An Ode to Empty Youth Centres

an ode to empty youth centres…

If this last week is any indication, our life just became even busier. Our youth centre has already staved off serious financial crisis, started two new programs, and begun pursuing funding for major expansions next year. Not bad considering the New Year started three weeks ago, eh? Here’s some of what’s in store for the upcoming calendar year:

• Peace Corps is partnering with our Vava’u Youth Congress to develop a microloan program that will offer training, funding, and mentorship for qualified young people interested in starting small businesses here. Of course, the catch is they have to pay the money back…a rather foreign concept around here (no pun intended). Amber is particularly involved in this program’s policy formation, curriculum development, and upcoming implementation.
  
• Our youth group has expressed interest in planting a vegetable garden, placing trash cans throughout our community, and eventually building Vava’u’s first gym. We’ll start with smaller projects in the hopes of our group learning the essentials of project design and getting some success before, you know, building an entire gymnasium. This week we’re getting our weekly fundraising kava night started up again, and next week I might be helping some group members write a small project assistance proposal to Peace Corps.
  
• Our youth centre remains relatively short on youth; this seems somewhat problematic given our organization’s mission statement. So we’re hoping to level our large lawn, construct some athletic fields, and begin some activity nights that will draw youth from throughout our island. Of course all that requires funding, so we’ll be having a biweekly barbecue at the local market. Sensing any trends yet?
  
• My Tongan counterpart and I will be visiting and assessing all 31 member youth groups in Vava’u over the next several months. These site visits will hopefully help us to structure programming around local communities’ needs and empower groups to effectively pursue their development goals. That’s two nights a week of visiting local villages…you guys are writing all this down on a calendar, right? I’d record all scheduled events in pencil, as these visits tend to get cancelled about 90% of the time.
  
• Our youth centre is the only organization in Vava’u servicing the needs of people with developmental disabilities. Thus far these services have chiefly involved singing songs with nine individuals whose disabilities are disparate to say the least: cerebral palsy, Downs Syndrome, mental retardation, physical disabilities. We’re hoping to offer our staff training with this population and broaden services to include practical lessons.
  
• The drama team that I “help” (my assistance typically consists of watching, offering some critiques, and frantically attempting to keep track of dialogue written entirely in Tongan) will be traveling to ‘Eua, another island in Tonga. This trip will encourage the new drama group in ‘Eua and educate youth there about various issues facing Tongan adolescents. While we’ll also be performing in Vava’u before and after this trip, it’s our travels that constitute the group’s greatest financial needs. So obviously we’ll start a fundraising effort…that way Amber and I have even less free time.
  
• Remember all those fundraising activities? Well, Amber’s the lucky one who gets to organize our staff, regularly review our financial status, keep everyone motivated, and prevent constant staff bickering. Oku pule ‘a ‘Emipa…meaning, she’s the boss.

We’ve come to realize that planning these various projects doesn’t necessarily guarantee they’ll occur anytime soon. The Tongan life is slower and more easy-going than non-profit existence in the States. Nonetheless, the time of initial community assessment and relationship building is drawing to a close, and the time for real work is starting. Which is daunting, to say the least. If you thought our domestic job descriptions were vague in terms of success measures, you have no idea what we’re dealing with here. So stay tuned. While our Peace Corps cohorts are basically attending a couple meetings a week, we’re putting in nine hour days. It’s not very fakaTonga of us, but at least we left our palm pilots and cell phones behind.

Cliff

An Ode to Pasikala a Kilifi

an ode to pasikala a kilifi…

everyday i ride you home
no longer do i moan and groan
you carry my burden, you ease my pain
therefore i will not complain
the helmet’s dorky, the exercise is rough
but my dear bicycle you save my duff

The verse printed above functions at multiple literary levels:

1) light-hearted tribute to E.E. Cummings and his well-known aversion to capital letters
2) self-effacing acknowledgment that I never have been and never will be a poet
3) genuine and heart-felt appreciation for my rusty, two-wheeled savior

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, January’s bicycle purchase has radically altered my experience of Tonga. The hip pains that plagued our first six months in country have slowly grown worse, making constant walking difficult and therefore making daily life slightly complicated. Our lovely little home is a ten minute walk from the Peace Corps office and a fifteen minute walk from the Youth Office. We were walking approximately one hour a day upon first arriving in Vava’u, leaving me sore before the workday even started, negative before even appreciating Tonga’s beauty, and persistently seeking creative methods for avoiding travel. I’m happy to report that things have changed.

