The Heat

Remember the scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy throws a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch of the West and she begins screaming, “I’m melting! I’m melting!” until she does literally melt? Well, that is how I often feel living in Tonga this time of year. It is always warm here, but the summer months of January, February, and March are especially scorching.

Without such luxuries as air conditioning – though I certainly think of AC now as more of a necessity – you don’t have move to even work up a sweat. The moment I get home from school, the first thing I do is always to remove my sweat dampened shirt and skirt from my body to make myself just a little bit cooler. While it is illegal for men to be shirtless in Tonga, it is acceptable to not wear a shirt in your home and I take full advantage of this legal loophole.

I won’t sugarcoat it. It is pretty disgusting. The temperature is usually in the high 80’s to low 90’s with the muggiest humidity you can imagine. To escape the heat, many Tongans sleep during the hottest parts of the day and at night sleep outside to take advantage of the breeze. Unfortunately for me, I am a particularly poor napper and to sleep outside where I live in the bush is to invite all of the mosquitoes to a buffet of American flesh.

So…what do I do then? For most of the week I suffer, drink buckets of water, run incredibly slowly as late as I possibly can before dark in an attempt to get in some kind of a workout, and sleep with an electronic fan mere inches away from my face. My more impressive strategy, however, and perhaps the more interesting one to read about, is having something to do on the weekends. As I have mentioned in previous posts, in Vava’u life shuts down from 12 p.m. Saturday to Monday morning because of church and Sunday being the day of the rest. In this heat, it is easy to go a little stir crazy just sitting around over these two days, so myself and the other volunteers have tried to be a little more adventurous the past few weeks, organizing events under the guise of a slew of volunteer birthdays.

One of the events, a few weeks ago, was a beach bbq and a campout on one of the most beautiful spots in Tonga, Secret Beach. Secret Beach, while not exactly living up to its name, is relatively off the beaten path as it is difficult for tourists to find and involves a steep hike to get too, dissuading Tongans from other villages from visiting. Thus a large group of Peace Corps and Australian volunteers, along with some Tongan friends, spent a day and a night escaping the tropical heat by swimming in the water and enjoying the cool ocean breeze.

We barbecued chicken over an open flame, using the leaves around us as plates and dipping sauce, i.e ketchup, receptacles. We had far too few tents and way too many people, meaning some people including myself for a bit, slept outside under the stars. Falling asleep under a blanket of starlight with the rhythmic crashing of the waves keeping us company, the weather merely warm, and the mosquitoes somewhat less unruly, we could escape the heat for 24 hours. At time like these, I wonder how I could ever complain, even about the heat.

As always, thank you for reading and enjoy the photos.

Camping at Secret Beach 

Another volunteer, Ryan, and I

We had shirts made for our group, Tonga Group 77

The back of the shirt is a turtle designed in the Tongan style by one of the volunteers. The words read, "Kau ngaue 'ofa," which is the Peace Corps Tonga slogan and literally translates to the work of love, but also is the word for volunteer.

He or She

I have not written one of my anthropologically leaning posts in quite some time, and I feel like I am just about due to pretend that I am still a college student writing papers on the most archaic of subjects. For those of you who do not seem interested in such a post, understandably so I might add, you may skip this reading at you leisure and I will hopefully see you again next week.

I understand that linguists and other specialists often study language to gleam some insight into other cultures. Having studied Latin in middle and high school, and slogging through one year of Italian my freshman year of college, this type of analysis never seemed to interest me. However, after living in Tonga and learning the Tongan language, I have been particularly struck by the fact that there is no pronoun differentiating “he” and “she” in Tongan.

In Tongan, ne is the pronoun for both he and she. The only way to figure out which pronoun is correct is though the context. This is not quite as easy as it sounds however. Take the simple Tongan sentence of ‘Oku ne alu ki kolo (The boy/girl is going to town). Simply written as is, there is no way to know if the speaker or writer is referring to a boy or a girl.

I have spent an inordinate amount of my free time (don’t worry I still have plenty of other free time to do whatever I wish) thinking about why this is the case and if other languages possess a similar phenomenon. By pairing this thought with my first academic love – history – it seems to me to be evidence of a traditionally patriarchal society where men and women had distinct roles. Men went to war. Women cooked. Men were fisherman and farmed in the bush. Women wove mats and took care of the children. In a traditional structure with such strict gender norms, it wasn’t possible to confuse the pronouns and thus there was no need to have two separate pronouns for what the Tongan people would easily have understood with one.

