First to care
Mandy shared her story with Jo Elwin
Living at big city pace is what makes small town life good for Mandy Welch. “I thought I’d hate living rurally because I like the busyness of the big city. But I’ve made this place really busy for me, so I like living in Luggate. I’ve made it work.”
Mandy moved from Auckland to Wānaka with her husband Marty and their sons, Jack and Scott, six years ago. Marty fell in love with it, inversion and all, on a trip without the family and was quick to bring Mandy back, pour her a glass of wine and, looking out over the lake, ask if she could see herself living there. “It was a calm, sunny day and I said ‘yes, this is really stunning’. Marty’s from Northland and didn’t want to live in Auckland anymore and my mum had passed away a year earlier so the time was right, we just packed up and moved. It was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. We did it for Marty, we did it for the kids … we did it for everything except my career.”
Mandy drives ambulances and she lights up like one when she talks about her work with St John. Explaining that she got into it to supplement their income when Marty started painting full time. (Marty is artist Stephen Martyn Welch who had an Everyone Deserves a Portrait exhibition in Wānaka late last year.) “We would get broke and he’d look in the paper for a job for me!” Mandy says, raising an eyebrow. “Police comms came up and Marty said, ‘you’d be alright at that’. I thought it was a bit weird, but I went along for an interview. I didn’t get through the police check because there had been an assault at a house I’d lived in – nothing to do with me but it disqualified me. A year later there was a similar job with St John Ambulance. I rang and they interviewed me over the phone straight away, I kept going to the next step and the next and I realised that I was actually getting in. I have no medical training but a recent change to a ProQA software system meant that dispatchers no longer needed it.” However, after “freaking out” at a car accident on her way to work one day, Mandy chose to learn more about the medical side of things. “Dispatchers wear the same uniform as the road crew and when I stopped at the accident on the motorway a doctor who was helping out left the scene thinking the ambulance crew had arrived. I didn’t know what to do. Luckily my trainer, who was a dispatcher and an operational volunteer, came up not long after me and took over. I decided I wanted to know more so that I could go to an accident and not freak out. I can now do the basics to help someone in need and it’s a really good feeling to know that I can do CPR.”
Mandy was employed for seven years dispatching ambulances and was training to go out on the road before they moved to Wānaka. “If I had stayed in Auckland I would have done my paramedic degree. I was passionate about it, I loved it. I could have done the course online down here, but I know I would have struggled. I need to be in it and see what I am doing … you need that experience,” she tries to explain. “It’s different down here … I’ve worked a Friday night and not had a single job. In Auckland you don’t stop, you’re lucky if you get a 30-minute break. Up there you get sniffles and cut fingers and things that don’t need emergency work, but here people know the distances and know the system, they don’t call an ambulance unless they really need it. It’s changing a bit now though – probably with more Aucklanders being here,” she laughs.
Her role with St John down here is as a casual and volunteer emergency medical technician (EMT). “I work in Wānaka, but also Queenstown, Cromwell and Alexandra – they are the catchments in this area. There are very long transport times in Wānaka, it’s quite unique, there are only a few places in New Zealand that are like that. We take patients to the medical centre and then they have to be accepted into Dunstan hospital. When the medical centre is closed costs start mounting and we have to advice patients of the costs for prime doctor callouts and assess if they need to see a doctor straight away or if it could wait.” Does this mean Ambulance crew here do a lot more for patients than elsewhere? “Absolutely, I recently picked up a guy from Haast - we met the Haast crew and transferred him - and he had his little dog with him. Dogs are not allowed in the ambulance, but I took her, she was a very good dog … how could you not? One woman’s husband and son came with her to hospital and they were having to find somewhere to stay at 11 o’clock at night so I told them to give me a call if they got stuck and they could crash at my place. I wouldn’t do that in Auckland! I carry a selection of phone chargers because people are always short when they need it. I like doing that sort of stuff. When I started call taking ‘ambulance, what’s the exact address of your emergency’,” Mandy mimics, “I got a lot out of being able to calm people down over the phone and it’s pretty cool being able to talk people through CPR.”
Because there is work available in Auckland Mandy has found herself heading back for extended periods. “I went up there for eight months in 2014, as a new officer I needed the experience and I knew what it was like up there, I knew the hospitals and the layout. You’re always training up there and they throw me in the deep end. You’ve always got help, whereas down here you can be quite isolated. I went for five months in 2016, and last year I did six weeks – it seemed like nothing, it went so quick. I go for the money but it’s also good for me mentally, it gives me a bit of a break because my son Scott’s pretty hard – he’s easy, but he’s hard.”
