What Happened from 2001 to 2006?

What a long strange trip, eh?

A great many things happened between May 2001 and June 2005 that changed my life for good. We moved from Dunedin and settled in a great little town called Geraldine in Canterbury on New Zealand's South Island. We bought a car and sold a house.


We rented and saved in Geraldine. The kids were happy at school and yours truly was a Scout leader in the little town.

All was good until my wife started getting headaches in 2004. After many trips to the doctor and finally a MRI scan we found out that she had a brain tumor. Three days later she had brain surgery to remove a high-grade tumor in her left temporal lobe.

The months following were a blur. The tumor was a grade 4 glioblastoma. The prospects were not good and by all reports six months was the mean survival time. Daily trips for radiation therapy, looking after the kids, cooking and being all things domestic, paternal and spiritual were taking their toll. Eleven months was challenging and draining. She died in June of 2005 in her sleep.


The kids stayed with me and stayed in school and with their friends and Scouts. We stuck together and stayed a family unit during the adjustment period. The kids were great and are very strong and well adjusted kids. Friends, family and community pulled together to provide us all the help we needed.



I worked on projects on the computer, kept the business alive and did my best to raise two girls by myself. I'd go into the bush a cut firewood with my dog, take my Scouts on camps, make birthday cakes and just about everything else that comes with running a family. The kids always had friends around and the teachers at the schools were absolutely wonderful.

Like all things, life moves on.



In 2006, I met a lovely Filipina lady on the Internet. She was single, professional accountant and living in Manila and working at a bank. I invited her to come and visit in New Zealand which she did in December and into January 2007. Unfortunately, after a month, she had to go back home and that was the hardest thing we ever had to do.


In the coming months I tried to bring her to New Zealand, but snags in immigration prevented this from happening. After writing letters to ministers, visiting MPs, getting letters of support from friends and family, I finally gave up. There was no way that we were going to be together in New Zealand.





So we made a plan for me to go to the Philippines. Over the next five months the kids got to accept the idea of living with their father. It was a time of lots of consultation and communications with their dad, uncles, aunties and grandparents. The fact remained that I was going to be leaving and they were going to live with their dad. Our little Foxy/Jack Russell doggy was found a good home on a lifestyle home with a huge family.




We'll were almost here. You won't have to wait too much longer.



Dan