Worlds Apart Cook Islanders Find Dramatic Differences In Weather And Culture During Extended Visit To Spokane Valley

Mauke Mauke wears shorts in January. Like any Spokane teenager, right?

Wrong. Wrong, by half a world. Mauke comes from the Cook Islands in the south Pacific.

Mauke and Tearoa Ioane, both 19, stayed seven weeks in the Spokane Valley.

They arrived during the November ice storm, experienced Spokane’s snowiest December on record and, of course, unrelenting cloud cover. The exceptions - blue sky and sunshine on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day - were God’s gift to two sun-starved visitors. They left for home on Wednesday.

Mauke’s take on his first northern winter?

With a telltale grin, he told of running a snowmobile flat out. Living with his host family for 12 or 13 days without electricity was a shock to his system, though. Only a fireplace heated Karl and Tamy Wilkinson’s home on a wooded knoll north of Trent Avenue.

“The snow lasted too long for me,” Mauke said, and the constant clouds made him lose his bearings. “I can’t tell which way is south.”

Karl Wilkinson, an East Valley School Board member and a Scoutmaster, talked of going snow-camping with Mauke. “We could go up on the hill,” Wilkinson gestured north. Eyebrows askew, Mauke registered his skepticism without a word.

Tearoa - pronounce each vowel separately - went skiing at Mount Spokane, where the inevitable happened. “I fell down,” she said with a smile.

The pair came to East Valley High School under the auspices of a sister school program. East Valley students and teachers have gone to the Cook Islands. The ongoing program emphasizes an exchange of culture.

Mauke and Tearoa visited most schools in the East Valley district, showing students their native dances and telling of their island home.

“My name is Mauke Mauke. I’m the fourth (one to be named Mauke Mauke) in my family. I’m from the Cook Islands, a place called heaven.”

The dances, or koni, sent the young students into stitches of laughter.

Mauke, a strapping six-footer, cut a formidable figure in his grass skirt, knees flying. Each dance told a story, and when Mauke was a warrior, he captivated his young audience with each war cry and lunge. Polynesian music played all the while.

One dance told of a love story between man and mermaid.

The two Polynesians kept their composure and answered endless questions. After their program for Trentwood Elementary School’s fifth-graders, Mauke and Tearoa invited a boy and two girls to try on miniature grass skirts and vast scarves. The laughter rose.

If there was anything funnier to a fifth-grader than watching Mauke dance, it was seeing one of their classmates - in this case, Tyler Alverado - don a grass skirt and headdress. But by the end of the session, half the fifth-graders were up and dancing.

To show an audience of kindergartners and first-graders at Skyview Elementary School just where the Cook Islands are, Mauke held out a globe. When he laid his hand over North America, he covered the continent.

“This is America. And this…” - he turned the globe so that only the blue of the Pacific shows - “…is Hawaii.” He traced one finger, down, down, south of the equator. “We come from here. The Cook Islands.”

Tearoa held up an aerial photo of their particular island, Aitutaki, flecked with tiny clouds and blue-green in the blue ocean.

Their island is two miles by six miles. Travel is by scooter, by foot, rarely by car. The day after Christmas, dancers dance around the island, feasting in each village. They start at 9 a.m. and are done by 5 p.m.

The two Cook Islanders saw life in Spokane differently, of course, than the rest of us do.

The friendliness of people here impressed both visitors. Their host families were generous and kind.

“It’s like they are my own parents,” said Tearoa, who stayed with three different families.

Both visitors said life here is run by machines.

They have a point. Cars. Furnaces. Hot tubs. Computers. Televisions. Radios. Bank machines. Vacuum cleaners. Mauke vacuumed for Tamy Wilkinson one day. “He was grinning from ear to ear. It was his first time using a vacuum.”

Here, money matters more, too, Tearoa said. At home, the Cook Islanders fish from their lagoon and eat crops grown in their own gardens, or on plantations. Bank representatives visit their island once a fortnight.

Mauke said many teenagers here, boys in particular, are less respectful of their parents here, than at home.

“No discipline,” he said. “I feel sorry for the parents.”

At East Valley High School, where the two took classes, they found more technology than they expected. And both were surprised at the behavior boyfriends and girlfriends display in the halls.

Hugging and kissing? “At home, they would be suspended. If we do that, we do it in secret,” Mauke said.

Also, Spokane residents do little to show Christian respect on Sundays, he said.

Were they ready to go home?

Yes. It was the chance of a lifetime to come to America, but they were ready to leave Spokane’s wintry gray and see their sun again.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (1 Color)