Speech contest winner remembers welcomes

Press, 27 September 1988, Page 16

Speech contest winner remembers welcomes

Christine Ward,. of Aranui High School, won two national trophies last week in Whangarei, but it is not winning which the Maori speech competition champion remembers. For Christine, the memories are more of the nine-day journey, and the warm welcome which she and her support party received at every marae on which they stayed. Most of the 20 pupils, teachers and elders who

travelled with Christine will remember their first attempts at bareback horse-riding. “A lot of people fell off.” At the national secondary schools’ Maori speech competitions in Whangarei, Christine was judged best speaker and also best female speaker. Christine, a form six student, said it was not easy to translate her

speech into English, but it was “a modern call for men and women to walk together.” “I don’t want anyone to walk behind,” she said. The school’s associate principal, Mr lan Macdonald, said he regretted that more students could not have shared the learning experience of the journey. “We were welcomed as a family wherever we went,” he said.