A Tongan Thanksgiving

Another year, another Thanksgiving celebrated in Tonga. In an interesting twist, we celebrated on the same day as my birthday. In the US my birthday can never be on Thanksgiving as the 28^th is the latest the holiday can possibly fall on, but as we celebrated on Friday the 29^th, I was fortunate enough to enjoy my birthday by eating my fill on one of my favorite holidays with many of the friends I have made during my time here.

Hosted at Don and Norie’s, it was an international affair. Eleven of the 13 Peace Corps volunteers were able to attend, including all 6 of the new recruits. Three of the Australian volunteers attended as well, one arriving with her Dutch boyfriend and her visiting mother. Last but not least, a Japanese volunteer celebrated her first Thanksgiving with us, a 20 year old American friend of ours who lives in Vava’u came, and a Tongan girl about my age who is leaving on her Mormon mission to Idaho in a few weeks joined to finish the party.

The food was plentiful and delicious – it was as if we combined the American need to overeat on Thanksgiving with the Tongan culture of food that has inevitably rubbed off on us. We had many of the Thanksgiving staples. A turkey that we had brought from the main island, stuffing, mash potatoes, and cranberry sauce. We even added our own twist to the staples with spaghetti and meat sauce, salads, green beans, latkes, pumpkin soup, vegetable fried rice that I had made and so much more. As tradition would have it, I ate way too much of the food, especially the turkey which I hadn’t eaten since last years Thanksgiving, and was absolutely stuffed.

We didn’t say what each of us was thankful for but it still felt like a true Thanksgiving. Just with a Tongan twist. One of the volunteers even made place cards with each of our names on them. Due to the heat and the lack of space, we laid down mats outside of the house and sat on the floor Indian style. We laughed and we joked, a bunch of people from all over the world bonded together through their lives in Vava’u. To finish the night, and in a moment that surprised and deeply touched me, Norie, who is an amazing cook and baker, brought out a chocolate cake for me with 24 written in candles. Not expecting such a celebration, I was profoundly happy and thankful for the new friends I have made in Vava’u and their ability to surprise me even after all this time.

Now, in a short list, here are some of the things I am thankful for:

1.     The incredible way Tongans say goodbye. When you say bye to a person you say their name then shout eeehhhhh!!!! Afterwards. They reply with io but it sounds more like yyyoooo!!! And then they do the same for you. It goes something like this. Sifa eeeeehhhhh!!!!!! YOOOOOOO!!!! Soni eeeehhhh!!!!! YOOOOOO!!!! It is spectacular and I am totally bringing it back to America.

2.    The ease and safety of hitch hiking – it makes not having a car no problem and I meet someone new every week

3.    The Tongan use of umbrellas – always as shade in the sun but never in the rain

4.    Living in a tropical paradise

5.    Continuously seeing the phrase “twerk” online, but being blissfully ignorant of the dance move as the internet is too slow to download youtube videos

6.    Roast pig severed over a skewer

7.    Tongan generosity, my school, and the three villages I reside in

8.    All of my friends and family back home who have supported me so much since the moment I left for Tonga

In others news, this week was our school graduation. As is the Tongan custom, many of the parents attended the ceremony that included a short prayer, a welcome speech by the principal, and the lining up of the kids from the best performing student to the worst in each class. I was hoping we would just announce the best student, but in the end we decided to reveal their exact class placements. As the kids’ names were called, parents would come up and tuck dollar bills into their shirts or place a necklace made of candy over their heads, a Tongan staple. It was a somewhat brief and anticlimactic finish to the school year, but I did feel a sense of pride watching my students complete my first year of school.

Also, this will be my last post until possibly mid-January. Next week, Monday through Thursday, will be Camp GLOW and GROW. The next day on Friday I am flying to the United States. When I return to Tonga in January and after I attend a training on the main island, I promise to write about what I hope will be the success of the camps and anything else interesting that had since happened to me.

Thanks for reading and see you all in America soon.

The birthday cake

Thanksgiving Tongan style

Take Two

I am now entering an interesting time in my Peace Corps Service. Though I have long since passed the one-year mark – 15 months next week – things are finally starting to repeat themselves. Last year, I spent my first two months in training living with a home stay family, and did not arrive in Vava’u until mid-November. When I arrived here last year, unsure of what I was doing and slightly overwhelmed, the class 6 exam was long over and an incredibly relaxed atmosphere had enveloped the school. School was finished by lunchtime. The teachers and I sat around getting to know each other, while the kids played cards and patiently passed the time until they had to practice their cultural dance at the end of the day. There was a definite pattern. It was unstressfully chaotic with kids flying left and right and teachers not caring less, but it was also my indoctrination, my welcome if you will, into my future life as a primary school teacher in Tonga.

