Reporting on elections can be an electrifying experience.

Young supporters wear the colours of their favourite candidate.

The mamas enjoy a good feed.

Winning candidate John Henry and his wife.

A seasoned journalist interviews Mark Brown after his win.

I’ve never been a big fan of politicians. Their mouths may say “I’m for the little people,” but their brains say, “I’m all about me.” It’s difficult to remember your campaign promises when you’re face-first in the public trough.

So it’s ironic that the Pitt Media Group brought me back to Rarotonga with the specific goal of covering this month’s general election.

Other than the Turama current events show – now on hiatus – I’ve made only rare appearances on CITV. Someone had deemed me too white and too Canadian to appeal to Cook Islanders.  But it was all hands on the CITV deck for election night, which allowed me to bring my nearly 25 years’ worth of journalism experience to bear on the matter at hand.

I was teamed with Sally (driver) and Tino (camera operator) to form what I dubbed Team Superstar. Politics and elections can be dry subjects at the best of time (“Now who’s going to screw us for the next four years?”) and so I decided to have a bit of fun with my team’s segments.

I waggled my tongue at the entire nation. I asked a pair of teenage girls if they fancied older Canadian men. I compared the future of the losing candidates to the stale doughnut I held up to the camera. All live on air.

And I do mean live. In order to get each segment on TV as speedily as possible, those of us facing the camera had to do everything in one take. No second chances. You flubbed it, you lived with it. Which would explain why you can hear me on at least two occasions pronouncing “electorate” as “electric.” Which would explain why, having zipped around from candidate to candidate, at one point you can tell I’ve forgotten what constituency I’m in, to the point where I had to ask the candidate to remind me.

Nothing robs your mind of every single rational thought than staring into the blank, black hole of an unblinking camera lens.

But I did it. Team Superstar did it. And, afterwards, a number of people said they enjoyed my segments, despite my pale face and funny accent.

The election itself? The ruling party, having dicked around for four years, was unceremoniously kicked to the curb. No surprise there: people were fed up with their shenanigans. What was surprising was that not one of the 17 independent candidates was elected, and only one of the nine women who stood will now be in parliament. Proving yet again that people vote along party lines (there are only two main ones in Cook Islands politics) and it’s an old-boys’ club.

The key to being elected: have lots of children. I talked to several people before the election and they all said they were voting for family: for their father/uncle/second cousin/sister’s nephew’s brother-in-law.

There are less than 11,000 eligible voters in the entire country, there is a village-level mentality. People voted for the person who promised to fix the pothole at the end of their driveway. These are the exact same politicians who now must mingle with members of the United Nations and rub elbows with world leaders whose stature puts their faces on the covers of magazines.

Are Cook Islands politicians out of their league? Oh, hell, yes.

The elephant in the room is that the politicians – all brown of skin – are merely the dancers in front of the curtain. You need merely to lift a corner of that curtain to see who actually operates the machinery that runs this country.

The owner of the largest supermarket chain? White. The owner of the shipping line that brings all the supplies into the country? White. The owner of the national airline? The owners of the two petrol-supply companies? White, white and, yes, white. What the people have done is simply elect new puppets.

Those who pull the strings from the shadows remain firmly in power no matter how the people voted. Funny, that.

It’s a dirty job, but someone has to eat the pig’s head.

There are bits missing from inside this pig’s skull. I do not want to know where they went.

The ‘Cook Islands fork’ in action.

An action song is always a crowd favourite.

A young dancer puts on his game face.

Orama dance group performs for Bishop O’Connell.

The children of the congregation display their dancing skills.

There are several advantages to being a journalist. And if you give me a minute, I’m sure I can come up with one of them.

Oh, yeah: sometimes the assignment comes with food. 

As one of my Cook Islands Herald workmates says: Never say no to free food. As one of my brothers says: Free just tastes better. Of course, he was talking about beer at the time, but I’m assuming his theory holds true for most anything you put in your mouth. 

