Aotearoa New Zealand · endometriosis
We're done waiting.
wander is a New Zealand endometriosis charity with one mission: a cure. We started with no funding and no office, because awareness is free, education is free, and handing the microphone to people who spent a decade being told their pain was normal costs nothing but the willingness to listen.
Ancient medicine blamed a “wandering womb” for two thousand years of dismissed pain. It is the root of the word hysteria. Endometriosis is womb tissue that wanders. We took the name back, and we carry it together: patients, whānau, researchers, and everyone who believed us all along.
Named for the myth they used to dismiss us.
The evidence
1 in 10
people born with a uterus in Aotearoa live with endometriosis. That number was always an undercount.
9.7 years
is the average wait for a diagnosis here. Most of those years are spent being disbelieved.
No cure
exists. Surgery removes disease; it does not end it. Recurrence is common and repeat surgery is normal.
Figures reflect widely reported endometriosis research. We publish our sources as we grow.
Why we started
It started in our house, and it has not stopped.
My wife lives with endometriosis, PCOS and a bicornuate uterus. Three diagnoses that took over a decade to understand, each one arriving long after the pain did. It has shaped our marriage, our work, our plans for a family, and the way we talk to doctors. It is still shaping them.
We have been through the appointments where the answer was a stronger painkiller and the classic "it's just a sore tummy". The laparoscopies. The fertility specialists. The months of waiting between a symptom and a scan, then between a scan and a surgeon. It is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has not lived beside it.
And here is the part we will not pretend about: we could afford it. We are upper-middle class. We have health insurance. When the public waitlist was measured in years, we could go private, let our parents pay for the laparoscopy, and sit in front of a fertility expert within weeks. That access did not make it easy by any means, but it made it survivable.
Most people do not have what we had. Same disease, same pain, no private door to walk through.
That is the gap wander exists to close. A diagnosis should not depend on your income, your postcode, or how well you can argue in a ten-minute appointment. Nobody should have to be wealthy to be believed and treated.
— Zac Warren-Brown, founder of wander
With what we have, right now
No funding, no office. A name, a mission, and 1 in 10 reasons.
01
Awareness
Plain, sourced content about what this disease actually does: the pain, the fused organs, the lost decade. No euphemisms, no softening.
02
Community
Free support groups for people with endo and for the partners, parents and whānau carrying it alongside them. Nobody should sit with this alone.
03
Education
The facts most people, and too many clinicians, still do not know. We want a GP visit to end in a referral, not a repeat prescription.
04
On Record
Our interview series. Women tell their stories whole, in their own words, uncut, and approved by them before anything ships.
You are welcome here
If you live with endo, or love someone who does: we believe you.
Our support groups are free, and they are open to the people around you too. Partners, parents and siblings carry this disease differently, and they need somewhere to put it as well.