Archive for Aotearoa New Zealand

Xmas 2007 Auckland

December 25, 2007 at 8:44 pm · Filed under Aotearoa New Zealand ·Tagged

Dear Friends,

The Up Series is a British documentary series that for the last 49 years has tracked the lives of a group of children every seven years as they have aged. It is placed 26th in a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes compiled by the British Film Institute. The first show in 1964 showed the fourteen children at the age of seven. They had intentionally been selected from both rich and poor backgrounds, with the underlying sociological assumption that class structure was so strong that a person’s life path would be set at birth. Over the last 49 years this has largely been borne out. Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment

Leaving the Motherland

August 10, 2005 at 1:28 pm · Filed under Aotearoa New Zealand, Indonesia, Letters back home

Sometime towards the end of last year I am told I applied for a job via an internet mailing list I had subscribed to. I don’t remember doing it, but apparently I did, because now I have been offered and have accepted that job starting 18 August 2005. It’s a 5 month contract in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Aceh was devastated in the December 2004 tsunami in Asia. I will be working for the Grameen Foundation USA with two local Indonesian NGO’s who are establishing microfinance initiatives. I will be responsible for implementing, documenting and providing training for the financial information system that the NGO’s will run. Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment

University life

August 10, 2005 at 1:25 pm · Filed under Aotearoa New Zealand, Letters back home

The highlight of the first semester was a rare campus sighting of Barry Cossar, father of Melbourne socialite Al Cossar (love your work Al). In fact it is up there with the time I saw the band members of Blur coming out of the bFM radio station studio. Yes it’s true, the only people I know at university are the fathers of the people I studied with the first time around. And before you say it, I should remind you that it’s not nice being called names, although I have been called worse things than a “mature student� before. The comment inevitability comes up when I reveal my university ID number, you know, like at parties and stuff, and people realise it is in the elite 2 millions, rather than the 4 millions like recently started students.

So what has been on the academic agenda? I have been taking papers in Sociology, Politics, and Economics. These are the questions I have written about, and what I wrote about them: Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment

NZ Reality TV

August 10, 2005 at 1:24 pm · Filed under Aotearoa New Zealand

It has been most stimulating and enjoyable to be back for the last 5 months in Auckland after Cambodia, which was stimulating in other, sometimes frustrating, ways. I am soaking up being back in an information overloaded society in which I can pay partial attention to everything and full attention to nothing. In particular are the various reality TV shows on in New Zealand at the moment, a brief run-down follows: Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment

Return to the womb

August 10, 2005 at 1:06 pm · Filed under Aotearoa New Zealand, Letters back home

It’s that time of year again, when you sit back and think to yourself ‘I’ve changed directions, I’ve moved back home, maybe I should let my friends know what I’m up to?’. Well that time of year was back in January, and I am finally getting around to actually writing to you. Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment

NZ Cambodian Community Photos

August 3, 2005 at 1:14 pm · Filed under Aotearoa New Zealand, Cambodia

Photos of the New Zealand Cambodian Community at the Auckland International Cultural Festival and Khmer New Years 2005.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment