Service With Many Organizations

Te Ao Hou, September 1965, Page 5

Service With Many Organizations That's sport. Let's turn to community service in the sense of the wider community, the people with whom he lives and works, regardless of race. Interest in health is an obvious one for a man of his profession. Thus we find that he was divisional surgeon of the St John Ambulance Brigade at Kaikohe from 1947 to 1961. The case of the intellectually handicapped child has always been close to his heart, and he is vice-president of the Northland Branch of the Intellectually Handicapped Children Parents' Association and vice-president too of the Kaikohe branch. From 1960 to 1962 he was a member of a Northland special school committee for intellectually handicapped children. Community service more often than not calls for work through statutory organizations, and Dr Paewai has accepted his full share of this. He has been a member of the Kaikohe Borough Council since 1962. His interest in education has led to membership of another local institution, the board of governors of Northland College. He is deeply interested in education at all levels, not only at secondary school. Thus it is not surprising to see that he is a strong supporter of the Kaikohe Free Kindergarten, being its vice-president from 1952 to 1955.

This same interest overlaps into the realm of the church of which he is so active a member, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. He serves on the New Zealand Advisory Board of Church College, the splendid educational institution established near Hamilton. Dr Paewai stands high in the councils of his church, serving on many of its constitutent bodies and carrying its precepts into his daily life. He was the moving spirit in the erection of the church's fine new building at Kaikohe. Kaikohe knows him as a leading member of the town's Rotary Club, of which in turn he has been a director, vice-president and president. Let's move into the field of Maori affairs, particularly welfare. With Dr Paewai this is not a mere interest, this is a crusade.