The UAE, a Mormon Feast, and an Exam

This past week was oddly eventful so I’m just going to discuss a myriad of thoughts and ideas as they come up in this post.

To start, international and foreign aid is fascinating, whether you’re from a country that gives a lot of aid (The US) or receives it (Tonga). I know there is a lot of controversy regarding how much aid is spent and where it goes, but I am not going to talk about that at this juncture. Instead, I am going to look at foreign aid through the guise of Tonga. Tonga receives significant amounts of money from New Zealand, Australia, the US, China, Japan, and formerly, the EU. The reasons New Zealand and Australia send aid to Tonga is fairly simple, as both countries receive large numbers of seasonal workers from Tonga and Tonga is relatively in their backyards. Similarly, China courts Tonga because of their UN vote and their aggressiveness in acquiring access to fisheries all over South East Asia and the South Pacific. The United States and Japan send money to help combat China’s influence, and for the latter to also gain the rights to Tonga’s fisheries. The EU, which no longer sends money to Tonga, is currently holding a climate change conference in the Cook Islands where 15 South Pacific countries are being represented. My counterpart, Paea, is there now as a representative of Vava’u. (Again, as a further disclaimer, these views are solely my own and do not reflect the views of Peace Corps or the US government.)

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is different. About a few months ago, the UAE funded and built a vast network of solar panels on the main island of Vava’u. The panels are not finished yet, but they will eventually power half of Vava’u and make electricity significantly cheaper. For a long time I was racking my brain trying to figure out why a country from the Middle East would send money to Tonga. I knew they were rich in oil and looking for foreign investments, but Tonga is not a place you expect to make money let alone a percentage return. Last week, however, my questions were answered. In the harbor, was a beautiful yacht with a massive blue sail that read Dubai EXPO 2020. I spoke to one of the boat’s employees, and apparently Dubai is one of the four cities that has a chance to hold the World’s Fair in 2020. Every country, including Tonga, has a vote, so the UAE has sent their boat to many of world’s islands, traveling through the Caribbean and the South Pacific, promising the islands projects in renewable and sustainable energy if they vote for Dubai. Clearly, Tonga happily capitulated to that demand.

Now, it’s feast time. I haven’t mentioned a feast in a while, as the feast season has been a little slow the past few months. It picked up in a big way last week, however, when the Mormon Church invited all of my village and important Mormons from the neighboring villages to fill our stomachs. The food at the feast was as plentiful as I have ever seen it, and in Tonga that is saying something. There was so much food that there was not even room for a plate for people to eat on. Trays of food were stacked on each other. To eat, you simply attacked the mountain of food like an onion, layer after layer. No plate, and to be honest, silverware was needed. I gorged on clams, pig, raw fish, chicken, fillet of fish, beef, noodles, cake, and so much more.

Though I try my best to remember proper eating etiquette, I must confess my eating has become decidedly Tongan. My hands flew from left to right, shoveling food into that hole in the center of my face. Forks were a nuisance, not a tool. I drove my hand into the pig like the bad guy in the second Indiana Jones movie, ripping a man’s heart out with his bare hand. To give myself credit, however, I was probably the only person using my napkin. So…you win some, you lose some.

After the feast, the Tongans moved as fast as you will ever see a Tongan move to snag the leftovers, of which there were plenty. I’ve gotten better at asserting myself into the leftover mix – meaning I no longer wait for someone to make me a plate and try to grab a little of what I like – but I still have a ways to go in this regard and I was hopelessly outweighed if any struggle ensued. I did however, after asking permission, grab a massive crab that made for a delicious dinner the next night.

As I mentioned early, my counterpart and class 6 and 5 teacher, Paea, is currently in the Cook Islands, so I taught his class all week. This is certainly challenging, as one can only teach so much English in a day, but it’s kind of fun to try my hand at teaching them math and geography or just playing rugby on the field. Also, with a school break of two weeks starting today, I had to give my students an exam that would go on their report card to their parents. While a few of my kids did exceptionally well, the rest scored pretty low, which was certainly disappointing. There English was very low when I arrived and I know it has improved, so if anything this just gives me more determination to work even harder next term to get my students ready for the Secondary School Entrance exam in October.

