My First Kava Circle

My first night at home stay I was brought to a kava circle, which meets on Saturdays right outside my house in a converted shed type thing. This was quite the experience considering I knew about 3 words of Tongan at this time and I hate the taste Kava. It turned out to be awesome! The Kava circle is called the Pelican Club and all the guys were super nice. The Pelican club is part of a kalapu, which is a kava circle that acts as a fundraiser for various things like school supplies for the village. It turns out that no onelikes Kava- they eat a corn nut, a hard candy, or drink a sip of soda after every turn, to get the taste out of their mouths, and then jokingly exclaim ifo! (delicious!). It is hard to imagine the logistics of the circle I am sure, but to help you with the image imagine a small room about the size of a living room with 4 separate circles and a giant tub of light brown liquid placed in the middle of each circle. Typically the server or Tou’a is a female and her purpose is to sit and serve the men while they each try and hit on her. There were two of these this night and the rest of the circles were just males who took turns serving (I even got to serve for a bit!). You drink the Kava out of a carved out, sanded coconut shell. The shell is filled and you are expected to drink the entirety every time it is passed to you, which could amount to liters by the end of a kava session. In order to get the stuff down I had to take a few deep breaths then try to chug the liquid without having it hit any part of my mouth (kind of like the operation board game). There was just way to much liquid for this technique to work so I stuck to draining the shell then ate a corn nut as a chaser. The circles are like what I imagine smoking circles would have been like in the 70’s except instead of a joint it’s a shell and instead of disco playing on a speaker it’s men playing guitar and singing island songs. I guess I should put in the side note here that all Tongans are amazing singers! Literally, they hit every note perfectly. No matter what they look like on the outside you can bet your life they can win you over with their Polynesian vocals- imagine big brown Adels everywhere. After 4 hours of kava I was starting to feel the effects- a little like being drunk except you are more cognitively with it and a lot more sleepy (Maybe like being cross faded?). My host mom finally rescued me from my host brother and having to consume more of the drink when she came looking for me around 1 am. The men in the circle, who just happened to be all the men in my village, told me kava makes you sleepy and have to pee- damn them if they weren’t right on! Best sleep of my life besides the constant feeling my bladder was going to explode. A quick observational side note- they say that men who drink kava regularly get aged by the drink and start to have wrinkles and bad teeth, after my experience I would say that these side effects are more a result of the chain smoking that goes on in between each rotation… I didn't have my camera so sorry for the lack of pictures, if I can ever figure out how to get them off my Tongan phone I will upload them.

This is the converted shed where the village Kava circles happen