Sports Day

March 20,2013

All schools in Tonga do this really cool thing called Sports Day. It is a day where all the students from different schools get together and compete in running events. At the primary schools classes 4 through 6 compete. In effort to include the whole school, classes 1 through 6 (and maybe to have a semi-day off), we had a mini version with just the kids at our school last Friday. I was leading a team with one of my co-teachers and my principal and the other teacher were leading the other team. My team was team green, so on Friday we had our team come to school wearing green and the other school was wearing red. After the radio broadcast, parents came (with food of course (-: ) and we had the kids run all different running events on the field in front of our school. We even had them do a sack race! It was adorable seeing kids as young as 4 try and run, especially when they were in a giant bag.

I love any Tongan event because that means there will inevitably be food, and in Tonga you don’t need to worry about quantity or mode of consumption, as long as you are not standing up while eating (that is the biggest no no here as i was informed when I was eating a canned spaghetti sandwich and trying to hold up the finish line marker) you can eat as much as you want in anyway- my favorite is double fisting usually some sort of root crop in one hand and some sort of dipping sustenance in the other.

The day ended around 11 and as if you didn’t already know, my team was the victor.

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TEAM GREEN!

some of the kids resting under our makeshift shade- i had to climb the tree to make the shade a success but it ended up not being able to stand up to the wind )-:

class 1 and 2

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The sack race

the moms sitting with their food in front of the school