Tongan Take-aways : 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.