Sabrina, Lisa and I went to a Maori-language service at the Cook Islands Christian Church this morning. Lisa's a fellow hostel guest, a Brit who's spent the past 12 months traveling around the world, and has a week left – so she's pretty much in exactly the opposite place I am!
The service was beautiful – in an open-air church filled with tropical flowers, and most of the service was sung. One unusual part was the presentation of sports team trophies during the middle of the service! I didn't catch the whole thing since only a few words were in English, but apparently several local teams had recently won about 16 trophies in various sports such as handball, netball and soccer.
I had a visitor in the middle of the church service – a little Cook Islander girl, maybe 3 years old, came wandering over and presented me her Strawberry Shortcake notebook out of which she had just taken a nice big bite of cardboard. She then proceeded to slowly pull all her gum ,which was mixed with the cardboard from the book, out of her mouth and fling it around. Sabrina and I finally got her to get it back in her mouth (and keep it off of her nice dress!) after some pantomiming that I'm sure amused everyone else around us.
After the church service, the congregation had a lunch for visitors. It was wonderful, a welcome break from pasta or rice – fresh fruit including several tropical varieties I've never had before, tea sandwiches, seaweed, cheese and crackers, fresh avocado, cakes and coconut sticky buns.
The three of us sat with Jess and Inge at lunch – Jess is an Aussie med student staying at our sister hostel, whom we'd briefly met on the bus the night before, and Inge is a Norwegian pharmacist at the beginning of a 2-year contract with the Cook Islands Health Ministry.
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