Having seen me endure daily pain and hobble occasionally, a nearby Peace Corps volunteer and dear friend concluded that I needed his bike more than he needed his bike. Even though his Peace Corps service ends in March, he’s going bikeless and saving me. What does having a bike for daily commutes and transport mean? It means energy at the outset of every single workday. It means looking for opportunities to explore our island instead of looking for opportunities to avoid physical exertion. It means feeling independent and physically capable again. It means much more than any cheesy poem could ever possibly express.

One of my doctors in Washington D.C. was a young and athletic guy who had recently undergone total hip replacement. He’d run a few too many marathons, and he feared his active lifestyle would suffer following surgery. Quite to the contrary, he assured me there was hope. He now bikes 300 miles a week, and the near-constant pain he formerly endured has disappeared. I’ve got a couple years before that kind of idyllic existence becomes a reality, and for now that means dealing with daily pain. However, thanks to my bicycle I’m enjoying being here more than ever before and I’m seeing things for the first time that I’d walked by everyday. I gotta say this island’s a pretty incredible place to call home, and if you’re interested in visiting we could always take a bike ride together.

Cliff

Christmas in Tonga

Ah, Christmas in Tonga. Perhaps some of you – our small but devoted legion of loyal website readers – find yourselves wondering what exactly the Advent season looks like here in the South Pacific. Well, allow me to paint a portrait, albeit a picture absent reindeer, lightly frosted windows, fireplaces, or any other Kincade-like characteristics of winter wonderlands.

You see, there aren’t really any reindeers in Tonga, but we did have an entire horse carcass hanging in our backyard last week. Our neighbors were hosting a wedding feast for a family member, so they slaughtered a horse, blowtorched numerous pigs, and generally reminded us why we didn’t live nearby Chicago’s stockyards. We’ve got a great photo of an able-bodied young Tongan male showing us the horse’s head, just in case anyone’s looking for Christmas card fodder.

In terms of frosted windows, most windows here seem to have forgotten their central duties of keeping out the elements or looking pretty. Nope, windows here pretty much just collect dust during the months of May to October and then allow buckets of rain indoors during the months of November to April. On Thanksgiving, I asked our neighbor when the rainy season would start, as we’d not yet had rains during November. He informed me, “Uha lahi i Tisema.” …which roughly translates to, “Just wait till December when it rains so much your pants start growing fungus and your outhouse looks like a swimming pool.” Sure enough, December 1st rolled around that week and we’re now sitting around attempting to describe the sun for young children who have forgotten what life looked like before the storms began. And rain here in Tonga doesn’t involve sprinkles or mists or dew-like beauty. You’ve got your torrential downpour, and you’ve got your slightly more torrential downpour. Those are your options, and the aforementioned windows consider themselves successful when only a few inches of rain are allowed to invade a home. Happy Birthday, Jesus!

And oddly enough, fireplaces are eerily absent here in Vava’u. It’s as though the 100 degree heat with 100 percent humidity has left the population with little need to roast chestnuts or warm mittens. When it’s not raining, people remain rather wet thanks in part to the rampant Christmas sweating. I’m sure there’s a Christmas fable about yuletide sweating, in the tradition of Frosty the Snowman or Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer. Perhaps something like Vito the Perspiring Workshop Elf? It could be a network television stop-motion animation hit as early as 2005.

The two familiar things Christmas clearly involves here are decorations and caroling. The decorations serve to remind Americans disoriented by tropical climate that tacky plastic lawn ornaments signal holiday cheer in every society. On Thanksgiving, the Peace Corps volunteers of Vava’u had a humongous potluck dinner featuring dishes miraculously prepared without any animal slaughtering or boiled root crops (and there was much rejoicing); after gorging ourselves on single male volunteers’ delectable contributions of recently picked fruit, steamed rice, and bags of chips many of us went swimming off a nearby pier. I’m guessing you can picture our stunned and perplexed faces when we emerged from the inviting blue waters of the South Pacific on a beautiful Tongan day to find Santa Claus hanging from numerous store-front windows and Christmas lights on multiple family homes. And after expatriates have forgotten about Christmas lights or plastic Santas or glowing elves, church choirs remind them that the holidays have arrived. At any given moment in December, one can hear a Tongan choir somewhere singing choruses in a strange language locals call English. Their selections include “Go Tell it on the Mountain,” “Joy to the World,” and Handel’s “Messiah.” Just to clarify regarding Handel’s masterwork, Tongan choirs typically follow American choirs’ lead by simply singing Hallelujah repeatedly for a couple minutes and then giving up. Amber and I have occasionally been tempted to offer hot cider to local choirs, but I’m afraid that would be akin to offering cold glasses of ice water to carolers braving the cold of Midwest America. Lest scalding beverage be tossed in our general direction, we will continue quietly singing along from our living rooms while choirs rehearse next door.

