'Uesiliana Church Conference

The 'Uesiliana Church has a conference each year at the end of June. It is a huge celebration. People from all the island groups come down to the main island Tongatapu and even people from New Zealand, Australia and America. The purpose of this conference is for all the leaders in each church, however, all the church members come to the conference to perform during the different masses that happen 3 times a day for two weeks.

This is the church where all the masses are held. It is huge inside with a big balcony, of course for the Sunday service is when it is most full. There is a picture of the second Sunday of the conference and you can see all the people outside because everywhere inside was all ready full. It was amazing at how many people were there.
Here is the other side of the church. If you look closely you can see that they set out rows of seats on the patio of the chruch as well as stadium seating just outside (the right side of the picture) and yet there were still people sitting on the ground everywhere you looked.
On Tuesday of the last week of the conference the District of Lulunga (5 islands - including Tungua) performed for everyone. Here is a group picture after the performance. The people wearing white were in the performance and the people wearing green were in the choir. I was in the choir, you can also see the married couple - Eric and Melanie from Ha'afeva the island one hour away from Tungua.

For two weeks straight, three times a day after each chruch service there is a kai pola (big feast). As you can see the line of table there are two rows like this and all the table are going to FULL of food.

And it is amazing at how much the Tongans will eat at each meal. You would think after a day or a couple of days of eating meals like this 3 times a day you would be sick. But not the Tongans, it is AMAZING!!!

Random Adventures and 'My Family'

Here is the family that has adopted me. Their last name is Finau (fee-now) and actually this is only about a quarter of them. They had 12 children 6 girls and 6 boys, however, one of the boys died when he was 4 years old. All of the girls are married and only the oldest boy is married. So in the picture: there is only 4 children of the 11, 1 spouse of the total 7, and only 7 grandchildren of the current 26.

From the left back: Melelose(daughter), Viliami (son, youngest of all 12 children), Pomana (father), Saane (mother), Melape (daughter), 'Edimoni (son, oldest of all the children), Mele (wife of 'Edimoni). Mele is holding their youngest child of 6, Tevita.

Front row from the right: Sivi and Kilisitina (children of 'Edimoni), 'Ana, Siulanga (children of different daughters not pictured), Lea'aengalu and Saane (children of Melape).

After the boys come home from the ocean it is time to clean up the fish for dinner. From left to right: Pomana, Saane, Viliami, Melelose, 'Edimoni, Mele and standing up in the back is Sioeli (one of the sons that has not been pictured yet).

Filimone, Sinilau and a tuna.

As some of you have heard how I have to get my mail, I thought I would post a picture for you to better understand. If you see in the background a bigger boat, that is the boat that comes from the main island, next you can see the little boats that we take out to meet the big boat, and in the foreground you can see an example of how most things get done in the island, jsut man power. We not only get mail off that big boat but anything else we need for the island. You can see Sioeli pushing a drum of gasoline onto the beach for the church generator.

Tokelau (son of one of the daughters) and Filimone holding a bat, yes, a bat!! I guess it some how got holes in it wings and was not able to fly back home. The kids saw it in the tree and decided to climb up the tree and get it.

Peka - bat or flying fox, technically

Some of you have heard that I have a cat and a dog so I thought that I would post a picture of them to share. They are not allowed into my bedroom since they play outside with all the other animals. So, one cold night, I was laying in bed reading a book and when I looked over to check on them I saw them sleeping like this. Too cute to resist, I had to take a picture of them. My cat's name is 'Ivi, which means energy, power, strength. My dog's name is Sinilau. The reason I named him this was because there is a story about Hina and Sinilau. Long story short, that was her boyfriend and later her husband. The people in my village would always ask me where is Sinilau, especially if they had seen me walking on the road with any of the male youth. So I decided to have a little fun and give this name to my dog. So now when they ask I just point to my dog. =D

Coconut Milk

As I am sure you can imagine living on a small trpical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean there are a lot of coconuts and in turn we end up using the coconut milk in a lot of our cooking. So I thought I would show you guys how they make the coconut milk, and also a good way for you to get introduced to 'my family' here in Tungua.

First if you look to the right of the picture you will see a sharp stick. That is what they use to husk the coconut (take off the outside), you can see the outside parts on the round (sorry the picture is a little dark). In the picture you are see Saane (the mother), Viliami (the youngest son), and Tevita (the son of one of the daughters).

Now that the coconut has been romoved from the shell, Viliami opens up the coconut by hitting it with the muchete to let all the coconut water out.

After all the water has been drained out the coconut it is split in half and the meat of the coconut is shaved out of the coconut. The thing that Viliami is sitting on actually has a sharp serrated blade at the end. In this picture: The woman behind Viliami is one of his sisters, Melelose, and next to her are two of her children, first Tevita and than Kulisitofa (in English David and Christopher) which is holding my dog Sinilau. The women to the left of Viliami is his oldest brother's wife. And the two children are children of two of his sisters.

