June update

It is Saturday night and Katie and I are just relaxing on the floor reading and now blogging. We don’t have any living room furniture. Most Tongan homes don’t. Everyone just sits on the floor and a lot of Tongans sleep on the floor as well. Our furniture consists of a little cushion mat and a plastic chair that doesn’t have any legs, so it sits right on the ground. These legless chairs are quite popular at kava. They make sitting on the ground easier and they are surprisingly comfortable. I am especially looking forward to taking the legless wonder to kava. It is killer on my knees sitting Indian style for 3 or 4 hours even when I’m drinking a mild narcotic. I often cheat and sit with one leg out and one folded Indian style. Well my favorite chair was also Mango’s favorite place to sit. I don’t know how to bring this up, so I will just say it. Mango was hit by a car last Saturday night and he died. I will spare the details because they are just too awful. It was one of the saddest things I have ever witnessed. Katie and I are crushed. He was our best friend and slept in our bed every night. I love that little guy. Our home is now a little quieter, a little cleaner and a lot sadder. He got us through some rough times adjusting to life here in Tonga and we’ll never forget him for that. This change of events certainly has rocked our world. It has also brought Katie and I closer. It makes you realize how quickly life can change and to appreciate every moment. Ok, I will move on from talking about this unfortunate event, but forever will I carry his memories with me.

Well, what have Katie and I been up to? We have been scuba diving twice in the last two weeks. Katie and I are thinking about getting advanced dive certified, but we wanted to do a few test dives before we invest the money. We had a great dive yesterday. It was the most comfortable that I have felt in the water. We went down to 94 feet, which is crazy to think you have all that water on top of you; it’s pretty cool being down there. I would like to thank Riki for letting us use his equipment for free on both dives. So if anybody ever comes to Tonga please go dive with Riki at Riki Tiki Tours. Most of the businesses in Neiafu are very Peace Corps friendly and give us discounts on food, sailing, diving and whale watching. It is going to be pretty cool here when the whales come through. The humpback whales come here to breed in the warm Tongan waters and they stay from around July to November. Tonga is one of two places in the world that you can swim with the whales. If Katie and I are lucky we may see the whales from the beach in our village. Katie, Steve (another PC volunteer), and I have hiked Mt. Talau a few times in the last few weeks. Mt. Talau is the highest point in Vava’u at 131 meters or roughly 393 feet. That doesn’t seem very high, but it does give you a bird’s eye view of the whole island. It is beautiful up there. There should be some pictures posted from our treks up Talau on our photo web site.

Work has been going great for me. I am starting to adjust to being a teacher, but I don’t think I will pursue this profession when I get back to the States. It is hard being a teacher, which I think I have talked about in a previous blog. My catering school catered a few small events these past couple of weeks, which is great. We have been making a good profit from each event. The money we make goes to the students to help them pay for their ingredients they use during their practical exams. The high schools are in rugby and netball season now. The Tongans take rugby very serious and practice a ton. The team from my school was training in my village today; I went out and talked with them while they were running this giant hill. I noticed a lot of them did not even have shoes on. I don’t know how they do it. The roads are so rocky. Every time I go out without shoes on I look like an old man hunched over walking over hot coals. It does not even seem to faze them. I just think back to when I played football and if I didn’t have spikes, I wasn’t practicing. Here if one kid has a pair of spikes he will give one shoe to his friend and they will share one pair of spikes. It just shows you how communal this culture is; they share everything. A good example is when a kid gets on my bus with a stack of crackers, by the time he gets to his seat he has one left. The kid won’t even be upset about it. He would probably split his last cracker in half if someone else wanted it. It is a wonderful sight to see…not the kid getting his crackers stolen, but the fact that it doesn’t bother him.

I have a new rule that I follow in Tonga. If you feel like you have something crawling on you, then you probably do. I remember back in the states I used to feel like I had something crawling on me and it was always nothing, you know like a phantom itch. In Tonga I feel like I always have something crawling on me and it’s always some kind of bug. It is usually an ant or a mosquito or a centipede or some other kind of random bug that I don’t know the name of. The point is I can’t ignore any tiny itch or anything because most likely there is something crawling on me. Speaking of bugs, Katie and I got another visit from the bed bugs. We thought that we had gotten rid of them, but apparently you can never get rid of them. Our mattress is a hand-me-down 4- inch thick piece of foam. It looks like it has been around since the 70’s. It doesn’t provide that much cushioning either because you can feel the uneven boards that our bed was built with. Throwing your mattress out and getting a new one is the best way to get rid of bed bugs, but since mattresses are extremely expensive in Tonga we can’t do that. A real mattress would be over $1000 US dollars and for a new piece of foam like the one we currently have it would be over $400 Pa’anga, which is around $200 US. That is way more than half of what the Peace Corps gives me to live on per month. So we battled them again and we are hoping this time they will stay away. We did get a hypo-allergenic mattress cover from Katie’s parents (Thank you!) that says it keeps bed bugs in, which means that they will not be able to get out to bite us. So hopefully that will do the trick. Nothing gives you more paranoia than going to sleep dreaming about little bugs biting you and feeding on your blood.