Captions by Starsha Samarasinghe. Edited by Desney Shaw. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017 (RELAXING MUSIC) Masterton is the biggest town in the Wairarapa. As a rural service centre, it's less boutique and more business than some of the picturesque towns that surround it. The population skews a little older, as the young folk feel the lure of the big cities. I grew up in Masterton. I was born male, and growing up I realised I was gay. Now, after gender reassignment surgery, I'm a woman. Visiting Masterton takes me back to a time before I was runner-up on New Zealand Idol... when I was living as a male. It's fascinating to think how much I've changed since I left, and how much Masterton has changed too. In this episode of Neighbourhood, we'll hear from some of the people who have helped make Masterton a more colourful and accepting place since I've been away. We'll discover a musical heritage handed down through generations. It's pretty cool to think that, you know, Grandfather was learning out of this back` basically, the same thing I'm sort of doing now, but 70 years ago and right now. A man from Honduras rallies the locals for a good cause. We'll share a dish that tastes like home for a Masterton resident from Jordan. Today I'll cook musakhan ` a chicken with spices and with bread. I used to buy the bread in` from the bakery in Jordan, but here it's hard to find what to` and fresh. That's why you make it at home. And we'll explore the fairy tale influences in the work of a local who shares his birthplace with the Brothers Grimm. I would describe myself as animator, but I would like to describe myself as an artist more, because I get` I'm bored by things quite quickly, so I wanna explore something new all the time. I'm Nikki Lee Carlson and this is my neighbourhood. (UPBEAT MUSIC) (REFLECTIVE MUSIC) At primary school, most of my friends were girls. I wanted to look like them, be one of them. I was never really bullied. Called a few names, and that can still hurt, but my family showed such unconditional love right from the very start. I came out to my parents when I was 16, and when I told them through my tears, Mum said, 'What are you crying for? We already knew.' They had been waiting for me to tell them. Dad said, 'Do what makes you happy, and we love you no matter what.' I wouldn't be the person I am today without the love and support of my family. (CEREMONIAL MUSIC) So, I started playing the bagpipes, probably, seriously when I was about 10 years old. My grandfather did try and start me earlier, but it was` yeah. I was too young, probably, didn't quite understand what he was trying to tell me. There was no real choice in the matter. I was the last grandson that came along, and none of them had picked up the pipes before, so my grandfather was, 'Yep, he's gonna be the one who plays,' so I sort of had no real choice in the matter, but I was more than happy to pick them up. I always love playing them. (PLAYS 'BLACK BEAR HORNPIPE') So, my grandfather started playing when he was a boy about my age, when I started playing ` 10. In about 1940-odd he played when he was at college, and he played also when he was in the army for a while in Waiouru. Then he got married and had kids, and it had to` bagpipes went in their box and went under the bed, sort of thing. He was persuaded by my aunt to pick them up again in about 1990 when he moved to Masterton, and I used to follow along behind him, pretending I was playing as well when I was 3 and 4. (PLAYS BAGPIPES) I don't know, really, what drew me to them, apart from the attraction of being able to spend almost every waking moment with my grandfather. (PLAYS BAGPIPES) So, the book was printed in the 1930s or '40s. I'm not sure exactly the age. My grandfather learnt out of it, and, uh, yeah, I've gotten a good number of tunes out of it as well. It's pretty cool to think that, you know, Grandfather was learning out of this back` basically, the same thing I'm sort of doing now, but 70 years ago, and right now. So, my bagpipes are made in England ` in Somerset, England. They're a set of David Naill Bagpipes. Seems a bit funny that the English make extraordinary bagpipes, but, I don't know, they're just` they're the ones that called to me. My grandfather did help pay for them. We sort of went half and half. I didn't quite have the money. So, Grandfather has given me all of this stuff, but he's also given me the knowledge and the experience and the tools to also be able to put all this to practise and how to actually find a tune and learn it from there and what to do. So, Grandfather's had a rough time lately. He was diagnosed with angina last year, which is a heart condition. But he's on the mend now. We're gonna get him better, get him back up to health. I think that's what he lives for at the moment. Every competition he sits me down and, 'Right, what's your plan for this competition? 