Before closing this portrait of Christmas celebrations and Tongan winters (you’ll notice the glaring absence of Hanukkah or Kwanza in my narrative…that’s because Tongans’ idea of holiday diversity is attending a different Christian church on the 25th), I’d like to sing the praises of Tonga’s greatest contribution to celebrating Advent: the mandatory week off from work. In case you’re wondering what happens between December 24th and January 1st here in Tonga, the answer is: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Everybody takes a week off at Christmas time, so it’s no wonder everybody gets so excited about decorating and singing songs and generally rejoicing in their impending vacation. Amber and I will most certainly appreciate the rest; it will offer us the chance to open any gifts that actually manage to arrive on time and of course prepare a traditional Christmas dinner of pineapple and Tuna steak. Thankfully, no horse heads will be involved. Welcome to Christmas in Tonga, everybody.

Cliff

Our needs...er...selfish wants

Life's not too rough in Tonga, but if you REALLY want to send us something from America we won't stop you. Here's the stuff that's easy, light, and especially fun for us to have:

* DVDs, especially discs with TV shows we're missing

* CDs, especially music you think we've missed while living on the other side of the globe

* magazines, particularly Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, and Entertainment Weekly

* snacks, such as chocolate and snack crackers

We pay no duties on packages! It's as though even the Tongan government wants you to send us stuff. BUT BE WARNED: generosity comes at a price. Shipping a package to Tonga costs roughly $5/pound. Mail takes between 6 days and 7 months (no joke)...if packages are sent via airmail, three weeks seems about average.

Our Contact Info

Our placement just outside the town of Neiafu allows us to maintain our personal e-mail accounts (cliftonofun@yahoo.com, aminchicago@yahoo.com). However, we're only able to check e-mail that way two or three times a week and long replies won't always be possible. So we recommend either displaying extreme patience with us or keeping in touch with us the old fashioned way (letters take about 2 weeks to arrive, and we promise to reply eventually).

Our mailing address is:

Cliff and Amber Johnson, PCVs
Peace Corps
P.O. Box 147
Nuku'alofa, Tonga
South Pacific

Our Work

The Tonga National Youth Congress is a non-profit, non-governmental organization founded in 1990 to address the needs of an ever-growing population of adolescents in the Kingdom of Tonga. These needs included elders' tendency to discourage leadership and individuality among young people, school systems focusing exclusively upon rote memorization, graduation rates low enough that only 1000 of 17000 students complete upper school levels, diminishing work opportunities, and land scarcity increasing with each succeeding generation and damaging traditional farming bases. The TNYC was therefore created to promote the advancement, welfare, security, and development of all young people in Tonga.


We are working within this organization toward the following objectives:

* Provide basic skills training and development in planning, accounting, business, agriculture, and vocational skills

* Promote physical and mental skills of youth through participation in recreational activities

* Encourage the development and expression of artistic talent, specifically visual arts and drama

* Increase awareness and involvement of youth in environmental protection and rehabilitation

* Promote income-generation and enterprising activities in both urban and rural activities


Amber's role is managing the Vava'u Youth Center so that it runs smoothly, professionally, and in a way that invites active youth involvement. Cliff meanwhile focuses on community outreach programs, computer lab maintenance, and youth center financial oversight.

At the Center of the Village

At the center of our homestay village there was a large town hall with peeling green paint and uneven, chipped concrete steps that led up to its barn-like doors. The building was on stilts - heavy concrete columns - and weeds had overgrown the area under the building so that they tickled your feet as you walked along the edge. The hall was bordered on one side by the Wesleyan church; when the sunlight was just right, the church's garish stained glass windows cast patches of primary colored light on the thin strands of grass that attempted to cover the dirt yard. On the other side of the hall was the road that ran through the town. There wasn't a single vehicle on the small island, so the road was for pedestrians only - of the two and four-footed kind - and the worn grass had become matted in the places where feet fell most frequently.

The hall was not just at the center of the village, it was the center of the village: the single building, half the size of a basketball court, from which life in Nuapapu took shape, grew, and emerged. During the day, the women of the islands gathered to weave together, sitting cross-legged, bending their stooped shoulders over the two or three yards of wide, straw-like strips of dried plants, nimbly weaving both new mats and new stories. The mats might eventually be placed under a bridal bed, at a graveside, or rolled in the corner until needed for extra sleeping space. The stories would undoubtedly be unrolled later that day, and again the next, and the next after that. Stories, like mats, never grew old in Nuapapu. The joke you told on the day of your arrival would haunt you until the day of your departure.

