Most Tongans are
pretty quiet. They don’t say a whole
lot, even when asked questions.
Sometimes they don’t speak to you at all. If you ask them a question and the answer is
yes, sometimes they don’t speak, they just raise their eyebrows. At first you think they have something wrong
with them, but it is just one way they communicate with you. When Sister Johnston, the mission nurse met
our mission president she was getting frustrated because he didn’t respond to
her questions verbally. It was 20
minutes into the meeting before she found out he was communicating with her,
the Tongan way of raising eyebrows.
Tongans love to
sing, dance and play rugby. They also
really love to eat. Friday night,
October 12, we had a High Priest social.
There were some salads and fruit, taro, green bananas in coconut milk,
red snapper fish, BBQ’d chicken, and chicken cooked in an umu, and
coconuts. An umu is a pit lined with
rocks, covered with banana leaves, chicken put in, covered with more banana
leaves and hot rocks placed on top and covered.
It was delicious, all of it.
Tongans can really put away the groceries. They don’t eat until they are full; they eat
until they are tired. Just about
everything was consumed.
Tongans don’t
like the sun. They wear hats and use
shade umbrellas. But, they wear black
clothes just about all the time. When we
first got here, everyone was still wearing black in mourning over the King’s
death. But, the period is over and black
is the color most worn in the country.There is not a
traffic light in the country. There are
only a handful of street signs in downtown Nukualofa, with a couple of streets
lined. You drive on the left side of the
road which is crazy for us right siders.
On top of that the Tongans are terrible drivers. The reason they are so bad is there is not a
test to get a driver’s license. You just
pay your $60 pa’anga and you get your one year license to create mayhem on the
road. We pray for safety daily!
There are
government schools and private schools in Tonga. Some cost more than others and the
curriculums can be quite different. But
some things are the same. All the kids
wear a uniform to school. Each school
has its colors. The girls wear a jumper
with a white shirt underneath. The guys
wear their tupenus (guy skirt) with their ta’ovalas and kafa wraps. Flip flops or sandals for the feet. The girls all braid their hair which is
mandatory. It makes deciding what to
wear to school each day pretty simple every morning. However this sameness makes it hard to
remember names of some of the kids. It’s
not like you can remember hair styles or clothes to help you out. We love watching the Liahona High School
students come to school every morning.
Some of them ride a regular bus, but most of them are jammed into the
back of a pickup or flatbed truck. There
are no seatbelt laws in Tonga.
Many years ago,
the first king conquered the many villages and islands of Tonga. In the early 1900’s one of the later kings
who now owned all the land in the kingdom, consolidated all the village chiefs
down to 23 Nobles in the land. The king
took most of the land and divided it into 8-10 acre plots for each family in Tonga. These plots have been passed down from
generation to generation. The Nobles own
land and have titles, and most of them are in Parliament, earning gov’t money. The King owns great chunks of the island and
is basically supported by the taxes, fees of the people. The Royals and Nobles have all the wealth in
the kingdom. The commoners have small
plots of land, but the family and extended families still have the original
plots. They call them plantations, but
most are used for subsistence farming to keep the family alive. Most of the people are very poor. They say they are going to the,”Bush,” when
they go to their plantation. Usually
they are carrying their machete with them.
These plantations can grow tomatoes, potatoes, cabbage, taro, yams,
manioke (tapioca), coconuts, bananas, cucumbers, and the
like. It’s hard to believe there hasn’t
been a revolution. However, the people
reverence their king and the nobles.
Our air
conditioning stopped working a couple of weeks ago at the office at
Ma’ufanga. On top of that the room would
smell bad when we opened it up in the mornings.
Now that the weather is turning warmer I decided to call the facilities
maintenance people to have them look at it and get it fixed. I emailed the boss man, and within 60 minutes
a guy was out there. He poked around a
bit, swapping batteries in the remote, running a different power line, etc. and
decided to call in an electrician. A
team of 3 guys came a while later and began to take the unit a part. The 2nd guy opened up the
electrical part and said it smelled really bad in there. When he got the electrical unit pulled out he
found a fried gecko. Evidently the gecko
had managed to crawl up in there and when the juice was turned on it cooked him
and he shorted out the unit. They could
not fix it right away and had to order a couple parts. The guy said he had seen this once before in Tonga. Only in Tonga!
I have attached
photos of some ‘Liahona High School buses”, some Liahona High School students
at a career fair, some missionaries who wear the traditional Tongan clothing
with the tupenu (man skirt), ta’ovala (waist wrap), and kafa (rope-like strand
that Tongans use to tie their ta’ovalas around their torsos. I have also
included a beautiful Tongan sunset, and the picture of the dead gecko that got
fried in our air conditioning unit.
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| Fried Gecko in AC unit |
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| Elder Bean and missionaries wearing traditional Tongan clothing |
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| High School Transportation! |
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| High School Bus |
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| Beautiful Sunset |
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| High School Girls in school uniforms and braids |
