A few months ago, I wrote a blog in which a Tongan friend, Sila, randomly put on a sandal he found on the beach. I thought that was hilarious for so many reasons: it was only one shoe that he put on, why had someone left one shoe on the beach, and so on. (Just today, Sila came over before rugby practice wearing only one cleat. He explained that he only kicks with one foot.) There are many things to be found as discarded and forgotten junk all around the village, but I keep seeing single shoes and sandals.
I know why. Sure, the wear and tear of wearing flip flops to go farming will cause them to fall apart quickly, but, at least for me, there’s another reason. The dogs.
My dog, Papi, used to love to carry off my sandals that I leave by the door. He wouldn’t go far, just into the grass, so he could gnaw on them. Lately though, Papi’s been hanging out with another dog: Gold-Colored Dog. Though this other dog is cute, he seems to be a bad seed. In the past couple of months, I’ve had single shoes go missing. Three shoes from all different pairs. I used to think it was Papi, but one night, I found Gold-Colored Dog happily chewing through the straps of my Chacos.
If a sandal goes missing, I’ll ask my students to search for it. Sometimes, a few weeks later, they’ll find a sandal on the beach, obviously taken by a dog and eventually abandoned. Recently Papi’s collar disappeared, and, sure enough, a week later, a kid returned it to me saying they found it in the sand.
Losing footwear to the sea – yet another thing I won’t worry about when I get back to America.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
Over the past few weeks...
I haven’t been able to upload any blogs recently, since I either haven’t been to town or the internet was down. Here is a summary of things that are going on around Ha’ano/Ha’apai/Tonga, mostly related to me.
In January, there was a serious cyclone that hit Ha’apai. Peace Corps had me go to town to ride it out. Though it was much shorter (and fortunately so was the time we were consolidated), it was more destructive than last year’s Cyclone Rene. Walking around Pangai, we saw roofs that had been ripped offs, old buildings that had collapsed, and trees that had been uprooted. (PCV houses were all fine.) The long-term impact is that much off the breadfruit fell off the trees, plantain trees were overturned, and the stems and leaves of root crops were broken. In a few months there’ll be a shortage of staple foods in Ha’apai. The Ministry of Agriculture is trying to import potato seeds to grow quickly to make up for the gap.
Tongan friends have been hanging out at my house quite a lot. The biggest draw is my iPod and speakers for them to listen to music during the day (too bad it’s always the same mix of Akon, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, and Eminem) and, once the electricity comes on at night, I’ve got “Glee” on my harddrive. I like having people over, but it makes it difficult to relax or read a book when everyone’s jamming to some Pitbull song or skipping around episodes to find the songs.
A few days before school started, I still didn’t know who would be teaching at my school. As of last year, both of my teachers were transferred and only one new teacher was coming to Ha’ano. But, this is Tonga, and nothing is certain until it actually happens, so a week before school started, I was told that the one guy who was supposed to come to Ha’ano wouldn’t be coming. Up to a few days before school started, I still didn’t have any Tongan teachers at my school. Eventually, 24 hours before school started, one of my teachers from last year, Paula, and his new wife, Veiongo, were dropped off by the Ministry of Education. So far, school’s been going really well. I’m still teaching English, and with the new syllabus for primary schools, my hours teaching have been cut from 13 hrs/week to 6.5 hrs/week. I’ve offered to teach PE and Art classes when those come up in the schedule, but those classes always take a backseat to the core subjects, so I haven’t taught any yet.
In January, there was a serious cyclone that hit Ha’apai. Peace Corps had me go to town to ride it out. Though it was much shorter (and fortunately so was the time we were consolidated), it was more destructive than last year’s Cyclone Rene. Walking around Pangai, we saw roofs that had been ripped offs, old buildings that had collapsed, and trees that had been uprooted. (PCV houses were all fine.) The long-term impact is that much off the breadfruit fell off the trees, plantain trees were overturned, and the stems and leaves of root crops were broken. In a few months there’ll be a shortage of staple foods in Ha’apai. The Ministry of Agriculture is trying to import potato seeds to grow quickly to make up for the gap.
Tongan friends have been hanging out at my house quite a lot. The biggest draw is my iPod and speakers for them to listen to music during the day (too bad it’s always the same mix of Akon, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, and Eminem) and, once the electricity comes on at night, I’ve got “Glee” on my harddrive. I like having people over, but it makes it difficult to relax or read a book when everyone’s jamming to some Pitbull song or skipping around episodes to find the songs.
