Tongan Take-aways : All Heil The King!

August 10, 2013

Once a year (although it hasn’t happened in Vava’u for more than 5 years) each island group holds an agriculture fair where all the villages come together and display their best. Their best include: very large root crops, their healthiest of fruits, their most vibrant vegetables, mats and tau’ovalas. This year it was held on the rugby field at Vava’u High School. This year as an added bonus, the King was taking his first tour of the islands as the King. He was attending the ag. show for all the island groups.

Side note here on Tongan royalty. Tonga is still a very big monarchy, the King owns all the land and governs the country through his nobles. There is a separate royal language and one is not even supposed to address the king directly, in each village there is a Talking Chief who is appointed to relay messages to the king in his language. All of the monarchy is through inherited through family lineage along with that of the nobles, if you marry outside of royal linage you are ousted from your position and disowned. In fact the King even has the power to annul marriges if they are between a person of nobility and a commoner.

Harrison, Mandy and I had volunteered to help the Vava’u Tourism people at the show working at their booth (we were lucky to get some money donated to the women's empowerment camp we are trying to start). We painted the faces of the plethora of wild Tongan children running about the fair. As most of the Vava’u Tourism group is white and do not speak Tongan we were also their as crowed control.

For the main part of the morning we were busy at the tent but at about noon we took a break which lead into the ceremony for the King. The ceremony itself was very typically Tongan- lots of praying, crying, hymen singing and long-winded speeches. After the welcoming of the king he walked around the show looking at all of the villages goods, as he rounded the corner Harrison and I, who had been trying to sneak a picture of him from the next isle over, didn’t have anywhere to go so we just sat down at the corner. The king came around and he made eye contact with us and then gave us a smile and head nod- which to me basically means we are close friends now.

The show went on for a while longer and the King presented the pale (awards) for the best goods. Our volunteer friend Ryan got to shake the King’s hand because a guy who won a prize in his village asked Ryan to accept his reward! There was dancing and tau’olungas as well as stepping performed by the boys at the Mormon high school.

The show began to wind down and we all went our separate ways to hitch a ride back to our respective villages. I met up with my village and was waiting for a ride, fortunately this provided me with an opportunity to add another interesting item to my weird-stuff-I-have-eaten-in-Tonga list. As we were waiting for the truck to leave a women from my village opened up a small ziplock bag of what I at first thought was full of fish eyes. It turns out it was filled wit mama-what I later figured out is a type of sea slug. This special treat is about the size of your thumb and is relatively flat. It has a line of hard shell pieces along its back (they look like several half thumb nails but thicker and black). To eat it, you take the shells off and brown guts start come out of the openings made by the removed shells. After the shells are gone (and you mentally prepare) you pop it into your mouth. It was actually way better than the Jelly fish and the taste was more appealing than that of pig lung but the mental capacity it took to get over the image of what was in you mouth was too much for me so I only indulged in one.

As we rode back to the village, with one of my favorite class 3s falling asleep on my lap, I thought how awesome it is to be in a place that I can be in the presence of a king and eat sea slugs and ride in the back of a pickup all in the same day.

the entrance to the fair

my handy work on a class 5 from my village- Fokileni

Timote and me

these are some girls who have family in my village, the one in the middle is Sela, she actually lives in my village, she is a class 6

my village's booth

the King's Assembly, it's kind of a bad picture but the tent he was under (at the back of the picture) was really nicely decorate with Tongans mats and tapa cloth