The Scales Don't Lie!

Holy moly! Carbon footprint calculators are about as enthralling to use as my bathroom scale. The latest one I tried was last week at my daughter’s school in the Tread Lightly Caravan. The calculator predicted that, despite my worm farm, weekly organic box of fruit and veggies, home-grown veggies, four chooks and low, shivering-in-winter electricity bill, we will need 3.8 earths to sustain our current lifestyle. That’s not ONE earth, but nearly FOUR!

The main culprits? Apparently our wood-burner didn’t fare so well. Eating take-aways even occasionally doesn’t cut it if we are throwing away four to eight plastic containers at the same time. And driving a petrol-driven car for two hours each week makes us bigger carbon gluttons than the average person in the UK. Yikes.

I did try cheating a bit by re-doing the calculations about eight times, tweaking my answers to drive for only twenty minutes a week and only fly in an aeroplane for two hours, but to no avail. One earth won’t do for us.

So here’s what we are trying for starters:

1.       To scoot home from school on scooters instead of driving. That’s 25 km of exercise per week sorted.

2.       To use the train to visit the city.

3.       Turning off plugs at the wall, for all appliances.

4.       Using cold water washes in the washing machine.

5.       Absolutely, absolutely stick to our policy of only buying second-hand for all household items. Like this cute designer jacket I picked up at Savemart, my favourite clothing store in the world.

The best Carbon Footprint calculators:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2009/oct/20/guardian-quick-carbon-calculator

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/stories/the-15-best-carbon-calculators

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/19/carbon.web

A great article on reducing household waste:

10 Tips for a Zero-Waste Household

A year’s worth of solid waste from Bea Johnson’s home fits in a quart-sized jar. Here's how you can reduce yours.

Two years in New Zealand, and you always take the weather with you!

This post is long overdue and to be honest, I’d almost forgotten I even had a blog. This is partly because life is so busy and full that I’ve stopped noting the significant, novel things about New Zealand, and just enjoy them in the moment. The other reason is that I was one of the unlucky Titirangi residents to catch the whooping cough doing the rounds in January 2011.

 The hills of Titirangi

Instead of sipping a glass of champagne to celebrate our milestone of two years in New Zealand on 24 January, I was swigging cough medicine. And coughing a lot.

And let me tell you, whooping cough isn’t called the 100-day cough for nothing. I didn’t just cough, but felt as though I had a fever for four months. Looking after two young children, trying to work and keep the house clean had to fit around long naps, or just periods of exhausted lying about for weeks on end.

Being a hard worker, this was an interesting experience of being forced, for the first time in my life, to stop the treadmill and convalesce. It's been a time for deep reflection. The result? I have walked away from the past few months with a new, exhilarating mantra playing around in my head: ‘What am I waiting for?’

Why wait when I can have exactly what I want right now.

Three years ago when we started the immigration process, we were tired of the waiting game, tired of hoping for change in South Africa, tired of being disappointed, and tired of being scared in our own homes. We grabbed the chance to make a new start in New Zealand and came bounding along full of enthusiasm. We had done it!

Along with this life-altering shift were a bunch of personal goals: I was going to join the Green Party in New Zealand, do art every week, get solar panels and an electric car, do yoga, dancing, surfing, the list went on and on. In a nutshell, I was going to do all the things I love and had put off for too long.

And did I?

Not really. Life took on its new routines, new demands and even new excuses. And there I was, playing the waiting game, or, as Dr Seuss calls it, living in the Waiting Place, where everyone seems to be waiting for something.

So yes, I’ve been better the past six weeks and have approached my days with a flying tackle. I took up singing lessons with a fabulous voice coach, read a dozen incredible books, started a Dream Group with a team of inspirational women to support each other in living a full life and got back into shape trundling up and down these Titirangi hills.

Nope, I'm not done yet. I got quotations for solar panels and an electric car (waiting for the fabulous Nissan Leaf to be released here in 2012). Our hot water heat pump is being installed on Monday (up to 70% off our heating bill, and a whopping reduction in energy usage) and by January we'll be powering it with solar panels. And most important, I figured out what I want to do with my life for the next forty years. Bring it on.

Oh, and after 18 years of trying, I finally stood up on a surfboard.

