Tonga School Visit

Sept 14, 16, 2014  Matamoto, Tonga       

We spent 2 lovely days in this quiet anchorage  just off the village.  Alan read completely through 3 mysteries while I visited the school.  20 kids, one teacher/principal.  My task the first day was to talk to the older kids while the younger ones finished their exams.  The second day the entire student body was waiting for me after lunch.  We told stories, read books, sang songs and talked about their life, with numerous stops for translation and explanation.  They have a small library full of books which have been withdrawn from New American libraries.  Sadly, most of the stories depict a culture and lifestyle that is so foreign to them as to be meaningless.  The teacher says that while they learn to speak and read English they often have no ides what the words really mean.  There is an opportunity here for someone who can capture their stories and legends and everyday life and put them into picture books with lovely illustrations.

The drought is a huge problem here.  The entire village depends on rainwater for drinking and cooking.  There is a well but we were told that the water is not very good, “tastes like ocean water”.   The tank at the school is almost dry.  If it runs out they will have to close the school.  The principal is hoping that they get enough rain to last through the exams, which are not until the end of November.  The school has one of the few flush toilets in town but it has been put off limits to save water.  The kids need to run home if they need to go.  I suspect that lots of them just use the bushes.  The problem is apparently the same throughout the islands.  It seems a shame that with all the ocean water around, someone has not come up with small desalination plants that could be installed.  Almost all of the cursing boats have water makers.  It cannot be that hard to come up with a similar system for the schools.

After school we went for a walk around the village.  There are 500 people living here, all related of course and 5 churches.  Religion is very important to the Tongans.  No one is allowed to work on Sunday.  Even the restaurants putting on Tongan feasts for the tourists cannot have dancing on Sunday.  The day is devoted to church services, 6 am, 10:00 and 4pm with a family meal in between.

Part of our tour took us along the beach.  Noticing numerous clam shells, I asked if people here eat clams since I never see them in the market or on the menus.  She said that the reason  I don’t see them is that the people collect them and eat them themselves, usually raw.  When I asked how to find them, she immediately offered to meet us at low tide to show us.  Just about sundown we reassembled on the beach, joined by several of the kids from the school.  I think they were somewhat bemused that we actually wanted to do this but they joined in with great enthusiasm.  This is the technique;  Walk along in ankle deep water, shuffling your feet in the sand and searching with your toes.  When you think you feel a good one, reach down and dig around see if it is really a shellfish or just a rock.  Mostly mine were just rocks but I did find about a dozen.  The kids were really good at it and we ended up with a large bucket full of various kinds of shellfish just as it got too dark to see.  Back at the boat, we scrubbed them and dumped them into a pot of boiling water while the pasta and garlic bread cooked.  I pulled out our last bottle of two buck chuck and about 15 minutes later we had a feast.  Yum!