Kia Orana!

Around the year 1350 AD, seven canoes set out from the tiny island in the Pacific known as Rarotonga. About a century prior some exporers had followed migrating birds and discovered a land 14 days journey to the south which they named Aotearoa, Land of the Long White Cloud. So they set out "left of the setting sun," as the directions proclaimed it, and sure enough they landed in Aotearoa and founded the seven Maori tribes still in existance in New Zealand today.

Now think about this for a minute, as this entire situation boggles my mind. First of all you have a bunch of people without much by way of navigational aid (except by the stars) noticing that some birds pass through at the same time every year and figuring it would be kind of cool to follow them. They luck out with the current and return to Rarotonga with tales of trees ten men can't reach around and chickens the size of a person, leave behind general directions on how to get there, which are intriguing enough for people to set out to find a hundred years later when things get a little crowded. Finally, you are the first people to do this in the entire history of mankind, and it only happens around the time Europe is being ravaged by the Black Death and the first whisper of Renaissance is heard in Italy. You are ahead of Abel Tasman's ship by a mere 300 years in doing so, which is nothing in terms of most history of human settlement.

But for better or worse at the end of the journey you're a bit far from where you came from, so eventually the language starts to differ. Soon enough everyone thriving in New Zealand is greeting each other with "Kia Ora!" but back in Rarotonga everyone says "Kia Orana!" instead. Keep this in mind and you'll realize just how much in common New Zealand has with the Cook Islands, of which Rarotonga is the largest island and where I spent the better part of the past week or so.

Now of course the Cook Islands are tropical islands very similar, I'm told, to what Hawaii was like before statehood. I rather liked it- it's underdeveloped so tropical nature is right there, everyone is very nice and delighted to see you, and they hand out leis wherever you go, such as arriving at the airport-
As you can probably tell from that picture, I went with the American group of study abroad students I'm affiliated with, which was a rather nice and fun way of doing things (from right to left, the people in the picture are Jenny, Amy, Sarah, and me). To say the least, we had fun.

Ok, so in order to make everything a bit more readable I split up the pictures and interesting information in a few smaller posts that follow. I wrote them backwards so this introduction post would be at the top so if something doesn't make sense I appologize, but with luck things will work out. I made a special "Cook Islands" label for thse too so they don't get lost later on.

Ok, that's about all I can say about the Cook Islands for now because I am tired as the plane left very early this morning. Assuming I finish my work due when classes resume on Monday, however, I looked and I have several hundred pictures from the South Island adventures last week, so when I'm done I'll sort through them and see if I can decide which ones to post!

Until then, as it works both coming and going, Kia Orana and happy reading!

School Days

I will come clean right now- if I lived in the Cook Islands, I'd probably spend a lot of time playing traunt and going to the beach. Apparently a lot of the kids agree with me as it's a big problem there, but that didn't stop a bunch from staring at us curiously when we visited Avarea School...

The school goes from pre-school to Form II (8th grade), and there are about 500 students. They were all rather sweet and adorable in the way little kids tend to be, particularly when they're excited about "the Americans" visiting them, and they gave us leis they'd made themselves and a venerable banquet of food. (I got a few leis in the Cooks and always felt bad as they're gorgeous but you have to throw them out pretty soon.

The kids also did a performance of native dance for us while we were there and let me tell you, they were great! All Cook Islanders are required to learn at least some native dancing in school as a way to encourage pride in who they are, and it definetely works. These kids were some of the most confident people you'd ever meet- none of them shied away from meeting a bunch of random strangers, and were excited to come say hello and show us around.


By the way, there's an interesting thing I noticed about the artwork all the kids did, which you can see on the walls in the picture above. You know how back home kids always scribble something in crayon on a piece of paper in art class and it all has a similar feel? I used to think it was just the "standard little kid" style to drawing but was excited to note that the drawings displayed throughout the school were completely different- they were in bright colors and usually focused on a flower or a bird specifically, even the ones done by boys. This excited me in the sort of way you get excited when a preconcieved notion gets shattered that you didn't even realize you had.

