TIME FOR A NEW DICTIONARY
Living in Tonga has certainly jarred my sense of which-way-is-up. This island culture is definitely down-under, being a six-hour plane ride from New Zealand. The stars look somewhat different here. The water goes down the drain counter-clockwise rather than clockwise as in the northern hemisphere. Though I’m tempted to call it “backward,” I realize that it’s just third world. I remember living in England for a year right after college. I saw gadgets and sociological happenings that were ten years past in the US. Here I’d say it’s more like a hundred years ago in America. Sometimes I feel like I am in a Little House book, and other times I feel like I’m in the most beautiful, untouched place on earth; and other times I feel like just regular living is camping.
We live on a Youth With A Mission campus called Lafa Lafa, located on the southern tip of the main island of Tonga. Our home is a beautiful, well-built structure that a German family expanded from the normal two-bedroom hut or fale that is common in Tonga. The home is an answer to my husband’s prayers, who asked God for nice accommodations for his family prior to our leaving our lecture phase in Kona. God definitely did that. But it’s what is around and part of this campus and island that throws me. I’ll try to explain it so that friends back home in the Northwest can grasp what it’s like for us as we swim through layers of culture adjustment.
The campus seemed at first to me like a retreat center with little cabins around. Near our home are three little portable-sized classrooms with little decks and brightly-colored plywood exteriors. These are for the little Christian school that is on the campus (which is currently on summer break here in December). Very close by our home are more small fale’s, which I thought were more classrooms or out-buildings for the campus, but they’re not. They are homes where young men live, part of the Team Extreme ministry run by our friends Lynn(American) and 'Ale (Tongan). I realized that I needed to change my definition of home when I saw young men going in and out of these structures. I had to keep changing my definition of home as we wandered into nearby villages, offering to pray for people or to invite them to our outreach meeting that Friday night. I’d approach a home with a Tongan brother, and we’d knock on the door. Apparently, it’s not considered rude to wander around peoples’ homes in their yard trying to find them. One such day we found a young man asleep in what I thought was a fort of some kind. Wrong. This is not some tinkering by teen-agers trying to get a touch of freedom from their parents’ place. This is a “bedroom” made of corrugated steel roofing softly lined with cardboard. The floor was dirt with a very old rug over it, and the walls were open framing with cardboard stuck in for insulation. The “bed” this young man climbed out of was a table with a foam pad on it. His “kitchen” was a hot-pot for tea. Under his bed was a huge, rolled up tapa cloth, which is a type of matting made by the women from bark of the Ironwood tree, and then dyed with natural dyes from the Tongan soil. I have seen kitchens without stoves under a tree lined by 3 feet high “walls” of the same tin roofing. Inside will be a chair or rock to sit on, and a fire over which 1-2 women may be cooking. Wow. Front entryways, even of nice homes, will have 3 foot-high little concrete walls in front of them that you have to step over when you go to the door. Quite necessary. Keeps the pigs out or in, whatever the case may be.
Besides the term “house,” I now have a whole new definition for “clean” and “safe.” There are very few seatbelts in this culture. I’ve seen a working one once when I caught a ride with a gal to the radio show we were doing on the local Christian radio station. Usually, our family (including our boys ages 7 and 10) climb onto our team bus where a boy will sit next to a parent for stories or singing wherever we’re going. No seatbelts there. And the bus door will be open the whole time, feet from where my 7 year old is sitting. Two nights ago we crossed the island for that outreach evening and had 35 people in the bus that is to hold 25. Two small children were crouched up on the dash board, smooshed against the front window. We cringe and hold our tongues—as well as our boys, tightly.
In this humidity, I have a new definition for “damp” and “dry.” I also have new words for being sick. They all range at this point along the stomach-flu end of things, but there comes a point in you when you know that dehydration or weakness is setting in, and you wave the white flag and declare yourself “sick.” I did this yesterday. It was wonderful just relaxing instead of going out for street evangelism. Though my teammates returned with wonderful stories of what God did, I was able to relax in a longer (cold) shower, and to nap for a good long time. “Relax” and “cold shower” wouldn’t have been near each other in my old dictionary, but they are here in Tonga.
“Going shopping” no longer means a nice, predictable, tight little journey. It’s instead an adventure I can bank on from finding the right shops to the bus breaking down to the city bus getting in a wreck with me on it!
Finally, “Tongan” to me used to mean someone with dark skin who was larger framed from Tonga. They probably would be someone who enjoyed traditional dancing, and may not have the same sense of time that westerners have. I have found that “Tongan” is someone who can “TIHOO!” like the rest of them in excitement. He is someone who can and does enjoy laughing, has a natural shyness, but when s/he gets going, they are the life of the party. Tongan is no longer an unknown face. It is Mata, Mapue, Siddatha, and Sunny. It is Sepho and Nive and their 11 other siblings; it is smiling faces, frequent laughter, ingenuity with their hands, and somewhat of a knowledge of Jesus. Tongans are friends from a new dictionary, yet to be completed.
