This is New Year's Eve island style: my neighbour Blondie and some of her friends sitting in the water just out from her house. It was just beautiful. 
We had a pretty quiet night... went for a kayak as the sun set... and then for a bike-ride in the dark around the village... knowing that we had an earlyish start the next day.I wasn't prepared for just how early though - at 6:30am on January 1st my neighbour hollered outside my door that it was time to go pick flowers and make the 'eis' or garlands for our heads - essential wearing for church, especially when one is singing in the church choir!
Why was I singing in an all-islander choir? First to back-track to Christmas Day... gosh, seems like ages ago now. Christmas morning we had the customary stocking-opening time (C has a special stocking knitted by her grandmother which we brought over)... I love watching her open her gifts... and then we made a spontaneous decision to go to the local church. This turned out to be the best part of the day.
The village of Titikaveka, like all the villages on the island, is divided into several tapere or sub-villages, and for special occasions each tapere composes and prepares a song. But they don't just sing...they sing to each other, one choir to the others, challenging them with the words, trying to out-do each other in harmonies and volume.. and they get so excited they get up and dance.
It is fantastic to see 80-year-old mamas wiggling their hips in church. One guy even got up and stood on the backs of the pews. You really had to be there to understand how riotous it was. I didn't take my camera - how exciting was a church service going to be after all - but afterwards asked a tourist who was there to send me a photo or two. You can see me and C sitting in the second row back. It was so much fun; easily the loudest and most joyous church service I have ever been to.After that we dashed across the island to have lunch with a bunch of friends at Aquarius, a restaurant-resort kind of place - we had a lovely meal and the kids enjoyed playing in the pool
(even when C and her two little friends were pushed in by one of the older boys, just before the meal, in their clothes!)Later that evening we had dinner with some friends who had gathered a bunch of "orphans and strays" - ie people like us who did not have any family on the island. Everyone had to prepare an island-Christmas themed item.... so that afternoon, at the last minute, C and I re-wrote the words to the "My Favourite Things" song from The Sound Of Music. If I may say so, we were a hit:-) I am my mother's daughter after all (for those who don't know, my mother and some of her more colourful friends used to sometimes compose or re-write the words for funny songs at various community events when I was growing up.) So, all in all, it was a lovely island Christmas.
My best gift came the day afterwards: an invitation from Blondie. I was telling her how much I had enjoyed the choir singing on Christmas Day. We had discussed 'imene tuki' before, this style of singing, and she had explained to me how the early missionaries liked it but wanted to 'tone it down' for church.
"So would you like to sing with us for New Year's Day then?" she asked. Would I ever. So for the next few days, I walked down the road in the early evening to the local community hall and sat outside on the porch with a bunch of mainly older islanders and we would sing. After the first time I turned up, everyone was asking Blondie, 'Who is she? And why does she want to sing with us?"
It was quite hard to learn. The imene tuki or traditional hymn singing is quite unlike any form of singing I've done before - and being in Cook Island Maori, of course, I didn't have the meaning of the words to help me know where we were. There are multiple harmonies, all of them seemingly spontaneous, unusual timing, and quite intricate patterns of singing back and forth between the men and the women.
Two 80-plus-year-olds composed the song and were in charge of making sure we knew it. I would sit next to one of them, Mama Tuki.
"Pere-pere!" she would command me with a nudge of her elbow. Harmonise! To their great delight, and much laughter, I took along a small cassette recorder the first time and recorded them so that I could practise at home. The composition had to be based on the reading for the day... this year it was John 1 ('In the beginning was the Word' etc).
So come New Year's Day, that's why I was up early sitting threading gardenia flowers onto a garland for my head. Blondie even made me a dress to wear - each year or special event the choir will choose a fabric and everyone makes up a dress or shirt (for the men) in that fabric.
Here is C sitting with two of our neighbours... Aunty Rongo and Aunty Te'ei... after making our 'eis' on New Year's morning. You can see Aunty Rongo wearing hers. They are from the same family - in fact everyone we know in the neighbourhood is related to each other in some way or another (they even have geneology meetings here to learn how the family tree goes themselves) but I lose track. We love these wonderful ladies.January 1st, then, there I was, in my flowers and frock, the only white face in a sea of singing brown faces. Actually, it created more of a stir than I realised: last Sunday, several weekends later, I went to another church. When the woman sitting next to me asked where I lived, she said suddenly, "You must be the papa'a who knows how to imene tuki!!" and she called over another friend of hers to say, "This is the papa'a woman you were telling me about, isn't it!"
It was a very joyful start to the year. And I hope I get to sing with them again.
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