Creating community connections

Creating community connections in the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle When Cyclone Gabrielle devastated Hawke’s Bay, Auckland’s Marieann Mohi knew she had to go and help her whānau, her marae and the wider community. Within a week, she was on the ground, working as a registered nurse at Wairoa Hospital and helping to connect people to the services they needed in her downtime. “Of course, I’d seen the TV pictures, so I was expecting to see the devastation, but I wasn’t prepared for the heat and the humidity a tropical cyclone leaves behind, and the stench of mud and rotting vegetation was awful,” says Marieann. “The dust from the silt was everywhere, all the time, and there were clouds of sandflies. “Although it had been a week since Gabrielle had hit, the impact was still very fresh and raw and everywhere was in chaos. People were doing their best for each other but all the systems we take for granted – roads, power, water, communications – were gone.” While Marieann (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Maniapoto) had grown up in Hastings, she had headed to Auckland as a young single mother looking for more than the factory and seasonal work open to her at home. “I had thought I’d like to be a midwife but then a scholarship to help bring more Māori into nursing sort of fell into my lap and away I went,” she says. She worked in various roles for the then Auckland DHB before ending up in the operating theatre at Starship Hospital. Then an opportunity came up to join Kaiarahi Nahi, a project to help tackle the inequities Māori experience in the health system, which led to a role in the Performance team, working to help shape the way the system responds to Māori health needs. Given her kaupapa, it was unsurprising that when Marieann wasn’t working a shift at Wairoa, she was out in the community, providing a connection between people and healthcare services by advising where they needed to go to get help, helping to carry out wellness checks, doing the dishes and chatting with the elderly on the local marae. “I just went where there was a need, either to help people navigate the health services available to them, to do the jobs that needed doing or just to help provide a sense of peace and calm, a space where people didn’t have to worry for while,” she says.