The Road Less Traveled : 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.