Feast Crasher

May 23, 2013

Those who regularly read my blog are probably aware by now that I am somewhat of a feast junky. Well yesterday I may have sunk the lowest yet in order to find myself a free meal. Before I explain I need to give some background in order to rack up some sympathy points. First off this week has been a little stressful and endless. My refridge broke again after I had paid 100 pa’anga to get it “fixed” last week and my class 4 was practically running up the walls and not listening to anything I was saying- I had, hands down the worst lesson I have had so far this week. Oh, and my walking/ Zumba group is down to just me and one women, even when go to the weaving house I steel their stuff to get them up the ladies won’t come exercise! I don’t mean to complain, I am simply justifying why I purposefully went to the conoseti early and dropped the line that I was hungry ultimately leading me to be fed.

How it works is, the people performing in the conoseti and the important people (i.e. the pastor, and for this specific show one of the high school’s bands) get to eat before the show. I showed up and sat down to drink kava with the men outside the hut where people where eating and mentioned something about the food. In Tonga, all it takes to get fed is saying something about food when it is anywhere in the vicinity. After the group had finished eating and took their food away, I was told by one of the Pastors to go and eat. I felt a bit uncomfortable going in by myself and what not but I was hungry so I went to sit down anyway. The women who were cleaning up put some plates in front of me and told me to eat. I sat there, just me and plate, stuffing my face with fried chicken while the little kids ran around picking up scraps of food and the women were cleaning up the place- definitely not my proudest moment.

The rest of the conoseti turned out good though; a lot of dancing and what not (I was called up to do some dancing by the announcer guy and my kids). I ended up drinking so much kava that I was up half the night making trips to the bathroom (it makes you pee a lot). I guess the lessoned learned is even when you are not having the best week Tonga throws you a bone…or legs of fried chicken.

  

just chilling with my hommie

the dance floor got packed, this picture is just from the start of the conoseti

my favorite Tongan Toddlers

the band's trombone players did a dancing solo

Night School

May 22, 2013

Po ako essentially translate to night school and is the name given to the extra classes that the class 6 students have in order to prepare them for their class 6 exam in October. My students do their po ako before school and right after school because our class 6 teacher doesn’t like walking in the dark and the school is a bit away from the center of the village. The class 6 students have about 2 and half hours of extra class every day, which is also extra teaching time and I really doubt that this extra time is compensated for…

I teach English po ako for about an hour and half to two hours once a week. Yesterday, I took the class 6 teacher’s slot because she wasn’t going to have class so we started around 4:30. Now I was pretty hungry because I hadn’t really eaten all day (which is pretty unusual as I am sure you know if you have read some of this blog), so I told the kids to go and get me some coconuts before class. This right here is probably my favorite thing about Tonga, since everything is surrounded by bush and the kids are expert climbers by the age of 5, you can send them off to get fruit at any moment. Unfortunately, my little farmers came back about 20 minutes later with just papaya- I don’t like papaya, I think it smells farty and it is always too mushy. After the kids finished cutting up the fruit with the same box cutter razor that they use to sharpen their pencils I did decide to give it another try (a decision I make every time I am offered the fruit) and it actually wasn’t too bad-I think I was just too hungry. I should mention here though that I sort of might be allergic to papaya as I was up all night with the worst stomach pains I have ever felt (of course this probably wont stop me from tasting it again if it is offered to me)….

Find The Smell!

May 16, 2013

I played my first game of “Find That Smell!” today. It is a pretty simple game that us, here in Peace Corps Tonga (and I am sure in many other PC countries), like to play. The game play is simple- you simply administer poison to anyone of your bugs/ rodents- most common, obviously being the rat, and you wait for it to dies and start to decay. When the smell has reach its prime you simply follow it (if you’re lucky you will get help from the flies) to your prize!

My game was played with a rat. I have had a rat for awhile and since I only had one and felt bad I didn’t want to kill it so I just let it have my house as long as it only came out after 10 pm and didn’t go in my room- it seem to understand this deal. I didn’t know that rats here are a bit more hungry/ aggressive and it ate through 2 of my plastic storage bins- one being my spice bin and chewed through a plastic bottle of salt and a few other select spices. After the spice bin and the massive amounts of feces it left everywhere, I decided I needed to just end it. I got some poison tablets from town and gave them to the rat a week ago, I am pretty sure he was a super rat because he just started to smell today and I doubt it really takes that long. Lucky for me it was during my site visit from the Peace Corps Medical Doctor! She wished me happy hunting after she left and I felt glad to have a doctor who knew a little about volunteer life.

Village Shows

May 10, 2013

There was a concert in my village tonight, now I don’t mean with a stage and huge speakers and pyrotechnics but more think of it more like Shakespeare in the Park. Instead of the stadium however, imagine grass, and instead of the classically trained thespians, there were Tongan men dressed in drag- which oddly enough may be more Shakespearian…. The show (some outer island’s church fundraiser) drew out the whole village, all excited to see Tinitini. Tinitini is the Tongan equivalent to a movie star- he is well known all around (although I guess the island is so small I am pretty well known too) and he has video recordings of his past shows at the knockoff DVD shop in town. I couldn’t really understand any of his jokes but with the way the crowed was cackling I could imagine he is a pretty funny guy- of course some of the jokes weren’t in Tongan so much as just Tongan humor, like hitting fellow actors really hard with a big stick. Between the hitting people and the drag I realized that Tongans have a very refined since of humor….Of course that is the best thing about Tonga really, they really laugh at anything, and meaningfully laugh- it is pretty awesome. If I were to ever go into standup comedy I know that I would always want to plant Tongans in my audience for their infectious belly laughs.

