Ha’ano and Thanksgiving

For the week of attachment I will be staying with a current volunteer named Grant. He lives on an outer island named Ha’ano in the Ha’apai group; so it will be very similar to what Tungua might be like. He is only one year into his service. Also staying at his house will be Melanie and Eric, the kick ass married couple. That is the only reason that a single girl would be able to stay at a single male’s house. It is very culturally inappropriate for the single volunteers to have someone of the opposite sex be an overnight guest. But I guess since there is a married couple with us it is a little better.

As we get off the airplane the current volunteers are waiting there to take us to our new homes for the next week. We start off by all eight of us pilling into a taxi van with all of our luggage (how we all fit….I still will never know), dropping four of the volunteers off in Pangai where they will be staying for the week with a different volunteer. The rest of us staying with Grant continued on to the meat store (which was a little shack in someone’s yard off the side of a road) to get some moa (chicken) for the week, than on to the PC office to pick up his three Tongan friends who drove the boat into Pangai and also get some food from a little store in the same building. Once we are done shopping for our food for the week we headed over to a neighboring village where we drove to a wharf and loaded up into a small little fishing boat; in the boat was Grant, his three friends, Melanie, Eric, me, all of our luggage and of course our food. The boat ride was about an hour. It was really interesting to experience since that is about the size of the boat that I will have to take over to Ha’afava. If you put your hand on the outside of the boat and reached down about 5 or 6 inches you could touch the water. While we were heading over to Ha’ano it started to sprinkle on us…no worries about our stuff because it was covered, it was just us who got wet. =)

Grant’s and his village are great!! His village is a little smaller than mine, he has about 34 house holds but there are also about 3 or 4 other villages on the island, so the island itself is larger. He also has running water and electricity from 7pm to 2am. The day to day experiences that we had with Grant were priceless. Just to be able to see a current volunteer in his community really taught us a lot. Grant is a school teacher so the job will be a little different though. Grant also showed us some really important skills that we need to use while living on an outer island. Everything from cooking delicious meals with little supplies (not sure I mentioned that Ha’apai does not get any veggies from about December to about March/April), fishing, eating raw fish right out of the ocean (oh man…I have a really great story about that), gutting and scaling fish, husking a coconut, making coconut milk, starting a fire using coconuts to cook dinner with, to understanding how to be accepted in a Tongan culture and community without sacrificing your own culture and views. All in all it was a really great experience and I also made some good friends there that I will go back and visit.

The story about eating raw fish right out of the ocean…as those of you who really know me, I don’t eat raw fish! I don’t like the smell, the texture, and of course the whole mental thing about it being raw does not help. We were all swimming at the wharf one day after school with the children in the village and this man from the village comes up to Grant and just hands him this raw fish. The man had just been cleaning out the nets they have placed a little further down the beach. Grant tells one of the kids to go get a knife. Meanwhile, Eric, Melanie and I are getting out of the water curious to know what we are going to do with the fish…some what knowing that he is going to have us eat it, but still hoping that he might have something else planned. The kid returns with a knife and Grant guts the fish, scales it and puts three slits on each side of the fish. He then takes a bite out of the meat that is now showing and hand it off to Eric. Eric takes a bite, has a hard time ripping a piece off but finally gets it and his consensuses is that the raw fish is ifo (delicious). Grant then bites off another chunk of raw fish meat and hands it to me, while I give him a really nasty look I take the raw fish. Not wanting to go anywhere near this raw fish but at the same time taking the piece knowing that I should at least try it because this is a very common way that fish is eaten on an outer island. And since I will be on what is considered an even further outer island than Grant’s, I figured there is no better time than the present to give it a try. I go ahead and bite off a little piece from the chunk that I was given, try and forget exactly what I am eating and just taste it. My consensuses…..It is not that bad…I actually kind of like it and I finish eating the chunk in my hand. Melanie tried a little piece too but did not really like it. It was really crazy to think back on the event and know that I…I of all people just ate a fish that was just alive and swimming just a few short minutes before. Definitely an experience to write home about! ;-) **with all of these new and unbelievable experiences that saying has a whole new meaning!!

For Thanksgiving Peace Corps provides a turkey for each island group and all the volunteers and trainees on that island group get together and try to make a traditional dinner with the available supplies. Since everyone else on Ha’apai where already on the main island it was just us on Ha’ano who needed to find a boat to take up into Pangai. Grant informed us, that like most of the other parts of Tonga, everything runs on island time and we should pack and get everything ready the night before because we don’t know exactly when the boat will be leaving. It could be 6am or 10am, just whenever people feel like leaving. So in the morning we wake up at 6am all packed and ready to go, talk with some of the locals to see who is going and when they might be leaving. After a while of talking with different people in the village we find out that no one is going into Pangai do to the shortage of fuel for the boats. So needless to say, we get to spend one more day on the beautiful island of Ha’ano. All of us are really fine with the change on plans and make the most of the day. For dinner we ended up sharing a really nice simple ika mo e moa (fish and chicken) dinner with just the 5 of us: Grant, one of his really good Tongan friends, Eric, Melanie, and myself. Even though we were stranded on a beautiful tropical island, we all really enjoyed ourselves and had plenty of things to be thankful for.

We were able to find a boat going into Pangai the next day, caught our flight back to Tongatapu and headed onto our second home stay and the final leg of our training schedule.