At night the town hall became the haunting grounds of the village's men. They also sat cross-legged, in a rough circle, with the minister or town officer presiding as the host. Together they drink kava, a powdery Polynesian drink made from ground roots that has a mildly numbing effect, like drinking a shot of puddle water laced with Novocain. While the women weave during the day, the men work in their bush plots, planting and harvesting the root crops that provided the greatest sustenance of their diets. At the end of their work day they sleep a few hours - restless sleep under the family's mango tree or on the floor of a breezy house - and then go to the town hall, where they drank kava until the early hours of the morning. Between rounds of kava passed in polished coconut shells, the men sing traditional Tongan songs that told of the beauty of the islands, bravery in battle, and their pride for their homeland. A young Tongan man, Lomi, known as the local artist, musician, and barber, plays a scratched guitar and selected songs from a notebook where he has written the words to each tune. On alternate pages are Lomi's drawings: ink reproductions of traditional Tongan patterns, intertwined flowers and hearts, the occasional big-breasted woman.

As a woman in Tonga's conservative society, I never left the doors of my two room home after dark, unless accompanied by my husband or on a quick trip to the outhouse. But during the day I was free to roam the village, watching the children jump rope, the older boys play rugby or tease stray dogs, the men mend a boat "Almost finished, be done tomorrow," I was told during my first week in the village, and during my last).

From their perch in the town hall, the women watched all this too, and would call out to me each time I walked past. Sometimes I would climb the uneven stairs, slip my sandals off at the door, and join the women sitting cross-legged as they wove tan and darker brown strips into a new room-sized mat. Light from the uneven clapboards drew pin-stripes on the splintery floor as the women talked and worked and laughed together.

Young mothers took breaks from their work to breastfeed their children, completely unembarrassed to unbutton their faded shirts in front of others. One woman, Oleveti, would entertain us, stopping in the middle of a row of weaving to dance to the Tongan music that played on the radio. She'd encourage me to dance too, and my feeble attempts to mimic Oleveti's gracefulness would make the women double over in laughter so hard their foreheads nearly touched the wooden floor. I tried to use my new Tongan vocabulary on the weavers, and this too would make them laugh, though they would also compliment my attempts. "Poto aupito, 'Emipa. Vave aupito." Very good, Amber. Very fast.

It was here, at the center of the village, that I realized just how soft my hands were. Even in Tonga, my fingernails were white, my cuticles trimmed, and my hands uncalloused. The weavers had strong hands, roughened from the scratch of the dried plants pulled continuously through their hands as they wove. Their knuckles were raw from hand washing, in cold water and with abrasive soap, the laundry for their family of five, or eight, or ten. Their arms were tanned and strong, from carrying water, children, and laundry. They spent their days laughing and talking, but also working, harder and more physically than I have ever attempted.

Several trees were visible from the window of the little house where I stayed: a mango tree with a table and three mismatched chairs underneath, a small flowering bush, and a few others that seemed to produce no fruit or flower. One morning I awoke to find bows of white fabric tied to the tree limbs, and each bow holding several strips of a long green plant. Slowly, using gestures and the few Tongan words I knew, my homestay mother, Lolei, began to unravel the mystery of these decorations. There were lines under her eyes as she spoke, and she didn't need to tell me that this project had kept her awake all night. Though she was in her early forties, she looked much older. A lifetime of compromising sleep in order to care for her family of eight children had left her prematurely old, though still beautiful.

Hanging in the trees to dry were panderas leaves. There were tiny red cuts on Lolei's hands, damaged in the all night effort to prepare the leaves for drying. Her work had began the day before, when her oldest son, Makoni, had returned from the family's bush plot with a bundle of panderas on the back of the family's horse. Lolei and her neighbor Marieta, who was my official Tongan dance instructor, spent the night preparing the leaves by pulling out the prickly spine of the plant. I had seen this operation occurring the night before. The table under the mango tree was piled high with plant leaves, and the women moved carefully so as not to puncture their bare feet with the panderas spines.

In the South Pacific, the nighttime constellations don't do battle with city lights, and on a full moon the sky is sometimes so bright I often felt I could have read in the outhouse just by the light of the moon. Under this bright sky Lolei and Marieta had worked all night, first removing the spines and then carefully wrapping the panderas together into large, flat rolls about 14 inches in diameter.

In Lolei's kitchen, a concrete and wood shack set a few steps from the central building where the family slept, they built a fire in the elevated fireplace and carried water from a rain tank 50 yards away to fill a large metal pot whose sides were charred into a black, sooty mess. The pot of water was placed on two metal rods that were suspended above the flames, with the roll of panderas inside. As I slept peacefully in my house nearby, and as the men started their second or third round of kava and songs, Lolei and Marieta brought the water to a boil, waited until the leaves were tender, and then removed them from the pot to cool.

