We were riding in the back of the Peace Corps vehicle heading towards town... again. The image of the airport and the normally pig filled airstrip was slowly fading into the backdrop as the driver stepped on the gas towards no real destination in particular. Like most drivers on the island, he was always in a hurry to get nowhere.
According to the schedule, all the Peace Corps trainees and staff were supposed to have left Ha’apai. As the country of Tonga normally does in situations like this, it laughed in the face of our schedules and plans, throwing them into the wind. This is island life, leave your schedule planners at home. Since we couldn't follow the 'schedule', we did what anyone would do, go to the only bar on the island.
There were two groups of trainees and staff that were to leave. The first group arrived at the airport early, eager to take the first plane out of Ha’apai. There was a farewell party at the airport so the volunteers may have just been eager to see their host family one last time or maybe they were eager to return to the mainland where they could eat a richer variety of food, who knows? The second group, not really caring exactly when they left, arrived a few hours later, only to discover that the first group was still waiting. As fate would have it, the second group’s plane arrived first and thus they were the first ones that left the island.
The second plane, which was the first group's plane, (are you confused yet?) was finally boarded and the twin engines came to life. Actually, it didn’t come to life as it instead out right died. Being in the boarding area, a Tongan friend and I gave each other looks that didn’t need words to express what was on our minds, “What the fuck sound was that? Did a pig jump into the engine? That isn’t normal at all!” Thankfully, no pigs jumped into the spinning motors, as that would prove to be quite a colorful image and quite the leap.
A few minutes later, the passengers came off the steps of the airplane, clearly disappointed with the events that transpired. If it were me however, I’d have had the opposite feeling and be quite ecstatic; thank God we weren’t even a foot in the air yet before the engine decided to die.
After a few hours of the mechanic trying to ‘diagnose’ the problem (over the phone), they decided that it was futile to fix the plane… over the phone. We joked around about how the guy on the other line was probably googling “how to fix maumau vakapuna” on a 56k connection in Fiji.
Some of the passengers that were on the plane came over to see if they could fix the problem, as if they had a background in Aerospace Engineering and were familiar with planes from the World War II era. I’m sure that the remotest experience anyone had with fixing an airplane engine was more likely some girl with a Bachelors of Arts in African American Women Gender Studies.
In any case, they’d give us a call if they fixed the plane before 6 p.m., about as likely as giant eagles landing in the middle of the airfield and saying in perfect English that they’ll give us a lift over to the next island group as long as we didn’t pull on their feathers too harshly.
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