Manuia le aso,
Hello everyone. As you may know the week before last week was Samoan Language Week. We celebrated Samoan Language Week with a Samoan umu. An umu is a way of cooking food, mainly used in the Pacific Islands. We learnt that the umu uses ‘thermal energy.’ On Friday we went to school in our own cultural clothes and started it with a Samoan prayer. After that we took a group photo, checked on the umu and then had a very competitive game of kilikiti! Kiliktiti is Samoan cricket. First someone has a bat and the feild team will throw the bal at them. Once they have hit the ball they will run to the next corner in hopes not to be hit by the ball. When the person who is batting runs the feild team will have to try and get the ball and eventualy hit the batter with it. If not, tough luck. The next batter will hit the ball and then the first person will run to the next corner without getting hit. Once you have made a full run (which is the whole feild/court) your team gets a point. And those are the instructions for how to play Kitikiti! Anyways after morning tea ended we decided to split up (boys and girl, boys with Matua, girls with Miss. Nees Kairua) and learn a dance. The boys learnt a fire dancr and the girls did another one. When we split up us girls tried to find the dance that we learnt in 2020 that some of you may know of (for our new school opening), but unfortuanetly we couldn’t so we learned a new dance – Siva Samoa dance.
One thing I learnt was a new way of cooking and the rocks used for the umu were volcanic rocks. I enjoyed representing my culture with my outfit and ‘ei katu (flower crown).
One question, what did you do for Samoan Language Week and if so did you enjoy it?
Thank you and enjoy you week!