23-year-old Scott has a very rare genetic disorder called Kabuki Syndrome. “We won Lotto without the money,” Mandy chuckles. “We are very lucky though, for a special-needs or intellectually disabled … whatever you want to call it, he’s a very cool kid. We still shower him, we pick his clothes for him, cook his dinner, brush his teeth, shave his face. We do that every day and we’re pretty tired.” Mandy is trying to step back and has a two-year plan to get both of her boys set up for life away from home. Jack is in his last two years at Mount Aspiring College and she wants to get Scott independent living. “I want to see it while I’m alive so that I know he’s going to be safe.”
Of the support network down here she says, “There is little to none. But that’s exciting because we can do it ourselves, we can set up the model. Along with four other families we have just set up a charitable trust. One of the goals is to set up … for lack of a better way of saying it right now … a residential care facility where kids come after high school and transition into residential care where they live for a couple of years away from their parents – they still see their parents but are away from them so that they are not doing everything for them, like I am doing, and they learn how independent they can be. There will be constant assessment, looking at what their capabilities are, what they want to do and where to put them in to society to best suit them. There will be respite care too and not just for the intellectually disabled, it could be for the elderly and others in the community that need it. I want it to be very well utilised. Scott used to go to respite in Auckland and he hated it because it was just a house with people who would cook for him. He had to do his own thing but he’s too sociable, he doesn’t just sit and read, and he doesn’t know how to play, so it was boring. I like the idea of the facility having a hall that can be rented out to groups who are happy to have the residents intermingle with them. Through the ambulance you see a lot of different living arrangements and there are a lot of people of all ages who are very lonely. It’s a big project but I’ve done most of the business plan, I just need to do the financials and I need to start fund raising. It’s all going to be too late for Scotty so what I envisage for him is to find a four-bedroom house to rent where he has one bedroom, he has a normal flatmate, a room for a caregiver and a respite room for whoever needs it. Through this house for Scott we can show what we can do with a bigger facility and hopefully get the funds to build it.
Mandy, Scott and Marty Welch take some time out from their busy schedules.
“At the moment Scott has us, his brothers, my brother, his wife and a couple of close friends – that’s his circle of support. We need to move that circle of support so that it includes someone that ensures he doesn’t get ripped off with banking, someone to help with lawyer stuff, someone to help with medical stuff and then there’s everyday living. This group of people will have regular meetings to make sure everything is going smoothly. There will also be someone who is checking up on him weekly. These kids are really vulnerable, and most of them have to leave this area and go to Dunedin because the supports are all there, there’s nothing here. We don’t want these kids being abused. They don’t have a voice like we do - Scott doesn’t take off a jumper if he’s hot or close the windows if he’s cold, he doesn’t have that, so it’s making people aware of that and putting safety barriers in place. We have compiled what we call a dossier for him that will help transition him out of home. It has everything that anyone needs to know about Scott - you can pick it up and know exactly what his needs are. We’d like to take this model out to others who need it, including the elderly. It’s a template that could help many people.”
Respite care is also top of mind. “None of the families caring for the intellectually disabled get breaks down here. They don’t have supports or help from other families. Mind you, I think Scott was nine or 10 before we got someone to look after him. I guess you just do it.” The couple have perhaps been doing it a little too long. With a one-week honeymoon in Fiji in 2006 being the only decent holiday they’ve had together, Mandy admits, “We just realised last year what an impact it has had, and that we need to put things in place. There are people out there who have 50-year-old special needs living at home, but I want more for Scott and more for us.”
Scott has a busy schedule, which is great for him, but a time commitment for Mandy and Marty. “That’s the downfall,” says Mandy. “We have to drive him around and attend when required. He works three days a week at New World and someone has to be there with him for that. He had horse-riding today and has kapa haka tonight. On Wednesdays he has choir night with the Wanakapella group and on other evenings he has gym and swimming. There’s dance on Saturdays, taught by three young girls, and they’re all loving it - the girls are blossoming through their teaching and the kids enjoy learning from younger people – that’s a win, win. A group of intellectually disabled kids did the Ruby Island swim again this year because they enjoyed it so much last year. They got so much encouragement - the applause for our kids was louder than for any of the winners. It’s such a good town for that.”
All this and Stephen Martyn Welch too!? “Yep,” says Mandy. “The plan was that I would give up St John when we moved here and do admin for Marty, but it has taken a few years to figure out how that works. I am now very much involved with Marty’s business and my phone constantly goes flat because I do a lot of my emailing and admin work on the go, sitting and waiting for Scott, so that actually works well. The Everyone Deserves a Portrait project is the first we have done together and it’s going well. I have got him focusing on this as a business, not just him painting in a room. I’ve categorised all his artwork and am recording each portrait and their story. We have a new website and have standardised everything, including posters and invitations, to have the same look. My brother and sister-in-law have helped us a lot with that side of things – they moved to Wānaka two years ago and it’s great – I’ve never lived near family before.”