While Tonga is historically a patriarchal society and remains somewhat so to this day, and I have no evidence to assert this claim, I do believe that this patriarchy is partly responsible for the lack of two separate pronouns. Though lack of separate pronouns may not have been an issue back in the day, it can be quite confusing in the modern world. Tonga is by no means a paragon of equal rights, as many of the stereotypes and gender roles I mentioned in the previous paragraph still abound, but women’s rights have slowly risen throughout the Kingdom. In today’s Tonga women can work in all industries and reach senior positions in both government ministries and in business. Most Tongan teachers, including myself, will tell you that girls outperform boys at both the primary and secondary level by a wide margin. For Tonga in the 21^st Century, one pronoun often just does not seem like enough.

I hope this was not too boring for everyone. Nothing particularly interesting has happened to me recently, and this was a topic I was saving for a rainy day. I don’t have any real suggestion to clarify this ambiguity, and I am certainly unqualified to request the Tongan language to add a pronoun, but this topic has definitely piqued my interest more than I should care to admit. If anyone has a better thought than I do, I’d be happy to hear it.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the photos of my latest fishing excursion.

A beautiful red fish another volunteer caught

A fish that I actually caught - Yes, I was shocked too!

Simply pan seared with only butter for flavoring.

 It was absolutely delicious and could not obviously have been fresher.

A Proud Moment

It is very rare that you are able to see yourself through the eyes of the people around you. Too often, even for the most self-aware among us, we must simply guess what people think of us. This can be a good thing – there is a reason people say ignorance is bliss and wouldn’t it be terrifying to actually know what people thought of you all the time? – but sometimes this leaves you unaware of the how even the smallest gesture can have an outsize impact.

I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed several of these moments during my time here, two of which first spring to mind before I get into the crux of this post. The first revolved my American expatriate friends, who early in our relationship were at the same café as the other volunteers, and I made sure to introduce everyone of the volunteers to the couple. I did not think much of the event. I was simply trying to be polite, and I always strive to make introductions when people don’t know each other. It was not until weeks later that I found out how touched the couple was and how much they appreciated my introduction. I had absolutely no idea that this tiny gesture could make such a difference.

Similarly, almost a year ago today, I was teaching a night class to the kids in my village, when I asked a Class 5 student who speaks exceptional English that she learned from attending school in town to help an older Form 1 boy with his English homework. When another child told me that it was strange that a younger girl would help an older boy, I said that it was ok because she was so good at English. It was a small bout of praise, similar to the comments I always try to encourage my students with at school, and I quickly forgot about the encounter.

Eight months later, I was invited by her family for after church lunch, and I was sitting on the couch next her mother, when she told me how happy I made her and her daughter because of this praise from so long ago. Her pride in her daughter’s abilities and my acknowledgement of that talent was so tangible I felt that I could reach out and grab it. I was amazed that they both still remembered what I had said, and then mentioned it to me so long after the fact. Once again, I was stunned.

Now, to the point of this post, I often have no idea what the Tongans I live with think of me. To the children, I know I am often a toy or a friend, or at worse the mean teacher who makes them study English. With the adults it is less clear due to the language barrier and the Tongan cultural unwillingness to show most of their emotions. I have been incredibly accepted by each of my three villages, but once in a while I am curious to know how they view me as an individual person, rather than yet another Peace Corps Volunteer.

I was rewarded such a moment at a church fundraiser last November. I have long since learned that when you are going to feasts, it is important to bring plastic bags so that you can take the piles on uneaten food back to the house for left over’s. At first I was loathe to do this out of some combination of shyness and not wanting to make some kind of cultural snafu, but those feelings have long since evaporated as I have learned to grab food as any Tongan would.

At this fundraiser, I was sitting in a pew at the Wesleyan Church as some of the women were walking around with collection boxes. When the minister’s wife walked past me, she asked me if I had brought any bags with me for the feast, and I tapped the pocket in my tupenu (Tongan skirt) and told her I had brought three. She smiled and praised my foresight, while the people around us who had heard the exchange chuckled.

The real moment, however, happened two hours later at the actual feast. During feasts, people continually stand up and say fakamalos, which are basically thank you speeches, and are very important. Almost every time the person saying the speech will tear up and have to pause from being so emotionally overwhelmed. This is one of the few times in Tongan culture it is ok to show your emotion. One of the men, during his fakamalo, recounted my bag-church conversation, and then praised me for being so “poto,” (smart) and how Tongan I have become. All around the Tongans at the feast were laughing and calling me poto, clearly impressed that I had brought three plastic bags with me.

