Eric Bergeson's The Country Scribe

My favorite baseball writer posts an inspirational tale of his past year. He won't, but he could put the diet in a book and sell millions. 

The "bush," which starts at the base of the mountain at the end of this paddock consists of 100 foot tall leafy evergreens with an understory of smaller trees and then another understory of ferns which can reach 30 feet in height. You'd need a machete to get off the trail any distance.

The West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand is primarily rain forest. You will do no walking off the trails--you just can't. There are trails which go for hundreds of miles through the bush. This short trail of twenty minutes length was more our speed. 

Here is Lance with a small version of the prototypical New Zealand fern. This fern is ubiquitous the entire 1000 mile length of the country. It is the symbol for New Zealand's national team: The All Blacks, of rugby fame. 

New Zealanders, like most non-Americans, think it a little weird to hang your national flag in your yard. We saw one New Zealand flag in a yard the entire trip, and that yard had an American flag in its window as well!

But All Blacks flags, pennants, signs, bumper stickers, gear and garb are everywhere. 

The All Blacks are one of the best union rugby teams in the world. The team is also the most prominent way New Zealanders express pride in their country. 

I remember calling home from one of these beautiful phone booths in 1988. Now they are relics, relegated to history museums such as this one in Norsewood, NZ. 

If you can deliver a thirty-minute sermon to this picture without losing your sanity, you qualify for the Lutheran ministry. 

With a better internet connection and some time to sort things out, I will have some more pictures over the coming week of New Zealand. Right now, it is to get used to driving on the right side of the road again!

If you can maintain a tolerance of, much less a love for, humanity after 17 hours in airplanes and another 10 hours languishing in airports, you are a better person than I.  

Got in at midnight last night, then spent a while getting to the hotel, etc. here in St. Paul. 

Went down to breakfast this morning and listened to (you don't overhear things as much with Americans, we foist our conversations on others. You can't help but overhear, and that often is the point) a conversation style which just wouldn't happen with New Zealanders. Both grouse about the weather over breakfast, but the style of grousing is totally different. 

As an American hears one person's story, he is in his mind preparing a rebuttal which will dwarf the story of the first person. "In 1968, I remember we had snow over the stoplights," and so on. They one-up each other until they eventually call a truce on that topic and move to another. The arms-race conversational style is the source of American tall-tales, I suspect, an aspect of frontier culture not seen in so pronounced a manner elsewhere. 

New Zealanders, in contrast, will grouse to each other in understated tones, "not much of a day today, is it?" and then snipe at each other's comments in a low key small-arms exchange issued in their sweet accent so you don't realize until later that the give-and-take was actually quite sharp, yet sort of a game, one played with a wry smile.

The comedy happens when earnest Americans meet ironic New Zealanders and the American starts telling tall tales. The New Zealander, far from taking up the challenge and telling tall tales of his own, goads the gullible American into more tall tales, all of which the American believes completely, even if they are utter lies. As the American gets anxious at the one-sidedness of the exchange, he doesn't quit but instead digs the hole deeper. The tales get taller and taller until eventually the New Zealander swoops in for the kill, often with the sly help of his fellow countrymen, using phrases from the first tall tale to refute the second tall tale or summing up in one pithy phrase the ridiculousness of the entire American attempt to win the conversation by piling up points claiming vast experience with the biggest this and the best that and the most famous this and the tallest that. 

I know this, because I have been the American many times. 

So it was funny downstairs at breakfast this morning to hear two Minnesota couples vying to outdo each other's weather stories at a volume that forced the rest of the room to listen. 

No travel or tourism today. It rained throughout the day in the north half of the South Island. Nothing to do but sit in the room. Nelson is a beautiful city, but today it is getting drenched. 

Tomorrow, we get on the ferry back to the North Island. 

I used the day to do some research online. 

Lance and I have been discussing how with the Internet, all of the information is out there--it is just to find it. To find it, you have to know the right questions to ask Google. 

After learning some terms and situations in eldercare, I was able to find more online. Today I found a 60 page report of eldercare in New Zealand which has answered many of my remaining questions. Of course, it raises new questions as well. 

I have read several papers on aging in New Zealand, but the one I read today reflects the reality I saw in the nursing homes better than anything else. When I am in Wellington, I will ask people at the Aged Services office there what they think of this report. 

The perception of aged care in New Zealand is a hot political potato. There is a great interest by sitting politicians in judging it to be of a high quality. Anybody who rocks the boat, I suspect, will be shut down--at least until there are a certain number of highly-publicized and atrocious events that require the politicians to take action. At that point, they come out firing with righteous anger and probably overdo it, or at least come up with a lot of what we call unfunded mandates: Policy changes which don't come with the money to implement them. 

Here are some surprising things I have learned:

•Eldercare in New Zealand is relatively unregulated. Two-thirds of the nursing homes are for-profit. There is almost no way to rank homes or to check them out before entering other than to go in and sniff around. Literally, for smell, I think, is a true test of a nursing home's quality. 