For the record, once you graduate high school from the Cook Islands (assuming you don't go abroad for high school), most students who want to go end up getting scholarships for abroad. Most students end up in New Zealand or Australia, but the Mormon students go to Brigham Young University in Hawaii or Utah and the more technical studies are often in Japan. China is increasingly becoming a factor too in scholarships since they want to increase their Pacific influence- Russia did the same thing during the Cold War, we were told, but Moscow winters never agrees with people who spent their lives in the tropics so no one stayed there long anyway.

If you do stay in the Cook Islands for whatever reason, though, you can enroll at the University of the Southern Pacific's Cook Islands branch, which is part of the USP system based in Fiji. Your classes would mainly be via link to Fiji (USP was the first university to use satellite links in the world), and you would graduate with maybe three other students in your year.

After graduation, it should be noted, a lot of Cook Islanders don't come back home because there's very little opportunity for them. It's gotten to the point where 80,000 Cook Island natives live abroad (compare to the 15,000 who live in the Cooks themselves), meaning most citizens don't actually live there. It's an interesting situation, to say the least.

How to Paint the Sky

Beautiful, isn't it? Unfortunately we didn't have great weather on all the evenings, some nights it was overcast or even raining a bit, but when it was a little better the sunsets were fantastic!

Click to get the larger image on the above, as it looks a lot better that way... none of these images actually does justice to the real thing, of course, as photographs are poor substitutes for seeing the actual sunsets themselves. But let me tell you that the above was was a very deep, very vivid shade of hot pink that I've never seen before in the sky, and was just wonderful.

Ok, that's it for sunset pictures before someone gets really jealous and comes to New Zealand to exact revenge.

Cook Islands Government

The Cook Islands are a nation of a mere 15,000 souls, meaning the Cook Islands Government is responsible for around 35% of the number of people represented by the University of Auckland Student Government. This is tiny for a country! They were under the rule of New Zealand until 1965 (and were obviously British Empire at some point before that), but today the Cook Islands are a soverign state with free association. This means they basically get New Zealand citizenship and all the associated perks, but still get to run their own affairs.

And of course, in such a small country who's going to have a beef with a bunch of students showing up at Parliament?

Yes, this is Parliament, and has been since the 1970s when the random little building they were in beforehand was destroyed in a cyclone (Pacific hurricane- no, they do not call them typhoons here). So they needed a new building and saw the old guesthouse used by the contractors for the then-recently completed airport, and moved in "for a few years." Needless to say, they're still there.

This may sound odd to people like us, but things like this happen rather often in Cook Islands government because they just take over an old, abandoned space and convert it to whatever's needed. So you'll keep running into random governmental buildings all over Rarotonga, with occasionally entertaining results-


But anyway, back to Parliment! Which is curiously is a quarter of the island circumference away from the "capital city" of Avarua by the way... which is just a thickening of buildings alongside the road honestly...

Parliment in the Cooks has 24 members- it used to have an additional member for all its citizens abroad (you get Cook Islander citizenship if you're a decendent regardless of residency), but it proved to be too expensive so they dropped that one. We got to sit in the main chamber in the seats of the MPs while listening to a really interesting lecture about how the entire system works, so here's what the room looked like from my seat toward the Speaker's chair-
Note that little sign just to the left of the Speaker's chair, as it's very important. You see, when it says "Parliament" like it does in this picture, that means Parliament is in session. When it's flipped to say "Committee," on the other hand, that means a Committee is in session instead. Great idea, no?

If this all sounds a little silly, well, that's because it is: the government is the largest employer in the Cook Islands, to the annoyance of everyone who doesn't have a government job because, quite frankly, you don't need a big government for 15,000 people. It's rediculous, and it drains your economy terribly.

As a final note, because it's such a small population the major factor for running for MP here is to have a large extended family (and elections can be won by one vote, and in fact often are). They get to stay in office for four years, and while the salary seems decent initially it's apparently not so much because Cook Islanders expect a lot from their representatives we would never dream of from our politicians- if you need a loan your rep gives it to you without nessecarily wanting the money back, if you're from an outer island visiting Rarotonga your rep will give you a place to stay, if your great aunt dies your rep will pay respects at the funeral... all in all, a bunch of things that must be followed through with, because if they're not you'll vote for the other guy next time around.

It's all quite simple, really.