Massey Magazine November 2001

Educating Sonya

Sonya Eastmond is as amazed as anyone at how far she has come from her days as a quintessential flower child travelling New Zealand in a house truck, a sole parent of two children.

In April she graduated from Massey University, Auckland, after six years of cash-strapped slog, with a BInfSc and a job heading the Albany campus computer laboratories. The woman who could not afford her own computer throughout her IT degree is now in charge of keeping 171 up to speed. She looks at home in her office, where she has swapped the cheesecloth and batik of previous years for casual pants and blouse.

As she regales you with stories of her past you realise this is a woman with a first-class honours degree from the university of life. She sums up everything by calling herself ‘living proof’ that supporting the ‘dregs of society’ with education and the necessities of life is the best investment society can make in short circuiting the poverty cycle. A recipient of just about every benefit along the way, Sonya is now fully self-supporting and actually delights in paying tax.

“I look at how much tax I pay and I think I’m funding a whole family for the same amount that I used to receive. Eventually my tax will have paid off everything that was given to me and then I feel those taxes will be making a positive contribution. “It is the best feeling,” she says with intensity.

Her story is one of finding herself, of coming into her power. For most of her life she followed her instincts all the way. “Then I made a conscious choice to follow my head instead of my heart and to go through university. Now I have returned to a balance.” Eastmond recalls astonishment at her own audacity in taking up study: “The first day of class in 1995, another mature student and I just looked at each other. I said to myself ‘Who the hell do you think you are? You are too dumb to be here’. It was the self-esteem thing.” Until then Eastmond, a self-confessed complete hippie, had lived an itinerant, barefoot, bush existence in New Zealand and the previous five years in Indonesia. In her 30s, she had barely seen a computer, let alone touched one.

She backs up her claim of never having been technologically inclined with the story of the birth of her second daughter, Rosea. “It’s on her birth certificate that she was born ON the Hokianga Harbour. She was born on the car ferry in the middle of the night. The ambulance driver hadn’t seen a birth before and insisted the baby wasn’t coming and looked the other way,” she recalls. “I just did it all by myself. So you see I had never been very technologically advanced.” At 15, Eastmond left home to live with her 18-year-old boyfriend. “I was the typical teenager, I just went a bit further than most. I rebelled against society. You couldn’t tell me anything.” Her partner, who was to become the father of her first daughter, Teika, espoused the hippie lifestyle, but, at the same time, was quite entrepreneurial. He’d saved all his wages and bought 12 acres deep in the Coromandel.

“It was the first land that had been subdivided and sold and we were the first pakehas in the community. It took us three years to be accepted.”

As she looks back she laughs at the irony of her embracing the stereotypical hippie lifestyle in order to pursue freedom and never seeing that she was missing out on her youth. “I dug out gorse and blackberry.” A pause. “Yes, naked in gumboots, I did all that.” “I thought I was so free but I worked like a dog. We put in a citrus and fruit orchard. At first we had no vehicle and I had to pushbike down to the beach and stack up the seaweed and put it on the bike and ride back to the land and put it around the trees.

“So much for rebelling. Any spare money would go straight into the land. I’ve done everything – cleaning, shepherding, painting, everything. It is just too hard. We lived on flour and water and fruit and didn’t go shopping.” “You think you are living as a free spirit, you don’t have clocks, there are no responsibilities. But in hippiedom women do all the work.” Eastmond’s rebellious streak was short-lived and her devotion to her partner total because she had fallen under his spell.

“I was really quite brainwashed between the ages of 15 and 22. He was charismatic, he had a following and I was proud because I was his woman. “He would rave for hours. Like the others, I thought he was such a visionary. He seemed so forward thinking, but in reality he was stuck in the dark ages. He basically had no respect for women.

“The followers would come up from Auckland and stay for weeks. I had to feed them from a campfire. We lived in a shed. We had running water – running straight from the stream, no electricity, no bathroom. After a while we put a coal range in.” After seven years Eastmond knew something was wrong. The big questions – who am I?, where am I going? and what do I want from life? – were demanding answers. “It was scary not to have the answers, I had no answers at all, and I had fallen out of love.” Finally she couldn’t help but question her partner’s authority and the violence that had driven Eastmond from home at 15 resurfaced.

“My daughter was two-and-a-half and I left with her, a blanket, the clothes on our backs and the car to the strains of a screaming banshee.” Years later when Eastmond enrolled in university, he assured her she would never finish the degree. “Now the sight of me intimidates him. The last time I saw him he couldn’t look at me because I was just too strong, too independent.” But then, with no money and no skills Eastmond set out to travel the country on the dole in the house truck she had swapped for the car.

“I was free, but I had had no teenage years. I think I was innocent and quite naïve and I got another baby,” she says simply. “So then I had two children, no money and a house truck.” She lived in her sister’s house in the Hokianga while she was overseas for a while. The rent was cheap and the fact it had no electricity was nothing new.