So, yeah, sometimes there is such a thing as a free lunch, although in my 20-plus years in the newspaper business, they have been rare. Oh, sure, there was the annual Cloverdale Rodeo press conference where the promoters put on a spread, but you had to be quick out of the gate to the buffet table to beat the radio guys and the sales guys and the city slickers from the daily papers who wouldn’t know a steer if it gored them in the expense account.

It’s different here in the Cook Islands. Someone wise and beautiful and very close to my heart once told me the best way to ensure Cook Islanders show up for a meeting is to tell them there will be kaikai (food) served afterwards. I’m guessing that works for most people, including me, in most any country you’d care to name. On numerous occasions I’ve endured boring social gatherings because someone said there’d be cake later. Mention pecan pie and I’ll not only show up, I may very well move in. 

I scored food big-time last week. Two days in a row, Jeane and I went to the Infrastructure Sector Forum to gather interviews for our Turama TV program. We had to show up during the lunch break because that was the only time people were available to talk. But first they had to eat. And, since we had to wait anyway, we were invited to eat as well. It would have seemed positively impolite not to partake. 

I did mention we went two days in a row, right? Sometimes you just have to go the extra mile to ensure you get everyone’s opinion. It’s called balanced reporting. It’s a dirty job but . . . well, you’ll have to finish that thought because I’m busy chewing. 

I didn’t eat as much on Day 2. Perhaps I was still full from breakfast. Perhaps I didn’t want to appear greedy. Perhaps it was the pig’s head on the food table. Upside down. With bits plucked out of it. Some days I forget I’m in a foreign country. This wasn’t one of those days. 

On Saturday, I attended the reception put on by the Catholic Church for Stuart O’Connell, the Bishop of Rarotonga. He was celebrating 50 years in the priesthood and there were speeches and gifts and entertainment, provided by one of the island’s cultural dance groups. 

And there was kaikai. But this time I did not elbow my way past the little old ladies to fill my plate. This time I hesitated. The food, you see, had sat outside through the ceremony and that always makes me a bit leery. The mayonnaise (as they call potato salad in the Cook Islands) looked particularly vulnerable to being out of the fridge for any length of time. 

But if anyone else was concerned about a future date with a stomach pump, you’d never know it. They dug right in, content to use their fingers (“Cook Islands forks” one local calls them) when utensils weren’t immediately available. 

When the reception was over, everyone went away full and content and happy. And, really, what more could you ask for out of life?

My future never looked so bright.

This brochure looks, um, colourful.

Announcing a new career choice.

Busted!

Objects in the rearview mirror.

I’m ready for my closeup.

Smile for the camera.

No gang signs, please.

Smile for the nice photojournalist.

In one of those haphazard instances of synchronicity, the same week I reported on a Careers Expo in Rarotonga, word reached me that someone was in the process of organizing yet another reunion for my grad class from Langley Secondary.

I was already reminded of my high school days as I circled the Telecom Sports Arena where more than 30 booths had been set up in an effort to disseminate information to students from Rarotonga and several other islands in the Cooks chain.

The colourful balloons and posters and banners and brochures were all designed to lure the 600-plus teens into banking. No, wait, make that a career in law. Or the New Zealand military. Or the Cook Islands police force.

Become a chef, a healthcare worker, a mechanic, the person who scans your groceries at the supermarket.

Work for the government, work for Air New Zealand, work for Telecom Cook Islands, work for an investment firm.

The Pitt Media Group had a table there as well, just in case anyone had the urge to be underpaid and overworked for the rest of their professional lives. Mostly the kids just wanted to play with the TV camera, freeing me – a mere photojournalist – to wander and wonder.

The wandering produced enough photos of fresh-faced future Captains of Industry to fill an entire page in the ensuing issue of the Cook Islands Herald.

The wondering has never ceased.

You see, during the half-decade I spent meandering the venerable halls of LSS, there was no such thing as a Careers Expo. No future options carefully stacked in a neat pile at a cardboard booth. Not a single balloon in sight.

Nobody to take my hand and gently place a brochure in my palm while pointing out the door to my future. (That would be the big, bright door, the one with the rose-coloured light beaming around its edges.)

Instead, we had guidance counsellors whose advice appeared to be limited to this: Never become a guidance counsellor.

