Ae Marika: Too many lawyers and doctors
te-pati-maori
Mon May 21 2007 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)
Ae Marika: Too many lawyers and doctors
Monday, 21 May 2007, 9:40 am
Column: The Maori Party
Too many lawyers and doctors
A couple of months ago MPs were asked to nominate someone to be part of a 3-day Youth Parliament – a tough ask for me because there’s heaps of talented rangatahi all over the north. I put a pänui on Te Reo o Te Tai Tokerau, and the best of the mix turned out to be a young woman who has actually been pestering me about it since last year.
Her name is Hope Puriri. She hails from Ngapuhi, Ngati Hine, Ngati Whatua, Ngati Awa and Te Arawa, and she’s an excellent speaker of Māori.
Hope is currently enrolled as a 17-year-old student at Whangarei Girls High School, where she’s a student trustee on the Board, and a member of the student council as well. She’s also into choir singing, kapahaka, manu kōrero, waka ama and a bunch of other sports as well.
With all that goin’ on, you gotta laugh when you ask her what she wants to be and she tells you what she doesn’t. “What I don’t want to be is a lawyer or a doctor because there’s already too many of them in my whänau.”
Hope’s buzz is graphic design and art, something she’s excelled at ever since she won an international poster competition when she was just 11, and she’s hoping to translate her talents into a double major in Architecture and Māori Studies when she gets to Varsity.
Hope’s mum reckons her girl is pretty independent. “She’s a mature young woman, and all she asks of me and her dad is kai and clothes. She does all the rest herself - schoolwork, sports, everything. And even though she’s into a lot of stuff, she never complains.”
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Hope tells me that what she really wants to do is to work in Maori affairs, what her granddad Brownie Puriri was well known for, because “I want to bring change and a better future for Maori people.”
Hope is also a very strong willed young woman. She rang me, she texted me, she emailed me, she sent me her CV, she bailed me up at the Waka Ama down Karapiro – she just wouldn’t let it go. I have no doubt that she will represent Tai Tokerau well.
The Youth MPs will gather in Wellington in early June. They will sit for 3 days, they will attend select committee hearings, and they will participate in the life that normal MPs do, except she won’t be getting my salary – OK miss!
If you want to hook up with Hope before she goes, or got some ideas you’d like her to raise, email them to her at youthmp[at]tokerau.co.nz
Hone Harawira
Tai Tokerau MP
www.tokerau.co.nz
ENDS
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