Mix & Mingle

If you’re seeking community spirit, find the places where people play.

Where they dance together, exercise together, shoot hoops, sing, paint, roller skate, march, meditate, stretch, kick a ball, whack a shuttlecock, learn to cook, make music, and laugh – out loud and together, all at once, for no reason.

These pockets of play are everywhere. They are in your neighbourhood.

You will find them tucked away on the edge of your local park, or front and centre on the main street, right at the heart of where your suburb hums.

All across this rapidly growing city of ours, from Pāpāmoa in the east, to Welcome Bay, across to Tauriko, over to Bethlehem, and everywhere in between – including Mount Maunganui and Greerton, Matua and downtown Tauranga – you will find community halls and centres full of people playing.

This includes the very youngest of people, tiny humans, who might discover the sheer joy of smearing brightly-coloured slime all over their clothes and smiling faces.

This also includes joy-seekers with many more years under their belt, who have long since opted for brightly-coloured tiles instead.

But let’s start in town, on a Thursday evening, with the sun setting and cars pulling up to Elizabeth Street Community & Arts Centre in time for a 5.30pm ura class.

Ura is traditional Cook Islands dancing and Ngaire Utanga says her weekly class is “all about the fitness”.

“I’m getting women out here who are too shy to go to the gym and want to try something new,” she says.

“It’s fast tempo, medium tempo, and slow tempo movements and it goes for an hour.”

By the looks of it, it’s also a lot of fun.

The class works up a sweat to a fast-paced mix of music and drumming, their hips, legs, and arms moving to the beat, their pareu (sarong) creating a blur of orange, yellow, blue, green and red.

The women are full of smiles and laughter, when they finally catch their breath.

Ngaire has been running her ura class, which also features Tahitian dance styles, for just over a year and says she started with about 10 dancers and now has close to 30 regulars.

“I’m just really proud of them, they’ve come a long way over a year and a lot of them, when they first started, couldn’t even move. They were just so stiff. Now they’re so flexible, they’re so happy, and they leave here feeling excited because this form of fitness is totally different.”

Ngaire says the ura class has also created a “sense of community” and has attracted a diverse group of people, “from the Pacific, Europeans, all over”.

There is also a good mix of ages, from high school students all the way up to a woman in her 60s.

“I’m pretty excited. A lot of the participants are from Polynesian backgrounds and a lot of them are coming here to learn the dance, learn the Cook Islands culture through the form of dancing.”

The next morning, on the other side of the city, more play beckons.

Young mums and dads and their babies are arriving at Papamoa Community Centre ready to make a mess.

Nine-month-old Luca Tomlinson is particularly enjoying the green slime made from cooked couscous and natural food thickener.

He’s sitting in the slime, playing with a toy donkey, and the green mush is everywhere – in between his fingers and toes, all over his pants and top, around his mouth.

At one point, when he looks up, a big wide smile on his face, you can see a single green drop on the tip of his nose.

“Thrive gives me a chance to bond with Luca through messy play, without the set up or clean up,” mum Laura says, herself wearing a bit of slime.

“It also offers Luca and I experiences that we just don’t have the resources for at home. He absolutely loves it and so do I.”

Thrive Sensory is the brainchild of Georgia Murray, a trained children’s social worker who specialises in sensory processing – how our bodies receive, interpret and respond to sensory input.

She started the business last year after having her first child. Georgia wanted to create a place where parents could connect with others and do fun activities with their kids that they might not do at home.

Each Thrive Sensory session has six different stations, introducing babies to new colours and textures (both dry and wet). All of the stations are “taste safe” and the final activity is a warm bath in a bucket, meaning the mess doesn’t make it home.

Georgia runs sessions at Papamoa Community Centre, Papamoa Sports & Recreation Centre, Waipuna Park Pavilion in Welcome Bay, and Bethlehem Hall. The sessions are selling out.

She also has a slightly more structured “sensory adventures” class for toddlers.

“We’ve had people who have stuck with us from day one and that’s been awesome – seeing their little ones grow and how they interact differently at each age and stage,” Georgia says.

“Parents just keep coming back for more, they see the benefit of it but they don’t want the mess at their house, so they’re like, let’s come here, and it’s more fun doing it with other people, connecting with other families and babies connecting as well; interacting rather than just at home on their own.”

It’s now almost lunchtime and it’s Friday, which means Marlin Friendship Mahjong will be starting soon at Arataki Community Centre in Mount Maunganui.

The group meets once a week to play the game of tiles and they are already sitting at their tables when I walk in.

The two longest-serving members, Betty Watts, 86, and Barbara Lagan, 85, have been involved from the very beginning – 26 years ago.

When asked what brings them along each week, Betty responds quickly with a definitive answer.

 “The company.”

They play mahjong together for about three and a half hours each Friday afternoon in a quiet, light-filled room, with a break for coffee and maybe a piece of cake. What is it about this game specifically?

“It makes you think,” Betty says.

Gill Bagnall, 75, sitting across from her, agrees.

“It keeps the brain going and at my age that’s terribly, terribly important.”

Another group making the most of Tauranga’s community halls and centres is Recreate NZ, an organisation creating life-changing experiences for young people with intellectual disabilities through social, recreational, and educational programmes.

Recreate NZ has had social sports days at Welcome Bay Hall and Queen Elizabeth Youth Centre, and a MasterChef Challenge event at Papamoa Sports & Recreation Centre.

Its community work experience and volunteering group, MOXIE, has also been visiting some of the venues and lending a hand, including helping out at the Arataki Community Meal at Arataki Community Centre.

“We love connecting with our wider community and getting out and about, and these facilities provide us with the opportunity to do so,” Bay of Plenty Programme Coordinator Fleur van Lieshout says.

And so there you go. If you’re seeking community connection – community spirit – you just need to wander down to one of these places where people are playing.

You will find salsa dancing and belly dancing, yoga and Zumba, table tennis, indoor bowls, country music, accordion music, ballet, drama, arts and crafts, gardening, the LOL Laughter Club, and just about every other hobby, class, group, club or activity imaginable.

There is a community hall or centre waiting for you just around the corner.