What Ails Me.

So I have an owie and I am bonding with the PCMOs (Medical Officers. There is something about me and nurses. They always seem to be my fast friends...) but during one language lesson I was elevating my swollen ankle (It got infected from a bug bite but is not a big deal. I am taking drugs and I'm okay, Mom.) My buddy Trent jotted down a poem written from my perspective on my notebook. It went a little like this: "First there was the dreadful heat, Then the mosquitoes raped my feet. The second week I finally cried, A few days later my stomach died. This present week is almost done; And my little ankle looks like the sun. But when life is rough and the cards stacked to the deck, I just laugh at my teacher 'cause he looks like 'SHREK'!" And he does too. It's uncanny, if only he were green...

Ten reasons I don’t think we are in Kansas ( well, Iowa) anymore.

1. There is a banana tree outside the shower I use. 2. Speaking of a shower, it is freezing and from collected rain water but it is all good since it is 90 degrees and humid constantly. 3. The toilet has a full flush and a half flush, you can choose depending on your need of disposal. 4. The seemingly unsupervised children roam the village in hordes. 5. My 4 year old host brother runs around the house naked with a stocking cap covering his face and yielding a machete. 6. No shirt, no shoes, no service doesn’t exists. Half the people in line at the bank were barefoot. 7. Loitering is not discouraged. In fact, it is a national past time. If you ask anyone what they are doing, their most frequent answer is “Eva pe” or “Sio pe”. Just wandering around or just watching. 8. I miss public transportation. There is a guy in the village that owns a bus and drives it into town twice a day and you just catch a ride with him when he goes otherwise you hoof it. 9. If I walked down the street an hour ago, everyone knows it and speculates as to why. 10. My sexiest legal swimsuit consist of men’s basketball shorts I picked up at the market and my Pat McManus t-shirt.

For Mrs. Green's Art Students:

In Tonga, men and women both dress up their attire for formal occasions by wearing a traditional woven garment around their waist. The men wear a taovala, which looks like a woven mat tied by a rope, and the women have a kiekie, which is more stylized by the creator. The kiekie can by woven strips, braided ropes or other styles hanging from a belt around the women’s waist. The kiekie and taovala are part of Tongans strong sense of indentity and pride in their culture as they are the only Pacific nation to wear these regularly in their daily life. The uniqueness of the taovalas and kiekies say something both about the creator and about the person whom they are created for. How might this cultural fashion element speak to the views of the Tongan people who are very modest in dress and very proud in the heritage? note: The women above are wearing taovalas for a Catholic Sunday Mass.

Tu'anikevale: The Tou'a and the Men

Every evening as the church choir practice and maululu dances wind down, the men take over the halls for their kava circles. The kava circle is a boys club where the men get stoned on kava and shoot the shit, gossiping and poking fun at each other. If they are lucky, the men get a tou’a to serve them. The tou’a is a single young female who is willingly to hang with the boys, let their come ons roll off her shoulders and sass back to them while serving kava late into the night. The tou’a is typically guaranteed only at the formal kava circles or the circles held for fundraising for community projects where the men pay in to join the circle. I was asked to tou’a at one of the later and I could not say “no” to an invitation for my first peek into the Tongan boys club. The men were, I think, unusually kind to me keeping their crude jokes to themselves for now. I am pretty sure my instructor being in the next circle kept them somewhat inline. (He’s kinda a big guy. I wouldn’t mess.) The best way for me to describe the circle is to compare it to a puff, puff, pass situation in a smelly frat room where that guy is falling asleep against the wall and the guy on your left is giving you the eye but blushing when you catch it. The highlight of the evening came when an older member of my circle stood to relieve himself and his tupanu ( the mens’ wrap around formally worn in Tongan) had slipped down and his butt crack was peekin’ . The men rolled and continued as he walked across the room and bent over to talk to another man and mooned us all. Ah, giggle fits. Tongans are fun. Fakaoli, man.

Tu'anikevale: My First Mormon Mixer

I had the most bizarre sort of fun at this event. The whole village attended the dance held on the basketball (or rather net ball here) court behind the Mormon Church. Crepe paper and balloons hung were crisscrossed over the fences and folding chairs were set up along the boundary lines. All the Mormons in the village showed up in their best get-up and the rest of the village drove their cars onto the lawn , directly up to the fence of the court to watch. The entire village bumped to the sounds of Tongan music and reggae intertwined with hits from America’s popular club sounds. It is quite hilarious to watch Mormons, who do not believe in enjoying a drink, get down to “Bartender”. As the song spills, “I’m at the bar with her…”, the men approach the women sitting in the folding chairs around the court and bow in front of the lucky lady they would like to dance with. The lady gets up and follows him into the middle of the court where they immediately beginning swaying about 3 feet away from each other, avoiding all eye contact and not speaking to each other. There is absolutely no bump and grind, my friends. After a few awkward numbers, I settled on dancing with the group of preteen girls who have become my posse. They like my palangi dance.

Tu'anikevale: My Family Ties

I am staying in Tuanikevale with a young couple not much older than I. Tupou is 25 and her husband, Vi’iangi, is 27. They have three children. One is 4, Sifa is 3 and Falemaka is only 5 monthes. The family is overwhelmingly kind and treats me well. I fight with Tupou trying to get her to let me help. Week one, I said she could treat me like a guest but by week two I need to be pulling my own weight; yet, today she still said, “Next week?” when I got up to do my dishes but I shook my head and did them anyway. I am not very comfortable being catered to. The family is trying to help me learn Tongan by quizzing me on various occasions, particularly right after I wake up when I can hardly speak English so most of the time I just sound like I am slow. One, the four year old, is probably the most fond of me as he yells my name from the front porch whenever I walk down the drive and runs out, often bare-assed, to greet me. He even speaks to me like I am slow since most of the time I just smile at him and ask him the four questions I know. I let him listen to my ipod a few times and now he runs into my rooms asking for the telephone and making a motion of putting head phones in his ear.

The family is among the poorest in the village and I believe this to be in part because they are so young. The kids consume most of their time and I don’t see them working much away from the home because of this. Vi’iagne works in the bush harvesting crop and Tupou weaves mats for sale in town but with such young kids they do not leave the house for long. The baby was sick the first week I was here and cried a lot so I felt like another child to add to their burden. They are wonderful parents, noting a difference in parenting (I will talk about that later), and seem like very happy people. The family is Mormon, which I just discovered upon arriving at Mormon service Sunday and that will lead to a bunch of interesting discoveries I am sure. I received the Book of Mormon during the service; special for me in English.

I am very grateful for all that Tupou and Vi’iange are doing for me. This experience is proving to be interesting and challenging. The home stay is definitely to break us into the Tongan way of life and it is doing so fast and hard for me.

Tuanikevale: The Human Experience

I have been sent to Tuanikevale on the Vava'u, the most northern group of islands, for my six week homestay. It is a sleepy village that never sleeps blanketed by thick stars and set in rolling hills of "the bush" that seperate it from the waves crashing on the coral reefs just beyond the beach. The people walk lethargically through the town and work in the bush harvesting mango, root and pinneapple taking frequent breaks from the hot sun and sleeping and eating every couple of hours but in the cooler evenings the thick air is full of the sounds of singing and laughing as the people gather to practice traditional dance or gossip around the kava circles. Every day is the same. And it is here that I have discovered again what I know to be true; people are people where ever you go and it is the simplest things that make us all the same. I am a foreigner still who "lea faka-Tonga si'i si'i pe." I speak very little Tongan but though a laugh, a touch, the upraised lift of an eyebrow, there is a commonality some understanding, even just at me being the butt of a joke.