Tongan Take-aways : A Bit More About the Tongan People and Villages

I want to take a moment to explain in better detail the Villages and Tongan people. I feel like I have done a very poor example of describing the incredible generosity and kindness of the Tongan culture. From the moment we got to Tonga the people been nothing but kind. We have been greeted and fed by almost everyone we run into. There has not been a single time I have walked down the street and not been greeted by anyone I come into eye contact with. The greetings are sincere as well, not forced in anyway. People in cars wave and sometimes they even stop to make sure you are all right on your walk between villages. Tongans are very concerned with maintaining their image of “The Friendly Islands,” they share everything among each other. It is even a cultural thing for one sibling to ask another sibling for their children if they want and the sibling has to comply. They are always quick to provide you with food, if a neighbor doesn’t have enough to eat then they can just ask and they will get a complete meal with no expectation of having to repay the family. Their houses are always open and welcoming, never have I felt like an imposition with my host family and I have yet to actually feel hungry since I started living here.

The villages are really rad! There are pigs and dogs of all different sizes that roam around everywhere and on every corner there is a church and a small rectangular cement building called a falekola that sells general nonperishable food and a variety of household items and beverages. The houses are normally very small and built with obvious unfinished walls or roofs. Some are tiled and some are not but most are surrounded by lush greenery. On the inside they are lightly furnished, as a lot of Tongans sit on decorative straw mats placed on the floor. The most amazing thing about the villages, and Tonga itself, is that everyone knows everyone and everything that goes on around the islands. There is a thing called the coconut wireless, which is a name given to the fact that gossip is a way of life here and being such a small country there is very little privacy. You don’t really have addresses you just say who you live with and people figure it out. Life here is very slow paced; most people work in the bush (we would call them farmers) and they make money by selling their crops in front of their homes or in the market. Most of the money to finance building of houses is normally given to families from overseas relatives (in my case, my host mom’s daughter who lives in New Zealand or Australia). In short, the people are awesome and the way of life is very different than anything we could imagine in the US, and as you move further from the main island you only get more rural and less developed, it is in these places that we all will be eventually placed. Hopefully we can all learn how to appreciate life like the Tongans while imparting some of our ideas about life and what we value.