Here I am helping to shave the meat of the coconut. They let me do this every once in a while but they let me this time because they said my family would like to see a picture of me doing Tongan things. =)

Once all the coconuts are done being shaved now it is time to start squeezing out the milk. From the inside of the shell of the coconut Viliami has taken out the 'coconut hair' to use like a cloth to squeeze the shaved coconut meat.

You can see him packing in the shaved coconut meat. (Sorry the picture is really dark.)

And the last step is to squeeze out the coconut milk. You can see it running down his hands. You squeeze the coconut hair with the coconut meat inside just like you would squeeze out a dish towel. Once you have squeezed the milk out from all of the shaved coconut milk you are ready to start cooking. The main use of the coconut milk is to be used like of like oil or butter when boiling the root crops or fish. Just like of adds some flavor and fat to them. I will actually use all of this coconut milk to bake the banana breads for the Fakame celebration. It is used instead of butter or oil in the baked goods. =)

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 =)

A day in the life of Hina

I don’t think I have explained what type of work I do here in my island. When I received my description of what I would be doing…my main job was to help the youth develop their business skills. I would also help teach at the school, help the local fisherman with their businesses and help the weavers sell their mats. My work seems to follow that description somewhat. You have to keep in mind that we work on island time, so something that would normally take me a couple of days to accomplish now takes me a couple of weeks. When I first arrived here it was summer time for them. So school was out and there were a lot of families visiting and lots of things to do night and day and of course….no work. It was really nice because it gave me some time to get to know the community, work on my language and get used to island life. My work really started in the beginning or middle of January. I started at the school for just an hour everyday half an hour with grades 1, 2 and 3 and half an hour with grades 4, 5 and 6 helping them with English. The rest of my time was filled with just hanging out with the youth and doing all the chores round my house. Like doing my laundry...by hand takes about an hour or so and that is just for a small load. Some of the other chores are: bringing water into my house, washing dishes, and sweeping. Everything here seems to take twice as long to accomplish. So far working with the youth…they have decided on a business to start, I helped them write up a business plan and apply for a grant to help with the start up costs. Right now we are just waiting on the grant committee to meet and approve our grant. The youth want to start a ‘gas station’. But of course there will be no pumps like we are used to seeing when we think of a gas station. There will be 205 liter drums full of the gas and oil for their boats and lawn mowers and kerosene for the lanterns. This will not only help our community but also the neighboring islands that are inhabited.

I have also helped a man in the community who wanted to start a store write up a business plan. I have also started what you could call a mini kindergarten. One day I saw one of the little granddaughter’s of my family writing on a piece of cardboard and asked her over to my house to help here practice her writing. Well that has turned into having 3 little girls from the community, all will be going to grade 1 next year, come to my house for about 2 hours and we practice writing, recognizing and singing the Tongan alphabet and numbers.

Currently, I am trying to get a first aid training here for the community. When ever they have a cut, a head ace or something wrong they always come to my house looking for me to help them. I am not supposed to use my Peace Corps medical supplies to help them so I try and do my best with their requests. I am usually able to help them at least until they can get to Ha’afeva to see the doctor. Here in Tonga going to the doctor and all supplies are free to them. So it is just a matter of getting the knowledge on how to best care until they can get to the doctor.

Here is what my typical day looks like:
6:30 – 7:30 am Wake up
7:30 – 8:30 am Getting ready for the day
(showering, bring in water, eating, if doing laundry get it ready)
8:30 – 10:30 am Helping teach English at the school
10:30am – 12:00 pm Do chores around the house or prepare for the Kindy class
12:00 – 2:00 pm Kindergarten
2:00 – rest of day Study Tongan, go to youth meetings, go to weaving group meetings,
work with the youth if they are mowing lawns, play basketball or go running, cook, read,
chores, go to community events, or just hang out with the youth or at the family’s house
that helps me, oh yeah, or watch movies if someone turns on their generator.
10:00 – 11:00 pm Go to sleep

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.

