International Women’s Day: Inspirational wāhine making a difference

This International Women’s Day, 1News meets five Kiwi wāhine who have had a profound impact on the world around them.

At 19 years old, a bold and naive Amanda Stevens left her small hometown of Motueka to see the world - first stop, San Francisco. Four years later in London the world suddenly became a blur, and she was diagnosed with permanent blindness.

"For about a year, I was bartending and not telling anyone that my vision was getting blurry in one eye. Then one day I was hanging up my washing and that was it. Both eyes were gone."

At 18 months old, Amanda was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. At age 24, her sight became non-functional which eventually led to total blindness - no perception of light.

Not knowing how to access support, she was pulled from a life of independence into poverty. For the next six months she lived off charity, eating cold food out of tin cans because she was too afraid to use her gas oven. She was often too scared to leave her apartment.

"It took me three weeks to save up some coins, to grope to a phone box to call home and tell my family I'd lost my sight. There was a lot of shrieking on the other end, and I suppose that's why it took me so long to call home.

"But I've never been one to be rescued. I'm autonomous at heart."

True to her word, it would be almost two decades before she finally returned to her hometown in Nelson, where she had been raised by tobacco farmers.

It was an upbringing, she says, that had clearly defined gender expectations and where women didn't always have a voice.

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By then 42, Amanda had studied and built a career working in tertiary education tutoring students with diverse physical and learning needs. She'd experienced marriage, divorce, lived in Wales and Lincolnshire and became a qualified yoga instructor along the way.

Finding a new normal as a blind woman empowered her even more than when she'd first left home as a young teenager.

"I had spent my young adult life walking around in heels with a handbag flung over my shoulder and all of a sudden I needed a cane to walk down the stairs of my apartment to go and get some milk. For a while, I struggled through fear and shame.

"Then one day I realised I still have life and I have to live it."

Fifteen months after returning to Aotearoa, a virus would cause her to lose all her hearing in her right ear and her ability to walk, due to loss of balance.

"Helen Clark once said, 'Don't get mad - get organised'. It took me three months to learn how to walk again. I pulled myself together, put my high heels on - which was the only good pair of shoes I had - and I went to a job interview with a wheelchair user assisting me. I got the job.

"Being deafblind is my normal now. I know the environment around me has become inadequate to my abilities, so I've learned to thrive by doing things differently.

"When I went blind it was like my whole world became a dark sky, and each time I achieved something - like making toast for the first time on my gas oven - a star would punch a hole in that darkness.

"My dark sky is filled with too many stars to count now. What gives me joy each day is being there when another deafblind person's star lights up."

While most New Zealanders are sleeping, you'll often find Annah Pickering roaming the streets of Auckland looking for sex workers alongside her colleague and close friend Charlotte.

They've been dubbed the 'hooker fairies' by workers on the streets.

Outreach nights, as she calls them, involve hours of driving around Auckland handing out valued sanitary packs that include condoms, information on how to keep safe, helpful social and wellbeing contacts and even packs of lollies.

"It's for energy," says Annah. "The girls love them."

Annah is one of the rare people to gain the trust of sex workers in her region. Helping others is second nature to her. Helping women - and sometimes men - in the sex work industry has been her passion, and she often goes above and beyond the call of duty.

Even while sitting in an MIQ facility, isolating with Covid, she is still responding to text messages from a sex worker needing support with housing.

"The workers are my life," she says, "I know most people in Aotearoa feel uncomfortable talking about this, but they don't realise that sex workers are just ordinary people from all walks of life.

"I knew a sex worker who was working to pay for her pilot's licence. Another worked full-time at the DHB and had a three-month goal to pay off her debt. And that's what she did - she came into the industry for three months and then she was out.

"Women are paid less than men and if you're a woman of colour, you're paid even less than a pākehā woman.

"For many women, the industry has created opportunities for them to work for themselves and to reach their financial goals or dreams, in a shorter amount of time."

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Annah's activism has taken her around the world, hearing from sex workers in India, Thailand and the US.

"We're the only country in the world that has full decriminalisation of prostitution - except for migrant sex workers, that is work we are continuing every day," she said.

"But I hear sex workers around the globe still calling for some of the protections we have here, and I think of all the women who were brave enough to share their stories and fight for the rights' of sex workers here.

"It's been almost 20 years since the Prostitution Reform Act yet we're still fighting against stigma and discrimination today. It disempowers the women in our industry. That's the work I'll continue fighting for as an activist every day."

When young girls in rural Canterbury's Selwyn District see police officer Anna Partridge, they want to be like her.

"I was at the school the other day and the kids were like, 'I've never seen a girl-one-of-you before,' and I said, 'It's cool, isn't it?'"

Female police officers are few and far between in Aotearoa's rural areas - something Anna is working to change as part of her co-chair role in the police's Women's Advisory Network.

"Most of the rural police officers are males, and that's the only police officer that some of these kids will ever see in their lives because they might be in that role for 20 years. So for me to go out into the schools and just be a role model - it's really cool."

Fourteen years on the front line has seen her working with high-risk offenders and self-harm cases in the police negotiating team and helping to create a neighbourhood policing team in one of Christchurch's toughest suburbs.

And there have been life-changing events - such as the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes and the 2019 mosque attacks.

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"It's been a real eye-opener for me. I was quite naive when I started," she says. "I came from a typical middle-class Kiwi family and then was going into some streets that I didn't even know existed in Christchurch, even though I'd lived here my whole life."

