Te Pāti Māori coleader and motherof-three Debbie Ngarewa-Packer sat down with the Weekly to share treasured memories and valuable life lessons from her mother Colleen Ngarewa, who has recently been diagnosed with stage four cancer. With the future uncertain, it feels more important than ever to Debbie and her whānau to acknowledge her mother, and all she has overcome and achieved – and Debbie knows one thing for sure: with Colleen in your corner, anything is possible.
“It’s such an honour to talk about Mum. We’ve just very freshly learned she has stage four melanoma. It’s made us really talk about her background and who she was and is.
She was raised with a really tight intergenerational Irish Catholic family in Paeroa. But when her parents separated, she and her sisters moved to South Taranaki.
I think she deeply missed that intergenerational village, so she went
