Feature

Critic brings you five salacious summer tales. The following stories broach the Beehive, ascend to Beijing, touch down in the slums of Kenya, wash up on the beaches of Samoa, and even dip into the murky waters of Christchurch. Susan Smirk talks to five Otago students about how they spent their summer.

Selini Pua: returned home to tsunami-ravaged Samoa
 
Like many people, Commerce student Selini Pua made his way to the beach this summer. But Selini's beaches are not the same as they once were – not since his home, Samoa, was hit by the tragic tsunami last September. Although Selini had already returned home since then, it was not easy to spend five weeks living alongside the devastation left by the disaster. He describes the worst part of the trip as “the fear of looking around – getting there and looking around at the affected areas. I cried when I went there.”
 
When news of the tsunami first came through, Selini just wanted to go home. With all the telecommunications systems down, he had an anxious wait to hear from his family. He says, “It was shocking, because it was the first time we heard such a thing, and no one expected it.” Now, he explains, people take tsunami warnings much more seriously than they did before: “Now everyone is just on their feet, once the warning comes out. Everyone is just packed and gone, straight away.”
 
Selini's family is lucky to live in the town on the main island, which largely escaped the brute force of the wave. “It was pretty sad to see other areas … to see all the houses torn apart,” he says. The low point of his summer was “seeing all the little kids, without homes, and they were just staying under tarpaulins.” Nevertheless, Selini believes that Samoan communities are feeling fairly hopeful. He describes some of the progress being made: “Right now when I came back, there were some constructions happening out there … but the rate things are going now, it's just really slow.”
 
After a long low in numbers, even the tourists are returning – although they have fewer beaches to frequent than before since “most of the really cool beaches were affected by the tsunami.” There are still a lot of international aid workers there, Selini notes. In fact, over summer he personally travelled to some of the most badly-affected areas to help tsunami victims. He says, “We had to give out some clothes and stuff, and help out all of the Red Cross people as much as we can, distributing those overseas donations.” Selini is quick to commend the amount of overseas aid Samoa received, particularly from New Zealand, but based on his recent visit he suggests that “they don't really need that much clothes and stuff right now. It's more the money to make things happen – all the developments and stuff, rebuilding houses.” 
 
Marie Jenson: an anxious fresher
 
Like so many wide-eyed freshers, Marie Jenson is about to enter the big, scary world of tertiary education. Having finally cast off the shackles of secondary school, Marie's summer was split neatly between working as a cashier, socialising, and making the mental and practical preparations needed to step up to tertiary study.
 
“I felt like time has passed by too fast! It's pretty scary, knowing that the next year, I won't be able to go walk through the gates of my high school, that I would have to move away and live in another city!” Marie lives with her family in Christchurch, but has now moved into UniCol for the year. She notes rather resentfully that her family has “yet to reveal any signs of sadness,” but maintains that they will miss her nonetheless.
 
With little idea of where she wants to take her studies, Marie chose to take the road most travelled and enroll in First Year Health Science. While she hopes her grades will be enough to get her into one of the “five professions,” she is confident that she has plenty of other options if things don’t go to plan. As she looks forward to the epic educational odyssey that is Otago, Marie is more worried about getting lost than of anything else. “My sense of direction is really bad, so I'm really scared that I won't be able to find my way around and I'll be later or even miss out on my lectures.” She also seems sincerely sobered by the weighty reality of university study, noting “I think in uni, you have to be very self-motivated to study in order to do well.” In general, Marie feels “anxious and nervous – possibly excited” about beginning life at Otago, since she has heard that “it can get pretty crazy down there.”
 
Charlotte Greenfield: cuddled Kenyan kids
 
It was the long-cherished imagery of The Lion King that drew Charlotte Greenfield from Wellington to the sprawling slums of Nairobi, Kenya – but life is not all Hakuna Matata there. When she decided to commit three months to volunteer work, the New Zealand-based Global Volunteer Network organised her placement in an orphanage to simply “do what is needed.” This turned out to be everything from teaching and running games, to dispensing vitamin liquid at lunch, feeding babies, and arranging doctor’s visits. 
 
The simple concrete buildings of the Nairobi Children's Home house 80 children from the ages of newborn to seven years. “I was shocked by the utter disregard by the government for Kenya's most important asset: their children … there is little more than the basic resources to keep the children alive here,” she says.
 
Charlotte describes the children there as “resilient” and “very independent, but also desperate for love. Most of them, I don't know their specific backgrounds, even the management don't know for most of them because they are often found wandering alone. But the burn marks, bruises, and tough eyes speak for themselves.” 
 
