The Road Less Traveled : What I'm Doing

8 months in, I believe it is finally a good time to fully explain what I am doing as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga. Yes, I know I have mentioned that I am a teacher at a primary school, but now I hope to provide a little bit more information regarding my work, and actually prove that within the adventures of this blog lies a somewhat productive teacher/volunteer/palangi.

To reiterate my primary assignment – speaking in Peace Corps terminology (every government agency loves their acronyms and titles, Peace Corps being no exception) – is teaching English in a primary school. I teach all of the school’s English, and am responsible for making sure the hopefully graduating Class 6 students do well enough on the English section of their final exams to move on to the next level.

Within the school, I also play several odd roles, taking care of the positions that otherwise may fall through the cracks. One of these roles, quite simply, is being a male version of the Tooth Fairy, albeit with far less money.

Within Tonga, the ministry of health runs the Malimali (smile) program. In its simplest form, a Japanese (JYCA) volunteer and a Tongan hygienist visit my school once a week to brush the kids teeth, but they are unable to provide extra toothbrushes or toothpaste to the school. To fill this void, my counterpart Paea and I have been able to acquire toothpaste and brushes from the Red Cross, and I brush the kids teeth every morning before school starts. It is actually pretty fun, and as you can see in the pictures below the toothpaste gets all over the kids’ faces. With a few exceptions, the days I brush their teeth at school are the only times of the week their teeth get cleaned.

In the village, my town officer asked me to teach a night class to the older youth. The village was donated 3 computers in January, and he wanted me to teach English and computer classes to the middle and high school students. Hoping to make good on their investment in me, I of course agreed. Havea announced the beginning of the night classes to the community in church, and the parents all promised to send their kids.

As tends to happen in Tonga, what was supposed to happen did not. Instead of sending their older kids, the parents sent their primary school children, happy to acquire an unexpected break. The older kids, inevitably, rarely came, if they showed up at all. After weeks of fighting the onslaught of children, I decided to run with this new program and now one of my night classes is aimed for the primary students while the other is geared for my invisible high school students.

Now, I finally get to the point of my post. With the hope of putting an emphasis on my service in Tonga and contribute something I believe will be meaningful and lasting, I have been working on developing a boys camp – named Camp Grow, Guys Reshaping Our World by your humble narrator – to run parallel to the internationally renowned Camp Glow – Girls Leading Our World. Camp Glow is run by pcvs all over the world and focuses on the empowerment of women.

I, along with several other volunteers, am helping to organize Camp Glow and am in the process of developing Camp Grow. Shameless plug alert! due to changes within Peace Corps, it is now much harder to request donations to fund projects, something I had already hoped to have accomplished by now. As such, we are currently in the process of partnering with a Tongan organization or forming a committee of influential Tongans to take ownership of the projects and hopefully ensure the camps’ sustainability. To conclude, in the event this is successful, I will be posting a link on this blog in the next few weeks, where people can send donations to help us run the girl’s camp this year and usher in the inaugural boy’s camp. I will provide more information when the link is ready, but I am hoping that a shameless plug with a little bit of warning is somewhat less shameless.

The above, for the most part, is my life in Tonga. I hope you found this somewhat interesting, as I figured I should actually reveal to the masses that I don’t only attend picnics, eat feasts, travel to islands, and go camping. I am, however, hoping to do some island hopping in the next few weeks – I didn’t say I never do those things - and can only hope to return with a fresh breath of tales and adventures.

Thanks for reading!