A few days before school started, I still didn’t know who would be teaching at my school. As of last year, both of my teachers were transferred and only one new teacher was coming to Ha’ano. But, this is Tonga, and nothing is certain until it actually happens, so a week before school started, I was told that the one guy who was supposed to come to Ha’ano wouldn’t be coming. Up to a few days before school started, I still didn’t have any Tongan teachers at my school. Eventually, 24 hours before school started, one of my teachers from last year, Paula, and his new wife, Veiongo, were dropped off by the Ministry of Education. So far, school’s been going really well. I’m still teaching English, and with the new syllabus for primary schools, my hours teaching have been cut from 13 hrs/week to 6.5 hrs/week. I’ve offered to teach PE and Art classes when those come up in the schedule, but those classes always take a backseat to the core subjects, so I haven’t taught any yet.
Overheard in Ha'ano
People here talk. About everything. And nothing. Here are some things I’ve overheard Tongans saying about me. They aren’t taken out of context. There is no context.
“Hey, look, Pele has a wooden spoon!”
“Where? Oh! Look at that spoon!”
“Yeah! It’s wooden!”
- Two of my students, standing outside my kitchen watching me cook
“Pele’s taking a shower at night.”
“Really? At night?”
“Yeah, she’s showering right now.”
- My neighbor and her mom, at their house which is next to my shower
“Lile asked Pele to come over so Lile could ask her something, and Pele was like, ‘Oh, I have to go over there!’”
- A woman in my village, telling other passengers in the bed of the truck what I’d said an hour earlier
If the most mundane details of my life are comment-worthy, imagine if I did something interesting.
“Hey, look, Pele has a wooden spoon!”
“Where? Oh! Look at that spoon!”
“Yeah! It’s wooden!”
- Two of my students, standing outside my kitchen watching me cook
“Pele’s taking a shower at night.”
“Really? At night?”
“Yeah, she’s showering right now.”
- My neighbor and her mom, at their house which is next to my shower
“Lile asked Pele to come over so Lile could ask her something, and Pele was like, ‘Oh, I have to go over there!’”
- A woman in my village, telling other passengers in the bed of the truck what I’d said an hour earlier
If the most mundane details of my life are comment-worthy, imagine if I did something interesting.
Universal Experiences
Volunteering in the Peace Corps, I hear that we PCVs all share certain experiences. Year of service, country of service, job title – despite differences in all these areas, PCVs often have the same feelings just by working in a developing country.
I recently read “Away from Home” by Lillian Carter, taken from the Ha’apai Peace Corps Office’s library. Though she served as a health volunteer in India 1966-1968, her collection of letters to her daughter could very well be something that we PCVs in Tonga say today.
“One thing I yearn for on my vacation – PRIVACY! I doubt that I’ll have that, because wherever I go, a crowd gathers.”
“How I wish you could see India through your own eyes. I know the sameness of my days must get boring, but I do have some experiences here that almost defy words.”
“I’m feeling so damned low and useless! I have been here exactly six months now, and I needed a MORALE booster, so I went out and bought four cans of pineapple juice!”
“We have to go to Bombay for another Peace Corps meeting on whether or not to continue the family planning program. Frankly, I couldn’t care less, and know we will just hear the same old B.S., but maybe they will serve dinner.”
“I’ve been barefoot all day – anyone can go barefoot any time here, outside or inside.”
“Gosh, how the time is flying! The closer the time comes, the more upset I get about coming home. Why? I don’t know but I am. ... How can I stand it, when I bawl at the very thought of leaving them – these wonderful people, for whom I’ve done so little, but who have done so much for me!”
I recently read “Away from Home” by Lillian Carter, taken from the Ha’apai Peace Corps Office’s library. Though she served as a health volunteer in India 1966-1968, her collection of letters to her daughter could very well be something that we PCVs in Tonga say today.
“One thing I yearn for on my vacation – PRIVACY! I doubt that I’ll have that, because wherever I go, a crowd gathers.”
“How I wish you could see India through your own eyes. I know the sameness of my days must get boring, but I do have some experiences here that almost defy words.”
“I’m feeling so damned low and useless! I have been here exactly six months now, and I needed a MORALE booster, so I went out and bought four cans of pineapple juice!”
“We have to go to Bombay for another Peace Corps meeting on whether or not to continue the family planning program. Frankly, I couldn’t care less, and know we will just hear the same old B.S., but maybe they will serve dinner.”
