Ōtaki Repair Café
It’s a drab Sunday morning but the Ōtaki Memorial Hall is abuzz with people fixing everything, from small electrical appliances to the actual planet.
A few times a year, this local hall becomes a Repair Café - Te Whare Whakatika o Ōtaki.
For a koha, you can get help “putting back together” anything that has come apart. There’s also good coffee, and a café table run by a different local charity each time, where for $3 this Sunday you can get the best chicken sammies and lemon drizzle cake anywhere in the world.
I spot a toaster – wisely unplugged – being poked at on a table near the stage while, next to it, someone offers to 3D-print whatever you fancy.
Over to the right, a broken vase has been glued back together and placed in a clamp while it cures. The mender and mendee are now chatting happily about non-vase-related things, while a small group of women hover over a mosaic project as though it was the family jigsaw puzzle.
Elsewhere, there’s a tiny lady holding a huge pair of secateurs, those long-handled affairs for pruning tall trees without bothering with your ladder. The woman is birdlike, but has an energy that suggests she could “see to anything” with those things, especially now she’s had them sharpened.
People bring knives for sharpening, bikes for fixing, and there’s a whole row of ladies with sewing machines, keen to “make do and mend”.
I am here with a coterie of storytellers (I believe the collective noun for us is a yarn) – five of us given residencies, each with our own bach for ten days, to experience that thing writers need most – time. I feel weepy each moment I realise I have nothing to do but arrange words in new and satisfying ways.
Each of us in the “In Other Words Ōtaki” residency hosts a community activity, and this morning it’s (poet and essayist) Ashleigh Young’s turn. She reads delightful “cycle diaries” to an enthusiastic gathering, and we all stay after for cake and sandwiches.
Another of the writers, Mark Amery, gives his pumpkin-coloured jumper - a recent and glorious op shop find – to local repairer Mary to have its tiny hole expertly - nay invisibly - mended. Mary, of course, turns out to be the aunt of an old theatre friend of mine and honestly if you chat to anyone in a small town it turns out you’re basically cousins.
Repair Café is run by Energise Ōtaki, a charitable trust which does a bunch of things in this community from bike repairs to tree planting, composting and even a community owned solar farm – they’ll do anything that’s good for people and planet.
It’s a teach-a-man-to-fish scenario – here at the hall, you don’t “drop off” your broken thing and come back later, you stay to watch how it gets fixed. There’s even a sign offering to teach you how to sew on a button.
It’s part of the growing “repair café community” in Aotearoa - which is all about community connection as well as reducing waste, and growing the circular economy.
Sue, over by the loom where she’s making a glorious rag-rug, worries about another kind of sustainability – they need young ones involved to ensure this thing carries on. For an amusing second I think of reaching out to friends who live along the Kāpiti Coast, then realise … we’re not the young ones anymore.
No one’s chucking us out, though. Here we are, honouring longevity, keeping things sharp, tightening the threads that weave us together.
The next Repair Café is scheduled for November, just after the election. Come and get your knives and your wits sharpened.