This year I seriously began my Akonga journey. It has taken me 40 years to understand and be ok with why I have got this far without the fluency of Reo in my everyday language. I came from an era where my parents who both spoke Reo discouraged us from learning our indigenous tongue and all succeeded in learning English.

For the first 4 Te Reo classes I would find myself internally crying for the desire to retain a lesson, sentence or kupu in a language I was born to know yet denied. It took another class mate to state "I can't keep up with everyone here, I'm going to leave." We both agreed that if we kept coming back every week our goal was to take one piece of new information that we didn't know before we walked in the door. Tomorrow we enter week 9 and know 9 new things we didn't know 9 weeks ago.