A far cry from utopia

This is a new weekly column by journalist-at-large Rachel Reeves. After three years as a staff reporter, Reeves is travelling and pursuing studies and research for a book. She will be covering a broad range of material – political issues at home, viewpoints of Cook Islanders overseas who’ve also got Raro on the mind, together her own musings and reflections. I’m just over five feet tall. My brother is 10 years my junior and has legs the length of me. People who pose for photos with me have to bend at the knees or risk looking like behemoths. At university I got a side job driving a bakery truck but I couldn’t reach its pedals, so every day I would earn my keep by shifting gears from my perch atop a precarious pile of textbooks.

This is a new weekly column by journalist-at-large Rachel Reeves. After three years as a staff reporter, Reeves is travelling and pursuing studies and research for a book. She will be covering a broad range of material – political issues at home, viewpoints of Cook Islanders overseas who’ve also got Raro on the mind, together her own musings and reflections. I’m just over five feet tall. My brother is 10 years my junior and has legs the length of me. People who pose for photos with me have to bend at the knees or risk looking like behemoths. At university I got a side job driving a bakery truck but I couldn’t reach its pedals, so every day I would earn my keep by shifting gears from my perch atop a precarious pile of textbooks.