Sunday Church

We just finished another dance lesson at one of the volunteer home stays. The trainees in our town are getting ready for cultural day (where we’ll do a group dance for the village). We have the first verse down and just learned the second. The volunteer dance instructors have been really nice, patient, and can bake some killer banana cakes.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated so here's what's happening.

I helped fixed the backyard fence of my home stay; it involved laying lines of barbed wire to keep the pigs enclosed. I also started lifting weights with another volunteer in town. Hopefully we’ll motivate each other to go and work out regularly. It gets a bit depressing sometimes because we're probably lifting at the same level as 14 year old Tongan girls...

Sunday church was interesting. I thought we were going for the usual hour, give or take a bit since we're on 'island time'. As soon as I donned my taovala (its a big woven mat that gets wrapped around the waist for formal occasions), I felt irritable bowel movements.

Mind over matter; "I can hold it for an hour; it’s not that bad." My family and I start walking to our normal church, but they continued walking. Muli tells me that today we’re not going to our church, but instead we're going to the next village's church. I tell myself that its still ok, I can handle walking a little extra! Mind over matter!

I forgot to bring my watch and I’m wondering how much time passed. I ask the Peace Corps volunteer sitting a couple seats away, but she just gives me a hopeless look and shrugs. More than an hour and a half passes by and it seems like the minister read the entire Bible twice, all the while accompanied with hymns in between each story.

I sighed with relief once church services were finally over. I couldn't wait to get home. I was in for another surprise though! We weren’t going straight home; we were instead ushered into the town hall for a village feast. It was great food, but it would’ve been better if I didn’t have to use the facilities! While we were eating, I’m told that it’s the only meal for the day so I better eat up.

Great… After Church and the feast finished, over a combined 3 and half hours passed. I'm thanking God that I didn’t shit my pants.

We bought some fishing wire / hook at the local store on Wednesday. A couple volunteers came to my town and we went fishing. Fishing in Tonga doesn't consist of using a pole or even a net this time around. We went old school by tying one end of the wire to a three pronged hook and the other end to an empty glass bottle. Since we couldn’t throw it out too far, we would take turns swimming out in the ocean to place our hook / bobber (a makeshift empty plastic bottle).

For bait we found Bob, this pretty giant creature that resided in a very tough shell. We tried to crack his home open with everything from coconuts, slabs of concrete, rock, and finally a pair of Leatherman’s pliers did the trick. To this day I still don’t know what Bob was. I just know he has a wicked hook, takes more than 2 hours to die after being gutted, and the fish don't find him the least bit appetizing.

After fishing, another volunteer and I bumped into a more ‘seasoned’ education volunteer that we met on Friday. She complained to her vice principle about kids turning in papers that had blatant plagiarism. The next day the vice principal talked to the veteran Peace Corps volunteer and asks for her help to correct a paper. The paper turned out to be someone else’s homework from another school!

On Wednesday we did an exercise where we had to write down our worst day and our best day. It took me a minute to think of my best day. It was one of those days (I think it was a Saturday) where I just woke up thinking “This is going to be a great day!” At the time, I had declined all my law school apps so I could try to get officially invited into the Peace Corps. Now that I look back, it was an impulsive move because if I didn’t get into the Peace Corps, I had a year and a half to kill before I could get into law school again. I'm glad it worked out though.

Anyways, back to the topic of the Best Day! That day I was nominated for the Peace Corps to serve in Tonga so I was pretty psyched. Work just flew by and I got to go home a bit earlier than normal. With my schedule, I didn’t work Sundays and Mondays so my weekend just started. A friend from high school invited me to a birthday party for his sister and I went to visit. There was a local band playing in his backyard and there were plenty of free / good beer.

Some of my friends that I knew since elementary, high school, and college were there. I bumped into a friend that I hadn’t seen in a few years and got to talk with her for a bit. It was just one of those days that was just perfect, though it just sounds fairly lame on paper.

Then when I got to thinking about the worst day… I couldn’t think of anything. I know it sounds stupid, but I can’t really think of any day where I was just like “Damn, this day is the worst day in my life”.