Catching Up

The last two days have been busy as usual (and I've had no internet access).  On Wednesday morning (that's Tuesday for those of you east of the date line), we got up early to drive to Mount Bruce where we saw our first kiwi bird in another beautiful bird sanctuary.  The kiwis have been nurtured back from the brink of extinction to live peaceful lives in this protected, yet natural, environment.  The kiwi we saw was white instead of brown because both of her parents had the recessive gene for it.  It wasn't an albino, it was just white.  These birds are flightless, and when they run, they kind of look like a chicken with it's "arms" cut off.  They are nocturnal, and apparently, they mate for life.  The males are also the ones who incubate the eggs - a pretty highly evolved species, if you ask me.

Kiwi bird in its nocturnal home.

Next, it was off to the Tui brewery.  Tui is New Zealand's most famous beer, and they have become very well known for their "Yeah, right." ad campaigns.  As in, "It's too cold for a beer.  Yeah right." or "This is a business expense.  Yeah right." After a tour of the brewery and a turn at creating our own "yeah, right" slogans, we had lunch in the brewery restaurant with our new host families.  As an aside, two days after our visit, the brewery was hosting its second ever "drought shout".  This is an event for local farmers after a long summer of drought - there were more than 3,000 farmers registered to attend.

After driving for about 1.5 hours, we arrived in Otaki to tour a traditional Maori church and learn about it's history from the parish's pastor.  It was very interesting, and we learned a lot.  What was most interesting was how the community came together after the church had been burned down to recreate an exact replica of the original church, including building the structure around three enormous tree trunks, which functioned as the internal supports for the church.

That night, we met with all our host families at club president Carol's house for anther great potluck meal.  Then, it was off to our host family's houses and straight into bed.

Yesterday, we spent the whole day doing vocational visits. (see below). Our dinner and presentation at the Rotary Kapiti Cluster meeting was hosted at the Southward Car Museum. There were "only" 70 members at this meeting.  Members had great questions for us afterwards, and it was a pleasure to do more sharing and comparing of cultures.  We had a chance to look around the museum before we met. We took pictures mostly for our brothers and fathers.

For my vocational visits, I had the pleasure of meeting with a very dedicated instructor/program manager in the local Learning Centre, who told me about their Youth Guarantee programs and how they do goal setting and career pathway planning - very interesting.  Then, I had the privilege of spending the afternoon with the principal of the local Maori immersion school.  It was a great pleasure, and I was able to learn a lot about what they did to help Maori students become successful in the school.  There are a lot of things that Canadians can learn from how New Zealand has embraced indigenous culture and language.

Nathalie and Laura had the pleasure of spending the morning with the Friends of the Otaki River which is a group that is working hard doing riparian plantings along their beautiful river. They had a lot of fun helping with weeding and repotting. In the afternoon they met with Dr. Mike Joy, a professor at the nearby Massey University. He explained all about the pressures New Zealand's waterways are under and some of the solutions they are exploring to help address them.

Nathalie helping transplant some native tree saplings for the restoration. 

Laura helping group leader Margret remove stakes from maturing trees. 

That's all for now, we are off 4 x 4ing this afternoon!