Finally, this will probably be my last post for about two weeks. On Monday, my first visitor to Tonga, Katherine, is coming to Vava’u, so I will be m.i.a while she is here. I am incredibly excited to share my experience here with another person and were also doing a bit of the tourist thing, so I hope to supply my next post with some cool stories and even better pictures.

As always, thank you for reading.

Not the best picture, but this is Dubai's boat

The harbor on another beautiful day

My delicious left over crab from the Mormon Feast

The Land and the Sea

With nothing of merit having occurred this past week to relate to all of you, I have instead decided to dust off the cobwebs of a post that has been sitting in my back pocket for the past few months. I hope it will captivate you at least enough to want to read another post next week.

Before I arrived in Tonga a little over 9 months ago, I knew very little about the country and the culture, and therefore I tried to begin my service with as few preconceived notions as possible so that I wouldn’t be excited or disappointed about something that simply wasn’t true. One of the few facts about Tonga that I did know was that it was an island nation with a total combined landmass of the 5 island groups equal to that of Memphis or Dallas. With such little land and so much access to open ocean, I could not help but think that fishing was a huge staple of the Tongan diet and economy. As has usually proven to be the case, I was wrong.

In the unseen battle of land and sea in the tiny island nation of Tonga, land has undoubtedly won. There can be no dispute. Out of two, Sea placed second in Tonga’s hierarchy. Fishing exists in Tonga, but it is nowhere as prevalent as one would think it would in an island nation, especially on the main island. Very few people own boats or fish. The village I lived in during my home stay on the main island did not possess a single fisherman even though it was only a five-minute walk from the ocean. People may walk out to the ocean and spearfish for tiny fish and collect clams at low tide, but I didn’t know a single person who went out on the water and fished in a boat. There are villages that specialize in fishing and have many fishermen, but considering that almost every village boarders the ocean the number is surprisingly small. Further, the price of fish on the main island is shockingly high, making it unaffordable for most Tongan families.

In Vava’u, my present home, fishing is certainly more prevalent than Tongatapu, the main island. Here, many more people have boats, especially those who live or have family on the numerous outer islands. Fish is cheaper than on the main island, however it is still more expensive than beef of lamb, which are considered luxuries themselves in most Tongan families, and is triple the cost of chicken, which is itself still a rare treat for most Tongans. Tongans instead mostly survive off bread, root crops, canned food, and anything else they may grow on their land. Fish may be more present in Vava’u, especially in the delicious ‘ota ika (raw fish and think of ceviche) but it is still in short supply for an island that when I told people from my home stay village that I was moving to Vava’u joked that they hoped I liked fish as that was all I was going to eat once I arrived there.

The winner of the battle that exists only in my mind, land, is of course a much different story. Every single Tongan family has their own ‘uta or bush. This bush, consisting of a few acres, is farmland where Tongans raise pigs, cows, and chickens and grow root crops and vegetables for personal consumption and to sell in town. Farming is the very backbone of Tongan life and the economy as it is the only source of income, other than family members from overseas sending back money, for many Tongans and supplies nearly all of their food. Interestingly, Tongan farms were never turned into large properties that employed workers on wages, and instead practically every Tongan owns their own land and decides how to best use it. To give you some idea of how prevalent the bush is in Tonga, every person in my village, even the few who have jobs in town, works in the bush every day besides Sunday. For the vast majority of people in my village, their only occupation is their bush. Every morning when I walk to school, I have the same conversation with the men I see.

Them: ‘Alu ki ako? (Going to school?)

Me: Io. ‘Alu ki ‘uta? (Yes. Going to the bush?)

Them: Io. Nofo ‘a (Yes. Good-bye)

Me: Toki Sio. (See you later)

This conversation almost runs like clockwork, with very few deviations from the above discussion.

Therefore, land 1 sea 0. 9 months in, I am still amazed how expensive fish is in Tonga and how important farming is to the people, especially considering that while Tongans have been farming for centuries, growing vegetables has only become popular and prevalent for the past decade. As for me, I just try to enjoy to the fish when I do eat it and try not to get overwhelmed by the abundance of root crop at my disposal.

