This was a first: I used te reo in journalism, it was extraordinary, and I got a haircut
Friday, 13 September 2019
This was a good day. I'd been a journalist for a while and there weren't many firsts anymore. Here were a couple I never thought could happen.
I never interviewed a person via a mirror before. That was a first. The whole time I questioned Tōmairangi Te Peeti I followed his reflection as he laughed, chatted, worked, and I never once looked him in his flesh-and-blood eyes.
I like to think every year as a nation we get a little bit more excited about Te Wiki o te Reo Māori. More people have a go at using little phrases in everyday life.
Each new word pops into life like a spark, every 'kia ora' and 'tēnā koe', warms up the world a little bit: As Te Peeti shared his life, and snipped the greys and messy curls from my head, he was building a fire.
**READ MORE:
* Te reo skills handy in workplace
* Answers to awkward questions**
This week, for the first time as a journalist - in my life actually - I used te reo Māori as my first language for my job. For one day at least I was a new journalist and person again.
You don't realise how much English there is floating around until you try not using it in a job that is entirely about language. You can't interview by waving your hands, pointing to signs or miming at people. In journalism, language is the metal on which information is minted.
Last year I quit journalism to learn a new language - te reo Māori in full immersion at Te Wānanga o Raukawa in the town of Ōtaki, north of Wellington. Before that you could write the words I understood in te reo on a single page of one of my reporters' notepads. The kind you can squeeze into the pocket of your jacket if you really try.
Thanks to the incredible generosity of the teachers and the help of my fellow students, I advanced to a point where I thought I might do a little bit of journalism in my new language.
That was put to the test for this story: I would use te reo to speak to people who have an understanding of the language and use it in their work.
Social worker with Porirua's Te Roopu Awhina Services, Conrad Noema has seen what happens when Māori people lose their way, lose their customs and language. He is Tūhoe and grew up in the language himself. Now he is helping others in Porirua find their way in the world, and find their way back too.
He had just returned from a pōwhiri for a kaumatua day at school Te Kura Māori o Porirua. The language was alive and well there.
Noema still remembers his first day at school, coming from a home where te reo was the first language, to a world where it wasn't. This shy kid in a strange place, and strange building was struggling till a teacher saw him and hit him with a k-bomb. A simple 'kia ora' .
'Ka mea mai tēnei kaiako, ki ahau, 'kia ora!', anā, i reira ka oho ake, ka menemene mai.'
Others like Jessica Twomey, who hopes to get back into learning te reo again next year, are helping people take little steps. She works at the Wellington cafe Karaka, and helps people use the language - a coffee order at a time.
Nowadays a new breakfast group has sprung up that meets at the cafe, and its numbers have grown like crazy. The place is full of reo speakers on the Friday mornings when it is held, she said.
We headed north from the cafe to Ōtaki, where Most Faded Barbers owner Te Peeti grew up in a world where te reo was the number one language. He shifted overseas from New Zealand and nearly lost his language. It was still there inside his heart, he said, but it struggled to work its way out his mouth.
One day as an adult when he was working at a Kohanga reo, a child came up and spoke rapidly in Māori to him. It was, he said, simply unintelligible.
He picked up a guitar and started playing songs in te reo, started relearning.
'I roto i ngā waiata o ngā kuia me ngā koroua i timata tōku manawa ki te nuku. It started beating.'
He says he is not yet as fluent as he should be, but he speaks te reo in his shop.
That, he said, wasn't the plan when he started his business with his partner Hinewai Fraser. It just started happening - kids that would usually sit silent for their cuts would spark up when they realised they could speak in te reo. It was the nature of the bilingual town, which has many more speakers than average New Zealand.
Hundreds, thousands maybe of people over the years have spoken to me and shared their thoughts, experiences and a little bits of their lives. Extraordinarily personal and painful moments sometimes. Other times people evade, they get angry, or upset, sometimes they get aggressive.
But every time we use the language in a real way, in a meaningful way, we make it live and breath again.
That as much as the stories, as the little pieces of their lives, of their thoughts and experiences was what these everyday people, using te reo in their everyday lives, gave me in this wiki o te reo Māori.
It's a gift, it's a fire. Let's build it together.