Born-again Sam Kahui is settling into his second unofficial city halfway house

Press, 15 October 1986, Page 21

Born-again Sam Kahui is settling into his second unofficial city halfway house

By

STAN DARLING

“My rules are no drugs, no alcohol, clean your dirty dishes and respect other people’s privacy. I think that’s about all the rules we have here. You know, let’s try and live with each other.”

The man talking is Sam Kahui, a recovering alcoholic Maori social worker, not necessarily in that order.

He had just moved from a house in Sydenham where he lived since 1981, when he came to Christchurch from the North Island. The decrepit house, owned by the Government, was finally sold, and replaced by another factory site. It was not much of a place, says Mr Kahui, whose life shifted from prisons and mental hospitals in the late 19705, but at least it was cheap. His new place, in Somerfield, costs more to rent, nearly as much as his benefit. Sam Kahui is blind in one eye and partly blind in the other from drinking methylated spirits.

For some time now, he has been pushing the idea of a halfway house for Polynesians who have trouble with drugs and drink, and the Coleridge Street house served as an unofficial one.

Now he is looking for $4500 to $5OOO — he has no idea where it might come from — to cover his rent for 12 months so he can worry less about money and more about some of the volunteer work he does.

A group he helped start earlier this year, Whanau Awhina, works with children of recovering alcoholics, “children who need a friend,” says the former jockey whose troubles started early in his life.

Whanau Awhina means family support. Half of its members are recovering alcoholics, and it was born out of a children’s health camp organised by Mr Kahui and held at Glenelg almost a year ago.

Mr Kahui calls his new place Whare Whanau, or family home. It has six bedrooms, and will be able to house five people comfortably. It costs $l4O a week to rent. His Coleridge Street house

once had 27 people staying in it, with no outside funding. “A lot is done from what we can scrape,” says Mr Kahui, who asks each occupant to contribute something towards the rent. . “Many recovering alcoholics

don’t know how to budget. They pay rent to me, but they may be with me only a short time. They are such a moving lot, you’re never sure how long they’re going to stay. We’ve already got a bank book started for this place. “When I came down in 1981, I had no idea this is what I would be doing. It started only because I couldn’t get a job.”

Sam Kabul’s life was turbulent from the start. He was born at Auckland in 1938 and his parents separated when he was only two. He went with his father.

Today, he has 12 stepbrothers and sisters on his father’s side, and 13 stepbrothers and sisters on his mother’s. He was 17 years old and a jockey when he next met his mother — at a racetrack.

As a boy, he moved around the Auckland area with his father, who was a shepherd and farm worker. He started school when he was eight and dropped out four years later to train as a jockey. “I never started getting into trouble until my early 205,” he says. "I was asked to hand in my jockey’s licence because of my boozing.”

His first trouble with the law came after he used an employer’s tractor without permission, then wrecked it trying to tow a car out of trouble. He went to jail for three months. “You know, life was to become the same pattern — hydro work, shearing, fencing gangs, truck driving, in and out of jail, once for three years for blowing a safe. I didn’t even get off the property with the contents.

He was also in and out of mental hospitals. In prison, he drank things like strained-out Brasso, or a home brew made

from potato and apple peelings, or pumpkin wine. “I couldn’t see any way out,” he says. “In 1978, the turnaround came because of fear.” He was in Porirua, in another mental hospital. "The last thing I really remember was Waitangi Day, outside the Wellington Library with my alkie friends. I lived in parks with a lot of maintenance men.”

He had gone into some kind of blackout, he says: “I hadn’t really understood anything about it.” He came to his senses in a room with men wandering aimlessly. “I thought to myself, now what the hell am I doing here? I’m not as mad as them.”

Things did not go smoothly, even after he decided to find a way out of his troubles. “When a man like me goes mad and who’s got no brains, we get very violent,” says Mr Kahui. By February, 1979, he was well

enough to go into a halfway house. He got a job with a Wellington construction firm. After a couple of years, towards the end of his time there, he was a leading hand. “I still wanted to drink, still had blackouts,” he says. “A couple of times I wanted to kill myself, but I never made a serious attempt. At the time, I didn’t realise withdrawal had a lot to do with it.” He came to Christchurch with no firm plans: “As a drinking man, I had always liked the South Island. I stayed at the City Mission eight to 10 days until I could find a place.” The Ministry of Works had the Coleridge Street house up for tender. It had been used for storage. “Me and 16 others moved in and squatted,” says Mr Kahui. “It became a place where people like us congregated, drug and alcohol addicts. We didn’t pay rent for the first month.” He says the Ministry of Works relented after he found quite a few of their houses empty during a time when housing was scarce. “They let me go in for $4B a week. I took it to rent appeal, and got it for $15.”

Mr Kahui and others fixed the place up a bit. It had only one plug, and there were cords running everywhere. The roof leaked, and second-hand iron was used to replace it. Mr Kahui was part of a programme for alcoholics at Sunnyside Hospital, where he helped run a Maori cultural group. One thing led to another.

His only Government-assisted job since coming south has been at the National Marae in Pages Road, where he ran a healthcounselling course for nine months. He was encouraged by a doctor to run a camp for underprivileged children, which he did last summer at Glenelg. The experience at that camp led to the formation of Whanau Awhina, which will have its office in the sun porch of Mr Kahui’s house. He helped set up ; fund-raising

projects for the camp. Since then,' he has taken children to Coes Ford, and Methven on shorter camps. Two dances have been held, for young people and adults, at Woolston School to raise money for camps.

Mr Kabul is also a volunteer counsellor for Maatua Whangai. the Social Welfare office that is trying to get Maoris out of institutions and back into the fold of their tribal groups and extended families.

At times during 1984, he was spending 60 to 70 hours a week doing volunteer work there. Now he spends two nights a week at prison Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at Paparua and Rolleston, and does day counselling at Paparua Prison on Wednesdays. Last week, he was at a North Island hui which moved closer to setting up a national body to look after the interests of Maori alcoholics, a project he has been supporting. “People reacted suspiciously about my work at first, stood off,” he says. "People more or less fear me because I do things a bit unorthodox. But I thank God I've seen a lot of my dreams come true.”

Drinking and blackouts

Working for Maoris