Instead, we had an aptitude test for those of us nearing the end of our five-year sentence. I don’t know who designed it, and I can’t, so many years on, recall a single question. But I do remember that the idea behind the aptitude test was this: depending on how you answered the questions, you could glean a rough idea of what career path might best suit your present skills and interests.

While that was too long ago now for me to remember my own results, I do remember a fellow named Ian taking great joy in announcing how he’d fared. According to the aptitude test, he gleefully announced, he was an ideal candidate to spend a lifetime being . . . a shepherd.

We all laughed, of course, as you do when you’re a kid and still living off the largesse of your parents and The Big Ugly World has yet to tighten its grip on your throat or your balls.

After a number of false starts – surveyor for the government; movie theatre management – I did eventually fulfil a childhood dream of being paid to write. Yes, I am underpaid and overworked, but – after seeing my name in print on a million pages and being amazed every single time – you learn to take comfort where you find it.

As for Ian, well, I see him on occasion whenever I return to Langley. He walks everywhere because I don’t think he’s ever owned a car. Or held down a steady job.

He grew his hair and beard along with the rest of us, and then decided to stay with that style well into middle age. Actually, he looks a bit like Jesus would if Jesus was six-foot-four, wore glasses and loved Tolkien.

And since Jesus has been described as someone who tends to his flock of true believers, well then maybe that aptitude test proved to be pretty darn accurate after all.

Calendar challenge a lot like herding cats on a beach. You need to tread carefully.

I’ve always enjoyed taking photos, even before I started earning a living as a reporter who also knew his way around a camera. I count myself fortunate to have worked with the likes of John Gordon, Rob Newell and Ted Colley at the Langley Times, and could only hope some of their magic dust settled on me and my beloved Nikon.

Digital photography – no more counting the cost of film and developing – and a blog with which to showcase my work – bitemymoko.wordpress.com – only deepened my love for the art of painting with light.

A return to the Cook Islands has been this photographer’s dream come true. You can point a camera in practically any direction on Rarotonga and capture an image to rival the postcards.

So you can imagine my excitement at being recruited to take eight of the 13 photos needed for the 2011 Miss Cook Islands calendar. Beautiful young women, exotic locales: a match made in heaven, right?

Only if they herd cats in heaven.

To date, it’s been an, um, interesting assignment, as evidenced by the “blooper” photos I’ve included with this posting. But make no mistake: this is a job. As much as I envied those shooters who worked on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Editions, I now understand that it’s not all sun, sea and skin. There is also sweat. And, on occasion, swearing.

Of course, those elite photographers have an army of assistants working for them and, so I imagine, have little more to do than glance through the viewfinder and trip the shutter.
For the most part, I’ve had to put in most of the effort on this project, short of styling hair and applying makeup.

The majority of the models – all former contestants in the Miss Cook Islands pageant – have been absolute dreams to work with. Some of them have not, which probably explains why an assignment with a May 31 deadline has now drifted into June.

Mind you, I’m not complaining. I’ve taken some wonderful shots – I humbly call them “happy accidents” – of some stunningly beautiful women whom I felt privileged to work with. But I’ve come to realize that, if I hope to continue shifting my career arc away from journalism and into fashion/beauty photography, I need to get serious about my craft. This calendar project has been a wakeup call and I appreciate the lessons I’ve learned.

With three different photographers contributing images, the final product should have a very interesting look to it. I hope the Miss Cook Islands organizing committee sells thousands of calendars and raises all the funds needed to help sponsor the next event.

But, more than that, I hope I emerge at the other end with new skills and a new outlook and a new appreciation for how difficult even the easiest-looking task can be.

While aiming my camera at pretty girls, I’m also aiming to be a better photographer by the time the final shot is taken.

A man of few words leaves writer with short story.

Cook Islands Prime Minister Jim Marurai.

Sunset at Blackrock.

Mango smoothies.

Having a texting moment at the market.

Lovin’ the ice cream.

News reader.

Telephoto lens fail.

The Muri Lagoon tour boat.

 Disclaimer: The views in this blog posting are strictly those of the author and no disrespect is intended. 

