Doing the work. Literally.

School was optional in his view. More often than not, he would whistle for his horse and head down the back of the property instead.

"Everything was just manual work," he says. "That was just how I lived."

He spent most of his adult life in prison. Over half his life in total. And what he missed more than almost anything else, was being outside.

"When I got locked up, it was like I lost myself. I had to become somebody that wasn't actually me."

Change, when it came, was not sudden. It started in the final stages of his sentence, when the environment around him shifted and the people in it made things possible that had not been possible before.

"When things started to change, I looked at it and thought, well, if I'm going to change this. It has to be here."

Now Wairehu is on the outside. He lives in a residential reintegration facility in Christchurch, in the early stages of finding his footing in a life he has not lived for decades. There are real limits on where he can go and who he can spend time with. Progress is gradual and structured.

One of the people approved to take him out is a Pathway volunteer and community support person. A few times a month, the two of them drive out to Pathway's retreat property in Motukarara and get to work.

There is plenty to do. A water tank to install. Grounds to maintain. Practical jobs that need practical hands. Wairehu has those. Engineering, mechanics, joinery, building. Skills picked up over a lifetime of watching, learning, and doing.

"I quite like the physical work," he says, "It's something I've always done."

The volunteer sees it the same way, "When it comes to doing practical jobs, we have a lot in common. It's kind of like we're just pretending we're still kids in the country, sticking things together with barbed wire and a couple of nails. I've never seen it as me having something to teach him. I just try to find the things we have in common, build from there. It's more like a friendship than anything else." 

For Wairehu, getting back outside, doing something useful, being somewhere that feels like where he came from, is not a small thing.

"You can't find nothing like it."

He is keeping busy. Moving forward. And when the chance comes to pass what he knows on to someone else, he takes it.

"It's better when you pass it around," he says. "They can learn from your mistakes."

*Name has been changed.

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