When Māori orthopaedic surgeon trainee Kyla Matenga speaks at schools, she often finds herself fighting back tears.
“It’s because I can feel in my heart how meaningful and important it is to help inspire these girls,” shares Kyla, 31.
Breaking new ground
Growing up in a whānau abundant in aroha but light on higher-education examples – where teen pregnancy was the norm and no one before her had been to university – Kyla knows how powerful it is to have a relatable role model.
“I truly believe if you see someone like yourself, from similar circumstances, succeeding, you get the opportunity to believe in yourself more,” she says.
“My mum and dad got pregnant with my oldest brother when they were 14 and 15, so they were children, just like my grandmother and my aunties before them. Everyone in my family had children really young. No one went to university. Most people didn’t even finish school, so doing higher study was not really on the cards for me.”
The third of five kids in her whānau, Kyla lives by the words, “Your beginning doesn’t decide your becoming”.
But she will also always be grateful to the three staunch Māori and Pasifika women – her mum Joan Samuela and grandmothers Kaka Matenga and Mere Butchelor – who believed in Kyla when she dared to dream bigger. “My mum always says, ‘It costs nothing to be kind,’” tells Kyla, who reminds herself of this wisdom regularly when she’s under pressure doing surgery.
The women behind the success
When asked what she’s most proud of, for Kyla, it’s not her own success in a highly competitive and demanding medical field, but watching her mother graduate as a nurse in 2020.
“The sacrifices my mum has made for me to go through medical school, and putting her career and her life on the back burner for us kids, I’m so much more in awe of that than what I do.”
When she was seven, Kyla’s parents split. Not long after, her grandmother Mere found work at the Sealord factory in Nelson and Kyla, her mum and sisters left Porirua to follow.
“She’s the hardest worker I know,” shares Kyla.
Meanwhile, her dad’s mum Kaka has always instilled the mana of being Māori.
“I don’t shrink who I am within the space of medicine – I just authentically stay myself,” says Kyla.
From her loving whānau, to the people she met in Nelson who encouraged her to set huge goals – “My friends’ parents were lawyers and dentists, they owned their own businesses and they took me under their wing” – and her peers and mentors in medicine, Kyla says so many people have helped her.
She’s also quick to add she feels no better than anyone still stuck in intergenerational cycles of poverty and believes luck has had a part to play in her life too.
“Porirua is my home and always will be,” she insists. “But if I didn’t leave, would I have been any different to my cousins who had babies when they were 15 or 16? No, I definitely would not have been.
It’s not an innate thing that I am any better – it’s purely circumstantial.”
Leading through representation
The road to becoming an orthopaedic surgeon is long – six years of medical school, four years minimum as a junior doctor, five years of specialist orthopaedic training and two years of fellowship training beyond that. Kyla is now in her first full year of orthopaedic training at Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital.
“Being able to enhance a patient’s quality of life is really satisfactory,” she smiles.
Kyla was one of only 17 doctors chosen for her intake of orthopaedic surgery training.
“Two were female and two of us were Māori, and I was the only Pasifika person,” says Kyla, who is of Cook Island, Ngāti Toa Rangatira and Ngāti Porou descent.
While balancing an incredibly busy schedule of surgery and study, Kyla also prioritises looking after herself, waking at 4am daily to make time for CrossFit.
“It starts my day off feeling good and I know whatever comes next, I can conquer it,” she explains.
With women and indigenous people still underrepresented in the job, Kyla has chosen to share her life online with her now more than 40,000 followers.
“Hopefully others see it and think, ‘Well, if she can do it, then why can’t I?’”
It’s why she visits schools, shares her story, and why those moments with rangatahi still move her so deeply.
Kyla enthuses, “Māori and Pasifika young girls need to know they can do whatever it is they want to.”
Follow Kyla on Instagram