Wooohooooo!

Heading for our second Christmas

The year is galloping to a close with school galas, school outings, holiday plans and general end-of-year mayhem. It will be our second Christmas in New Zealand - part of me can't believe how the time has raced past.

Reflecting on the past 20 months is a painless task: as new immigrants we have been blessed with the softest landing possible - a wonderful group of friends, a small and close community, successful jobs and very happy kids. We love this country. We cannot imagine calling any other place home.



Lunch with friends at a waterfall near Karekare near where we live.



K and I watched a series of brilliant documentaries on New Zealand, among them "Here to Stay"  - a look at several different cultural groups that have immigrated to New Zealand.  Understanding the history of NZ is important to us, as well as discovering many quaint and interesting little towns and beaches. So when we recently landed up in Puhoi and saw a tiny, white-washed wooden villa on the hillside called the Bohemia Museum, we took note. I'd just returned from a holiday in Prague (Centre of Bohemia) and after watching "Here to Stay", I realised that Dallies had lived there. Sure enough, in a tearoom in Puhoi that specialises in Devonshire tea, we were told that a small group of immigrants from the Czech Republic had canoed up the river in the early 1900s after months of travel.

Breaking News: NZ third best place to live according to UN

This article was posted in the NZ Herald today:

New Zealand is the third best country to live in the world, climbing 17 places in the latest United Nations' index aimed at measuring development.

The Human Development Report 2010 (HDR) was released today by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and UN Development Programme Administrator, and former New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark.

The report, The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development, highlights countries with the greatest progress as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI).

The index calculates the well-being in 169 countries, taking into account health, education and income, which are combined to generate an score between zero and one. The countries are grouped into four categories: very high, high, medium, and low.

New Zealand was named 20th in the 2009 and this year is just behind Norway and Australia, first and second respectively.

The country's score has been rising by 0.5 per cent a year between 1980 and 2010 from 0.786 to 0.907 today, placing it in "very high" category.

New Zealand's life expectancy is 80.6 years, average number of school years is 12.5, and gross national income per capita is $25,438 ($32,046).

Read the rest...

A Blessed Sunday morning

Today is our second Easter Sunday in New Zealand. We have been here for 15 months and each month the love affair with a new country and new chapter in our life grows stronger. We watched a shimmering gold sunrise on the sea through the Kauri trees, listened to bird calls in the dead-still forest, had a gentle, leisurely breakfast and contemplated our blessings.


I am glad we are over the one-year milestone, which was a bitter-sweet bump, and now we listen to the gentle hum of our days. The last two months were among the happiest I can remember in a long time. “Pinch me! Pinch me!” I want to yell. Things can’t possibly be this... lovely.

We feel we have integrated fully in our community and that has helped speed along the at-home feeling. Of course, living in a spectacular area helps, but establishing deep friendships and playing an involved and committed role in community life has brought us a sense of belonging we didn’t expect to get so soon. What a blessing. Other people find community in church; we have found it by volunteering at the kids’ schools, planting school gardens and going to working bees and community meetings. To me it feels like “This is what my life is meant to look like”.

One year, one month in....

The second year is definitely harder than the first.

Our first year as immigrants – 2009 – was a blast. We were like tourists, out every weekend climbing dunes at Bethell’s Beach, exploring tunnels at Devonport or hot-footing it over searing black sand at Piha. We were welcomed by people we met, and it was so easy.

“We arrived here a few months ago,” we’d smile. “We’re loving it,” we’d beam. And we’d be invited in.

Now it’s different, but it’s hard to pinpoint why. The magic of all those first months is over. We know now what to expect. We feel more responsible for our move. It has finally sunk in, and we are looking about and admitting: this is our new home now. Do we like what we chose? (The answer is ‘yes’, by the way.)

But it’s complicated.

For one, I feel a new level of homesickness. It would be so much easier if everyone back in SA said, “This isn’t working. Let’s all leave.” Then we wouldn’t wonder what we’re doing here, thousands of kilometres from SA. What makes it more confusing is that all our friends and family have stayed in South Africa and life has continued as normal for them. We wonder: why was it not OK for us, when clearly, they’re still fine there? Did we over-react? Are we too sensitive? Should we, gulp, go back? The thought fills me with dread, but the questions don’t stop.

