Free e-books: World travel; Suicide Grief; Malaysian Borneo (green travel)

 

The price of my three e-books are now $0.00 – on Amazon: "A Love Letter to Malaysian Borneo.", "Surviving Suicide" and, "Naked in Budapest: travels with a passionate nomad,". Enjoy my gift to you!

A Love Letter to Malaysian Borneo

Surviving Suicide

Naked in Budapest

                                          Two anthologies I've appeared in 

maybe I want to come out of retirement!

A wee announcement  ... think I'll start blogging again. Not on Kiwitravelwriter but here on Blogger.  Here is a pics from Christchurch, where I've been for a week. Dogs waiting for their coffee drinking owners at The Boatshed

Announcement - I've retired!

After about twenty years of use, my Goddady WordPress blog (kiwitravelwriter.wordpress.com) is no more - that is sad, but now I can do other things. not sure what they will be I'm just exploring that one day at a time.

Right now I'm thinking of writing a blog about my current trip to Christchurch 

It must be all the cruise ship passengers giving me the urge!

Looking forward to the heat, food and culture - and writing about it all

Want to follow my next travels (July & August 2019) here are your choices.

• My travel stories blog www.kiwitravelwriter.wordpress.com  ) sign-up to get an email when I publish a blog
• Travel photos as I go  https://www.instagram.com/kiwitravelwriter/
• Regular updates about my travels https://www.facebook.com/TheTravellingWriter/

hello rugby NZ

I sent this to the NZ Rugby Union Board 24^th April 2019. The topic line said to the Rugby Union “Please forward to the Board Chair (Brent) and Crusaders (Grant) and all board members”

To Brent Impey, Grant Jarrold and your boards,

This is an open letter to you and other rugby fans.

 I am 73-year-old All Blacks, Canterbury and Crusaders fan. I’ve been a one-eyed Cantabrian since I began, as a child, listening to the games on the radio and/or standing on the embankment at Lancaster Park with my Dad. I also expected my younger son to play for Canterbury – he played for Shirley, and once, in a junior team, played for Canterbury. Sadly, his coach-father died when he was 12 and then, at 15, a motorbike accident saw his leg being ripped off at the groin – killing his dreams and expectations of a rugby future.

The reason I’m writing is that I want to have my say as I’ve not signed any petition or been included in any poll. I also believe a letter is of more value than a signature.

I want the name ‘Crusaders’ to change. I’m glad the extras have been stopped and I hope the horse and knights will never return - in any form. I was disturbed, no - actually I was horrified - when the team was named in the mid-90s but put it down to ignorance of history and assumed most people/fans would be ignorant too.

That passive acceptance on my part changed in an instant when the white supremacist terrorist killed Muslims in my home city. (I live in Wellington now but you can take the girl out of the city but not the city out of the girl).

You don’t need a history lesson from me, others more qualified will have advised you. I also don’t believe a nation-wide poll should drive your decision either. Just do the right thing for all of us – a decision you will be able to capitalise on, as proof of a team of honourable, inclusive, diverse, people.

Please do not consult the local mosques unless the first question is – do you want to have a say about a name change? You would just be setting them up for more vitriol when you change the name – people not wanting a name change will blame them entirely.

Without a name change, this topic will come up every year. Will fans like me be able to wear our jerseys with pride? Not really. We will still love our team no matter its name or rankings but keeping the name and branding will cause issues for us fans too. If we can't wear our red and black with pride, I suspect many will lose interest.

Please consider these points when you vote about the name change . . .  long before the new season starts, so we, and you can buy the new red and black kit!

I look forward to hearing from you.

Heather Hapeta

Here’s their bounced back reply: 24^th April – I’ve received nothing more.

Kia ora,

Thanks for contacting New Zealand Rugby.

We greatly appreciate you taking the time to email us, we'll do our best to respond to you as soon as possible, however,

we are currently experiencing a high volume of emails and may require an extra few days.

If your email is about All Blacks schedule, public appearances, tickets or for signed memorabilia for charity, please go to http://www.allblacks.com/Contact

For all other questions and queries, we'll come back to you as soon  as possible.

Nga Mihi

	Info
	NZ Rugby Info

Climate change - worldwide protests: Wellington New Zealand

The photos speak for themselves: repost as long as my copyright photos are acknowledged  :)

Review of Surviving Suicide: a mothers story

Surviving Suicide: a mother's story 
by 

Heather Hapeta (Goodreads Author)

Pip Adam's review 

Oct 07, 2012

really liked it

Like many people, suicide has been a part of my life from an early age. I found Surviving Suicide: A Mother's Story a very helpful book. Although, thankfully, it has been almost a year since the last suicide in our family I still gained a lot of information and hope from this book.

The book begins with a detailed retelling of the author's experience of her son's suicide. Hapeta recounts this time in an intimate way, explaining exactly how she felt and what she did, in the time leading up to the suicide as she tried to help her son recover from the debilitating affects of a serious accident, when she found her son's body after his suicide and in the time following. I found this account very affecting and the detail was extremely helpful. I have found that we often talk in abstracts about suicide, with our relatives and friends, but to read a detailed account of one person's experience was very useful. I could relate to many of the experiences Hapeta recounts and I found it quite helpful to compare my own experience with hers, both the similarities and the differences. In this section Hapeta also talks about what worked and what didn't during this time in her son's life and death. I'm not sure what it would be like reading this account closer to a suicide but I found it very helpful.