One of the hardest things is the lack of structure or activities for the children – they are left to their own devices. The saving grace is a teacher named Esther, who despite having very little money herself, works for free on weekdays to run two classes for the children a day. They do singing, drawing, reading, and practice the alphabet and numbers. “There are so many children and it easily descends into chaos,” she says. “The children can be utterly hilarious ... But a lot of things become funny here, because everything is so difficult, so the only thing you can do is laugh most of the time.”
 
A Law and English student, Charlotte has hopes of breaking into journalism and continuing her humanitarian interests. “Of course it's clichéd, but it makes you realise how lucky you are and it has taught me that my limits are so much furtherer than I ever thought they were.” She is also thinking bigger than the day-to-day chaos of the children's home – she wants to arrange sponsorship for two of the girls, Maria and Cherotich, to get out of the orphanage and go to school. There is a link on Critic’s Facebook page if you are keen to contribute.
 
Matt Booth: rubbed important shoulders in the capital city
 
Matt headed to the windy city in a state of saintly submission, quite prepared to humbly fetch coffee, file paperwork, and sit quietly in a corner as an intern to Minister John Carter. But he says “I was thrown in the deep end from the start. The office was slightly under-staffed, so had to help out with speech writing.” 
 
Bowen House, where Matt worked, is attached by an underground tunnel to the Beehive. “I got lost a lot,” he admits. “It's a run run in the Beehive, with little signposting, so that took a little getting used to.”
 
He was quickly introduced to the work of writing speeches, briefings, and opinion pieces around the Minister's electorate of Northland, and his ample portfolio included such stimulating topics as Racing, Civil Defense, and Senior Citizens. Matt's worst day on the job came about when another office neglected to inform his office of an important development in a portfolio that their Minister was making a speech on. He learnt that day, as he rushed around changing the speech and trying to get it to a then-absent Minister, that “a major part of the job is managing political risk.” 
 
While he didn't get a chance to swap drinking stories with the Prime Minister, he did get to hobnob with a few important figures, such as Gerry Brownlee and David Carter, mostly while 'his' Minister was en route to the House. Matt found his summer hijinks in the Beehive both “enjoyable and rewarding,” with one of those rewards being that he got to travel in Crown cars a few times, which he deems to be “super.”
 
He was admittedly “a bit sad” to leave the productive hum of the Beehive, explaining that “You can’t get that experience anywhere and you certainly don’t learn it at uni.” He returns to the relentless slog of study in Law and Politics, which he is “eager to finish.” Matt has no immediate plans to use his newfound knowledge of speech writing, Crown cars, and not-so-secret tunnels to return and conquer the Beehive, but he does have long-term goals of getting into politics, after “acquiring some worldly experience.”
 
Luxi Nie: a high-flyer in Beijing
 
Beijing, Luxi Nie explains, is a city where snow turns to ice and the ice never melts. She left a lukewarm southern summer to spend six weeks in sub-zero Chinese winter. Luckily, Luxi had a spot on the 36th floor of a Beijing high rise to warm her toes. Having just finished second-year Law, Luxi walked into China's third most prestigious law firm as a “terrified” intern. Although bilingual, she spent a lot of the first few weeks flipping madly through her Mandarin-English dictionary, trying to relearn all the legal terms she had only just mastered, in yet another language. After that she drowned in a tonne of legal paperwork, floundered through some research, and sat meekly through meetings and conferences. She says “the most technical thing I did was to work with the English translation team.” 
 
The law firm she interned with specialises in international company law, so has numerous clients from Western nations. Luxi explains that “What the companies mostly wanted was to set up business within China, so the law firm generally was the go-between – between Chinese officials and the Chinese system, and that of the company who wanted to set up their business.” China's dubious-at-best corporate ethics record would suggest that this would be a scandalous area of work indeed, but Luxi says “Something quite fascinating that one partner said, is that he got into corporate law because it was the 'cleaner' area of law … systems in China can be quite corrupt – Judges can be bribed and such.” She says that corporate law, by comparison, is more removed from the corruption of courtrooms, and more grounded in bureaucratic systems. Nevertheless, she hints that there were one or two juicy cases she is not at liberty to discuss.
 
Luxi's 6am till 6pm daily commute and work routine left her few hours to spare, but, ever the shopaholic, she managed to find some time to explore the markets and mega-malls of the frozen city in hopes of finding the perfect high heels to fit her high-powered surroundings. While her Law lecturers may not mark her up for her shoes, or her ability to discuss legal material in Mandarin, she is glad to have gained something of an insight into her future career, which she intends to carry out somewhere slightly warmer than Beijing in winter. Check out www.critic.co.nz to read Luxi's web-column "Brave New Beijing" for more insight and intrigue into life, law, and fashion in China's capital city.