Everyone Deserves a Portrait is a very personal project for Marty focusing on those who are often overlooked in portraiture. He has already painted a burns victim, a hermaphrodite and a young man with Down Syndrome. The plan is to take it global, but the pair decided to start with the local Wānaka exhibition with portraits of 12 locals who stood out to Marty for various reasons. “We did everything ourselves and it was all new to us. We had to get sponsors on board because we couldn’t do it financially and were surprised at how easy that was. It was good for Marty to see that people think it’s cool and believe in what he’s been believing in all these years.”
You can tell that giving up her St John’s career is tough for Mandy. “I really want to focus on Marty and Scotty, but I love the ambulance work and I will keep doing it for as long as I can, on my terms. I’m probably getting a bit old anyway - my knees are creaky. Once the kids are set up the two of us can go overseas and do commissions together, doing what we do here - meeting the people and talking to them together. I can be quite useful, Marty was doing a big family portrait and they couldn’t decide how they wanted to pose so I asked them what they liked doing as a family. They enjoyed eating so I suggested they stood around their beautiful dining table laid with the special bread that the mother likes to make. This made the portrait more of a story, not just a painting.
“A group of intellectually disabled kids did the Ruby Island swim again this year. They got so much encouragement - the applause for our kids was louder than for any of the winners. It’s such a good town for that.”
As we talk through Marty’s background – there was no formal training, he has always had a natural ability to draw and focused in on it during the very long periods of time spent in hospital with Scott when he was born – Marty arrives home and takes over the story. “Amanda is the first person I show paintings to. She knows f-all about art, so she’ll say, ‘well that’s shit’ (“yeah, I either like it or I don’t,” says Mandy). “Sometimes I’ve done what I think is a shit painting and she says, ‘I really like it’. I enjoy that grounding … sometimes,” he drawls. “I’ve never told Amanda that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about (obviously she doesn’t, he jokes) because it’s subjective and I enjoy showing her my work for that honest feedback.”
“I don’t tend to paint more than one painting in the same style because I get bored easily but with Everyone Deserves a Portrait (EDAP) they’re not dissimilar, I’ve never painted so consistently. The portraits all went to the sitters, the only money we made was from the auction of a blank canvas to help fund the global EDAP. EDAP is not about reward, it’s about me getting to know someone well enough to paint them and tell their story. It might be someone living with a disfigurement or someone odd. Maybe twins and one of the twins is gay – but they’re identical so why is only one of them gay? I’m fascinated by anthropology and evolution.” “It’s a fluid idea and we’ve always been leftfield,” says Mandy. “She has hair like that because she lives with me.” Marty says of Mandy’s bleached, gravity-defying, flat top haircut.
Retreating to the garden Marty steps back in and says, “One more thing, I could not do or be who I am without Amanda’s support.” Mandy returns a cheeky “thanks dear.” “Not a problem” chuckles Marty.
“I was a hairdresser,” says Mandy of the hair comment, “and I’m back doing a bit of that to help out the neighbours at the Luggate Pub with their Clip and Sip sessions. It’s fun. I like helping people, I like to help where I can. It’s a lot and there are times when I just stop, close the curtains, watch movies and do nothing, just to recharge.” Mandy also finds some peace fishing. “I looooooooove fishing.” Devil’s Nook is an easy walk from her home in Luggate and she heads to Ohau when she can.
They family moved to Luggate three years ago and it provides them a good lifestyle. “I love it. I love being out of town. We have awesome neighbours and we have a lot of get togethers, Friday nights can be a bit messy,” she laughs. And once a year I send out an invite to everyone around for a potluck because I like to know who my neighbours are.”
Auckland born and bred, Mandy says she still has a big connection to it. “Yeah, I enjoy it up there, but on my last trip I realised I didn’t want to go back there to live. This is my home now. It’s cool when you get off that plane and think ‘oh my God I live here’. We’re pretty lucky eh. Even if it is hard at times and expensive.” When I query the expense, Mandy explains “Well, we are renters, so there’s high rent and medical is expensive. When I fell over in Auckland recently, I went to a medical centre that cost me ten dollars and the x-rays were free, that stuff is limited and expensive down here. But there a lot of amazing things you can do for free … like fishing. I don’t need to be rich; I just need to be able to pay the bills. There are other things that are more important, like family. Life is good … I’m certainly not bored!”
M!NT Charitable Trust
minttrust.nz
minttrustgroup@gmail.com
Stephen Martyn Welch
smw.nz
enquiries@smw.nz
EDAP
Stephen Martyn Welch’s portrait of Rob Holt was one of twelve featured in Wanaka’s Everyone Deserves a Portrait exhibition. Read more about Rob and his See Crow Fly coffee company here.