Hangi Report

 So on the 18th of March, we walked to Whare Manaaki four of us boys grabbed shovels and the baskets and went out to the section next door and so we put the baskets down on the grass. We put three of the baskets side by side and put slits in the ground around them with the shovel and then we started to dig the hole. While we were digging we kept on hitting huge pieces of concrete and so we had to dig around them and then lift them out and then we would hit more of them and we almost broke some of the shovels by hitting the concrete. We found tuns of stuff like full-sized bricks and also an element of a stove and wire and other things so we thought we were going to dig up a house because we kept on finding things that would be used for building a house like piping, metal, wire, brick, concrete and an element from a stovetop. 

Then we had to dig it until it was a little deeper than the basket so we could have the irons underneath it to cook the kai. But we had to square the edges of the hole so the baskets would fit nice and snug so no heat and steam would escape when we buried it nothing would escape and so we made it all nice. Then we had to dig another hole for dirt to go on the top of the soaking wet sheets and sacks and so we put Hangi and so we dug it about half a meter and so we dug it out and squared it off and so we had a good amount of dirt to go on top of the hangi. Then we dug a third hole that was probably one meter deep and so we got the hole down to hard-packed clay and while we were digging we found more concrete and bricks and so we had to fill up the second hole with concrete and then the third hole was used to put the hot coles in and so that was the process of digging the hole for the hangi. We had a lot of dirt to put on the top of the sacks and sheets and so there was a lot more than we needed.

Being involved with the Hangi was really nice because I used to dig them all of the time in Okains bay but we never dug them with shovels we used a digger. Because the hole had to be so big because we had to feed the entire community. So it had to be like 2 meters deep and like 4 meters wide and custom baskets to fit all of the kai in them and so doing this hangi was way different to what I was used to doing it. But it was better than the others because we got to use shovels and our hands to dig the hole. It was really nice seeing the family’s faces when they were eating the kai because they were happy. All of the work that we put into making that hangi to have all of the family’s really like it was nice and made me feel good.