For over half her career, she's also juggled motherhood - which has taught her empathy and shaped her into a better police officer.

Being married to a sole-charge officer in rural Canterbury means the lifestyle can be 24/7.

"I live in a police house attached to a police station and he's the only cop for the area. We have people knock on our door all the time. We've had to put our kids in the garage while we've had to deal with things out on our driveway, all that kind of stuff."

Last month she was promoted to sergeant. She'll be moving to station supervisor for Lyttleton. No females in the police had been promoted in Canterbury in the previous year, so it's a rare celebration.

"We struggle getting those females. Our numbers are increasing for constables but to get from a constable to a sergeant is really, really hard. This is also why this matters to me. It's not just about making a difference in the community, which I love, but it's also about making a difference within the organisation.

"It would be great to get some more female police officers in rural communities, something I'm hoping to help change."

Service is the legacy that belongs to wāhine in the Takarangi whānau from Tairāwhiti.

At 70, Tui is one of four generations in the Māori Women's Welfare League. She followed in the footsteps of her late mother Hikitia Haig-Beach, one of the league's earliest members.

Her own daughter, Tia, joined the league as soon as she was eligible. She wakarangi has become a member.

"I was just two years old when the Māori Women's Welfare League was constituted in 1951," says Tui, who remembers her late mother being heavily involved.

"I remember I'd always hear my aunty's big car about half-a-kilometre away, and I would sit at the door and weep because I knew my Mum would be gone for a few days."

While the memories are vivid, they hold a strong influence over Tui's life.

"Those aunties would come and pick our mother up and go off for a few days. There were things to be done, there were remits to be placed before Parliament. They just got up and got on with it.

"And I learned that's the way you make positive change. You get up and you do the mahi."

"I went to all the meetings when I was a kid, drank all the cups of tea and ate all the biscuits," says Tia. "It just became a natural extension of my values to join the league and contribute to that mahi."

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Tia was an area representative in Tairāwhiti for one year, following on from her mother.

The league is founded on empowering wāhine Māori, with many of its members networking and serving throughout their communities.

Support includes distributing food packs in their communities to women and their whānau, supporting women who need housing and even getting whānau vaccinated during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But it's the little things, says Tia, that many women find most difficult asking for help with because they don't want to come across like a hōhā or annoying.

"Those might be the key things that bring meaningful change to their life and wellbeing. Sometimes a nanny might need help understanding bank forms. One time a nanny just asked me if I could give her hair a trim."

What has been disheartening for both women is seeing issues Māori women struggled with when the league was founded still prominent 70 years later.

One of those issues is immunisation. Tairāwhiti's vaccination rate was the lowest in the country during last year's lockdown. Thanks to a community-driven campaign it's now on par with the rest of Aotearoa in almost every indicator.

"It came down to people talking to people", says Tia, "and having that trusted relationship and being able to say, 'Hey, you know me, we live in the same world. We played in the same paddock. You know that I care about you.'"

There is always so much work to be done, say Tui and Tia. Women like Dame Iritana Tāwhiwhirangi, Māori Women's Welfare League president Prue Kapua, past presidents and other league members are inspiring them to serve.

"Where there is change needed, we will always step in, continuing the work of my own tīpuna," says Tia, ever hopeful her whānau legacy will continue.

Being robbed more than 30 times, surviving an armed hold-up, having your sound gear stolen and your windows smashed multiple times is nothing to deter Sharon Heke's goodwill in the town she calls home.

"I'm just a little ol' Kawerau pastor's wife," Sharon says. She's run the town's main foodbank for almost 20 years.

She's a woman of faith in a Bay of Plenty town where almost half its roughly 7000 residents declared they had no religious affiliations in New Zealand's last census.

Kawerau is one of Aotearoa's youngest communities, purpose built for paper mills in 1953. It's also the country's poorest town, with the lowest average income and highest share of sole parents and beneficiaries. And for the 30 years that the Heke family has lived there, it's been dominated by the Mongrel Mob.

Sharon and her husband Paul moved into the town as industrial chaplains for the mills.

"When you're a chaplain, you're all things to all people. You relate to them where they're at from no matter what they're faith background is," she says. "It's just part of loving people."

Sharon and her team have spent countless hours over the last two decades packing up food bags for families and setting up the town's 'Koha' op-shop - where items and furniture are given for free if you don't have a koha.

The foodbank has taken up much of her time, especially with an increase in the number of struggling families over lockdown. Sharon's support for the local women in her town has gone beyond handing out food parcels.

"We've had phone calls in the middle of the afternoon, someone saying, 'Help! Help! My wife's chasing me with an axe!' So you just have to do your best to be adaptable. Be as real as you can with people. Give people hope."

For nine years, Sharon and her husband were also the town's welfare officers for Civil Defence. When the 2017 Edgecumbe floods devastated the district, she and Paul opened up their church facilities to house hundreds of people and feed families.

They've received several awards, including a Government community service award, handed to them by Mayor Malcolm Campbell.

"He gave us the award and goes, 'These people don't go around shouting about what they do. They just go and bleepin' bleepin' do it,' and that was really nice," says Sharon.

While the foodbank is one service, it's her connection with the local women that is most important to her.

"There was one time that I had a lady whose husband was in the Mongrel Mob. They needed food and she'd come and got food on quite a few occasions. But when there was a very serious incident, there'd been a stabbing. I was the first one she came to.

"People sort of know when you're genuine or not I guess and sometimes when others around you shun you, you reach out, and try to be the best you can."