It is a very different life style here in Tonga. Marilyn's first impression was to liken it to rural Florida in the 1950s. I would describe it as living one day in the future (on the west side of the International Date Line) but a half-century in the past. In fact, due to the kinks in the International Date Line around this and that national boundary, Tonga is on the west side of the IDL but east of the 180th meridian, with the result that it is the only place on Earth that is 13 hours ahead of Universal Time Coordinated. The planet's day begins here, and any time of day occurs here before it does anywhere else. As a pubescent sci-fi addict and later as an aerospace engineer, I always wanted to live in the future; I got my wish finally, and I’m living even farther into the future than Max Headroom… he was living only 20 minutes into the future.
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Singing is a big part of the culture. We live nearby a church and a school, so we hear singing day and night. Also church bells, which have a low pitch to them. Bong-bong-bong-bong. The churches have early services at 0430. Bong-bong-bong-bong. Are you of the body, friend?
We also hear roosters, chickens, and dogs all day long, but we were used to hearing them in Petaluma, along with horses and sheep. Pigs roam freely here, and nearly every female dog is heavy with milk. No Department of Animal Control.
People say hello as we walk by, and they even wave at us from their passing autos. Everywhere one can see people laughing, and sometimes singing. I can see why the English called these the Friendly Islands. If Americans acted like this I'd think they were on drugs.
We white folks are called palangi. One version of the story of that name that I heard is that it means "skyscrapers," for when Captain Cook arrived here in the 1770s, the Tongans were appalled that anyone would be so rude to the sky gods as to build ships so tall. It's a good story, but I'm not sure that it's accurate. Another version is that palangi means "to appear from the sky," because Cook's tall ships could be seen far away on the horizon.
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As Marilyn and I were en route here, the founder of 'Atenisi University, Dr. Futa Helu (a very short version of his name) passed away. We wanted very much to meet him. His funeral is going to be a very big deal, with the royal family in attendance. Scholars are flying in from all over the world. Futa is a national hero, having founded the only non-government, non-religious university in the Pacific. At the same time, however, his democratic ideas made him a thorn in the side of the royal government, and his atheism made him a pariah to the various religious communities here (Wesleyans and Mormons being the larger denominations in a Kingdom that is very religious), so both the government and the churches worked to undermine the university (shall we call it what it is, persecution?). Methinks they come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Inevitably, this will be a time of change for the university. We have lost our great standard-bearer, but we may be able to open opportunities for the university that remained closed in his lifetime.
Maikolo has run the university in the day to day for years as Futa aged into being the figurehead, and he has a lot of balls in the air. He's very happy that we're here, for aside from the eternal problem of fundraising, he has a hard time retaining faculty. A lot of people coming in from overseas can't handle the culture shock, apparently. Maikolo says that this place is like the US would have been if the 1960s hippie movement had succeeded. I'm OK with that, dude. I downloaded over 200 Grateful Dead concerts during our last few weeks in the US.
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Marilyn is hot to ship her car over here, which would be very expensive, but I would like to defer this decision until we better understand how things work here. Again, do more with less. We can do most of our shopping on foot, and our bikes will be here in a few days. My big concern is refilling the propane tanks to the stove and water heaters. They're too heavy to transport by foot or bike, and the filling station is kilometres away. However, ‘Uta offered to have her husband take the tanks by car. Things may operate in a communal way here, so the independence of having one's own car may be an unnecessary extravagance. The key to everyday life may be the interdependence of plugging into a social network. Quando in Roma, fa come i romani fanno. In any case, cars can be rented, and there are taxis. If we can get by without our own car, we'll be living much as I did in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1974 as a one-striper in the Air Force, getting around mostly by bike... another anomalous temporal phenomenon: living at the age of 55 as I did when I was 20. But I'm not 20, and we don't have our bikes yet, so it was nice that on our way downtown Monday afternoon, we found a taxi service about four blocks from our house.
Money is an imported concept. Although items in stores are marked with prices, a transaction on the street is more in the realm of an exchange of gifts. For instance, when I asked the taxi driver the price of the fare, he said, "That's up to you." We encountered the same response later when buying shell necklaces from a street vendor. Apparently, there is no wrong answer; the money is considered a gift. Polynesians have a different concept of personal possessions, which accounts for what Westerners would consider property crimes, but also for striking generosity. After reading a little about Tongan culture, I looked up from my book and asked Marilyn in a Russian accent, "So, comrade, do you think that the Tongans have achieved true communism?" Her response was that they probably achieved true communism thousands of years ago and had been just tinkering with it ever since. Of course, that's not exactly correct, since there is a hereditary distinction between the royals, the nobles, and the commoners, and only the royals and the nobles (or the state, which is controlled by them) own the means of production, i.e., the land. Still, had Karl Marx been able to travel here, it surely would have informed his speculation on the evolution of capitalism in industrial societies toward socialism and ultimately communism, to see communistic customs operating in an unindustrialized society. The traditions of giving and sharing mitigate the class distinctions, and probably make them less of a rip-off of the working class than was European feudalism, and is the capitalism that has supplanted it. So, here in Tonga we see a fascinating and intricate mixture of cultural feudalism (commoners were emancipated in 1875, but elements of the social order remain) and traditional communism interacting with European-imported capitalism.
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Given that it is the height of summer, and that we are in the tropics, the weather has been better than expected. We shower several times a day to keep from feeling too grubby. We had light rain throughout Thursday, and it remained overcast and humid on Friday. Saturday was our first glimpse of blue sky, with broken cloud cover, mild temperatures, and lower humidity. But, we had intermittently heavy downpours on Saturday evening. On Monday there was nearly clear sky, and thus it was warmer. On Tuesday morning there were torrential downpours before dawn. About the only thing that happens quickly around here is the change in weather.
Well, the change in weather... and the change in arrangements for Futa's funeral, which keeps Maikolo in a state of agitation. Don't believe anything until it actually happens, and then check with someone else who was there to verify that it really happened the way you think it did.
Thomas Gangale's Tales of Tonga
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