Giving Thanks in ‘Eua

As part of training, we are assigned to spend a week with a current volunteer to get a sense of what our life might be like for the next two years. The idea is to be placed with a volunteer who currently works and lives in the area you are assigned. I was placed with a volunteer on an island that I have now deemed “my vacation home”. ‘Eua is the only island with notable elevation so there are fantastic hiking trails, cliffs and banyan trees, oh, and a rainforest with a waterfall. I am getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning. I traveled to ‘Eua from Nuku’alofa (if you have been following, you may note that this is where I will be living) on a three- hour boat ride. Being a land mammal, I was pretty sure my sea-legs were underdeveloped. I, Ashley (another trainee) and a current volunteer, sent to show us the ropes quite literally in a few different ways, climbed up from the deck to the top of the boat with the crew. We stood grasping the crates tied to the top and ducking to avoid the waves that swept over the vessel. I arrived in ‘Eua with my breakfast still in my stomach and wearing a fresh skin of dried sea salt. The adventures continued the following day with a hike through most of what the island has to offer inland. The banyan trees’ tangled roots and branches reached deep down into eroded caves and stretched above the rest of the trees to make an interesting skyline. (Matt, if you read this, these are the trees you dream of climbing.) The paths cut through field of palms and coconut trees that juxtaposed groves of pine trees. (The pine trees were sent to the island as part of New Zealand Aid as a source of lumber; yet, nothing is really built out of wood…) There was a lookout above the rainforest where we could over hear a parrot’s conversation and caught a glimpse of one in flight. Yet the highlight was without a doubt, Rat’s Cave. While the name dauntingly seems to come from an Indiana Jones flick, it is quite possibly one of the most beautiful places on earth. We shimmied through a hole in the forest floor and dropped onto the floor of a shallow cave gouged in the face of a cliff over looking the South Pacific Ocean. Looking out, the wind whipped and all that could be seen was sea kissing sky. It was like sitting on the edge of the world. You could image the water simply tumbling off the edge of the horizon and falling to the abyss. And then there was Thanksgiving. Eight Americans from various states gathered in a Tongan guest house with a turkey shipped from the States and a collection of other delicacies, like apple pie baked from scratch and mashed kape (a starchy root crop that is so dense that it attempted to cement the wine bottled we used to mash it in its thickness), inviting a German guest and a handful of Tongan children to join us. It wasn’t holiday with the Oswald’s and there were no peanut butter balls but that turkey was good and so was the company.