April 11, 2013
My volunteer friend Katy, who now works on the island of Eua (which is very far away), planned to come up to Vava’u and visit before our In-service Training. We were both excited and planned the 4 days she was going to be here to be a blast! We booked a day sail and snorkel and I planned on taking her around my village and around Vava’u plus I planned amazing meals and snacks, to be prepared by yours truly... She was all booked to get in at 9 in the am on Wednesday so I arrange to meet her at the airport and come back to an awesome breakfast of breakfast burritos, hash browns and toast and coconut cream brownies- I had spent the previous night precooking. The morning of her arrival I got a call from her saying that the airline over booked her ticket and told her she could not come on the plane even though it was a connecter flight from her small island. They told her to come back for the afternoon flight. I was pissed and upset that are plans would have to be changed (and that my breakfast would go to waste) but I decided to change the breakfast burritos to regular burritos and await her arrival in the late afternoon by helping the class 6 kids build an umu in the back of the school. Side note here- it is hilarious that in the States kids can barely hold a knife without getting yelled at, here the kids are building underground ovens with machetes, chopping onions and grating coconuts. Anyway, I got another call from Katy telling me the airline told her the flight was over booked again and she wasn’t going to make it- I just kept thinking this would never happen in America, only to remember I am not in America and this is definitely something that would happen with the corrupt temporary 1-plane-airline set up by the Tongan government after the actual domestic airline left the country. After a lot of yelling at the airline and some minor lying (I told them I was a coordinator for PC and I needed my volunteer up in Vava'u) they agreed that she would definitely would get on the flight in the morning so Katy and I decided that she should still come and we would just try and rush to make the sail in the morning.
this is the umu prepared by the 8 class 6 kids- they still have class during school breaks so this was done during class
1 day down and no more food later I picked up Katy at the airport and we had to go straight to town to get to our day sail. We were joined by Mandy and Jeff (Vava’u volunteers) and had an amazing day on the water, snorkeling, eating and doing some light drinking-some of which was fresh coffee, like actual not instant. After the day sail we got some fries at Café Aquarium then we went to quiz night at the local pub and even though we lost by a lot at quiz we had a great time.
Katy and me
Me, Katy and Mandy
the sunset from the boat
The next day we met up with the rest of the Vava’u volunteers to spend the day that the beach in my village. We got back from the beach and made more tortillas from scratch (left over from my failed burritos) and made chicken tacos. It was a super awesome night and we all had a lot of fun so even though Katy’s trip started off rocky it ended up turning out pretty dang good.
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