Our One Year Milestone

“I love this place. I love this city.” This is the silent mantra that played in my head this year each time we visited a new part of Auckland. Or each time we drove home from school pick-ups and saw the serene turquoise of the harbour mouth, the bush-covered ranges, the startling red of Pohutakawa flowers against the deep blue sky.

For the nature lover, NZ is pure paradise. For the biker, the camper, the hitch-hiker, the adventurer, the loner, the tramper, the mountain climber, the river rafter, the ocean kayaker, opportunities abound in a mostly unspoilt, always un-crowded setting.

We never did the boerewors, beer and braaivleis thing back in SA, so we don’t miss any part of SA culture. We fit better here with the European immigrants than we did back in SA. On every level, in every way, coming here has given us the life we always wanted: open, carefree, lots of interesting people in an interesting community, loads of friends for my kids who like nature, clambering up trees and scouring beaches for treasures. My little girl skypes her old friends back home and they stare blankly at her precious kauri gum collection, her worm farm, her crystal and shell collection from the last year. They don’t get it because their lives are restricted to back gardens and shopping malls. That crazy, dirty, outdoorsy kind of childhood is dying out in the SA city suburbs.

So what made the first year so much easier than expected? We could have settled for one of the few mouldy rentals we found, but we took the massive risk of buying a house instead – after only three weeks in a country we had never seen before. We could have chosen a built-up suburb with massively expensive shacks, but we opted for a small lifestyle block in a community that suits us (Noordhoek is the closest equivalent that comes to mind). We wrote down what we wanted a year before we arrived, and we fought for it.

Number One in the world for PEACE

So, the Global Peace Index figures for 2009 have just been released and guess who came number one in the world? Yip, New Zealand. Read all about it here:

http://www.visionofhumanity.org/gpi/results/rankings.php

This is the third edition of the Global Peace Index (GPI). It has been expanded to rank 144 independent states and updated with the latest-available figures and information for 2007-08. The index is composed of 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators from respected sources, which combine internal and external factors ranging from a nation’s level of military expenditure to its relations with neighbouring countries and the level of respect for human rights. These indicators were selected by an international panel of experts including academics and leaders of peace institutions.

Going Green

One of the biggest changes we made when we moved to New Zealand eight months ago was to buy a lifestyle block in the Waitakere ranges and start a food garden. Our aim was to live a simpler, greener lifestyle by making small changes. We - as parents - felt that by not reducing our carbon footprint as a household, our children would one day hold us partly responsible for being eco sloths.

What we did

So this is not meant to be some smug 'look at us, we're so good' kind of post. I have just been amazed at how simple it can be if you just go ahead and 'be the change'. Sure, we want governments to put restrictions in place on carbon emissions and company pollution levels, but if we know which companies are contaminating our environment, it really is up to us to choose whether we support their products - or not.

Seven months ago we moved into our new home in New Zealand, 20 minutes outside central Auckland. We changed all our light bulbs to energy-saving bulbs the moment we moved in, diligently avoid using plastic shopping bags, started a worm farm, a compost heap, bought four laying, brown shaver chickens who roam freely through the bush, and planted beds of vegetables.

The Food Garden

Almost immediately we planted two beds of spinach and bok choi, two large potato stacks and a bed of broccoli (that got munched in one sitting by our sneaky chooks!). We have two grapefruit trees bearing fruit, three cumquats, two lemon trees and two mountain pawpaws. We planted two feijoas which will bear in two years time and hope to add several nut trees to our collection. As the rain pours down at the rate of 2300 mm per annum year in the ranges, watering, for the first time in my life, is not an issue. The garden grows by itself. It was a dream come true after years of struggling to grow veggies amid tight water restrictions, withering heat, strong winds and the sandy soil of Cape Town.

Recycling within our property

We are down to one small bag of waste per week. The bulk of our edible kitchen scraps goes to the chickens, who in turn provide deliciously smelly manure for our compost heap. The worm farm gets all the peels and scraps the chickens won't want, and the Waitakere Council do bi-monthly collections of plastics, glass, tin, paper, all stored in bins in our kitchen cupboards.