The second section of the book (I am not sure the book is as clearly delineated as I am presented it as, Hapeta's voice continues into the second section which is great because its easy tone and direct language is part of what makes this book so helpful) offers some invaluable advice concerning a large range of things. This makes the book an extremely useful handbook to have in the time of a suicide. This section begins with some lists about how to deal with the time directly after the suicide and comes from both Hapeta's personal experience and her word as a grief cousellor. There is one particular list which helps friends of people surviving suicide might help them. I remember Hapeta giving me this list a long time ago after a friend died and I found it useful then and I think it is still useful now. As well as guidance on how to navigate the emotional landscape of suicide, Hapeta offers pragmatic advice about the law and the media. I think this is an extemely important part of what makes this book so successful. I remember directly after the suicide of a close friend, whose will I was the executor of, being inundated with legal requirements which I didn't understand. I'm not sure I would have been robust enough to read these sections of this book but if I had a copy I am sure someone close to me could have read these and clarified what needed to be done. This legal information deals mainly with New Zealand law, but I feel that if you are an overseas reader it would act as a checklist of things to ask legal experts about. I also found Hapeta's sections about the media very helpful. There is a lot of publicity about whether the media should report suicide and Hapeta offers really intelligent and caring recommendations about how to deal with this that again come from her unique experience as suicide survivor and professional.

This book is unique, I believe. I have never read anything quite like it. The blend of personal and professional experience is invaluable. My hope is that no one will every need a book about suicide again, but I suspect they will and if they do, I think this is a very good option.

this book is avaibake on Amazon

Tips to about how to help after a suicide death

How to help after a suicide death

Remember, despite the headlines, suicide deaths are numerically small and the grief from this form of death is different, however, I know, and so do many, many others, it is possible to survive the pain.

Here are a few suggestions learnt from my own pain and the experience of others’ when I was involved with the Canterbury Bereaved by Suicide Society:

* Do let us talk – mostly we don’t want your advice, just your ears – we need to voice what's going on in our head.

* Do respond honestly to our questions about the death.

* Don't remove tasks, responsibilities, or other actions, unless we ask you to. Tidying our daughter’s room; sorting our husband’s clothes, or a father’s office; although painful, these actions are often valued tasks that help us work through the pain. Just because it hurts doesn’t mean we don't want to do these jobs. We may just want to do it later: when we are ready.

* Don't tell us it's not our fault; that it's XYZ's fault; that it’s God’s will; and that we'll find a meaning to this in time, or any other conclusion you may have: ours may be different. Your deductions may be true but we have to work through a process to arrive at our own answers. Each of us will grieve in our own way and come to our own solutions.

* Don't tell us that you know how we feel – you don't, even if you too had someone die by suicide.

* Try not to let your own sense of helplessness stop you reaching out to us. Some of the most helpful support I got was from people who said; ‘I don't know what to say’. I knew they were speaking from the heart.

* Do allow us our own feelings: we will be working through anger, disbelief, hate, love, blame and every other human emotion there is. We won't be doing it in a nice neat list like many grief books suggest. It will be more like the tin of emotional worms I spoke of earlier – each one wriggling, and working their way from the top to the bottom then back up to the top, again, and again, and again.

* Don't tell us what you would do, or how you would feel if you were us – you aren't us.

* Remember our grief will not be over in six weeks or six months. We have at least a year of working through the initial, intense, pain, the funeral, the inquest, then the first Christmas, the first birthday, and the first anniversary of the death, the funeral and every other important time that we shared with our loved one.

 © Heather Hapeta

Extract from Surviving Suicide: a mother’s story

April 2012. ISBN 978-0-473-20510-2 available free for e-readers  - AMAZON 

Apartment life and an apologies to Wellington motorists

Twice a year my windows are professionally cleaned.  Inside it's left to amateurs like me ... that's good as I'm on the 4th floor and am scared of heights.

Sadly, for my fellow Wellingtonians, this means my street is converted to a one-lane throughfare for a few hours.  Sorry to have my windows hold you up every few months.

Here's a photographic story of my street and window cleaners.

Malaysian Borneo- one of my fav places

A love letter to Malaysian Borneo, or, can this travel writer be green? By Heather Hapeta

There’s no universally accepted definition of ecotourism, and there are considerable overlaps in the meanings. It’s perhaps the most over-used and misused word in the tourism industry - often deliberately misused for marketing purposes.

Hapeta say "I’m a self-taught writer, not a journalist, or an ecologist. This is not a scientific paper with lots of facts and figures, merely the musings about green issues by a traveller who wants to walk as lightly as possible on Earth"

She uses her trips to Malaysian Borneo as a way of exploring the issues.  She also says she is "Time-rich, I’m a slow traveller, so stay longer in more places than most, trying to absorb the culture and flavours, to sit and watch people. It also means that although I don’t always sign up for an expensive eco-tour, I do try to practise the principles of ecotourism."

This small book starts with her surrounded by noisy, diesel-fumed boats, nudging each other, racing their engines, drivers manoeuvring so their passengers get the best view.  It made her wonder "can a travel writer, or any traveller, really be green - or is this just an oxymoronic dream, given the air miles needed to get to destinations?"

In this essay-cum-travel memoir she considers how green she was, or wasn’t, while exploring this ‘seething hotspot of bio-diversity’ of an island. (‘Quote from Planet Earth’ BBC TV).

She obviously agrees with Malaysia's tourism tagline. ‘Malaysia - truly Asia’ and this booklet is a good introduction to the island of Borneo and green travel issues around the world.

Hapeta has two other book available on Amazon ( and other e-sellers) Naked in Budapest: travels with a passionate nomad;  and, Surviving Suicide - a mother's story

She writes travel blogs on www.kiwitravelwriter.wordpress.com  

Her FaceBook page is The Travelling Writer