•We are developing a two-tiered system for eldercare in Minnesota, one for people who can pay themselves and another for those who rely on government help. In New Zealand, the two-tiers are already in place, despite firm ideological convictions that all should be treated equally. 

•Culture is a bigger factor than policy in determining the level of care. New Zealand has great policies. However, the culture around aging here reminds me of the 1960s in the states. As we peered through the bars into an Alzheimer's unit (to which we weren't admitted entrance) last week, I saw a scene reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Cold, bare hallways. Uniformed nurses. 

The stories I have found in the reports and some of the stories I have heard from at least three people here, when taken together, show a system that is still coldly institutional. Not all homes are as bad, of course, but in many residents are required to get up at 7 a.m. They have a short time to eat their breakfast. They sit all day in front of a TV. Because of staffing shortages, diapers are used even for those who could go to the bathroom with a little assistance. 

In several cases, weekend help was so low that nobody in the entire home got out of bed for the entire weekend. 

In another case, a nursing home with 80 residents had only two night staff! Two! Many similar cases were reported. 

Again, there are, or were at the time of this report two years ago, no mandated staffing levels. 

Many nurses reported quitting because they felt overwhelmed. Geisla, the nurse we met on the ferry last week was one. 

"I quit in despair," she said. After reading more, I understand better why she had to. 

It is apparently common to deal with troublesome residents by putting their call bell out of reach and shutting the door, particularly on weekends when staffing is even lower. 

One man reported that he put his Alzheimer's stricken mother in a home only to have her raped by a fellow resident two days later. The authorities did nothing and eventually the woman was asked to leave because she was "too much of a temptation." 

One of the biggest fears of everybody here, both in the reports and with people we have talked to, is retribution if they complain. Families will not even report egregious abuse for fear of retaliation. There is an ethic here of respecting authority and maintaining a stiff upper lip. 

So, the old British colonial social habits still overpower all of the social welfare instincts of modern New Zealand. I am going to expand on that theme after getting home. 

Look at the details and our social welfare state for elderly people in the United States is much, much more all encompassing, compassionate and complete. 

Social security payments here are a uniform $500 per two weeks for everybody. That isn't much given the high cost of living here. It isn't much if you lived in the States! It is clear to me from seeing people on the streets that many elderly are trying to live on that amount. That is about $10,000 per year. 

Elective surgery? You pay for it yourself. Included in the category of elective surgery is cataract surgery, by the way. And knee replacement. Anything which isn't threatening to kill you immediately is basically elective. 

So, to sum up, what I have found in New Zealand is not the socialist "we pay high taxes but get good care" welfare state that I half expected, but a free-market dominated, unregulated, institutional, cold and sometimes cruel system which is woefully underfunded, understaffed, underappreciated and ineffective at providing even basic dignities to the frail elderly. 

It would be one thing to just read the reports. But I have seen the body language. 

Now, I am not saying that New Zealand's care isn't better than some places in the states. But I know that I wouldn't grow old and frail here over rural Minnesota at any price.

The rough care arises from a sheer disregard for the frail elderly which we share in some measure in the states. Regulation can help, but only if it is followed with funds. Overall, what is truly necessary is for people to value and treasure the elderly. All else follows.

For the past few days, we have been tourists rather than researchers. In order to see the wonders of the South Island, we have been bouncing from motel to motel, sight to sight. 

Last night, we stayed in a scruffy hotel in Westport. It is a port town and it is pretty rough. 

Tonight, we are staying in the polar opposite: trendy Nelson, filled with potters, artists, foofie tourists, etc. 

The entire South Island experience has been touristy. We have been accompanied on the trek by endless streams of Kiwi retired couples. I should say Retired Couples. These are people who are still plenty healthy but are now actively retired. I haven't seen so many Retired Couples since I was last to an Arizona retirement park. 

What is interesting is there are absolutely no young families with children, even on the weekend. The hotel is filled with retired couples. In the evening, they all get a bottle of wine and sit out on the sidewalk in front of their rooms and meet each other and carry on. 

My study of older people doesn't really include Retired Couples, the type who paint "Marlys and Erv" on the side of their RV and haunt relatives all over the country for months per year. Most of that sort look bored out of their minds to me. Having dealt with empty-nest syndrome by merging their identities, they amount to nothing more than a Retired Couple. If one of them collects spoons, at least they have a mission, but most lack even that. 

Here in New Zealand, that trend just seems accentuated. 

We ate at a pub the other night in Hokatika and we were the youngest in the entire place. A group of about 10 retired men held forth at the bar, bragging and carrying on like cowboys in a brassy version of the Kiwi accent. I struck up a conversation with one, who farms. The talk quickly turned to getting out of paying taxes, etc. which is about the same conversation one would have in Arizona. 

I look forward to digging in some statistics. However, if what we are seeing is any guide, rural New Zealand is even grayer than rural Minnesota. However, you don't see the very old, except through the windows of the rest homes. 

I wonder where they are being kept, as there simply aren't enough nursing home and assisted living beds for the population. Are they struggling at home alone?