Hard to believe it's been well over a year now since out Hawaiian friends visited on a taro exchange, and the heiva has already been and gone. Even the summer holidays are coming to a close...Somehow the blog has been left by the wayside...
But that's not to say nothing's happened!
The end of last year kept us busy with a project for our association, clearing access to a small waterfall above Moerai, along with a small fare pote'e overlooking the coral cliffs, made with the help of local students at the agricultural school, the roof is half pandanus and half niau! The kids LOVED playing on the waterfall's natural slide!
We had a quiet family Christmas, not much going on, just lots of beach time.
2019 dawned and along with it our plans for a sawmill have slowly started to unfurl...
With the usual salon, translating and piles of paperwork, as part of this new project and various other administrative endeavors (I've made the move to apply for French nationality, and maybe also start supply teaching, both require serious amounts of form-filling!), I was snowed under, but not literally. Rained out more like! The wet season in Tahiti made its way down to Rurutu this year. We had mozzies galore! But at least my tumble dryer has turned out to be a good investment.
Viriamu and his trusty sidekick Frenck are busy building and fixing away. There is now an outdoor toilet and a vanilla plantation. Viriamu was taught to plant the vanilla by a Dutchman, with insider info from Tahiti. I'm looking forward to learning how to pollinate and dry it ourselves. Viriamu's grandfather had lots of vanilla growing on the slopes of the mountain behind us, I've always dreamed of dabbling in it, along with milking goats and having our own chooks.... vanilla seems the easiest option right now! And it's just outside the kitchen window, easy for pollinating by hand at the end of the year. Now we just have to hope that the goat, pigs and horses don't get to it first!
We had Cécile Baquey with us, a journalist from FranceO working on an upcoming documentary on our dear ti'i A'a,who is actually becoming somewhat of a superstar! Between the international exhibitions back in Europe (he was recently in Paris), and there were a group of young art students from Tahiti here, working on all kinds of replicas of A'a, wanting to get a look at the plaster cast in the museum and find out more about the history. Poor Cécile had a bit of hard time navigating all the different version of the stories about the statue, as well as the local politics. I'm excited to see what the end result will be though, I never cease to be amazed by the complexity of this story, and I've a feeling that there's a new chapter opening up now...
Matotea is learning to jockey, another of my husband's dreams - taking his champion horse to Tahiti for the July races. A first Rurutu horse made the journey this July, and there's a lot of buzz, but he didn't beat Viriamu's horse in Rurutu, nor the local racehorses in Tahiti...so Viriamu still dreams of taking his horse next year...Who knows maybe Matotea will be the first girl to win the horse races in Avera!
Some delightful guests here for the whales taught the girls gymnastics, and we messed around with drones. It was hard to say goodbye!
But now the new school year is looming on the horizon.
...
250 years to the day, the HMS Endeavour sailed down the coastline of Rurutu, but finding the anchorage poor, the pass and sea conditions dangerous and the inhabitants fierce, they did not actually go ashore.
the same way as the arrival of Protestant missionnaries in 1821, for example. However, it has been marked by a small exhibition of first day covers at the post office organized by our friend Alain! We even got some commemorative stamps.
