On Saturday, May 8 the Pasifika group travelled to the Claudelands Events Centre in Hamilton to perform at the very last "Pasifika By Nature". This event is a good chance for secondary school students from around the BOP and Waikato region to come together and celebrate their Pacific heritage by performing a range of dances from all around the Pacific.

The programme was amazing. We got to see a lot of performances from different schools and learn a lot about different cultures from them.

Overall our performance was fantastic. We opened up our set with a Samoan Sasa and we did pretty well. Our Cook Island Dance was disappointing because there was a misunderstanding and the sound techs didn't play the right audio for the dance so we had to adapt and do our best to do our dance anyway. Our junior boys’ dance was amazing. They represented Fiji cultural dance. Our Senior boys did the Tongan boys dance and it went well. Our favourite performance from our group was the Haka. Everyone put their best effort into it and it was amazing. I enjoyed a lot of performances from other schools as well. Everyone had fun and all of their performances were mesmerizing.

We weren’t entered in the competitive section but still did our school proud. Tokoroa High School were the overall winners which was apt as they won the very first Pasifika By Nature 21 years ago.

Malo, fa’afetai, and thank you, leaders, students, costume makers, parents and especially to the teachers. We can’t thank you enough for the time and effort you have given up to put up with us students, and to Mrs Pekipaki thank you so much for giving us another chance to celebrate our cultures with our fellow PI brothers and sisters. Thank you for all that you've done for us students. We know we are all handfuls at times but the work you put into us doesn't go unnoticed so thank you.