'What are you going there to succeed?' But, yeah, he loves it. He travels throughout the country to listen to me play. And if he can't make it to the event, he'll sit down on the computer, and most of the time they're live streamed, so he'll sit down and have a listen to it. And as soon as I walk off the board, he'll give me a ring and say, 'Oh, I did hear what you played. That was bloody good. I loved it,' and blah blah blah. Might tell me anything that he thought I could improve on. But, no, he'll always` very supportive. Stuart, can you please go between Peter and Lawrence? (MAN MUTTERS) Yeah. That'll do. Righto. Yeah. Lee's not around tonight. She's sick. Granddad is in hospital still currently, so that's pretty much the bulk of us. All right. May as well bloody make some noise. (TUNES BAGPIPES) All right. (PERSON PLAYS DRUM ROLL) (PIPE BAND PLAYS 'SCOTLAND THE BRAVE') He's the pipe major, and he tunes our pipes and decides what music for us to play. That's his role. And tell us what to do, even though we're older than him. Bit of a bugger sometimes. (CHUCKLES) When I joined the band, Callum was about 2ft shorter than he is now, very young looking, probably 14 years old. To be a top-class piper at his age is pretty exceptional, and very difficult to be a pipe major at that age, I think, when rest of the band are about 30 years older than you. (PIPE BAND CONTINUES 'SCOTLAND THE BRAVE') In my opinion, there's nothing better than a great sounding bagpipe. You get them going really well, get them nicely tuned, there's no better sound, no better music, in my opinion that compares to piping. (PIPE BAND CONTINUES PLAYING) (RELAXING GUITAR TUNE PLAYS) # What will it take # for you to love me # just as I am? # What can I say # to make you understand I'm OK? # I was singing by the age of 4. My parents entered me in country music competitions around New Zealand, and I won lots of awards. That led to New Zealand Idol, where I came second. The show packaged me as the heartthrob of the competition, and there was a lot of speculation about my sexuality, but I just wasn't comfortable to share my personal life with the world at that time. # We got the right to be free, # We got the right to be happy now. Now it is so different performing as a woman. I'm here as a completely different person. In many ways, I'm recreating myself. # Oh, oh, oh. # (REFLECTIVE MUSIC) I think the Brothers Grimm are kind of stories that every child in Germany knows about. I was really interested in finding out the original stories of the Brothers Grimm, because they were quite a lot more, um, kind of scary and morbid and difficult. I used to go to the places where they were inspired for their stories, and so, for example, the story Rapunzel is the one with the woman with the long braids that asked the prince to climb up on to the tower, and we used to go to the tower quite a lot where the Brothers Grimm were inspired for that story. I would describe myself as animator, but I would like to describe myself as an artist more, because I get` I'm bored by things quite quickly, so I wanna explore something new all the time. It's really interesting about making the marionettes, because they don't have expression changes, so their faces need to be so precise and tell their character so well, that a lot of time goes into creating their faces because you really need to bring their character across. They've each got real idiosyncrasies that, like, you have to learn to control each puppet separately. Yep, every one. You know, Cook does a beautiful sort of head lowering, and James does nice walking, so you just get to know each... peculiarity. You just do something like a little look up and it means so much, you know? It means hope... a thought. (POIGNANT MUSIC) In 2003 I went to New Zealand for one and half months with my best friend from kindergarten. Just hitchhiked and got to know the beautiful country, but also the really beautiful people which I thought was just so different to Germany. And I found out that there's this agreement between Germany and New Zealand that if you do your master's here, you can` you only have to pay domestic fees, so that was quite an interesting thing for me. So I thought, 'Oh, I can just do my master's and work on a creative project in New Zealand 'and get to know the country even better.' So that was supposed to be only for nine months, but after three months of being here, I met Will, and that was very clear after one day that... (CHUCKLES) I needed to stay. Air New Zealand hostess says, EXAGGERATED KIWI ACCENT: 'Hello,' 'Thank you,' (CHUCKLES) Yeah. And then Duncan hears that via the flashback and says, 'Ah, the Kiwi supervowel. 'How I miss its prismatic quality.' We're currently working on a new episode for Lifeswap. Lifeswap is a web series that is about German and New Zealand cultural differences. There are two characters, Jorg and Duncan. Jorg is from Germany and Duncan from New Zealand, and they swap lives for a while. (UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS) Will is the writer for these episodes, and I animate them. So he probably spends about two or three days on writing scripts and coming up with ideas, and then I spend three or four months animating the episode. Lighten up, Jorg. GERMAN ACCENT: I can't lighten up. I'm German. Sunday is my lighten up. I think it's very important that it is a comedy, because it talks about kind of serious things. You don't wanna be pointed at by saying, 'Your culture does that. You're really annoying about that.' But if it's told in a humorous way and people laugh about it, then people take it on. GERMAN ACCENT: My point is that when the weekend comes, you Kiwis are still super energetic and ready to get things done, so you build a deck. But in Germany, we have been maintaining impressively high levels of work ethic during the week. We need our Sundays to be sacred temples of silence. It was a was a way to kinda earth a whole bunch of... differences that we'd seen in our own lives that we realised was more than just personality. We were bringing a whole lot of cultural baggage with us. We started to make a list of this directness thing with Germans, and the squeamishness about directness with Kiwis. That's come up almost daily. But we see this as a bit of a bridge so that people can cross to the other side and look back at themselves through the eyes of the other culture. And what are we doing out here in these serious yet stylish coats? Now we make our Nachmittagsspaziergang. Sometimes in a forest or, in this case, through a local 'willage`' Jorg, say 'village.' 