Bucket Baths by Candle Light

Sorry it has been so long since I have posted anything. After two months of living on my island I have finally made it back to civilization and the internet. =)

I am sure the first think you are all wondering is: how my island is? Simple answer….I love it!! =D The people are really nice and have welcomed me into their lives with arms wide open. On the island we do not have electricity or running water. Almost all of the houses have solar power that provides them with light at night. My house does not have solar power, but I was told that my house was on a list to get solar power installed maybe in March. (I guess it is a government funded project to provide all the outer island houses with solar power and they will be coming back through to all the houses that did not get it installed the first time through.) All the churches and about 10 families have generators that they use to watch movies and charge their phones. It is actually a really funny event when they watch movies. When one family turns on their generator every one knows about it and will go over to watch the movie or just bring their phone to be charged. So you will walk into the house and it will be filled with about 20 or so people watching the movie. Oh, and you can’t forget all the people standing outside looking in through the windows. The one plug now has about 3 or 4 power strips plugged into it and each slug is filled with cell phones and there is a line of phones to be next. But I always get special treatment…no matter whose house I go to, once I walk in the door they always magically find an empty plug for me to use. At my house I have two kerosene lanterns that I use to do everything from cooking to taking a bucket bath at night. The youth that I work with have a generator that I can use whenever I want, but gas is very expensive so I have not used it yet. With that being said, I have not really been able to use my computer to write down my experiences. So I am sitting here in one of the other PC Volunteer’s house on a Sunday finally have electricity without having 20 or so Tongans around. I will do my best to account for all the exciting experiences I have had so far.

The first couple of weeks on my island was full of hanging out with the community, playing volleyball with the youth, lots of eating, and getting to know everyone. During the Holidays a lot of family from all over Tonga and the ones who moved away to New Zealand come back home and spend about a month or more with their family. For the first month I was kept really busy, there was always something to do or some type of event to go to. One day we took a boat ride to a neighboring island to have a kaitunu (picnic). A bunch of the youth and I just get into a boat and head over to a different island. It took about 45 mins to get there and as soon as we got there some of the boys went out to go fishing. Below is a picture of what the boys brought back. So no need to bring food with us on a picnic just go out and catch some fish. =)

Here are some of the youth cleaning the fish getting ready to cook some of it and preparing the rest of it to eat ota (raw). Oh yeah, no need for napkins, plates or anything of that nature...that is what the trees and leaves are for.

So being the only single girl on the island who is not related to anyone on the island the youth always want me to tou'a (serve kava) for them. Well this time I just took picutes for you all to see..no serving this time. As you can see in the picture the kava bowl and the cups that are used. If you look in the background of the picture you can also see a couple of the men with guitars. All the men will sing while about 3 or 4 of them play the guitar. I really love it when they sing...I always tell them that they need to sing if I am going to tou'a...it is the only form of entertainment for me. =)

My island being so small (about 1 mile by 3/4 of a mile), you are able to walk around the entire island in about less than 2 hours. Below is a picture from the first time I walked around the island with a couple of the youth from the island. It was high tide when we decided to go and I took my camera of course so there was some points where unless I wanted to get wet we had to do some climbing. Which was fine until....I got stung by 2 wasps: one on my left big toe and the other on my hip. Oh man did it hurt!! This picture was taken on the opposite side of the island from where we live. The beaches have a lot more rocks. If it is low tide you are able to walk around the entire island without getting wet.

Sports Day!! There are about 4 other inhabited islands along with Tungua. Once a year they have something called a sports day where the other islands come and the women play basiketi bolo (basketball) and the men play volleyball. Below are pictures of both sports, volleyball is played just the same as it is in America. Basketball on the other hand is very different. As you can see below there is no court and the hoops are completely different. Once the girl with the ball is in the half circle no one can block her but she cannot move from the sport she caught the ball.

Funny story about this picture. Right after I took that picture I felt like the ball was going to hit me so I moved a little to the right and the ball hit me on my left arm. I was so thankful that it did not hit my camera.

Our only source of water on the island is rain water that gets collected from the roof tops and put into a simivai (cement water). When I arrived my house did not have a simivai. I had just been using the simivai at the church hall next to my house. The youth told me that they would move one of the unused simivais from around the village to my house. So about 6 weeks or so of being there they finally organized themselves and moved a simivai to my house. The picutes below kind of show the process it took to do such a thing when you have no equipment just man power.

First you have dig it up so that you can fit palm tree trunks underneath it to be able to roll it.

Next you need the man power of....oh lets say about.......the whole village!! and the only truck me have on the island.

It took us about 2 hours or more to move the simivai about 50/60 yards. It was a slow process since each time you moved it just a little you had to take the tree trucks from the back and place them in the front and then move the simivai. It was such an amazing site to see and the teamwork was absolutly amazing!! I am very thankful that everyone came to help, men, youth, women, children and even some of the elders. I was really touched!

Sorry that was not able to be as detailed in my stories as usual and there are lots more stories I was not able to write about this time. I will try to be a little more disciplined in writing some of them down after they happen and just type them up when I come into town. I am glad that I was able to post the pictures for you all to see.

Thank you for your support, love and prayers. They mean more to me than you know. Hope all is well in your lives. I will be back into Nuku'alofa in about a month for training so look for some more pictures and hopefully lots of stories. =)