The Road Less Traveled : Chugging Along

This past week marked my two-year anniversary in Tonga. It really is hard to fathom. I would be lying if I said that every day had been easy, but overall I have had an incredibly transformative experience that has deeply enriched my life and helped me grow both personally and professionally. As the cliché goes, the days may have seemed slow at times but the months flew by. While I still plan to save any nostalgia for my final post, I have a little over a month remaining as a Peace Corps Volunteer and I still have so much left to do.

Over the past few weeks and the next several to come, all of my time that has not been spent at school preparing our Class 6 kids for the Secondary School Entrance Exam, has been spent planning for Camp GROW and GLOW. Having created and developed the camps last year, the other directors and I possess a quiet confidence, calmed by the fact that we have done this before. However, we are still working on overdrive to make this year’s camp even better than last year’s with more campers participating in the program and an extra day.

Two weeks ago marked the first of what will be many Camp Saturdays. The other volunteers and I took all 12 of our counselors – 6 boys and 6 girls – to the beach at Talihau for a day of team bonding and camp discussion. I was particularly excited for this day, as several of our new counselors had been campers the year before, and I was eager to see how they would be able to handle the added responsibility and observe how much they have matured over the past year.

We swam and played all the energizer games we use at the camp, like the human knot, Kwa, and animal zoo. We ate a delicious meal of fried fish, grilled chicken, root crop, and pasta salad prepared by one of the counselor’s parents. Most importantly, we talked about our goals for the camp, specifically how Joey and I hope to take a less active role in the running of the camp this year, passing on more responsibility and therefore leadership opportunities to our counselors. All of the counselors asked terrific questions and seemed ready to play a major role in the camp.

Then there was even more to do last week. As part of raising money through the Peace Corps link, we also have to raise at least 25% of our funds locally in Tonga. So last Friday, working in conjunction with the High School Principal Committee, we held a Kalapu in town. Along with food, Kava is at the very center of all things Tonga, and a kalapu is when you invite men (only men can drink kava in Tonga) to come to a specific place to drink kava and donate some money. We had announced the kalapu on the radio and invited the local kava clubs and the men from our respective Peace Corps villages. As an incentive to come, we made sure all of the men knew that the female Peace Corps volunteers would serve as tou’a (the woman who serves the kava).

Joey, several of the male counselors, and I arrived at the hall at 6 to mix the kava and prepare the building. Having finished mixing the powdered kava with the water around 7, I began to feel the subtle nervousness that reminded me so much of when we used to throw parties in college. All I could think of was would anybody actually show up? At 7:30, things seemed gloomy, as only two men from my village had arrived. There were still no changes thirty minutes later, but at least the girls were now at the hall and were ready to serve the kava. Then by 8:20, appearing almost as if by magic, the hall was full with 100 men, as several villages humorously arrived in their school buses, carrying literally a bus-load of men ready to drink kava. All of my anxiousness quickly evaporated, and I spent the rest of the night making sure everything ran smoothly and drinking kava to socialize with our guests. I was really touched that for all the word we had gotten out about the Kalapu and for all of the people who had seen me in town and promised to come, the people who showed up in large numbers were friends of ours from our local villages and officials from the Ministry of Education. In the perfect display of the camaraderie and brotherhood that epitomizes Tongan communities and that I will miss so much, all three of my villages came out to support me.

As this post is getting a bit long, I will just mention that the next day, still somewhat exhausted from the kalapu the night before that didn’t end until 2:30 in the morning, we held a meeting with the parents of our newly invited campers, so that the parents could learn more about the camp and ask questions. We had a pretty decent turn out, especially for our prospective female campers, and the parents and kids seem really excited to come to the camp.

Thank you for reading and please enjoy more photos from the agriculture show.