Making the best of a very bad situation
Regarding homeless people and concerns of the young children utilising the sports grounds at midweek and weekends. The Dunedin City Council have allowed and accommodated the homeless to reside at the Oval, and generally this is making the best of a bad situation.
Cordoning off the tented area while the sports grounds were being utilised would be deemed insulting to those accommodated in the Oval tented area, and would cause a rift and aggravate the situation further.
Kainga Ora is planning a new housing development at the site of a Dunedin holiday park, but details about the size of the development or when it will be ready for residents remain unclear.
Kainga Ora planned to redevelop the site of the Aaron Lodge Holiday Park, in Kaikorai Valley Rd, to provide "warm, dry homes for people in need".
I travel daily past the derelict-looking site, which was once vibrant and inviting looking. Why not utilise the old camping ground site, which already has the facilities in place, as temporary accommodation for those at the Oval?
Identity crisis
I wonder if your correspondent Barry Stewart from Invercargill (Letters ODT 6.5.24) is the same who objected to a Māori name on a public building (ODT 1.2.24)?
Mr. Stewart is calling the removal of a defaced display panel at Te Papa a "national disgrace". While I don’t agree with the actions of the protesters, there had been a long history of protest around the display, which juxtaposed both the Māori and English texts side by side. This led to concern decades ago that visitors to Te Papa would leave the museum with the impression that Māori ceded their sovereignty to the Crown.
It was established by the Waitangi Tribunal in 2014 that Māori did not cede sovereignty — hopefully this is better reflected in a new and improved exhibition on our founding document.
Theft and national pride
Before the iReX project winds up, I thank the team at KiwiRail for their professional and personal commitment to designing ferries that would restore pride in the Cook Strait service not seen since the days of the Aramoana and Aranui. Unfortunately, plans to increase rail capacity by a factor of six condemned the project.
Those committed to "putting the nation back on track" were fated to run the project into buffers on the wharves at Picton and Wellington, turning iReX into iWrecKs to benefit future shareholders. With apologies, I give Shakespeare the final say: "Pride in nationhood, dear my lords, is the immediate jewel of our souls: But they who steal our purse steal trash; 'tis something, nothing; ‘Twas ours, ‘tis theirs, and has been slave to thousands: But they that filch from us our national pride rob us of that which not enriches them but makes us poor indeed."
Pre-op exercise programme a proven winner
At last, an acknowledgement of the benefits of the pre-operative exercise programme offered by surgeon John Woodfield's team at Dunedin Hospital (ODT 6.5.24).
Before I had undergone surgery for an internal nasty roughly seven years ago I had signed on for what might have been at that time a pilot programme and attended a series of sessions at the physical education school overseen by a doctoral student who had been enthusiastic about what benefits pre-op exercise had offered.
The exercycle bit called for some enthusiasm and application, with short bursts of almost "pedal-until-you-drop" interspersed with rest periods.
From a fairly "limp" response at the beginning, I had finally achieved "105% of my potential", (whatever that had meant); despite pushing age 80 at the time.
The upshot had been that, by the end of three days, I had felt confident in taking the option of leaving hospital after just 75 hours; which I had seized, due to the fact that the ward had been on the verge of lockdown due to an outbreak of a nasty respiratory virus.
Recovery had been rapid, and within a week of leaving hospital I had been back to walking most of the distance which I have walked daily, for years. I would strongly advise anyone offered the same opportunity to avail themselves of it.
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