“So I concentrated on bringing up these two little kids. When my sister came back I moved to Piha where it was the same thing – doing odd jobs like school cleaning, painting, any job that was going. “I am very good at budgeting so we always had enough to eat. There was always food in the cupboard, it wasn’t instant, you had to make it – but still you didn’t have to stoke up a campfire.” Settled at last, she continued her soul searching but when a friend suggested a backpacking tour for six weeks in Bali she decided to take the first holiday she’d had in years.

“Somehow I got the money together to go and we were off. We arrived in Kuta and caught the bemo to Sanur. We ended up staying there for six weeks – that was our big trip around Indonesia. During that time I met a Balinese man. Tjip, and he was my partner for the next five years.” Tjip’s family were middle-class workers in immigration. Their job was to look after a holding camp for visa overstayers and then see them out of the country.

“Tjip’s mother, Bu, a well-educated woman who spoke English, had close contact with the overstayers. Many of them were remnants of hippiedom,” says Eastmond. “She would feed them and look after them while her husband did the paper work.”Bu impressed Eastmond with her wisdom and kindness and her ability to change between East and West. “One day she would be in Balinese finery for an official ceremony and the next dressed like a European granny in a floral frock.”

Bu took Eastmond and her daughters into her family, where they lived as Balinese. She became fluent in Indonesian and worked in Tjip’s shop selling textiles and cassette players. Even though it was 12-hour days, seven days a week, she loved the lifestyle because work and life are blended and people eat and sleep as well as do business in their shops. “Bali just felt like home to me. It all made sense to me. The way they live has all the elements of what I was trying to achieve by living like a hippy – the communal life, the free and easy approach to time, people sharing what they have but there is respect for women.

“I started to find my voice there as a woman. “At first it seemed as if women were oppressed but once I started living there and being part of it I realised they actually hold the highest position in the household. Children are revered and so are the mothers held in esteem. “What ever they say, goes. That was my experience. The women look after the finances, they are great businesswomen. You see them at the market: either selling, and they are crack sellers, or buying, and they are superb hagglers.”

Eastmond is quick to point out that she experienced Balinese culture and that each of Indonesia’s hundreds of islands is different. “Somehow I learnt it was up to me, I couldn’t expect a man to provide because I had seen how women handled the money and were the entrepreneurs. About the time Eastmond decided she had to come back to New Zealand for her daughters’ education and health, her permit ran out.

“They have 180 million people. They didn’t need me so I decided to come back and get skills. When you are a professional, they want you.” She made the decision to gain some qualifications and applied to Massey University as a mature student for a Bachelor of Business. She was accepted with no other formal qualifications than four School C subjects. People had told Eastmond she had a brain, but she hadn’t believed them. It was desperation at being destined for a life of manual labour and the longing to return to Bali that really made her decide to tackle university.

In her first semester, excellent grades began stacking up: “You just grow in yourself once you start getting As. Then I did a computing paper and just loved it so much. I had discovered a whole new world.” She changed to Informational Science and didn’t look back. Her years of hand-to-mouth living set her in good stead as, once again, she had to live on government assistance.

“We were called bludgers, no hopers. I often had to throw myself on the mercy of the Social Welfare just to get a food cheque. I had to account for all the money. “Because I had a bomb car, for example, there would be a huge bill just to get it up to warrant of fitness standard. I would have to explain to Social Welfare that I needed money for food because I had to pay for the car and they would say ‘Well you don’t need a car’. But how can you bring up kids in Auckland without a car?” Eastmond is probably the only person ever to get through an IT degree without her own computer. One was way beyond her budget, as were $2 cups of coffee at the caf with fellow students.

She overcame the PC-less part by handwriting assignments at home after-hours (child care also was unaffordable), and by being the first one waiting outside the computer lab at 8:00a.m. to transcribe them electronically. And the coffee? Well, flat white deprivation was the least of her problems. Luckily a scheme available at the time for long-term unemployed sole parents called Compass funded her studies.

“It was a WINZ initiative. I was one of the first and one of the last in that scheme because now it only funds short-term courses, not degrees.” She used the various support structures for mature students at Massey, such as the learning centre, to find out how to take notes, manage your time, and write essays. Eastmond very consciously and determinedly went from the woman who despised clocks to one who structured her time and set goals. And ticked them off.

“I’ve lived the poverty trap and university is really the only way out that I can see.” She hopes her daughters won’t take such a tortuous and painful route to gain the autonomy and happiness she feels she has finally won on her own merits. Her proudest moment has been having Teika, now 18, and Rosea, 15, at her graduation. They were the ones calling out “Awesome Mum!” as her degree was conferred.

After six years, Eastmond’s long-term plan has worked brilliantly. She is finishing a Diploma in Communication Management this year to complement her IT qualification. She plans to be an IT project manager, wintering in Bali for six months and summering in New Zealand. As a fluent speaker of Bahasa Indonesia, the official language, she is looking at the possibilities of consultancy for New Zealand firms doing business in Indonesia.

“It’s not ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ any more. It is ‘What can I do to help others climb the ladder?’ The main thing now for me is to help other women. I want to mentor mature students who are in the position I was in, to give them hope that you can make a positive contribution.”
Just watch her go.

Reprinted by kind permission of Next magazine