'Willage.' We've just been asked by the Goethe-Institut in Australia to make a new web series about Australian-German cultural differences, so that's really cool. It's a change from Lifeswap, but it's still working with the same cultural differences topic. And our dream is to work on an animation that is about gender identities and sexuality, and do it in a, you know, beautiful way. Mm. (REFLECTIVE MUSIC) I was comfortable being male, but I also knew there was another part of me. I always dreamed that eventually I would become a woman. The unconditional love that I got from my parents has been the strong foundation that kept me alive and searching for my freedom and happiness. Then Dad died. Up until that point I didn't know what the future held. But Dad's passing shocked me to the core. It made me reassess what I was doing and gave me the strength to start a new life. (RELAXING MUSIC) Some people, they didn't know from where I came. They ask me` They think I'm from Iran or from India. And they ask me why you put your scarf. I told them, 'This is our religion, our traditional.' And, um... The good things, when they saw me, they never` I never felt I'm different from these people. (UPBEAT MUSIC) I miss our own coffee. (CHUCKLES) The taste and... It's not just the coffee; it's sitting with and chatting with my sisters and my friends. Today I'll cook musakhan, a chicken with spices and with bread. I used to buy the bread from the bakery in Jordan, but here it's hard to find what to` and fresh. That's why I make it at home. I am remind of my mum when she cooked for us. Was sharing with our families there. In Ramadan, the month we're fasting, we cooked this dish. It's traditional dish for us. Yeah. It's really nice. Everyone, they like it. (RELAXING MUSIC) I make a dough to make a bread for our dish today. All our family in Jordan, all the families, the people, they doing this dish. And I learned it from my mum. We put it in blanket. That's to get warm. (LAUGHS) My mum she do it like that. That's what I learnt from her. (LAUGHS) When I, uh, smell the taste of onion ` I'm crying from onion (LAUGHS, SNIFFLES) ` I remember my mum. It's easy now to do it in the mixer, but my mum, before she's doing in her hand ` cutting in her hand. I like to cook this dish for my family. They are happy. Yera, come and help me. I like Masterton. It's better for my daughter from when she's growing in busy city. Here she can grow in her hobbies, doing a lot of sports. Yeah. It's better for her and for us. Basam and Rawan, our friends, they coming to share us this food tonight. Now we do the last step. We put the bread in the oil and put the onion... on the top. I think all the people in Masterton, they know our names. Rawan and Maryam because just... (LAUGHS) Rawan and I wearing scarf. I think we are famous in Masterton. (BOTH CHUCKLE) In the weekend we have me and the two of us, because, you know, nothing there are to do. We can share the food, breakfast, sometimes go out if there's some events... to tell us there is something happened in Masterton. We can go together. RAWAN: Together. How are you think? Thank you, Mummy. You like it? (SPEAKS ARABIC) Thank you. You're welcome. Sometimes` Every time when we have... big meal like this, just telling you that, 'Do you remember when we eat this with my father, my brother, my friends, my...?' You know? That's it. That's the point for this meal (LAUGHS) ` telling us our stories. All the stories, our country. It's our life here, our new life in New Zealand. (REFLECTIVE MUSIC) I had my gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, thanks to Gorgeous Getaways. My journey was documented on a reality TV show called 'Beauty and the Beach', but not everyone has that option. New Zealand's only gender reassignment surgeon retired in 2014 and has yet to be replaced. There are nearly 100 people on the waiting list. Although there is funding for one or two people to be sent overseas each year, at the current rate, transgender people face a wait of 30 years or more to receive, what is for many, a life-saving operation. The statistics for transgender suicide are horrific. When you realise what some people are up against, all you can say is, 'How can I help?' You look so much like your father. Really? I think I'm always looking like my brother. (LAUGHS) Mm-hm. (LAUGHS) (LAUGHS) So, Marvin, tell us a little about you. You come today to do this show with us about this fundraiser that is going to happen soon. Yes, it's tomorrow in Greytown in Salute. We just put together three restaurants. OK. So, money. How much money do you need? We wanted to get a target of like $8000 to $9000 that night. And I promised him he will get help until he don't stop to fight. Good on you. (UPBEAT MUSIC) (UPBEAT MUSIC) Well, we're doing this to help Marv's bother in Honduras. And it's a great thing. Very privileged to be able to do that for him. (AMBIENT MUSIC) 100 bucks right there. $100. I'll look for 50 more. Come on, this is a goodie. $100. Who'll be 150? 150! 200. 200. 250. 250 here. (REFLECTIVE MUSIC) Before I left Masterton, I went to visit the mayor of Carterton. That person was Georgina Beyer, the first openly transsexual person in the world to be elected to Parliament. Georgina said to me, 'Think wisely about your decisions and take your time.' I left feeling hopeful. How I feel on the inside now matches what's on the outside. I'm still the same person, but braver, courageous and more complete. It's like my mind, body and soul are all aligned, and that means I'm in a better position to help others. Captions by Starsha Samarasinghe. Edited by Desney Shaw. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017