One year later, I am right back where I started. The class 6 exam is over. While school has been much more structured than last year, and the kids do not practice their cultural dance nearly as much as we are doing the same dance as the year before, the similarities remain blatant. This sense of déjà vu was particularly strong last week during our regional Tongan Culture day. Last Wednesday, the four schools of the East Region came together to show off the dances they have been practicing for months in front of the Ministry of Education officials, the teachers, and many of the parents.

The Tongan Culture Day last year was the first significant Tongan event I had ever participated in. Helping my kids prepare for their dance last year, I inevitably stuck out as the only non-Tongan in a sea of Tongans. My Tongan was much weaker then and I was still so new that I couldn’t yet tell who was from my village and who wasn’t – an extremely important distinction in a country where knowing where someone lives matter more than knowing their last names. While daunting might be too strong of a description, I was definitely alone at the event in a very literal way.

This year could not be more different. I, after countless regional events, know all of the parents from each of the villages and most of the kids as well. My Tongan has gotten to the point where I no longer embarrass myself. And, this time I wasn’t alone. A newly arrived volunteer now works at one of the schools in my region, making me stick out slightly less, and provide someone to speak English with occasionally and for me to pass on the little advice and understanding I had to offer.

Well, now that’s enough about me. Back to the kids! Back to Tongan Culture Day!

The school was decorated for the event. Flowers were everywhere. Leaves were plucked to wrap around the pillars supporting the school. The children were at their most adorable, wearing traditional Tongan clothes over their school uniforms. The parents’ spread mats everywhere they could find shade – under a tree, behind a water tank, next to a bus, and in front of the school. The kids were ready to perform.

The scene was set. For the next hour four schools, including my own performed their dances. While not as varied as last year’s, when one school dressed their boys in lime green wigs and women’s clothes, the students performed very well. They danced gracefully as the girls performed the ta’ulunga and the boys grappled with fake wooden spears. The teachers and the parents stood behind the dancers, singing the back up music and banging on their “drums.” And of course, adults walked around stuffing small dollar bills into the students’ clothes as a gesture of support and praise for the performance.

As my words cannot accurately portray the dancing or bring to life the actions of the precocious children, I have posted photos below. As always, thank you for reading and I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!

GPS Koloa

Placing money in the shirts of the performers

My students after they finished their dance

GPS H'alaufuli

The Lu Cook Off

For those of you who are a bit tired of my lu centric posts, I apologize, but with school winding down and Camp GLOW & GROW ramping up, lu has played an outsized role in my last few weeks. Those of you who did enjoy my previous post on cooking lu at school hopefully will continue to do so. This post, however, is not about a cultural experience, but rather a fun little contest among the Peace Cops Volunteers.

For the last several years the volunteers up in Vava’u have hosted a lu cook off with the winner walking away with a small trophy. Though we failed to hold the competition last year, we decided we could not make that mistake again and so last Saturday the newest and greatest Peace Corps cooking rivalry in Vava’u was hosted at Don and Norie’s, the American Baha’i couple who generously let us use their house.

There were five competitors including myself. The rules were simple. Everyone had to use the traditional lu ingredients – lu leaves, coconut milk, and onions – but beyond that the goal was to make the best tasting lu imaginable. Any ingredient that you could come up with and that you thought would add to a winning dish was admissible.

With the goal of winning on all of our minds, we spent the morning shopping for ingredients before arriving at the house at 2 pm to begin cooking. Everyone tried to maintain the surprise, as each of us made our food in separate corners of the house before walking over to Neru’s house, a Samoan friend of ours, to wrap the food in the lu leaves, to cover the entire dish in banana leaves to help cook the food and protect it, and to throw the meal in the underground oven.

An hour later the lu was finished, a dining arrangement was set up on the floor of the house, and the lu was spread out for the judges to taste. Each dish was varied. I, with my incredible culinary talent, kept things simple and made lu sipi (lu with lamb), as lamb works incredibly with lu and is by far my favorite meat for this dish. To top it off I added some tomatoes, green peppers, and cucumber to toss in a little more flavor. Another volunteer made a pseudo stir-fry in their lu, combining rice, vegetables, chicken, and chili sauce culminating in an intriguing blend of lu and curry. The third volunteer decided to eliminate meat, a risky and very un-Tongan venture I assure you, and added soy sauce and eggplant to the coconut milk and leaves to make a surprisingly spicy and tasty dish.

