Found in translation

The most exceptional gifts are those given freely. I’m sure you’ve experienced this.

At our house, a dad and kids whom we had invited for lunch turned up with the most beautiful tarakihi fillet just off a fishing boat. We promptly fired up the barbecue! Then there was the mum, who, when dropping off her two kids at the birthday party we were throwing for our four-year-old, brought along enough lemonade for everyone.

This is the true sense of ‘koha’, the Māori word and custom: a heartfelt gift, given freely, without conditions or expectation. It’s what you bring when you turn up. It’s fantastic.

Giving in this way is a part of our culture that, even if it didn’t come directly from tikanga Māori (customs), has certainly been heightened by it, and it’s something worth celebrating.

No strings

When I look at the koha I give these days, though, it can be a far cry from unconditional. It’s almost as if I can see the strings attached to my outstretched hand as I make a gift. There are strings pulling at me out of obligation (I’m giving this because I have to). There are strings of conditions I put on my gift (I’m giving this so you’ll do something for me). There are probably even strings of pride (I’m giving this to make myself feel good).

I’m sure I’m over-egging the whole thing, but if you look at the reasons why we hand things over these days, gift-giving is, well, a bit stringy to say the least. Why am I really giving this again?

It’s hard to keep all that other stuff out of it.

Lately, I’ve come closer to hitting the mark by giving surprise gifts to my kids. This is just because no one expects them, no one demands them, and sometimes I even don’t know I’ll be giving them ahead of time. The strings are out of the way.

And then money gets involved

Of course, these days, when the word ‘koha’ gets used, it can mean any of these things:

• Gift
• Present
• Offering
• Donation
• Contribution.

Traditionally, koha has taken many forms, like food or precious taonga (treasure). More recently, though, it has tended to be in the form of money, so the word is typically used in a way that means ‘donation’ or ‘contribution’.

Little by little, with each gold coin ‘donation’ I hand over for the kids to take to school, the more I seem to get away from the truest sense of koha... a gift from the heart. This, of course, is fair – there need to be ‘expected’ donations and contributions. A marae can’t run on aroha alone and it’s not fair for those in the community to cover all the costs of a hui, for example.

Koha can be food, koha can be money. It can even be the money smarts you bring to others – like helping people manage their debt or showing them how to compare KiwiSaver funds.

This Māori Language Week, let’s celebrate all that koha can be: unconditional gifts given freely.