A gift for posterity
Bus driver tells a different story
One of the men who has benefited from He Korowai Trust’s efforts on behalf of the homeless had a special gift for GovernorGeneral Dame Patsy Reddy when she arrived for afternoon tea on Monday.
Kenneth Hereora presented her with a kete he had made for her, fashioned from toilet tissue.
Dame Patsy was very impressed, saying it would be given pride of place at Government House in Wellington, in one of the cabinets where gifts received by Governors-General were displayed.
She also promised to tell the guides where it had come from, so they could tell visitors its story.
“I know you will succeed; I can see the sparkle in your eyes,” she told Mr Hereora as she accepted the kete.
He Korowai CEO Ricky Houghton had a not so quiet word of warning, however. Mr The driver of the bus whose 7-year-old passenger was struck by a car at Tokerau Beach last week (Boy off school bus hit by car, February 27) has told a very different story to that attributed to the police.
A police spokesman told the Northland Age that the boy, who was struck as he ran from behind the stationary bus on Simon Urlich Rd, was taken to Kaitaia Hospital by ambulance suffering cuts and abrasions, after reportedly being knocked unconscious.
A witness had told police that the car had been travelling very slowly, to the point where it had been hardly moving. The driver, from Auckland, would have been “lucky” to have been in second gear. An officer at the scene said police accepted that it had been travelling at less than the mandatory 20km/h when passing a stationary school bus.
The bus driver rejected most of that as “a load of rubbish.” The child, who had been thrown across the road by the impact, had undergone surgery for a broken hip, he said, while the car had been far from ‘hardly moving.’ He had frantically tried to flag the driver down, without success.
“Every day I see car after car, truck after truck, passing stationary buses with no attempt to slow down,” he said.
“No one gives a s... , and this rubbish doesn’t help. Where’s the message in that?”
He had approached the police at the scene, but they had not wanted to speak to him.
“I couldn’t believe it. I asked them if they wanted a statement and they told me I could go,” he said.
The Northland Age approached the boy’s school the day after the accident, and was told that the family did not wish any information to be provided. For this chook the high point of Saturday’s Kaitaia A&P show might well have been Ivy Timpe’s head, which provided just the vantage point it needed to survey its surroundings. The hen was one of Caro’s Crazy (pattable) Critters, from Umawera. Hereora, he said, obtained the raw material for his art from council toilets after hours, “so you might be done for receiving stolen toilet paper.”
Mr Houghton told Dame Patsy that the trust was currently providing accommodation in Kaitaia’s former hotel for 35 homeless people, with more for men with “family violence problems.”
“They go to work every day instead of going to prison,” he added, “and after a couple of weeks everyone sits down and looks at what’s going wrong.”
Dame Patsy’s itinerary in Kaitaia, which began a three-day visit to the Far North, included a citizenship ceremony at Te Ahu on Monday (see page 11).