At Four Square Tokomaru Bay, Māori Language Week is every week.
Every week is Māori language week at Four Square Tokomaru Bay, with owner-operator Mike Turney encouraging his team members and customers to speak te reo whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Tokomaru Bay is a tight-knit community in Te Tairāwhiti Gisborne, the largest te reo Māori speaking region in Aotearoa New Zealand.
For the local Four Square team, engaging with their customers in te reo is part of their everyday life: “Te reo is a huge part of the community’s identity and culture,” Turney says. “It’s important when anyone comes into the store that it feels like theirs, and that they know te reo is part of the store culture.
“It’s the simple stuff — we greet and farewell customers in te reo, the aisle signage is in te reo, the team values are in te reo, our Facebook posts have te reo woven in.”
Four Square shoppers around New Zealand can support Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori and expand their own vocabulary using the Four Square Rārangi Kai shopping list translator. The webtool provides a te reo translation for more than 200 everyday shopping essentials, from vegetables and fruit (huawhenua me te huarākau), through chilled and deli products (kai whakamātao me ngā kai tauraki) to cleaning products (taputapu horoi) and kai ā ngā kurī (dog food).
Rārangi Kai is available to use throughout the year, and features audio to help with pronunciation. To use it, simply select your shopping list items, click on the tick, and Rārangi Kai will provide a list of all the items in te reo Māori. You can even tick your shopping list items off as you shop, and translate them back to English if you’ve forgotten a word.
“It’s a great way to get the conversation going and introduce te reo in a practical way, into everyday life,” Turney says.
Turney’s own te reo journey started while working as a fishmonger at Gisborne PAK’nSAVE, where many of the other members of the seafood team frequently speak te reo with customers. He learned more when working at the Wainui Road Four Square in Gisborne, serving shoppers who spoke Māori as part of their everyday interactions.
“I’m by no means fluent but I try to greet customers and ask them how they are,” he says. “I’d like to learn more, along with the others in the team, some of whom are semi-fluent, and others who are at the beginning of their journey. The community are really encouraging and help us out with words and pronunciation.”
Among the team making te reo an intrinsic part of Four Square Tokomaru Bay is high-school student Iwiata, who works at the store part-time and is fluent in te reo, growing up speaking it at home and at school.
“It just comes out naturally, when someone talks to me in te reo or I say kia ora to them or ask them how their day is in Māori,” she says. “It’s important because it’s like a gift to have everyone learning it nowadays. I help Mike a lot and it’s cool that the rest of the team are trying to learn. It’s really encouraging for the community.”
With the evenings getting lighter and days getting warmer, Turney says it might be time to expand his te reo vocabulary to include ways to describe the weather — and hopefully this year it’ll be less kei te marangai (stormy) and more kei te paki (it’s fine).
“The weather is a hot topic — everyone is always following the MetService and when we see 10 days of sun, everyone gets excited,” he says. “People here are pretty resilient, but now they’re ready for a beautiful summer.”
For more information, head to Four Square Rārangi Kai: rarangikai.foursquare.co.nz/home
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