When we arrived, Ben and Zoe were out with Jessie, their dog, at the vet, as Jessie needed assistance delivering her three gorgeous puppies! 
Winnie, Dylan and Grace, Ben and Zoe’s three children, took good care of us until Ben and Zoe returned with their extended family and fish and chips for supper – great excitement all round! 
By a strange coincidence (if indeed coincidences are ever strange?), that evening the children and ourselves watched ‘Grayfriars Bobby’, a delightful old film about a delightfully loyal little dog – not unlike Jessie! And Winnie gave us an amazing display of fire poys – the best we’ve ever seen!
Like us, Ben, Zoe and their children all love watching films and we enjoyed swapping tales of our favourite movies and film stars. A fantastic Spiritual Cinema Circle film they showed us was ‘Play and Fight’ – a documentary about the Venezuelan Youth Orchestra and how teaching youngsters music has become a hugely successful national phenomenon across Venezuela now spanning several generations. Do watch it if you get the chance. It’s inspirational and very uplifting, especially if you love music as we do. In exchange, we showed them Ben Zander’s ‘Shining Eyes’ TED talk on YouTube – a great way to spend 20 minutes!
Ben runs a very successful landscape gardening and horticulture business, ‘Blue Nikau’ – check it out at http://www.bluenikau.co.nz/ – and one afternoon we spent a delightful time walking around their nursery with Zoe and the children admiring a wonderful array of beautiful and exotic plants, including
the first pineapple plant we’ve ever seen. We also enjoyed our lakeside parking spot on their 10 acres, fresh food from the garden, and feeding the chooks!Another thing we love and admire about Ben and Zoe is that they lived for many years at the Mamakea Community – that we visited with Genevieve – and Winnie and Dylan were born there we think (hope we’ve got that right!).
Having both completed a 7 Words Q21 questionnaire, Ben and Zoe signed Richard’s vision statement about creating ‘7 Words Theatre’ and Zoe even got Gracie and one of her young friends cutting out and painting giant “NO”s one morning!
Richard is excited about creating and developing 7 Words Theatre and keeping all our new friends in NZ up to date with its progress. He’s enormously grateful for all the support and encouragement he’s receiving from everyone he’s talking to about it. If you want to know more, get in touch. He’d love to tell you all about it too!Dylan is a wonderful juggler and he taught Richard how to juggle four balls – the first time Richard has managed four! He could already juggle three but had never conquered four until Dylan showed him how. Winnie is a fantastic hula-hooper too. For some reason Richard didn’t fancy mastering that particular art! Julie had a go though. Winnie and Dylan have both been involved in a fantastic venture called ‘Stage Challenge’ in which schools create their own up to 8-minute music and dance productions on themes of their choice. Having watched videos of some of the competing entries, we were also privileged to watch the production in which Winnie and Dylan were involved which won! Great fun and very inspirational. What talented young people! If you listen carefully you can probably hear Richard’s brain ticking over even now with how he can do similar things with 7 Words Theatre!
As Yoda would say about moving on, “Difficult, it is!” Yet done it must be! And done it was, on Saturday 25th April. But only after discovering more mutual friends – Bruce & Rebecca, and Rachel, from Unicorn camps – all of whom have visited Ben and Zoe in NZ. Small world!
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