The Helping Beans: Only in Tonga!

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 2^nd 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.