HOW TO SPEAK 15 Hawaiian
Aloha
LIKE A PAIR OF FLUTTERING BIRDS, Maile Napoleon’s delicate, 78-year-old hands never stop moving. I’m sitting with her at a food court table in Waimea, an upland farming and ranching community on the Big Island, surrounded by green hills in paniolo (Hawaiian cowboy) country. Maile is chatting – “talking story”, in the patois of the islands – while her nimble fingers continually inter-weave blossoms with strands of dried raffia to create a woman’s head lei.
This master lei-maker is known as Aunty Maile in the Hawaiian way of addressing even your unrelated elders as aunty or uncle, and she is teaching me how to make a lei. But without realising it, she’s also schooling me in the meaning of aloha,theubiquitous
