New Zealand Visitors (Written 9/26/06)

Yesterday we got some new guests at the school for the week – a group of students from St. Patrick's (an all boys Catholic school) and St. Katherine's (an all girls Catholic school) College in New Zealand arrived in order to learn more about the Samoan culture. There were about 15 kids plus 8 adults – so it was quite a large group. A lot of the kids seem to be of Samoan decent even though they were born in New Zealand, so this could be their first time to actually visit Samoa. The most impressive part of this visit wasn't the visitors but the preparations that went into making the place look nice for them and finding enough beds for all of them – basically the entire school had to chip in in order to accommodate them. Some of them are even living in the back room of my house, but hopefully the adults will keep them in line so they don't cause to much noise.

 

So when they arrived Monday morning around 11:30am, we held a special ava ceremony. This ceremony was different from the previous one's held for guests because it felt like a real ava ceremony with the Samoan culture teachers doing most of the talking (for Palagi/non-Samoan visitors they have used the students) and the main ava ceremony parts. The group from New Zealand even had their own orator who spoke on behalf of the group – much like Onofia did for us during training. After the ceremony, came the entertainment portion of the event where our school presented two songs and the schools from New Zealand presented their school Haku (a Pacific Island war dance – sorta) and their school song (which was of Maori origin – one of the main pacific islander groups in New Zealand). The day was almost done and the kids thought they would be able to go home early – not so fast my friend, they still had to go their last period of class (you could feel the excitement and disappointment from them all at once!).

 

So for this week the New Zealand students will be joining in on a few of our students classes (in fact, I had a packed house today in my computer class because almost half the NZ kids were there) so it will be interesting to see how they interact with each other. L8r.