G.P.S, Holonga and its Teachers

May 1 2013,

My little “bush school” is comprised of 3 teachers one of which happens to be the principal. There is a Teacher for a combined class 1 and 2 (Lose who is also the principal), a teacher for class 3 and 4 (Mele), and a teacher for class 5 and 6 (Ella). All females. The class 3-4 and class 5-6 teachers are actually from my village, which for Tonga is very rare because most often the teachers get moved around so much that they hardly ever teach in their same villages. My school is one long, one story structure with 4 classrooms and one resource room/ library that until recently when I was able to get some books donated (if you know of any way or have some books to donate, I have the perfect place!) did not have any books in it. We are privileged enough to have a photocopier machine that is essentially the life blood of the teacher here and I fear the day that the copier runs out of toner. My school has about 70 students, each as wildly energetic and physical as the last. Tongan kids- both the boys and the girls- have a strange need to constantly be hanging on each other or hitting each other. Even though they are the continual cause of frustration they are pretty freaking adorable and make me smile as much as they make me want to send them to do some hard labor for awhile. One of the best parts of my school, is that one of the classrooms is used as the kindergarten (kiniti) a few times a week, and I would challenge any other nation’s kids to be as cute as a 3 year old Tongan kid, not only is their general physical appearance one that could be plastered all over Gerber ads, but hearing them speak Tongan is one of my new favorite things in the world.

As of last week we are down to two teachers at my school. This is a transcript of the text I received to notify me of the new change:

"Hi sifa au mele can you please tell Lose im in hospital coz im giving birth

Apparently Mele couldn't come to school because she her baby and- now she is on maternity leave for 3 months. What happens in this situation you may wonder? A substitute maybe? No, in a small outer village school in Tonga what simply happens is the other teachers absorb the class until leave is over, so as of now When I am teaching English, Ella is teaching the other class, I teach longer and help teach math/ babysit when necessary. All this really means is, the kids are harder to handle because they are less supervised (hit less) than normal. The kicker is that Ella is also pregnant and will go on her leave about the time Mele gets back…

this is Naki a.k.a. Amanaki- he doesn't actually go to school because he is too young but there isn't day care here so he just hangs out all day while Ella (his mom but really his aunt teaches)- Naki is one of my favorite kids

Toni (in the green) is in my class 4 and he has the best dimples and the most expressive face

these little guys are in class 1 and 2 so I don't actually teach them

oh how they love being phtographed

the little guy is Misi he is in the kiniti he is pretty awesome, the other one is Selamaia and he is my favorite kid in class 2

The Kiss of Death

April 27, 2013

It seems like every time I attend a Tongan funeral I get more and more of the “experience.” After this time however I feel like I have been able to witness all a funeral has to offer. I know I have already explained the funeral process here but just a quick recap. A funeral starts with evening prayers at the hospital waiting for the body to be released at the time all the extended family has been able to come to Tongan from all corners of the globe (usually this takes about 4 days). Once all the family has arrived, there is the actual funeral service in the village which lasts all day and has many phases. The first phase was the one I experienced for the first time this time around. The first phase is a prayer service at the house of the deceased. Each church shows up respectfully and sings and prays while the mourners morn in the corner whaling and crying in between services. After a service is done you go and kiss the body. Now I have never seen a dead person before let alone kiss one but I guess there is a first time for everything. I was sitting down in the small house on the Tongan mats that had been laid out. I went with the first church to do their service (the biggest group because he was a member of that church) the Weslayans. The mourners (possibly the man’s wife and daughters) had their heads buried in their body engrossing tau’avalas. The room with the deceased man was small and connected to the main room where we were sitting but from my angle I could not see the body, just the ornate white draping all around the room. As the service ended I had a feeling we might have to go and give our blessings to the body. There was simply no way out, if I left out the door all of the waiting people would see me and I would be standing there in the pouring rain feeling guilty for not showing respect to the dead. So I made sure I would not be first and I got in line. Slowly I made my way to the front where there it was laying lifeless on the table covered in white cloths and looking pale but peaceful- my first sight of death. I saw that the people at the front where not simply saying a prayer and waving their hand over the man but they were bening down to kiss him. How awesome. My first time seeing a dead man and I also have to kiss him. When my moment came I gathered together all my courage and bent down to sniff the man’s lifeless cheek and give him an awkward hug thing. I followed the line to the mourners and gave them kisss sniffs as well and then exited the house feeling as if I had grown up a little. After the different church services everyone gets a bag of food and eats awaiting the big church service (I sort of skipped this interim church stop to help the men prepare the raw meat bags and bring fill two pick-up trucks with bags to bring to the burial ground) and then the final walk with the body to the burial plot. The funeral officially ends with the burial of the body and the passing out of the bags of raw meat.

After the official funeral, the following 3 evenings there are also prayer and singing services at the house at the end of which more bags of raw meat are given out. Tongan funerals over all are very interesting, if not for the cultural interactions and views of death for the simple fact that they tend to bankrupt families on account of having to give hundreds of people parting favors of meat.

some of the men in my village the night before the funeral preparing some of the food- it is a whole night process

just one of the giant piles of chicken that will be cooked or separated into little baggies for the people to take home after the service