The magazine for alumni and friends of Massey University.
Issue 14, April 2002

Extramural student & veterinarian
Jan & Adrian Rhodes
Master of Human Resource Management & PhD

Anchorlanders away

The dodo that perches on a table in Jan and Adrian Rhodes’s living room is kitsch, Jan concedes. But the obligatory souvenir is a reminder of what she calls their “off the wall mid-life Mauritian adventure”.

The adventure began when a curious job advertisement came across Adrian’s desk when he was president of the New Zealand Veterinarian Association. The ad called for an animal reproduction specialist to work on an aid project, sponsored by London’s Commonwealth Secretariat, to help boost the artificial insemination rates in Mauritian cows. The successful applicant would be under 45, French speaking and have recent experience in tropical countries.

Adrian was certainly an animal reproduction specialist. He had graduated from Massey University’s first intake of veterinary students in 1967, had gained the first veterinary PhD in New Zealand, and had spent his career specialising in animal reproduction. But he was heading towards retirement age, spoke only English and had no recent tropical experience.
Nonetheless, he took the ad home. And when Jan happened to read it she was instantly excited.

Says Jan, who was then an applied science teacher at the Auckland Institute of Technology: “We had to make a decision, which involved both of us resigning from full-time jobs and going somewhere we knew nothing about.”With their four children independent, they were in a position to leave the country for a couple of years, so Adrian “put his name into the hat” – and landed the job.

The Auckland couple arrived in Mauritius in January 1998. Fringed by coral reefs, Mauritius is an African island group in the Indian Ocean, just off the east coast of Madagascar. It is a prosperous place by African standards. The main export is sugar cane, the tips of which are often mixed with grasses to feed the cows.

Adrian and Jan moved into the island’s central plateau district of Floreal and Adrian went straight to work. “I just arrived there running,” Adrian remembers. “And I loved the place, loved the mountains and the sea.”

In the streets billboards promoted the Anchor milk brand, and Adrian took to telling farmers “‘I’m from Anchor-land’. Instantly they could recognise me as a New Zealander,” he says.

He found English, the official language, was widely used. If he had to communicate with French or Creole-speaking farmers, a project technician was always on hand to translate.

The artificial insemination service gave farmers, who typically kept only four or five cows indoors, hope of a new calf to sell and milk to feed their families.

Says Adrian, “We pregnancy tested every cow and seeing the smiles on the faces of the farmers [when we were successful] made everything worthwhile.”

During the two-year project cow pregnancy rates doubled to 60 percent in some areas, above the percentage rates of countries like America.

“ We got results in a country where farmers were mostly women, mainly elderly and mainly illiterate,” says Adrian.

Yet Adrian and Jan found fresh milk was hard to come by. Says Jan, “The village cows provided milk for the farmers’ families. There was no commercial milk production at all. We lived on powdered or UHT milk. Pavlovas are not quite the same with UHT cream.”

For Jan, a fluent French speaker, Mauritius provided case studies for her Massey extramural diploma in business administration and master’s in human resource management.

She sought special permission to use the University of Mauritius library for research. “I was one of the only white faces and was far older than all the other students. I used to go in and sit in my little cubicle and write furiously from books because quite often the photocopier wouldn’t work.”

Textbooks went too when Jan accompanied Adrian on his business trips, for example to mainland Africa to visit a women’s development project and a dairy co-op at Mt Kilimanjaro.

Outside work, Jan and Adrian took up golf, walked in the Black River Gorges National Park and went to lots of dinner parties with other ex-pats.

" Jan shopped at street markets for fresh ingredients and colourful Creole spices, but found that she could not get good-quality fresh meat – the one thing she missed from home.

In 2000 the aid project ended and Jan and Adrian were packed and ready to leave when Adrian was appointed to restructure the Mauritian government’s veterinary service.

He and the rest of the island learnt about his new 12-month contract through an announcement in the newspaper.

They finally came home in December 2000. Since then, Adrian has taken off his veterinarian gloves to tend to an assortment of do-it-yourself projects on their Auckland lifestyle block while Jan works part time as a human resources consultant.

But memories of Mauritius are never far away. Says Jan, “The experience gave us a vastly heightened awareness of an entirely different way of living.”

" This summer the couple walked around Lake Waikaremoana. “We were amused by a comment from some young enthusiastic environmentalists from Holland [who said] that it was great to see people of our age doing the walk! Little do they know that there are a few adventures left in us yet,” says Jan.