My Marae Recount

       My Marae Recount

In Term two, week one, 1-2 of May, my class and I went on a field trip to our local marae at Arahura. We were going to the marae because we wanted to learn all about the Māori culture.

Finding Greenstone

 We were going to go down to the river to find greenstone\Pounamu as one of our first activities on our marae trip. We headed off down the street. It was an extremely steep and straight street, I nearly fell over a few times. As I was walking down the street it was very slippery; as slippery as ice because of all the dew and frost from the morning. We arrived at a small clearing on the bank of the river. It was next to a long industrial concrete bridge. We had to walk through a short gorsy track through some trees and shrubs. It was very muddy and slippery  and I cut my leg in the process of walking down to the river. We arrived under the bridge and we had to walk through a sequence of streams in order to get to the other side of the bridge. It was very rocky and the river did not have much sand. Where there was sand it had a random gooey substance. I was searching up and down the river eager to find some greenstone. Not many people were having much luck in finding greenstone, then just when I thought I was not going to find any my hopes raised when I found a huge piece glistening in the sunlight in a crystal clear stream. At first I thought it was not greenstone\Pounamu and it was just a green rock but I picked it up. It must have weighed over 6kgs because it was very heavy. I carried it over to Jerry ( an expert at finding greenstone ) and he said it was a genuine piece of greenstone\Pounamu. I continued searching up and down the river keeping my eyes peeled, in the end I did not find a second piece. Eventually we headed back up the steep hill to the marae.





Sports Game

As the night creeped over the sky we did a rotation activity with a choice of tukutuku panels, soap carving, a game and  weaving. I did a sports game first. It was fun because we were constantly running. I tripped over a few times. We did a hockey game it was a game where you were given a number and you had a partner from another team that has the same number. When your number is called out you and the person with the same number from the other team run out and you grab a makeshift hockey stick each. You had to prevent the ball from getting into your goal while your trying to get the ball in your opponents goal. Then when we had our rotation I swapped round to soap carving. It was very messy. While everyone was making beautiful carvings I was just cutting out roughly a huge hole through my soap. I was making such a mess that the table was covered from top to bottom in soap crumbs!.


The next day we got in the car. We were going to do a walk around lake Mahinapua. On the way Hamish, who was traveling in the same car as me, put a pillow case on his head and pretended he was kidnapped. He tapped on the window and faintly said, “Help I've been kidnapped.” Whenever a car came he would do his act by tapping on the window with the pillow case on his head but all of a sudden we saw a police car in the distance. If the police officer saw Hamish pretending to be kidnapped the police officer would have taken it seriously. We stopped off  at the start of the walk.  There was a historic rail car off a bush locomotive. I got into a group of four  and we were running through the track. We reached the end of the track after going through a series of muddy puddles. I slipped over on slippery wet tree roots a few times. We stopped at a clearing at the end of the track with a small view of the lake. We listened to a maori story from ancient maori culture and had a snack. Then we headed back. Shannon, Flynn, Cameron,  Aiden and me pretended it was world war 2 and we pretended to shoot the Germans and the German army tanks. Then we reached the end of the walk. 

I really enjoyed my stay at the marae and I thank all the caretakers who work there. 

Photos are on the page below