Our volunteer leader molded minced beef into seasoned meatballs and threw them into his lu, creating a hamburger with leaves as buns rather than bread. And finally our last competitors made an interesting coconut and chicken stew to top everything off. The judges tasted each of the food and quietly deliberated. As the judges were pondering their heavy burden, the rest of us passed around the abundance of food and ate potluck style.

Once everyone was served. Don and Norie announced their judgment. The winner and champion of the Lu Cook Off 2013 was the eggplant and soy sauce lu, but there was a surprise. In an upset for the ages, and much to the chagrin of the other competitors, my lu came in second place with Don even revealing to me later that if he was judging by himself I may have won. Assuredly, no one was more surprised than I was – I pass along all credit to the lamb rather than myself – but I have to admit I will certainly enjoy my bragging rights for a few weeks at least.

All of the lu tasted pretty good, and it was really fun to take something that is so undeniably Tongan and add a little of our own personal and American flair to it. As an added bonus, several of the new Peace Corps volunteers were able to attend the cook off, giving us a chance to get to know them better. Several days before the cook off, 6 new female volunteers arrived in Vava’u for the first time to begin their service after two months of training on the main island. It has been fascinating meeting the new volunteers, as it seems like one giant flashback. Every question they ask, all of their obvious nervousness, reminds me of what I was like just one year ago, and has allowed me to realize how far I have come during my time in Tonga.

Thank you all for reading. I foolishly forgot to take pictures during the cook off – I am hoping to retrieve a few photos from another volunteer – but I have uploaded some more photos from the day we made lu at school. Hope you all enjoy.

preparing the leaves

the whole process

Crushing the coconut into milk

placing the lu in the umu

Counselor Bonding

Slowly but steadily progress on Camp GLOW & GROW is moving along. Our schedule and curriculum have been finalized. Speakers have been approached to lead sessions ranging from healthy life styles to family planning to environmental awareness to women’s rights and domestic violence. A catering contract has been created and signed. The campers, the essential part of the program, are signed up, and we expect a good showing for our parents meeting tomorrow. And, as pertains to this blog post, our counselors have been chosen.

We – volunteers – like to immodestly and optimistically proclaim many inspirational and profound lessons that will emerge from Camp GLOW & GROW, but one of the less discussed anticipated impacts of the camp centers on the counselors. Though the main subject of the camp are the campers, the Form 3 boys and girls, the aim is also for the counselors to learn the same information as the campers from the speakers who come, while simultaneously improving their leadership skills by being responsible for the campers and leading sessions themselves. The goal is very much to instill confidence in our counselors so that they understand that they have the ability to accomplish anything they desire.

For the girls finding counselors was easy. Each of the female staff has long been a part of Camp GLOW, either as a former camper or counselor. They are all old pros of the camp, and observing the enjoyment they receive from helping and their clear appreciation for Glow’s goals has been one of the most gratifying parts of my work so far. Since the boys camp is new, there were no former counselors to fall back on and we instead chose 4 boys – two 19 year olds, and 18 year old senior in high school, and a 16 year old sophomore in high school – who we know and whom we believe exemplify the attributes we want in our counselors. We had our first meeting 2 weeks ago to explain to them their duties and go over the schedule, but the real fun, and in some ways the true start to the camp began last week.

Last Saturday, an American couple who owns a sail boat that they run charters off of graciously offered to take us and our counselors on a day sail, free of charge, as a fun way to bond before the beginning of the camp. We were only too happy to accept the incredibly generous offer, so at 9:30 in the morning 4 Peace Corps Volunteers, 4 Camp Glow counselors, and 4 Camp Grow counselors embarked. Our goals were two fold: to instruct the counselors in greater detail about their responsibilities and to have fun.

I won’t bore you with all the nitty gritty details, but will instead state what we did broadly to show everyone reading and those who were so amazing as to contribute to the camp where your money will soon be going. Lead by Yamiha, an amazing Tongan counselor in her early 20’s who has been part of Camp Glow for its entire 4 year history in Vava’u, we went through the schedule with the counselors to explain what their duties would be and what the camp would look like. Speaking better Tongan than any of us could ever hope to achieve, Yamiha made everything click for our counselors.