As ridiculous as this may sound, I swear that I have never been more praised in my life than at this moment, and my village has never been more proud to have me as “their” Pisi Koa than during this feast. It was a surreal moment, being praised for bringing plastic bags, but it was very Tongan and I felt incredibly happy to be able to feel such a moment. Oddly enough, I believe this will be one of my fondest memories of my time in Tonga when I think back to this experience years from now. At that moment in time, for a few minutes, I saw how everyone saw me.

Thank you for reading and enjoy the photos.

Playing at the beach with Camp GROW/GLOW

Our youngest counselor, Wil, explaining his ideal healthy meal

Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament during a break with Camp GROW/GLOW

The 'Eua ferry

After School Activities

After abusing my position as chief, a.k.a the sole, writer of this blog and writing epic long posts in my last two entries after a long absence, I have decided to return the basics and give you all a bit of a break with a much shorter post this week. So sit back, relax, and know that it will all be over relatively soon.

I last left you in ‘Eua where I was about to board a three hour ferry to the main island of Tongatapu with my home stay brother Sione. I, after acquiescing to Peace Corps’ request, returned from my trip a day early so that I could be on the main island with the majority of the volunteers to face the first cyclone of my Tonga tenure, Cyclone Ian. For a quick piece meteorological information, cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons are the exact same thing, they just spin in different directions and have different names depending on what part of the world you’re in.

On the main island all of the volunteers clustered together in the guesthouse, as we were not allowed to leave and waited for the storm to hit. For most of the night there was some rain, a bit of wind, but nothing that I haven’t seen from normal tropical storms here, or my experiences with hurricanes back in Florida. The morning after the storm, I was happy to hear that the main island received very little damage, and that though my home island of Vava’u felt the storm more strongly, the only damage was a few trees and power lines down, nothing major.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the island group that lies in between Tongatapu and Vava’u, Ha’apai. The damage there was extensive, as the eye of the storm passed directly over the small group of islands. In some villages, up to 90% of the structures were destroyed. Schools, houses, and churches were flattened. Water tanks blew up. Tongans and tourists took shelter in Mormon Churches (the safest structures and by far the most technically sound buildings in Tonga) across the island, luckily saving many lives. Sadly, one woman was killed in her house by the cyclone.

A week later, after my training, I and the other volunteers took the 24-hour ferry ride back to Vava’u, which stops in Ha’apai on the way. Having an hour to walk around the regional capital, I felt like I was in one of those towns in the mid-west after it was devastated by a tornado. Power lines were everywhere. Trees with seemingly impenetrable roots were lying on their sides. Houses were flattened, and people were living in Red Cross supplied tents. It is a terrible situation, and there are links to donate to the cause if you Google Ha’apai Tonga and the Red Cross.

To end on a lighter note, the week of training was uneventful other than the fact that I met the rest of the new volunteers on the other islands. Though I won’t see many of them again, it was nice to put names to faces and get to know the new crop of volunteers.

Now – to get the name of this post – a funny event occurred last week. Monday through Wednesday all of the teachers, the volunteers, and the Ministry of Education officials met for the annual teacher planning meetings. I don’t have much to report from this week, except for one comical, and more than slightly awkward moment.

On Tuesday, the teachers were separated by their sexes, and a male ministry official spoke the male teachers, while a female official spoke to the women. Normally during these long meetings I tend to zone out a bit. My Tongan is somewhat decent conversationally, but I am pretty lost when I am listening to an hour-long speech, so I normally let my mind wander. This time was no different, except that I kept hearing the Tongan word for “sex,” being repeated over and over again. At first I thought I was mishearing the word, but the more I listened to the conversation the more I realized sex was definitely being discussed.

I was confused. Our primary school students are too young to learn about sexual education, so I didn’t understand what was going on. After the meeting, I asked one of my teachers what the talk was all about, and he explained to me that too many teachers, most of them married, had affairs with each other last year and the Ministry had said that had to be stopped. Apparently it was a rather large number, though I was relieved to hear that at least these affairs were not occurring at the schools.

It was an interesting moment, made more so by chuckling of the teacher telling me this story, but I guess I continue to prove the old adage that I learn something new every day, regardless of whether it is worth learning. Well…at least I can say there’s never a dull moment in Tonga.

Thanks for reading. I suppose my promise of a short post didn’t really come out true. Sorry! – I’ll try harder next time. Enjoy the photos and have a great weekend.

P.S.  Tonga made the news and the Winter Olympics...though the name change thing is a bit weird.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/sports/olympics/lugers-name-matches-the-one-on-his-waistband.html

enjoying the cliff views in 'Eua

makeshift ping pong at school