Malo e lelei! (Hello and Welcome in Tongan)



To all family and friends, this is my first attempt at a Blog. I am very excited, and hopefully this will be something that you will enjoy as well!



As all of you know, I am currently living in the Kingdom of Tonga, a beautiful group of islands in the South Pacific. Interestingly, in Portugese, Tonga means, 'two weeks from anywhere,' implying that my lovely kingdom is two weeks from anywhere significant; middle of NOWHERE. I laughed when my friend and fellow Peace Corps Volunteer, Elena, told me this. Her parents are missionaries, and she was brought up in the Phillippines. She has remarkable stories about her childhood, and what she has done with her life. All my fellow volunteers are fasinating people and it has been wonderful getting to know everyone.

My PC group, Tonga: Group 75, is made up of twenty-four people, almost all of whom have recently graduated from college. There are a few people here just out of retirement but for the most part, we're all 'youngins.' All of us get along great and we're having a lot of fun exploring Tonga and expierencing it's unique culture together.

Currently, I am in Nuku'alofa, Tongatapu. Tongatapu is the largest island in the kingdom and Nuku'alofa is the capital. I am here now for my last week of training and following that, upon passing my language exam, I have my swearing-in ceremony. I am thrilled to become a PCV, and cannot get over how two months has already gone by!

I left the states the first week of October and came directly to Nuku'alofa to begin my first week of training. Within the first two hours of my arrival, we had a major tsunamia warning and we all ran to 'high grounds.' (There really are no high grounds in Nuku'alofa. At all. haha) I must say that one would think we'd be in a panic, especially after the devasting tsunamia in Samoa and in the Niuas not too long before, but we were all surprisingly calm and the Tongan people, they go straight to the water to see the show. That's just one difference between Tongans and most people in America that I learned from the getgo- We would run and find safety but Tongans are not afraid of dying and they will go straight to the water just to witness the beauty of the storm.

I cannot possibly explain how amazing the Tongan people are. I got the chance to spend two month living with a hostfamily in Ha'apai, and was in awe of how beautiful and humorous this culture is.

Ha'apai is another island group within the kingdom, and my island was called, Foa, and my village, Lotofoa. There, I lived with my host-mother, Heiti; father, Sione; two sisters, Selana and Laveni, and my five year old brother, Sione Leka (Leka means, Junior). We also had one dog named Leka. We lived in a small fale (home), with a living room, two bedrooms, a toilet and bathing room, and one other small room where there was a cupboard where my mom would store food leftovers under a towel. We had electricity and a running toilet but no running water. I bathed in a silver tin bucket with water fetched from a simavai (a cement water tank) outside. We had no kitchen nor fridge, freezer, stove/over but instead cooked all of our meals outside over a fire or in an umu, which is an underground oven that Tongans use primarily for feasts or Sunday meals.

One thing which is evidently clear is how much Tongans love food!!! Most of Tonga suffers from obestiy and diabetes. It is a huge problem here but the younger generations are becoming more aware of equating a smaller figure with good health and longevity. This is no doubt in response to the outside world which is becoming more and more known here in Tonga through movies, the media, tourists, and no doubt agencies like Peace Corps, etc.

These outside influences have really transformed this kingdom to a degree that you can walk down the streets of the captial and see an internet cafe, hotels, women in pants and dare I say maybe some bare shoulders...!

You may laugh, but it's true. Particularly, amongst teenage girls, you'll see them rebeling against the traditional dress by wearing pants but for the most part, dress is traditionally and conservatively uniform: skirts below the knee and shirts that do not reveal shoulders or are the chest. To all formal work settings, functions, church, etc. women wear what is called a kiekie or a ta'ovala which is a decorative over skirt-belt that is made from a particular tree leaf. The men where tee shirts with a tupenu (their man-skirt), and for formal occasions, like the women, they may wear a ta'ovala as well over their tupenu. Though most men wear pants or long shorts but women still wear skirts, aside from those scandolous younger women who wear pants. They are out of control, let me tell you! ;)

One thing that's funny about dress is that wearing a kiekie or ta'ovala will make any outfit proper and formal even if one is wearing a tee-shirt underneath with a picture of Bob Marley on the front smoking a joint. If you put a ta'ovala around your waist you and your shirt would be perfectly appropriate to attend church or work though my dressy work pants could send me home. I may sound resentful but I am more just perplexed. Though I have come to understand it a bit more in that almost all clothes here are from New Zealand, Austraila and the States- all coming in from places equivalent to Salvation Army, etc. or from Tongans visiting overseas who just bring back bags of whatever clothes they could find at a cheap price. For this reason, Tongans were what ever is available. It may very well be that you'll see an older, respectable man walking around with rhine-stoned pink flipflops because they are the only shoes he owns. That said, Tongans don't care about dress but yet dress is exremely important. Perplexing, I know!