The rest of the morning was spent sailing to one of the islands, enjoying a little swimming in the beautiful waters to get refreshed from the hot Pacific sun, and then back to work. The next part of the meeting was to teach the counselors little games or “energizers” that they would play with the campers at various times to keep them engaged. Anyone who has attended a camp or worked for a business with a particularly conscientious HR department would recognize these games. One of the games, called kwa (said as if you were a ninja), consists of everyone standing in a circle, while one person points to someone yelling kwa, who then raises his hands in air saying kwa, while the two people next to him pretend to slice him in the stomach while also saying kwa, and this keeps going until someone makes a mistake. It is incredibly silly, but everyone always laughs and enjoys the game, and it is an easy way to break the ice or rejuvenate yourself after a long day.

The last part of business, other than swimming, snorkeling, and enjoying some fantastic American food (PESTO!) was explaining the bridge model. The bridge model, an essential part of Camp Glow and one that we have adopted for Camp Grow, defines the critical thinking and decision-making sessions of the camps that we believe are so vital for both the campers and the counselors leading the sessions. The bridge model consists of two islands, the ocean, and a bridge drawn on a piece of paper. The first island stands for where they are now, such as High School students, inhabitants of Vava’u, sons and daughters. The second island represents where they want to be in the future, such as high school graduates, teachers, doctors, good husbands and wives. The water signifies all the potential dangers that could stop them from reaching these goals, like illness, unwanted pregnancy, drugs, and alcohol. Finally, the bridge encompasses how the students will navigate these potential risks through concepts such as good decision making, studying, and hanging out with good role models. The bridge model represents the core of the camp experience, and this description is expanded throughout the four days. The counselors seem to really understand this concept, and are eager to teach it themselves next month.

The rest of day was spent talking and playing a few other energizer games. It was a truly amazing day. We were able to spend some quality time with our counselors, get to know each other better, and learn a little bit in the process. It was one of the best days I have had as a volunteer, as it combined a fun experience with work that I am truly passionate about, and I cannot express my gratitude enough to the American couple who took us out on their boat. It was an amazing offer and a great day.

Thank you all for reading. Before I get to the pictures, I wanted to state that for those of you who read last weeks post about rugby, my school region won the rugby tournament. You can see a photo of the winning team below. As for the other pictures below, they were taken by Mandy, another volunteer, with her terrific camera skills and her great camera. Thanks to her for sharing these with me and please enjoy them.

The Camp GROW Counselors

Discussing the bridge model in the shade

playing one of the energizers 

The winning rugby team and the 2nd place net ball team!

         

Camp Grow & Glow Staff 2013

Akapulu (Rugby)

Two events dominate the post-exam school life, the Class 6 & 5 boys’ rugby tournament and Tongan Culture Day at the end of November. The rugby event is the subject of conversation for the entire year for both the teachers and the students, especially the boys. From my first months working as a teacher back in February and March I remember eager students constantly alerting me to the fact that October and November was ruby time not class time. I have repeatedly been told that my region won last year, but in the highly scientific poll that I have conducted the past few weeks, every student and teacher from every school has assured me vehemently that they won the rugby tournament last year. Oh well, that is life in Tonga for you. Some of you may remember the track and field events I coached a few months ago, and Sports Day was certainly a larger event in terms of my contributions, the number of student participants, and family attendance, but for the few boys who make the regional team, rugby is as good as the school year gets.

First we trained at school. The older boys would line up practicing scrums (the play consisting of jumping on both your teammates and opponents after a tackle to attempt to retain possession of the ball), their backward passes, their tackling technique, and of course, their speed and shiftiness on offense. The practices were highly chaotic and far from a learning experience, but the kids loved it because they knew it was just the beginning.

My school is far too small to host its own rugby team, which has 15 members per side. We only have 7 Class 6 boys and 6 Class 5 boys, so even combined we could not support a full team. Luckily, like with sports day, the rugby competition is regional and we are Vahe Hahake #1 (East Region #1). Every afternoon for the past few weeks, Paea and sometimes I have taken the kids to the much larger and nearby school of GPS Ha’alaufuli to team up with their kids and the students of GPS Tu’anekivale. We would bring our Class 6 and 5 boys, throw them out onto the field, watch them smash into each other, and offer a few strategic tips and pieces of advice. Unlike with the track and field, I am pretty useless as a rugby coach and most of my time has been spent working as a cheerleader and a one trick pony of telling the kids to hit their opponents low rather than grabbing their necks during the tackles.

