … no one else is listening to them.”
It provoked her to organise a teen suicide march to parliament four years ago
“We always talk at our kids; ‘You are not doing enough; get up and do the dishes; who are you hanging around with? We talk at them, and we are failing them.
“Today, at the school, the questions that were coming up, man … so what do we do?
“It looks like every aunty, uncle, every mum, every dad looking and checking on the rest of the community – because this is of us. The system is not going to come and save our people and it’s only going to get worse.
“If we see a family and the mother’s on crack and we know she’s on crack, go check on those kids. Go take them a feed. If there’s a young girl that’s cutting, go and get her. If a young kid talks about their hurts, do not run your mouth. Do not make it gossip, do not make it funny.
“New Zealand has got the highest rate of teen suicide in the world; what we are doing is not working. We are only contributing to it, and it’s on us to step up.”
Community probation officer Mark Phipps Brown hopes the stories of David and Pania resonate with rangitahi and spark discussion about options available in Te Kūiti that they may not know about.
