“No worries!” I replied.
The Tongans have learned their English from the Aussies and Kiwis, which is a bit amusing to the American ear. But back to the left-hand traffic pattern, it’s a bit unnerving. All my life-long conditioned responses are wrong, so I look at all directions of at an intersection… maybe two or three times. On day when riding to campus, Melelini departed a couple of minutes ahead of me, knowing that I would soon catch up with her. I found her riding down the right side of the street. “Gyet on tha lyeft, yeh bloody Yank!”
Around dinnertime Tai came to the door and asked us for something to eat. Out of the blue. Our reading on Tongan culture had prepared us for this. No one in Tonga goes hungry; no one has to humiliate himself by holding a cardboard sign at a major intersection. Tai had just missed the potato salad as the first course. When she says she’s hungry, she means she needs to eat right now. I suspect that she’s borderline diabetic; obesity and diabetes are rampant among Tongans. So we apportioned the remainder of our dinner three ways instead of two. Joy, ‘Uta, and Mata came by as we were halfway through the main course. Mata stayed to watch a few episodes of Fawlty Towers with Melelini and me when the others left. We were, I believe, more hospitable than Basil.
At 0330 hours on Sunday morning, ‘Uta knocked on our door and chanted in a conversational tone, “Melele. Melele. Melele. Melele. Melele. Melele.” We had read that Tongans are apt to do this at any time of day or night, although I didn’t believe that ‘Uta would interrupt our slumber for light and transient reasons. Far from it. ‘Uta had come to warn us that a magnitude 8.8 earthquake had struck Chile; a tsunami was travelling across the South Pacific and was scheduled to hit Tonga at 0738 hours. ‘Uta suggested that we avoid the rush to high ground. Tai, Joy, Tapuaki, Tai’s son Siosifa, and Mata were waiting in Tai’s van in front of our house. Melelini and I got as much up off the floor and onto shelves or furniture as we could manage in a couple of minutes, packed up our laptops, knee boots, and a few pillows, and headed for Tai’s van. There were a few clouds, but otherwise the sky was full of stars. Our house faced to the south, so when I looked up, I saw the Southern Cross for the first time. I thought of the dozen or so Chilean Gangale whom I had befriended on Facebook and with whom I corresponded occasionally. Had the earthquake claimed some of them?
Tai drove us to Mataki'eua, near the King’s estate, about 20 km west of Nuku’alofa. As we approached, vehicular and foot traffic choked a narrow dirt road. I was reminded of the usual traffic snarl getting into the parking area for a Grateful Dead concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre, not far from NASA’s Ames Research Centre. Whilst I knew full well that no one would appreciate the humour, still I couldn’t resist sticking an upheld finger out the window of the van. “Need a ticket! I’ll be your best friend!”
If what passed for high ground on Tongatapu was more than ten metres above mean sea level, I should be surprised, but that was what we had the work with. Once Tai found a place to park that satisfied her, there was nothing to do but wait. Most of us slept at one time or another. At one point Melelini roused enough to realise that either Tapuaki or Mata was picking through her hair for lice. There was something instinctually comforting in that 10 million year old hominid ritual, and Melelini drifted off to sleep again. Several hours later, in the full light of morning, I realised that there was not a single dog in sight. I later saw one, but his unhurried stroll in the midst of the chaos of humanity marked him as a resident of one of the nearby houses. The evacuees had left their thousands of dogs to the whims of the Fates. The people in the car parked next to Tai’s van gave us four bread rolls, which we apportioned among the eight of us. In so many ways, from the sharing of food and the transportation from danger to the grooming for lice, these people seemed somehow more human. The one exception was the place of the dog in their culture, and that wasn’t much of a place at all. In the course of the ancient island-hopping that had brought their ancestors to Tonga, the dog had lost its rank and station, or perhaps the dog was a stranger to Tonga until transported there by Europeans. In any case, in Tonga they were partners in neither the herding of sheep nor in the hunting of game, nor were they companions; at most they warded off intruders, which was precious little responsibility and stimulation. They had been reduced to welfare bums, living off scraps they had not earned nor were given with affection. The children of neglect, they were listless and incurious. They had not been carefully taught. I am also told that some Tongans eat dogs. But, take this distinct culture of a hundred thousand people for all in all, for one is not apt to see its like again once it is swept from the face of the Earth, as Tevita foresees, by the 21st century tsunami of strangers.
