Jason's Birthday

So...Tongan's only celebrate a few birthdays, but knowing that we celebrate each one, Jason got to celebrate his 28th birthday over the course of several days and with several cakes! Here's a photo of our language group on his birthday.

I LIVE Here!!

The beaches here are truly something to behold - this Saturday, Sami, Jason and I headed to the beach for some much needed reading and relaxation!

Lining Up

An interesting piece of this part of training has been that the days in which we are all in school together (Wednesdays), we are required to line up in a boys and girls line before class begins so that our instructors can inspect our appearance. Sort of an elementary principle when working with adults, but that's what they chose to do. They never gave us a list or told us exactly what their expectations were for this graded portion of training until they started letting people know during our first line up session (and in front of everyone else) who was not dressed appropriately. Apparently, students are required to wear a tauvala (or for women, a kiekie) ... I guess we were just supposed to know this on our own? And, you can see we're such an unruly group that a bull horn was required to speak to the 16 of us during this process.

Don't Worry be Ha'apai

That is the slogan for the island group that we are staying on now. Our group of 16 has been split into 4 different villages by the language groups we were previously in. My group consists of: Sami (a 22 year old girl from Pennsylvania, who is very energetic, really inclusive and a lot of fun); Jason (28 year old guy from Spokane, who seems to be quite an adventurer and is also a solid Christian); Dawn (67 year old lady from Phoenix, who makes us laugh often as she says pretty much exactly what she is thinking, which is both refreshing and funny at the same time). I like our language group a lot and especially our language teacher Poli.

Our first day here, we spent primarily sleeping and getting to know our family (which is a bit awkward!). Poli, Sami, Dawn & I went for a walk in the afternoon. Here are a couple pictures of my new house and from our stroll.

This is my home for the next 6 weeks. Definitely a bit more westernized than my last home. I have a very nice bed (with mosquito net since some of the panes are missing from the windows!)

This is the church that all of our families go to, so we'll be here together which is sort of nice.

A 10 Hour Tour

To get to our next homestay, we needed to take a boat up to another group of islands. The boat ride was 10 hours, leaving Nuku'alofa in the late afternoon and arriving in Ha'apai about 2 - 3 in the morning. Our host family surprised us and showed up at the dock to say goodbye one last time.

Here are our accomodations. We had the nice place to sit. It was very uncomfortable and very cold. Although Tonga is tropical, being in an open air boat in the middle of their winter, at night was really, really bad. But at least we weren't sleeping in the stair/walk ways like I saw Tongans doing. I had no idea people still traveled in this manner! I lept wondering during the 10 hours how Peace Corps could have us travel like this and not at least provide blankets or sleeping bags or have told us to bring a coat at least...

Our view from the boat...you can see just how flat parts of Tonga are.

Leaving Ha'atafu

We left Ha'atafu today. It is really scary to think about the new place we will be going - Ha'apai. There, we will be on our own with a host family ... which is going to be really difficult. I'm used to relying on Amanda to vent to about the frustrations of living with a family and the cultural/language frustrations that come with it. I'm scared about what my new situation will be like. The unknown is always pretty scary to me. Although, I keep reminding myself of how worried I was about this homestay and how it turned out to be just fine and I'm sure the same will be true for the next section of training. Here are a few photos of our final moments in Ha'atafu.

Tongan Kids & Teeth

We have never been able to figure out how these kids are related to our homestay family, but that is very typical in Tonga...families are so extended and 3rd cousins are considered brothers, so these little girls stayed over at our house frequently and entertained us with their antics. One thing that is pretty gross about the kids is that many of them have teeth that are literally black. Since baby teeth fall out, our best guess is that children here don't brush their teeth until they have adult teeth which results in some pretty nasty looking teeth! (Unfortunately, I don't have any really good pictures of the bad teeth!)