Fakame (Fa-ka-may)

There is no direct translation for the word fakame, so I will just have to explain to you what it is. It is a celebration, it is always the first Sunday in May. The purpose of the celebration is to celebrate the children. May is kind of like the family month. The first Sunday is for the children - Fakame, the second Sunday is for Mothers (just like in America) - Aho Fa'e, and the third Sunday is for Fathers - Aho Tamai. They only have a big celebration for Fakame and of course when I tell you there is a big celebration I mainly mean that there will just be a huge feast. So I made sure to take some pictures of all the preperation for the food. We actually started the evening before prepareing some of the food. There were a lot of animals to die for this celebration. They killed and gutted the goat and the pigs at night so I could not really take pictures of them. And besides it is not really exciting to see the dead animals hanging from the trees with the blood and guts, when it is pitch black out side. They hang the animals from the trees while they are preparing it because of all the dogs, cats, chickens, and pigs wondering around. And of course they don't really have a table big enough and clean enough to do it on. So needless to say it was very creepy and I just could not bring myself to take pictures of it. Anyways, in the morning we started preparing everything to be cooked in the 'umu (if you remember from previous posts, that is an inground oven).

Here is Mele (the wife to the oldest son in 'my family') preparing lu. The lu that she is cooking has fish, hopa (a type of banana, really sweet), and coconut milk. It is wrapped it in a banana leaf and cooked in the 'umu.

This is Viliami (the youngest son) preparing the pigs for the tunu (bbq).

There is a lot going on in this picture. In the background you can see the mother, Saane, covering the root crops with foil. The pile of meat you see on the palm tree leaves is their goat they killed the night before, than you can see the three pigs we will roast. The boy standing by the pigs, Filimone - he is the oldest son's son. Than you can see Viliami playing with the fire. He is acutally moving all the wood pieces to a different pit to cook the pigs and all that will remain in this pit will be the hot stones for the 'umu.

Now that all the burning wood has been removed, 'Edimoni (the oldest son), places' the goat meat on top of some wire, which is placed directly on the hot stones.

Next, Viliami and 'Edimoni place the lu on top of the goat meat.

Now 'Edimoni is placing banana leaves on top of everything.

You have to look closely but they have places a sheet of metal down and then another layer of banana leaves.

Over that Viliami and 'Edimoni placed about 3 or 4 blankets to help keep the heat in and now they are working on moving the mound of dirt on top of the blankets. And in the botton left corner you can see where all the burning wood was moved to to cook the pigs.

While everyone else was in church, and the children performed a play, Filimoni, Viliami and I tunu the pigs. So this is the view we had for three hours while spinning the pig.

When church was over and all the food was cooked we brought it over to the church hall. There were three other place settings like this one and a little later some more food was added to this one from one of the sisters. Now, remember this is just once church in my village. There are 6 churches for a village of about 200 people. We had enough food to be able to feed the entire village but only about 30 people or so came to this celebration.

Then after the evening church service we just had a light meal of bread and cakes. My family made two different kinds of bread and I made the banana bread. Six of them actually =)