Southland educator Lester Dean has been awarded the Queens Service Media for services to the Pacific Community.

Lester Dean was a primary school principal between 1990 – 2006. 

Since leaving his education career, he has been involved with the Pacific Trust Otago in Dunedin and the Pacific Island Advisory and Cultural Trust as a manager and chief executive.

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Mr Dean said he felt a little overwhelmed when he learned he was receiving the award.

“It was unexpected. I guess it is not the sort of thing you think about when you are working,” Mr Dean said.

“I have no idea who nominated me.”

The award was not about him, he said.

“It is about the community I have worked with in Dunedin and Invercargill . . . I am not the first one to do this stuff. We are here. We do the best we can.

"It is about the elders and the younger generation, the education."

Mr Dean was born in Rarotonga and speaks Rarotongan Te Reo, the Cook Island language that is so very similar to Maori Te Reo. 

He migrated to New Zealand at the end of 1967 to pursue education and career opportunities, and has mostly lived in the south since then.

Schools he has worked at include Kew School and New River Primary.

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After leaving education in 2006, he worked in the community until 2010, when he was appointed to manage Pacific Trust Otago, in Dunedin, for six months. 

He followed that up with a four year stint at the Pacific Advisory Trust in Invercargill, before accepting another appointment at the Pacific Trust Otago and commuting to Dunedin regularly from Invercargill until his retirement in June.

“I am proud of raising the profile of Pasifika people. We live in a different country. We are all immigrants. Fitting into the New Zealand context is challenging. Making people understand they can be part of the New Zealand community and have a place in the community, it takes a lot of work. We are focusing on getting young people to understand they can achieve and on getting the first generation to understand they do have a place [here],” Mr Dean said.

People from Rarotonga and Niue were part of the Realm of New Zealand and were therefore New Zealanders, but other Pasifika nations felt they had to fight more to be accepted, he said.

After so long living in New Zealand Mr Dean has no doubt where he belongs.

“I am a Southlander, although I don’t have a drawl. But home will always be Rarotonga in the heart,” he said.

This year, Covid-19 had created challenges and put a stop to home visits to Rarotonga but it was important to continue to maintain connections and slow to down, he said.

The opportunities for Pasifika people in New Zealand would be “huge” in 2021, he said.

“I think it could be a cultural or social thing, but we tend to hang back  . . . But I think there’s in a change in the younger generation. The key is education,” he said.

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Mr Dean said it was important that Pasifika people immersed themselves in their communities. 

Many had come to New Zealand with a dream, as he had, and it was time to build up the trusts so people could progress and develop a sense of ownership and belonging, he said.

Over the last decade, he has worked with eight different Pasifika communities on various projects.

One trust project is a pod-style housing development, in partnership with local businesses in Dunedin.

The goal is to create reasonably priced, quick to build container housing in a tiny house style (6m x 3m), using imported building pods from China, costing around $20,000 per unit.

However, the Covid situation has interrupted supply, Mr Dean said.

Another obstacle was finding land for the housing project.

On the positive side, the project was still going and still being supported by businesses, he said. 

Another trust project is to build six Pasifika vaka (canoes), but Covid-19 meant it was hard to get the right materials.

Carver Papa Mata Taurarii, of the Cook Islands, has completed a vaka, which was launched earlier in December in Dunedin’s Andersons Bay.

Work continues on three other vaka for a launch in 2021.

The trust also gives scholarships to year 12 and 13 secondary school students.

Mr Dean said the scholarships would eventually be supported with funds created by the housing project.

“The whole idea is to value education by doing it ourselves. Raise the bar, show we can support our young people. If we are saying education is important, we have to show that,” Mr Dean said.

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Mr Dean said since retiring for a second time, he has “discovered a new world’’, spending more time with his wife, Lynley, and their children and grandchildren.

His retirement passion project is to work with his son Jon, a digital engineer, on Reo, an on-line, video-based, language resource that teaches users to speak Rarotongan language fluently.

“We are using the skills of native speakers, my generation and older, the last bastions of the language,” Mr Dean said.

Reo is being made on a shoestring budget but Mr Dean promises, as a former school teacher, that it will not be boring.

“It is an oral tradition. You hear it and you learn it . . . You learn phrases and build on from there. Nowhere in our system is grammar mentioned. The system links people to speakers and my son is now learning the language,” he said.

Acting, not waiting for things to be done, has always been his guiding principle in life, Mr Dean said.

“I always say, for every problem there is a solution. If you just talk about it and don’t do it, you will always be talking about it. I live by that. If people say to me, you can’t do that, I do that,” he said.