Over several weeks, we finally put a team together consisting mostly of Ha’alaufuli boys, a few kids from Tu’aneikivale, and my two largest Class 6 students, with several of my kids on the bench. Last Friday, the rugby competition began, consisting of 6 school regions. Our first match was against the Western region, home to one of the married Peace Corps volunteers, and we triumphed over them by scoring one try (a touchdown in rugby speak) and by shutting out the west – they were scoreless. We then played the northern district, again composing of a Peace Corps school, and manhandled them to assure our team a place in the semifinals tomorrow. I would love to tell you that the rugby was exciting, but I would be lying. Rugby is not a particularly enjoyable spectator sport, at least from this one American’s perspective, who does admittedly enjoy playing it, but it’s always fun to see a win and the teachers and students were happy. So…bring on the Semis!

And, speaking of rugby, the World Cup Rugby League is currently underway in England, but of course you know that. Tonga is one of the teams playing in the tournament and every match they play is watched by every single Tongan throughout the Kingdom. Parents and kids stay home. People bring tvs to their place of work. It is a major event. Last week, I went into town to attend a meeting for Camp Grow at one of the high schools, and when I arrived on time the principal asked me if we could wait for the rugby match to end before meeting. Tonga was playing Scotland, and I was happy to oblige as I walked into a room of dozens of students to watch the game with them on their large plasma flat screen tv, or, I mean a small tv with a large antenna sticking out of it.

Watching the Tongans reactions to the game was absolutely hilarious. There were shouts, cries of cheating, laughter, and enough anguish to make a fan of any team proud. The favored Tongans played poorly all match, only to make a stunning comeback to retake the lead with the time running down, but ultimately lost when Scotland scored in the last few minutes. According to my sources this was an upset and the Tongans will need some luck to reach the next round. The Tongan team has since beat the Cook Island team, as the Americans also did last week (USA! USA! USA!), but according to the coconut wireless (Tongan gossip) the Tongans are not playing very well because they have not been paid recently, and the people in Tonga are constantly calling the players’ parents to tell them to make their sons play better. If only I could do the same for the Heat!

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this rugby filled post and the pictures below. Have a great weekend!

The scrum - We are in orange

The out of bounds play

Net ball, which occurred at the same time as the rugby tournament, is even less exciting than rugby

Tonga vs Scotland

Kai Umu

With the Class 6 exam in our rearview mirror, the teachers and I have had some opportunities to be a little more creative with what we do with our time at school. Last week, Paea and I decided to spend the first two days of school building an umu (underground oven) and making the traditional Tongan meal of lu with our Class 6 and 5 students. Lu, for those of you who do not remember from previous posts, is named for the lu leaves that constitute the most important aspect of the meal. The leaves are spread out, and meat, such as fish, chicken, beef, lamb, and canned beef/fish, onions, salt, and juice from the coconut meat are placed on top of the leaves. Other ingredients, especially other vegetables, can be added to this recipe but lu, onions, meat, salt, and coconut milk are the meal’s true staples. The food is encased in the lu leaves, and then wrapped traditionally in banana leaves or more recently aluminum foil, and placed inside the oven for about two hours to cook.

The first day was all about preparation. The boys hopped over the fence in the back of the school compound to scrounge for the materials we needed, while the girls were content to laugh and watch how hard the boys were working. The first task was to find firewood. The 10 and 11 year old boys, who are so adept in the bush with a machete as they have been working in the bush since they were old enough to walk, made quick work of the nearby trees and threw the wood we needed over the fence onto the school. They then looked for the rocks that would be burned in the umu to bake the food.

After this the boys got a little creative. Apparently, the church minister of one of the villages taught the kids how to make a chicken trap. With surprising skill and dexterity, the boys built a pressure sensitive trap that would hopefully snare a chicken by the leg with a rope and leave it dangling upside down. I asked Paea if this was ok, as even though the chickens are in the bush and are not fenced in, they are not wild animals and someone does own them. He looked at me, shrugged, and said in a voice that left much doubt to his statement’s veracity that, “People don’t really care about a chicken or two. They only get mad if you steal a pig.” Neither of us really bought that, but a funny conversation did ensue between Paea and Soeli, the leader of the students designing the trap.

(All in Tongan)

Paea: What are you doing?

Soeli: Catching chickens

Paea: What chickens?

Soeli: We’re stealing them!

Paea: For who?

Soeli: For Soni!!!! (That’s me).

Somewhat luckily we did not catch any chickens, so no one was mad at me for apparently being the ringleader of a bunch of chicken thieves.

Once the kids were done collecting the rocks and the wood, climbing up trees to retrieve coconuts, and finished building the traps, they hopped back over the fence. All that was left for the day was to dig a whole in the ground that would serve as our umu – about 4 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 4 feet deep – and chop up the wood for the next day.

