No Shoes Required

I am sorry that is have been doing a bad job of keeping you all up to date on what has been going on here in Tungua since I got here. It has been hard to type up my experiences since there is no electricity and I don’t really like taking my laptop over to different people’s houses to have it charged.

Last week I was thinking of some stories that I could share and as I was walking around the village it occurred to me how quickly we come desensitized to the things around us. I tried to put myself back into the mind set of when I first got here to Tonga. Here is what I saw….

~A little naked boy carrying a knife and a coconut
~An eight year old carrying a one year old to church (the parents were still getting ready)
~Kids of all ages, one to 21, just wondering around (I am pretty sure the parents don’t know
exactly where their kids are but I guess you can do that when you live on such a small
island and half the island is your family)
~Kids and adults alike not wearing shoes to church, school, or around the village (including me,
for a little while, since my flip-flops broke)
~Swimming with all your clothes on
~The men coming back from the sea with 80lb fish, sea turtles, and sharks
~Men wearing girl clothes (clothes are clothes to them it doesn’t matter)
~Men walking around carrying a machete
~Having pigs, goats, horses, and sometimes cows right out side my house

Life here in Tungua has been good to me. There is a family that has adopted me. They always take care of me. Now when I say a family it is almost half the village. The parents are in their 60’s and they have 12 kids. The youngest is 24 and 8 of their children still live here in Tungua with their family. The WHOLE family takes care of me. When the men in the family come back from the sea they always come over and tell me it is time to eat. I now go over there and help them de-scale, gut, clean and cook the fish. Some of the women in the family are teaching me to weave mats. Weaving is a very big source of income for most of the people of Tonga. It is a very long process to get the loakau (type of tree) ready to be weaved, maybe one month. And then actually weaving is a very slow process, maybe three months. I will try to get a picture of very point in the process to share with you all. My language gets better everyday. I am still not able to understand everything people say, just basic conversation, but if they talk really fast forget about it.