“It’s much bigger than just going over there to do an internship with an NGO, for me it’s both a professional and personal journey,” she said.
The people of Rātana have a connection with Japan, especially the Ainu, people indigenous to the land surrounding the sea of Okhotsk in northern Japan.
The seeds of friendship were sewn between the people of Rātana and the Ainu in 1924 after a visit to Japan from the movement’s founder, Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana, with Ainu bishop Juji Nakata opening the Rātana temple in 1927.
During her trip, Nepia hoped to establish a base to send a delegation from Rātana to Japan in 2024 to mark the 100-year anniversary of the relationship between the church and the Ainu.
As well as this, she was going to hopefully be a role model to her community and show these opportunities were attainable.
“That’s my target, to demonstrate to rangitahi, young Māori people that these opportunities exist and we can attain them, it takes a bit of work but for anyone that’s wanting to explore that I’d be more than willing to help,” she said.
This won’t be her first international trip, as she recently returned from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Voices of the future conference in Thailand as part of a youth delegation.
“It’s kind of through that that I’ve become interested in working abroad and exploring what opportunities might exist overseas,” she said.
She hopes to have her young daughter join her in Japan for the last week of the internship so they can come home together.
Lily Smith is from Whanganui but is currently studying law and international relations at Victoria University of Wellington.
She received a scholarship to travel to the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago, Chile in January.
Her reason for applying was she’d never travelled internationally before and had always wanted to learn a second language, which would be an extra feather in her cap for her career later in life.
“Further on in my career in international relations and law I just thought it would be really good to be able to speak and communicate with people in another language,” she said.
In line with this, she’ll be participating in two courses in January, an intensive Spanish course, and a course about Chilean folklore, where she’ll learn about the indigenous culture of the country.
After the programme finishes, she will stay in Chile until the middle of February to put her newly-learned language skills to the test and explore.
“[It’s] just to really put our Spanish-speaking skills to the test,” she said.
She hoped to improve her communication and problem-solving skills by participating in the trip.
“Especially if I don’t speak the first language, my problem-solving skills are going to have a lot of fine-tuning.”
She also looked forward to learning about a different culture and hoped to come back to Aotearoa more culturally aware.