Maikolo phoned about the time the tsunami was scheduled to hit. He wanted to find me in the flood of humanity and talk about the methodology for my dissertation while we were marking time, waiting for the “all clear”. I couldn’t believe it. It was like trying to find a guy wearing a tie-dye T-shirt at a Grateful Dead concert. I told him that I had no idea where we were (I figured it out later as I noted the route that Tai took home, and checked it against a map). Maikolo said he had a Tongan soldier with him, and he wanted me to hand the phone to a Tongan speaker so the two of them could compare coordinates. I handed the phone to ‘Uta. After the phone call, ‘Uta explained that she had described the colour of Tai’s van and had given the license plate number. I went back to sleep, supremely confident that Maikolo would fail to find us. After an hour, he phoned to inform me that he was giving up the project. “What, you couldn’t find me? I was the guy wearing the tropical shirt!”
By then, the radio station had reported a 20-centimetre surge in New Zealand, and the Cook Islands had seen no wave at all. Maikolo advised that he was heading back to his house in Ma’ufanga, a few blocks from the waterfront. One by one, vehicles departed. There had been no official announcement that the danger had passed, and Tai was reluctant to abandon the high ground, but everyone else was in favour of returning home, so we did. ‘Uta assured her that she would keep the radio on throughout the day and that we could always return to high ground if a new threat arose, perhaps as a result of an aftershock. The tsunami warning was finally cancelled at 1230 hours.
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On Friday, economics class got more interesting as we started delving into game theory. Also, the miracle of the Internet came to ‘Atenisi, and I stayed on campus for more than an hour after my last class to take advantage of this unexpected boon. But all good things must end; Tai pulled up in her van along with ‘Uta and Melelini. Melelini want me to go with them the Pacific Timber and Hardware on Taufa’ahau Road while she bought timber and hardware to put up shelves in our house. Why my presence was required, I have no idea; however, it furnished an occasion to observe how things get done in Tonga. In the U.S., we could have walked into a hardware store, chances are that pre-cut shelving lumber would have been available in stock, and we would have been wheeling our purchase across the parking lot in a few minutes. At worst, we would have had to stand by for five minutes or so while an employee cut the lumber to order on a circular saw table using a guide fence. Not in Tonga. Instead, one man wielded a hand-held circular saw while two men held the opposite ends of a 6 x 8-foot sheet of plywood parked on top of a crate. The results were spectacular. Three men, working for half an hour, managed to craft the most ragged exposition of shelving material that I have ever seen in this or any other hemisphere. According to accepted economic theory, one mixes labour and skill with raw material and capital to create a value-added product; in this case, however, I have to seriously consider whether these men, labouring none too skilfully, and, it must be conceded, without the benefit of adequate capital investment in equipment, didn’t actually subtract value from the plywood sheet.
I have described some things that I hope convey the sense that the traditional Tonga culture is still very much in evidence; yet, under the influences of Australian, New Zealander, and American culture, Tonga is drifting into the 21st century. This is not entirely due to the work of palangi educators, for we are very few. Other palangi have come here to make their living in various other ways, and although they are not here to change the world, their entrepreneurship and standard of living provide an example of life beyond pigs and chickens. Aid trickles into Tonga from the ANZUS countries and from the European Union, and generosity often comes with a few strings attached. On the whole, the major influence for change is probably the Tonga diaspora; the many thousands who have emigrated to the ANZUS nations to seek their fortunes, have become enculturated there, and whose remittances back the family back in the old country account for about half of Tonga’s economy. As happens with so many immigrants, their children have lost their ancestral tongue, and those who come here to visit extended family are often foreigners in their parents’ land. Indeed, I am told that a number of ‘Atenisi University’s students hold foreign passports. A nation of little more than a hundred thousand people doesn’t possess the means to stand against the social, cultural, economic, and political forces of globalisation; it is only a few, difficult to find dots in the vast ocean of water, of time, of humanity. Where can Tongan culture run to find high ground?
Thomas Gangale's Tales of Tonga
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