It's Saturday. Had breakfast and I attended the Annual General Meeting. All the kaiarahi (leader) from all the Unis and Polytechs of Te Mana Akonga meet to discuss important issues, concerns and update everyone on what is going on. Very interesting and took some notes. Meeting started about 10am, heading into lunch. Therefore, we ate and continued the meeting. In the mean time it was sports day. So the rest of everybody headed to Porirua to play sports. Got some ideas and initiatives that I would like to see happen at Mānoa. It would really be awesome to organize a Native Hawaiian Student Association, however, the gr
eatest function for an organization to function is funding. Lots of these Māori Student Associations has been successful so far and it seems to really benefit the Māori student body. They have a MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) with their "partner association", a the term that refers to the general student association. The meeting lasted until at least 3:00pm and then we got a ride to Porirua. It was pretty far away from where we stayed, practically in another city. We arrived at in Porirua at the Te Rauparaha Arena. This place is huge! There's a big arena area, where you can place basketball and netball. Netball is like basketball, but you don't tribble the ball plus other rules. Heard it can get really brutal. Then in another part of the arena, there is this big indoor swimming pool, jacuzzi and water area for kids to play. Pretty cool! Pretty much each roopū (group) had teams and would play against each other in netball. Due to the time, that was the only game played. Really wanted to play some volleyball.
Later that night, was our last dinner together. We as in our group Waiora, were early to dinner. Haha, we've been late to pretty much everything except this. Were all in our Waiora hoodies sitting together. Everyone sat with their roopū, tables were decorated. Pretty much like a big feast. Also, was the awards night. We took Manu Kōrero (speech)! CHEE HEE! Thanks to Jackie, she was awesome! Her kaupapa (topic) was about, should Māori have one standard dialect. And she came out with no, she learned from her grandparents and so that is how she speaks. She is from Tuhoe and so she speaks Tuhoe. Really interesting even though I really couldn't understand more than half of what she was saying. So I asked one of my friends to translate for me haha. Awesome day and dinner!
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