According to general wisdom, if you hand a typical Cook Islands man a microphone, you’d better get comfortable – you’re going to be there for awhile. 

Jim Marurai is not a typical Cook Islands man. Which is too bad, because as prime minister – as the country’s highest-ranked elected official – he should be voicing his opinion on everything that crosses his desk. 

Instead, Mr. Marurai is a quiet man, a man of few words. A man who likes to keep his views private and his cards close to his vest. 

In other words, he is a bitch of an interview. 

Don’t get me wrong: I understand the unique opportunity, especially for a foreigner, of quizzing a head of state. It is, in the context of the Cook Islands, equivalent to interviewing Barack Obama or John Key or whichever uppity Easterner is currently lording it over Canada. The fact that I am sitting across from the leader of the country without being surrounded by a heavily-armed security detail with itchy trigger fingers – nor I have been subjected to a full body-cavity search before entering the room –  speaks volumes about this country’s relaxed atmosphere. 

In fact, the only thing not speaking volumes is the prime minister himself. 

No lie, there have been times when I’ve been tempted to lean over, tap him on the forehead with my tape recorder and say, “Is this thing on?” And by “thing,” I don’t mean my machine. 

Maybe it’s my Canadian accent. Maybe I talk too fast. Maybe I don’t understand the rules of discretion in this country and so tend to go for the throat with my queries. Whatever the reason, I have on more than one occasion asked a question only to have PM Marurai simply stare off at something in the distance over my shoulder. 

Leaving me wondering if he’s suddenly been struck deaf or is simply ignoring me. Or does not, after all, understand English. 

The other journalists in the room, accustomed to being reverential, chuckle later about the PM’s reaction. This while I’m attempting to write a story based on about 14 words worth of quotes. 

There are other stories to work on here, and so I’ve decided to boycott any more of the PM’s press conferences, leaving that particular torture to the radio and TV people. 

And then I’m sent to a ceremony involving the swearing-in of another Cabinet minister. I catch a ride with a TV reporter/camera operator named Alex. As I understand it, I’m just tagging along to take photos. I didn’t even bring my notebook because I’m not doing interviews. 

Alex, however, has other ideas. A bit on the shy side, he hands me the mic and says to ask questions of the new minister. What? Oh, OK. The thought occurs that, just maybe, I should have paid more attention to the political machinations behind this latest appointment. I instinctively fall back on my journalistic training: When in doubt, fake it. 

And then Alex is pointing his camera at the PM and indicating I should ask him for some comments as well. 

Oh. Crap. 

I somehow resist the urge to tap the mic on the man’s chest to emphasize my queries and, with nothing to lose, start asking some of the tough questions about the current political situation. The questions the man on the street want answers to, but only the foreigner has the nerve to ask. 

The next day, people stop me to say they enjoyed the way I grilled the prime minister. The way he was practically backing away from the camera under my barrage. I feel bad – it was never my intention to embarrass the man. And yet . . . 

And yet it felt so good. 

Oh, yeah, there’s another part to this story. After the interviews, Alex set me up in front of the property and had me do the lead-in, the whole “This is me reporting for CITV from . . .” thing. 

It was my first time on camera. I nailed it in two takes. 

I smiled all the way back to the station, the adrenaline still punching its way through my guts. 

I liked it. 

 Note: The following conversations are reproduced nearly verbatim. I said “nearly.” 

Charles: Bob, I hear you came across some European ladies suntanning topless on the beach. 

Bob: That’s right. 

Charles: What did you do? 

Bob: I walked right up to them and explained that, in the Cook Islands, it is considered rude and insulting to the locals to go topless. 

Charles: How long did it take you to explain that? 

Bob: About an hour. 

Charles: Bob, I hear a woman followed you home from the shop. 

Bob: That’s right. 

Charles: How old was she? 

Bob: Twenty-seven. 

Charles: What happened? 

Bob: She took off all her clothes and got into my bed. 

Charles: So what did you do? 

Bob: I took off all my clothes and got into bed with her. 

Bob, it should be noted, is 93 years old.