Tuesday was more fun. The teachers and the kids brought chicken – legally bought or raised – lu leaves, onions, canned fish, bread fruit, and kape (a Tongan root crop that I do not know the English equivalent for). The first step was to prepare the meat – pluck off the wings, remove the entrails and other organs, and wash off the blood – before placing the food on top of the lu leaves next to the cut up onions. Several of the boys were in charge of husking the coconuts, scraping off the meat, and then twisting the meat to get to the milk of the coconut. A few of the girls and the boys cut the cans of the fish in half to use the raggedy edges to scrape off the outside of the mei (bread fruit) to prepare for it to be baked. Our strongest boy, Lili, used a machete to peel the kape – somewhat similarly to how you peel a potato just on a larger scale – before tossing it into the oven.

Once these steps were finished, the students with the help of my principal Selu, poured some of the coconut milk onto the lu, which provides the food with most of its flavor. The lu was wrapped around the food, which was then in turn wrapped within tin foil. Finally, everything was ready to be baked. While all of this was happening, a fire was raging in our umu, as the wood was used to heat up the rocks. Once the fire was done, the rocks were shifted around, and then the lu, mei, and kape are spread over the rocks to bake. After the food is securely in place, the kids covered the food with a sheet to protect it and keep it clean, and then poured heaps of dirt on top of the sheet to trap all of the heat within the oven to cook the food faster.

Two hours later, the food was ready. Almost too hot to grab out of the umu, and then way too hot to eat with my fingers due to the absence of silverware, the students, teachers, and I sat upon banana leaves in a circle for a lu picnic. After the mandatory prayer, we dug in. While not the best lu I have ever eaten, the food was surprisingly good and it was a lot of fun to eat as a school after putting so much labor into the project. I still marvel at how efficient and skilled these kids are in every aspect of the kai umu (eating food from an underground oven) – using a machete, preparing meat, starting a fire, retrieving and husking coconuts, etc – and how different their lives are than how mine was growing up. It was an absolutely fascinating experience to see them do something that is such an integral part of their lives, but was never even part of my consciousness before I arrived in Tonga.

Thank you all for reading. I took way too many photos over these two days, so I have posted a few of them below and will upload the rest over the next few posts. Happy Halloween!

Maria (left) and Lose (right) scraping off the outer layer of the breadfruit

Sosefina, Paea, and Soana preparing the lu leaves

My principal Selu helping two of the girls pour the coconut milk onto the food to provide flavoring

Finished! Enjoying our lu picnic

Birthdays

Even with the risk of revealing myself as a bit of a nerd – I am – birthdays in Tonga have an undeniable Middle Earth feel to them. For those of you who are familiar with the Lord of the Rings novels and movies, I am of course speaking of J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythical world, Middle Earth, and specifically his hobbits that inhabit it. In Middle Earth, hobbits do not celebrate their birthdays like we do in real life. Rather than receive gifts on their birthdays, Hobbits in fact give them away. The anniversary of your birth is less a celebration of self but instead an acknowledgement of a communal achievement.

Birthdays are much the same in Tonga. People rarely mention when their birthdays are and almost never do anything to celebrate the day. A few months ago, I was trying to teach my students the meaning of date of birth during a particular unit, and several of them could not even tell me what day they were born. The closest they could get was the month and the year. It just wasn’t a big deal for them.

One thing the Wesleyan Church in my village does, and I have learned from the other volunteers that this is unique, is acknowledge birthdays. Each Sunday at the 10 O’clock service, the minister calls up everyone who had a birthday that week. The entire congregation then commences to sing happy birthday in English, and even adds an extra stanza of happy long life at the end. I still have no idea why we sing in English, as most of the people in the village can’t speak more than a few words of English and no other part of the service is conducted in English, but this happens every week. I must suppose than that even Tongans understand the greatness of the happy birthday song.

A perfect example of how Tongans handle birthdays is evidenced by my neighbor’s actions. My neighbor, Mana, has 3 kids, all of whom have birthdays around the month of August. At great personal expense and rather than simply buying his kids gifts, Mana hosts a feast every year in honor of his children and invites the entire village. The feat is the same as always, except every single piece of food was paid for and made by his family. In Tonga, this is a relatively obvious thing to do. There is no reason to have a party or elevate a single individual, and instead Tongans would rather celebrate with their entire community. The self is much less important than the group.

Thank you for reading and please enjoy the photos.

posing in the garden

The morning tooth brushing