“I’ve been barefoot all day – anyone can go barefoot any time here, outside or inside.”
“Gosh, how the time is flying! The closer the time comes, the more upset I get about coming home. Why? I don’t know but I am. ... How can I stand it, when I bawl at the very thought of leaving them – these wonderful people, for whom I’ve done so little, but who have done so much for me!”
Friday, December 17, 2010
What I'm Looking Forward to in America
Last week, Misa, a Tongan friend, was over at my house. We were talking about when I first got to Ha’ano, just about a year ago. He was in Tongatapu, but when he got back to Ha’ano in January, he told me he had heard about me, the new Peace Corp.
Pele: What did you hear about me?
Misa: Oh, that you just say yes to everything.
Pele: Haha, that’s true. I just say yes because I either don’t understand their Tongan or don’t have anything else to say.
Misa: Yeah, but you would say yes to things you shouldn’t say yes to. I was on the road with some boys one day, and you passed, and one boy said, ‘Hey, Pele, we’re going to go over there and eat, and then we’ll come over and sleep at your house. Ok?’ And you just said, ‘’Io’ [yes].
The funniest part of this, to me, is that it still happens. A year later. People will still make jokes too quickly for me to understand or to have any comeback. Of course, the joke isn’t whatever I say, it’s whatever the other person says, so my response doesn’t much matter, but I at least wish I could participate a little more.
So in going to America, in just a couple of day, I’m looking forward to understanding pretty much everything that’s going on around me. More than that, being able to respond to it all.
Here are a few other things that I’m looking forward to, just for good measure: no chickens/pigs/church bells waking me up, bagels with cream cheese, understanding how the system works. Oh, and my family. (I didn’t forget you, Mom!)
And in the month I’ll be gone, I know I’ll miss these things: Papi, the people in my community, the freshest fish I’ll ever eat, the Ha’apai PCVs, swimming at sunset, mangoes.
Pele: What did you hear about me?
Misa: Oh, that you just say yes to everything.
Pele: Haha, that’s true. I just say yes because I either don’t understand their Tongan or don’t have anything else to say.
Misa: Yeah, but you would say yes to things you shouldn’t say yes to. I was on the road with some boys one day, and you passed, and one boy said, ‘Hey, Pele, we’re going to go over there and eat, and then we’ll come over and sleep at your house. Ok?’ And you just said, ‘’Io’ [yes].
The funniest part of this, to me, is that it still happens. A year later. People will still make jokes too quickly for me to understand or to have any comeback. Of course, the joke isn’t whatever I say, it’s whatever the other person says, so my response doesn’t much matter, but I at least wish I could participate a little more.
So in going to America, in just a couple of day, I’m looking forward to understanding pretty much everything that’s going on around me. More than that, being able to respond to it all.
Here are a few other things that I’m looking forward to, just for good measure: no chickens/pigs/church bells waking me up, bagels with cream cheese, understanding how the system works. Oh, and my family. (I didn’t forget you, Mom!)
And in the month I’ll be gone, I know I’ll miss these things: Papi, the people in my community, the freshest fish I’ll ever eat, the Ha’apai PCVs, swimming at sunset, mangoes.
Well, Rats.
One PCV woke up during her homestay with a cockroach on her face. Another PCV has been bitten 6 times by 6 different molokaus – the highly aggressive centipedes that have a (supposedly) horrendously painful bite. Yet another PCV regularly finds scorpions in his shoes.
Knock on wood, I haven’t had any issues with those pests. For the most part, my house has absurdly large but harmless spiders. Some cockroaches. A bunch of mosquitoes. And the occasional hermit crab. (I found one climbing up my curtain. How on earth did he get there?)
About a month ago, I had a new infestation, rats. I saw them in the evening, crawling on my kitchen shelf and countertop. They would scamper in through the doors and run around, not doing much more than pooping on everything.
A friend who often visits me at night would point them out. “Pele, kuma.” Once, Sila decided to go after them. He pulled out my shelf from the wall and planned to scare them my way so that I could get them. Unfortunately, I didn’t have rat-killing weapons. All I had were hard plastic flippers. It didn’t much matter though, because when he scared out the rats and they ran at me, I threw up my hands, screamed, and jumped around.
For a few weeks they came in and seemed to enjoy hanging out in my kitchen, eating whatever I didn’t happen to wrap up. But then they started getting bold. Late at night, they would bang around in the oven, they would gnaw and scratch through a thick plastic flour container, and they would come into my bedroom and chew holes in any low-hanging clothing. I was getting fed up. From Ha’ano, however, there wasn’t much I could do about it. There aren’t rat traps, rat poison, or sticky traps in the store. So I just got more frustrated and less sleep as they noisily took over my kitchen.