In my life, I only have one new thing to report. With the “winter” school break next week, my school is sending the report cards of all the students to their parents. This means that I have to give midterms in English to all my students. Though I am testing my Class 6 and 5 students next week, I assessed my Class 3 and 4 kids and while their English is still low, I was happy to see that they have made some improvements. It is nice to know that at the very least I am having some positive effect on the kids and I’m curious to see how well my older students do. As for my grant proposal, I have heard nothing yet so once again I am cautiously optimistic that I will have more to discuss on that front next week.

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

Some kids from my village during our picnic last month

The 21st Century meets the the 20th. The new solar power on the island of Kapa.

Pecha Kucha

My days of prognosticating are over. Once again I was unable to travel to the outer island, this time on account of strong winds throughout the South Pacific that made small boat travel impossible. I will eventually make it out to the island but at this point your guess is as good as mine as to when that may happen. So, with the weather throwing me an unexpected curve ball, I find myself stepping up to the plate with a new bat (blog post in this analogy – work with me here please) hoping to still knock the ball (new story) out of the park.

This past Wednesday, I took part in a Pecha Kucha. You are probably asking yourself what in the world is a Pecha Kucha and how can it be Tongan when the Tongan alphabet does not have the letter “c” – well…maybe you were not asking yourself the latter part of that statement. Pecha Kucha is in fact Japanese slang for chitchat. The term refers to a style of power point presentation where, to combat the sometime tediousness of reading off a slide, Pecha Kucha’s consist of 20 slides that are 20 seconds long each. This means that you have just over 6 minutes to make your presentation with the hope that you don’t bore your audience to tears.

The owners of a restaurant I frequent in town and who I know well at this point asked me if I could help out with their Pecha Kucha last week. The goal was to attract a large audience, have 8 speakers give presentations on whatever topic they chose, and collect donations for VEPA – Vava’u Environment Protection Agency. VEPA is a NGO based in Tonga that does great work protecting the beautiful but delicate environment of Vava’u with projects such as raising environmental awareness in the schools, organizing recycling campaigns, protecting sea turtle habitats, mangrove swamps, and coral reefs as well as many others worthwhile programs. VEPA is the only group trying to protect the environment here in Vava’u (environmental awareness is still very low in Tonga) so I said that I would be happy to help.

I chose a random topic, the weirdest festivals in the world, and went to work preparing my presentation. I, very much thanks to Google, easily found 20 ridiculous festivals ranging from a baby jumping festival in Spain to a moose dropping festival in Alaska. On the night of the Pecha Kucha, I presented to around 50 people, many of who were a group of 40 yachts called the Oyster Club that had recently arrived in Vava’u. I know very little about the group besides the fact that they travel as a unit in their own private yachts throughout the world and the harbor is currently as full as I have ever seen it, as you can see in the picture below. They have a website and you can Google the club if you are curious and want more information. Going back to the Pecha Kucha, I was a little bit nervous but a definite side benefit of teaching in the Peace Corps is that I it gives me a lot of public speaking practice so it seemed to go all right. At the very lest people laughed at the parts that were meant to be funny, and didn’t at the parts that were not meant to inspire humor. I think that is a decent gauge of a good presentation.

The night was a lot of fun, and I was happy to help the environment of Vava’u in my own very small way. In terms of my life at this moment, this past Wednesday was a holiday so I had the day off. It was Emancipation Day, which is very interesting considering that Tonga was only a protectorate of Great Britain and as I mentioned last week was never conquered nor colonized, so there was never really any emancipation and thus the presence of an Emancipation day is somewhat odd. Regardless, this is Tonga and I was happy to have a day off, whatever the actual reason was.

I spent the days swimming in a fresh water cave and at a beach in a nearby village with some other volunteers. We went swimming with a bunch of Tongan kids so we swam the Tongan way, in shorts and a t-shirt. It was a great day, and a really nice way to start off the week.

To finish, I am hopefully meeting with all of the principals of Vava’u’s high schools on Friday, which is the last step in finishing my grant proposal. I am cautiously optimistic that in two weeks or so I will have more information on my blog regarding my camp project and possibly a link to donate.

As always, thanks for reading.

The election materials, as mentioned last week.

Yacht Season in Vava'u

Waiting for the boat on my trip to Kapa

One of the Tongan boats in Kapa. They are very different from the tourist boats as you can see.