Tonga: Singing, Snorkeling, Fed by Toi, Part 1

The drum across the road.  Drumming called people to church.

View of Vai Malo.  We stayed in the house on the left, with green roof and window frames.  The sea is at my back.

View of road into Vai Malo.  Our house is coming up on the left.

Toi, Sepa's sister, met us at the house
and helped us get some coconuts and breadfruit for dinner.  

Another neighbor brought over a papaya

kitchen stove

Joyce said, "It doesn't seem like they are being very NICE to that pig!"

Neiafu 1st Ward YM Campout.  Hosea, the leader in the red T-shirt invited us.  

Toi's Friday night dinner

group of missionaries getting on a boat for another island
We ran into missionaries every few hours in Tonga!

more missionaries

Mike backed into a pole, but in a rental like this, you'd never notice.

Toi's Saturday night dinner!  Toi and her granddaughter are 2 of the 4:30AM-singers.

Inside the banana leaves:  clams and coconut in one, ham and coconut in the other.

That's all the pictures...

Friday:

The next morning, or in the middle of the night - depending on how you look at it, I woke up to a drum beating across the street.  And then. . . singing!  I jumped out of bed, and crossed the road to a little chapel there.  A bunch of dogs surrounded me and started barking loudly, but I wasn't worried because the dogs hadn't bothered us the day before.  (Mike, however, got bit by two dogs in a similar situation a few days later!) Someone in the church heard the racket and came out and found me, and invited me to come into the church.  I felt very under-dressed!  Despite the time of day (4:30AM) everyone was in their Sunday best.

The singing was AWESOME!!!!  There were about 30 people in this little one-room church, all ages, many of whom I recognized from the previous afternoon.  Now they were in white shirts and lava lavas (boys and men) and nice dresses and hats (women).  They sang from the heart and from the gut - in multi-part harmony, with no music, for about 30 minutes.  Then their preacher lead them in prayer for a bit, and then they sang some more.

I loved seeing the abandon with which they sang.  Each person seemed completely unselfconscious of the dramatic volume of each of their voices.  Their singing was similar to what I would call yelling!  (Who knows what they would call my kind of singing?  Pale, at best.)  I think it would be very cathartic to gather with members of my extended family 3 or 4 times a week and yell out our favorite hymns in beautiful harmony.  It would be a good way to start the day.

The next day we got a ride into town and rented a car (classic experience, in itself!).  We bought some food and then went to a beautiful beach and played and snorkeled!  So fun!

While we were in town, I happened to start talking to a guy, Hosea Hefi, who had just returned from his mission to Australia.  He was taking the YM of his ward on a campout that night, and invited us to come along.

That night, we followed a busload of about 15 YM and 2 leaders as it drove about 20 minutes outside of town.  On the way, we stopped at the house of one of the leaders, where they shot a pig and brought it along in a bucket.  They ended up at a gorgeous beach, playing rugby, swimming, fishing, roasting their pig.  The girls and I went back to our house for the night, but Mike and the boys (the palangi) slept in a tent.  The Tongan boys didn't sleep much at all, but when they did, they slept on the sand or on the ground under a tree.  Nobody had sleeping bags or mats or camping clothes or any packaged food.  Just grab a couple of tarps, a pig in a bucket, and a rugby ball, then rent an old bus to drop you off on Friday night and come back to get you on Saturday morning...

Well, I'm sure it was more involved than that for the leaders, but that's how simple it seemed to me!

One boy, Alifeleti, told me, "It's the first time I meet Palangi members of the church."  I guess he'd seen palangi missionaries, but never a whole family.  We definitely stood out wherever we went.

The YM president, Tomasi, had moved back to Tonga with his family a year ago from Hurricane, UT.  Interesting family!   His wife, Liz, knows Aunt Lolly and Uncle Lou.

Mike said that some teachers from Saineha High School (the local LDS high school) showed up on the beach about midnight and stayed up until 3AM singing LOUD karaoke.  So that's another experience with Tongan singing altogether...

When the girls and I got back to the house, Toi was there with a fresh fish dinner.  Wow!  What a day!

Saturday:

I picked up Mike and the boys and we went to another amazing beach and LOVED the snorkeling.

We got home to another generous dinner from Toi - clams and ham baked in coconut milk, wrapped in banana leaves, and fresh papaya in coconut milk.  We start to feel a little more comfortable in a new place, starting to know our way around.

Looking forward to lots of great singing on the Sabbath!

To be continued...