While the leaves cooled, Lolei took an old skirt - a cream colored brocade fabric that must have come from a church donation box - and tore it into strips two inches wide and ten inches long. With these fabric strips at her side, she carefully unfurled the panderas rolls and separated each individual leaf, covering the mango tree table with the sticky wet leaves.

Each leaf has two layers which must be separated, like pulling apart the layers of a two-ply toilet paper. With their fingernails, their teeth, and sometimes the small paring knife the women shared, they would dislodge one side from another, slowly easing the sides apart so that neither would rip. Only one side was useable for the weaving, the other was discarded in a tangled mess on the trampled ground under the table. Then the good sides were bound and hung in the trees, using a long stick to loop the fabric bow over a small branch of the tree.

The overly sweet, chlorophyll smell of the boiled leaves, along with the scraps from the discarded sides, was still noticeable in the courtyard when I leisurely roused myself from bed and saw the leaves drying in the trees. As they dried over the next few days, they began to create a gentle rustle noise when the wind brushed through them. Their presence seemed a little ghost-like, dried specters of Lolei and Marieta's hard work and bruised hands.

One day I returned from language lesson and the panderas leaves were no longer in the trees. On the table under the mango tree was a pile of rolled leaves, now dried and the color of a wheat field. The rolls were eventually moved to the house for storage, becoming a tan-colored playground for the geckos and spiders that lounged in every corner.

Lolei and Marieta's work-sharing is one of the aspects of daily life in Tonga that can quickly become so common the beauty of it is easily overlooked. Men share work in each others bush plots, making their labor merrier by the good natured joking that travels with them. When a widow needs assistance, the men work in her plot in exchange for a meal for their families, presented to them in baskets woven from the green leaves of a coconut tree. The women share household items - sending young children to the neighbor's house to retrieve the family knife or pitcher - and household work too. In the Fale Langa, the weaving house, women bring their own mats on alternate days, working on their neighbor's on Monday and their own on Tuesday.

The rolls of dried panderas leaves sit in a pile in the town hall. They're pushed aside at night when the men come to drink kava, but during the day they are moved so they are close at hand. One woman, sitting in a plastic yard chair whose legs have been cut off so that the chair's seat is directly on the ground, unrolls the leaves and takes them, one-by-one, in her hands. With a triangle shaped piece of metal, she scrapes the leaf to make it more pliable, running the triangle up and down the length of the strip several times until the leaf becomes almost soft. These leaves form a pile around her legs, and the weavers grab them, or send children to grab them, as needed.

With their own metal scrapers the weavers slice the leaves into strips. The thinner the strip, the finer the weave, the higher the value of the mat. Quick, coarse mats called papas are woven with one inch strips for every day use. Fales, room-sized mats whose edges are later trimmed with multi-colored yarn, are usually woven with strips that are a fourth or an eighth of an inch wide. Very special mats for funerals, weddings, or gifts to nobles and royalty are woven with strands that seem as thin as a hair.

The weavers sit on the floor, with their crossed legs on top of the already completed portion of the mat. Large stones from the ocean's edge weight the mat down so that it doesn't slip as the weavers move across its length. Their fingers fly deftly, lacing leaves in and out of other strips, inserting new panderas and trimming edges so the change is unnoticeable. With skill, the women insert darker colored strips of panderas, colored with all-natural dyes, and create intricate patterns along the edges of the mat. Each one is different, reflecting the patterns that woman learned from her mother or grandmother and will teach her own daughter. After school, little girls come to watch their mothers weave, making their own school-girl projects with scraps of panderas leaves while they tend their younger brothers and sisters.

There, in the center of their village, the women weave together the traditional foundation of Tongan life. These mats are a sort of currency in Tongan society, and the accumulation of them indicates wealth as surely as a large home or livestock does. When given as gifts, they are a physical reminder of the family's best wishes to the recipient, a blessing pronounced upon the bride and groom or visiting guest. The mats are also practical parts of daily Tongan life; they are rugs, beds, chairs, decorations, and clothing, and, when desperate, can be sold as a source of income.

My soft hands attempted weaving on more than one occasion, and with the help of several women I completed a kiakia, a decorative belt Tongan women wear to church or work. The pattern was simple - the first pattern a little Tongan girl would learn - but I felt proud as Lolei tied the kiakia around my waist. She was proud of me too, in a mother hen sort of way, and squeezed my hand with hers when she finished the knot. Then she smiled, turned, and entered her house. It was early in the morning and her work-worn hands had many more tasks to complete before they could rest.

Amber