The Road Less Traveled : 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!