By shopping at the small farmers' markets, we buy extra fruit and vegetables we need straight into cardboard boxes that we then re-use to collect recycled items.

One thing that I noticed here is that Kiwis are not very big on the re-usable shopping bags yet. Plastic bag usage here is crazy. I can stand outside Foodtown and see dozens of shoppers with ten or more plastic bags in their trolleys. Now multiply that by one million shoppers per week in New Zealand, at a minimum, and you have ten million new plastic bags entering our environment, and ultimately, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Those that don't quite make it into the trash vortex break down in our landfills, releasing toxic, carcinogenic chemicals.

It doesn't take many brain cells to figure out that 520 million plastic bags per year (at a modest minimum) doesn't compare to using ten re-usable shopping bags per household - year after year. Kiwis need to wake up on this one.

Chemical-free

New Zealand has a large range of natural, eco-friendly cleaning products. They may cost a bit more in the short term, but I love the thought that long term they are not costing the earth and future generations. It makes no sense to spew out thousands of gallons of bleach and poisonous chemicals into our wastewater system, daily.

It's easier than I thought

It's much easier to reduce, re-use and recycle in New Zealand. Excellent second-hand clothing is something that NZ has sorted! I have never dressed as well in my life. I recently walked around a shopping mall gazing into fashion clothing shops and I thought - hey! Not a chance will I be buying those low quality Chinese imports made in a sweat shop. I buy gorgeous second hand designer items, often locally made, thereby halving the carbon footprint of the item.

After years of putting off some of these simple steps, it feels silly not to have done this sooner. It isn't even that hard, and now that we have done this for the past seven months, we cannot imagine living any differently.

Many of the magazines here - even the fashion mags - focus on the carbon footprint of different products and services offered. I imagine the future will include lists of companies that offset their carbon footprint - and those that don't. Again, it will be the consumer who gets to choose which product to support.

What all of us can do

On 21 September I took part in the Tck Tck Tck campaign in Henderson - one of 19 campaigns in Auckland and thousands from around the world. It was fabulous.

This post is in honour of Blog Action Day for Climate Change: http://www.blogactionday.org/

Here are some ways you might want to get involved:

Sign the Tck Tck Tck campaign's "I am ready" pledge supporting an ambitious, fair and binding climate agreement in Copenhagen this fall: tcktcktck.org/people/i-am-ready
Register for the 350.org International Day of Climate Action October 24: http://www.350.org/
Join the UK Government's "Act on Copenhagen" effort to promote a global deal on climate change: www.actoncopenhagen.decc.gov.uk/en
Learn and act with The Nature Conservancy's Planet Change site: change.nature.org
Watch and help promote Current TV's green-themed video journalism at: current.com/green
Support strong climate legislation in the US by making calls to your Senators with 1Sky: www.1sky.org/call
Put yourself on the Vote Earth map and upload your photos, pictures and weblinks to show the world future you want to see: www.earthhour.org/home
Put yourself on the Vote Earth map and upload your photos, pictures and weblinks to show the world future you want to see: www.earthhour.org/home
Join the Greenpeace cool IT challenge campaign to turn IT industry leaders into climate advocates and solution providers: www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/climate-change/cool-it-challenge
Add your personal story and tell the world what you will miss the most when you lose it to climate change with the United Nations Foundation Climate Board: www.unfoundation.org/global-issues/climate-and-energy/its-getting-personal
Find the latest and most popular climate change actions online at globalwarming.change.org
Join the Causecast community and find new ways to get involved with organizations working to end climate change. Watch videos, read news and support one of the many environmental nonprofits on Causcast. www.causecast.org/environment
Post to your blog or Twitter account about the impact of climate change on the world's poorest, and then take action with Oxfam International: www.oxfam.org.uk/climate

Seven Months in New Zealand

“Do you like your new life?” I ask K. We’re driving for our weekly Friday lunch date.
“I just love it,” he nods. “I mean, the freedom is almost unreal.”

And that’s just it: immigration brings the freedom to choose again. And that doesn’t mean everything is suddenly roses, our personalities instantly gregarious and massively fabulous. It just means we have a chance to choose new ways of being.

