He aha au e hiahia nei ki te ako i te reo Māori? He hiahia nōku kia whāngaihia āku tamariki mokopuna hei oranga mō tātau. Kia kaua tō tātau reo me ōna tikanga e rite ki te moa. I have always wanted to be fluent in te reo Māori because I felt like a part of me has always been missing. I was disconnected & ignorant. Learning te reo Māori has been a journey of self discovery & acceptance. Im doing the hard yards of reclaimation & re-indiginising so that my children don’t have to. My ‘why’ is my tamariki & my mokopuna. My job is to reignite the fire of te reo Māori within my whānau so that I can one day converse with my mokopuna in te reo Māori. It takes 1 generation to lose a language & 3 to get it back. I am the first for my whānau & my mokopuna will be the 3rd so it will be thriving for our whānau in future generations. “Ko te kāinga te mauri o te reo”, nā Tīmoti Kāretu.