Juleigh brought me rat traps from Pangai. Sila set them up. We set a little peanut butter on them, but the next morning, the traps were unsnapped and peanut butter was gone. For the next few nights, Sila set the traps with different assortments of food – bread, cheese, tomatoes – but every morning the food was gone with no rat body. We were just offering the rats a midnight snack.
One night I woke up to the sound of relentless scratching. It was about 2:30 am, so the electricity was out, and I had to explore with a lantern. All I could do was scare away the rats and go back to bed with ear plugs, but they were so loud that I got up again with more resolve to do something. I tried to move the trap to where the rats were running with the hopes that they would accidentally step on it. Instead, I accidentally snapped my thumb in the trap.
That was a low point. Here I was, on a remote island, alone with the rats. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about them. I couldn’t just go to the store to buy anything to kill the rats. I didn’t get a neighbor’s cat to catch them for fear that a cat trapped in a strange house overnight would do just as much damage as the rats. I had to wait for someone to help me.
For over a week I put up with the incessant scratch-scratching at night a surprise in the morning to see what the rats had destroyed, and then Todd brought leftover rat poison from his own most recent infestation.
Within two days, all was well with the world. The days were sunny again, and, even better, the nights were quiet. I’ve left out the poison since that first infestation. I’ll sometimes see evidence that they visited in the night, and one morning I found a moribund mouse on my kitchen floor. And now, for any future rodent infestations, I’m ready, and I have more in my artillery than snorkel flippers.
Knock on wood, I haven’t had any issues with those pests. For the most part, my house has absurdly large but harmless spiders. Some cockroaches. A bunch of mosquitoes. And the occasional hermit crab. (I found one climbing up my curtain. How on earth did he get there?)
About a month ago, I had a new infestation, rats. I saw them in the evening, crawling on my kitchen shelf and countertop. They would scamper in through the doors and run around, not doing much more than pooping on everything.
A friend who often visits me at night would point them out. “Pele, kuma.” Once, Sila decided to go after them. He pulled out my shelf from the wall and planned to scare them my way so that I could get them. Unfortunately, I didn’t have rat-killing weapons. All I had were hard plastic flippers. It didn’t much matter though, because when he scared out the rats and they ran at me, I threw up my hands, screamed, and jumped around.
For a few weeks they came in and seemed to enjoy hanging out in my kitchen, eating whatever I didn’t happen to wrap up. But then they started getting bold. Late at night, they would bang around in the oven, they would gnaw and scratch through a thick plastic flour container, and they would come into my bedroom and chew holes in any low-hanging clothing. I was getting fed up. From Ha’ano, however, there wasn’t much I could do about it. There aren’t rat traps, rat poison, or sticky traps in the store. So I just got more frustrated and less sleep as they noisily took over my kitchen.
Juleigh brought me rat traps from Pangai. Sila set them up. We set a little peanut butter on them, but the next morning, the traps were unsnapped and peanut butter was gone. For the next few nights, Sila set the traps with different assortments of food – bread, cheese, tomatoes – but every morning the food was gone with no rat body. We were just offering the rats a midnight snack.
One night I woke up to the sound of relentless scratching. It was about 2:30 am, so the electricity was out, and I had to explore with a lantern. All I could do was scare away the rats and go back to bed with ear plugs, but they were so loud that I got up again with more resolve to do something. I tried to move the trap to where the rats were running with the hopes that they would accidentally step on it. Instead, I accidentally snapped my thumb in the trap.
That was a low point. Here I was, on a remote island, alone with the rats. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about them. I couldn’t just go to the store to buy anything to kill the rats. I didn’t get a neighbor’s cat to catch them for fear that a cat trapped in a strange house overnight would do just as much damage as the rats. I had to wait for someone to help me.
For over a week I put up with the incessant scratch-scratching at night a surprise in the morning to see what the rats had destroyed, and then Todd brought leftover rat poison from his own most recent infestation.
Within two days, all was well with the world. The days were sunny again, and, even better, the nights were quiet. I’ve left out the poison since that first infestation. I’ll sometimes see evidence that they visited in the night, and one morning I found a moribund mouse on my kitchen floor. And now, for any future rodent infestations, I’m ready, and I have more in my artillery than snorkel flippers.
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