Tongan Take-aways : Easter Festivites in My Village

March 31, 2013

For those as religious as the Tonga people, the Easter festivities actually start the Friday before on a day know to those who follow the Lord as Good Friday. I got to celebrate this shamefully overlooked holiday by going to church and going to a feast. The feast was wonderful, as feast go, it was in town at the house of a women who used to be from my village but moved to town to work as a nurse at the hospital. Unfortunately for me, this feast was not all fun and eating, no my friends the time had come for me to get over my fear and give a fakamalo speech. Traditionally in Tonga, during a feast different people from all different statuses get up throughout the meal and give very long and slightly repetitive speeches thanking different people and the lord. Being in my community 5 months now and not being able to hide behind the veil of being lost in translation I knew that this would be the feast at which I would give my speech. So I ate fast and tried to translate everything I would need to give a short but thoughtful little speech. My time came a went and I feel like I did a decent job. I remembered everyone I wanted to thank and I didn’t screw up or fumble my words so I rewarded myself by eating more. The rest of the day was pretty good too. I stayed in town to get dinner with Sean and volunteers before he set off for his big vacation back to America for a month. We hiked Mt. Talau and went swimming by the new land bridge, which had the cool current that pulled you under the bridge.

On Saturday I returned to my village thinking I was going to have a relatively low-key long weekend. Come to find out that the big Wesleyan church in my village does an event called apitanga (camping) where the youth (youth in Tonga is anyone unmarried so essentially kids from about the age of 13 to mid 20s) sleep at the church from Friday to Monday. I spent Saturday night at action song practice and then slept in the back of the church with the other guys. The down side (beside the mosquitoes eating me) was that when you sleep at the church there is no way to avoid the 4:30 am wake up call by the church bells. I was unable to escape, eyes red with tiredness and feeling groggy I sat through 5 am mass only to go home shower make a cup of coffee and return for 10 am mass. It is frustrating that one of my goals is to see the sun rise and I haven’t been able to cross it off, not because I am not up early enough to see it but because I am trapped in a church every time! After 10 am mass we drank kava and then unbeknownst to me there was a feast (surprise feast are really the best kinds of feast)! So I got to re-feast, this time with the Wesleyans, and I gave another fakamalo- and in this one I threw in a couple of jokes.

After the feast we drank kava before going to third church and action song practice. Following action song practice we (the youth) went out to drink some kava. Apparently Easter Sunday is the one day a year that the youth can drink kava- see normally you are not supposed to drink kava unless you are finished with school. I think the reason for this is because that following Monday is also a holiday so no school. It was such a funny experience because all the men were very kava drunk and when the little kids came out they past them a shell of kava and it reminded me of dads giving their kids first sips of beer. The little kids were all so proud and tried to chugged down the shells and were encouraging each other as the drank. I ended up staying up until 3:30 drinking with some of the guys who are more around my age, which was a nice change. I let one of them give me a tattoo with marker but he was a little kava drunk and instead of some kupesi around my lower knee he gave me a full leg tattoo.

Finally we made it to bed only to be woken up an hour later by the church bells, but this time I slipped out and went home to go back to sleep. I had so much fun this weekend and it was a really big confidence booster because it was with just people in my village no one else. It is really good to know I can have such a great time without having to have another white person around, as weird as that may sound...