Seven months ago we left our entire world behind in South Africa, save our possessions and our kids, moved to the other end of the world and started life afresh. It is hard to imagine the experience of a new start, unless you have done it yourself. It’s as huge as having a baby. You’re so inextricably linked to this tiny newborn who has arrived in your life – permanently - you and your life are forever different. So here we are in a new country, and by default we are catapulted into an entirely different world.

And something of the complete newness of everything allowed us to take steps and make changes we would not normally have considered. There is no rut yet, because everything is startlingly fresh. One of the things we decided before coming here was: seeing that we were “losing” our country, friends and family, secure jobs, a lovely home, seeing as though we would start off on a blank slate, we may as well choose our most amazing place in Auckland to live. Hence Titirangi.

Where before K worked in a high-level academic position in Cape Town doing his 8 – 5 stint, now he works from home with me. Our days are punctuated by trips into the bush to fetch our kids from their various schools, exclamations over the turquoise sea through all our windows, the height of the tide up the creek, the stillness of the tree ferns. On every level, we have a new life. It is shiny. It is peaceful and graceful and calm and conscious.

So we left stuff, but now I can say we didn’t lose. We gained. We are a much, much happier family, even though we have had to build a friendship circle from scratch and have had to give up intimacy with family back in SA. Schedules feel looser, times ambles more gently here.

We have gained a more certain future, a happier, more connected community, found friends for our kids who know how to be friends, and access to fantastic resources, opportunities and support. There is no heavy undercurrent of unresolved communal baggage in New Zealand, and no one is about to be murdered because of their race. Entire swathes of worry and concern just do not feature here. The relief is extraordinary.

I like the way I parent, more. It feels so right to see kids happy and free in the bush. I don’t have to be anxious in public places or quiet areas. I don’t have to watch the kids as if my eyes were an invisible chain. I can let them go a bit. No prisons, no cages, the kids here in Auckland city don’t know about being chaperoned by adults to and from school, to extramurals and back, in their backyards, at the park. They are kept safe from cars, land slips, and maybe, the worry of an earthquake. An altogether different kind of conversation.

Our first winter came and went without a fuss. It wasn’t grey for months on end like we expected. It didn’t hail or storm or blow gales daily or even weekly. There were no tantrums of any kind: just a bit of an icy May. The sun shone, the days were often windless and still. Mostly I thought it was exquisite. And then Spring came with a flurry of colour on the trees: magnolia, camellia and rhododendron blossoms of every hue. It also brought gusts of wind. But it certainly felt like Spring. We thought that Winter lasts until December, but we are already wearing t-shirts on some days, the plants are sprouting wigs of lime-green growth and tiny white and yellow daisies (weeds!) dot the grass everywhere.

We even sat outside one evening last week as the sun was setting and felt the heat of the sun burning us, reminding us that summer is just around the corner. The smell of the bush is different in the heat and triggers memories of that tingly, sunset-on-the-beach, happy family feeling.

So, after seven months, what’s it like being an immigrant? Sometimes it’s really hard. Like, we just don’t know things. By now we know the names of some suburbs and how to get there. We know our favourite brand names, and what is sold in most of the shops. We know the quality of the gardens and houses here is far from what we were used to in SA. Now it’s the finer subtleties that demand our attention.

I still don’t understand why Kiwi women will be friendly one day and ignore me the next. I am slowly learning that here, friendliness is a fine art, a cultivated trait, and not insinuating friendship, loyalty, or even a connection. ‘Friendly’ is simply what Kiwis aspire to as a way of being. The women are wrinkled as hell from cracking smiles and tinkling laughs at every opportunity, but catch their eye and you will see the smile has often not travelled past their nose. They’re just being incredibly, incredibly nice.

Sometimes we feel insanely anonymous. That we are the sum total of our connections, and without many and old connections, we are nothing. We are invisible. Like, who cares who we or our kids are if hardly anyone knows our name. Some people find opportunities to hand out their name like business cards at a trade show. But I am not like that.

At times I force myself to pick up the phone and connect with people. I force myself to overcome my shyness, my tendency to judge. I literally put on a smile. When I want to escape under a bush and lament that life feels a bit grim, I remember that it is I who is choosing that thought.

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures. --John F. Kennedy