Weaving a place where no one is regarded as being ‘other’

In this whare with no doctors, I can sense care everywhere, surrounded by people who live by caring

I am at a Zoom introduction for a course of study in kaitiakitanga. Postgraduate diploma in bicultural professional supervision. Can I see another Pākehā face? I don’t know it yet but I’m āwangawanga – anxious, disturbed – in fact I’m terrified for the first time in years. It’s just a Zoom.

Now I’m in a wharenui at our noho marae. The second of eight weekend noho, in eight months. What was I thinking?

It’s Friday night. I’m so tired. Tough week. Lack of self-care? Our kaiako (instructor) calls it lack of aroha for self; both can go when I am tired. My brain can’t think but I’m trusting whakarongo, the whole tinana alive and listening. Fatigue opens my portal to whakarongo: listening, hearing, smelling, tasting, sensing, a sea of floating random thoughts, intuitions, sensations and feelings, sniffing my way towards something.

I’m in a room with a collective listening, but I’m noticing how it is to be “other”. There are 40 tangata but maybe two other Pākehā. I’ve been to lots of noho but usually the manuhiri are other Pākehā like me.

Now I am other.

What is other? Not like me? Don’t look like me, don’t sound like me, don’t smell or taste like me, don’t feel like me? Who decided I am other? Where does that thought come from – me or them? Why is there even a me and them in my thinking?

I am usually in spaces where I am the opposite of other: equivalent, equal, kin, related, alike. Places where I am with my white-skinned kin, alike, equal.

And others, are other.

Today I am sensing being other, and I am wondering what it might be like for others to come to me: the kaiako, the GP, mentor, teacher, the Pākehā. No doubt those who come to me can feel like other.

Today I am other, making tentative gestures towards a fragile connection. I have to step towards, look friendly and benign but I’m conscious of my different world: I have a middle-class bathroom, my friends’ parents go to resthomes, I am doctor, a high-status role with a white whakapapa.

Between being other and coloniser class, I’m on the back foot. It’s a position I kind of like: destabilising, tentative, unconfident but full of possibility, the back foot ready to power take-off. Preparing to leap into an unknown way of seeing. “Leap” was the word I chose as my intention for this course.

But I am currently still on the back foot. What do I need for take-off?

I’m instinctively “shutting the f**k up”. It’s strange because usually when I am not other, I speak, I have interesting things to say, believe my own voice, so this is a new place to be.

I’m experiencing whakarongo, instead of thinking of the next thing to say. Kaiako learning.

I need to feel safe to take off. I need a collective, but I’m not used to that, I’m used to a world of individual kin standing on their own two feet, independent, self-sufficient.

There’s a logo on the course book, “whiria te tangata, weave the people”.

I need the people woven into a kete to hold me, but it’s hard to ask for that and know how that might feel.

One of my jobs is to teach doctors about caring, as if that is some strange concept we have not quite incorporated into our way of being, an add-on. But in this whare with no doctors, I can sense care everywhere, surrounded by people who live by caring, at their mahi, at their whare, in their whānau for their people. Kaitiakitanga, felt.

I can sense the kete of caring. Whiria te tangata.

And I am reconsidering me as kaiako, being with other. I’m googling “other” – different, unlike, unequal (it doesn’t say brown, but that’s usually what it means). I wonder what I need to do to weave a safe container for them/us and I am seeing myself walk towards those who are other, unsure what I will do when I get there, perhaps greet “others” warmly, show manaakitanga, offer them whanaunga, whakarongo, whiria te tangata. Let my tīpuna guide me, let the karakia speak to me.

As our kaiako have taught us, I will greet the mana in other.

That may mean greeting my own mana, despite my being other.

Lucy O’Hagan is a medical educator and specialist GP working in the Wellington region