18 March 2010

The Eye of René

Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Gangale
@ThomasGangale

On Sunday evening, 14 February, as the wind unsteadily gained strength with repeated gusts, we heard neighbours boarding up their windows. ‘Uta phoned and asked whether she and her 13-year-old daughter Mata could weather the cyclone in our house, which is only a couple of years old and appears to be quite sturdy. So, we had a sleep-over. ‘Uta informed us of the storm’s name: René. I stayed awake until 0230, listening to the storm’s increasing force. Even at that late hour, I heard no rain; however, when I awoke around 0830, there was plenty of rain. ‘Uta and Melelini were already awake, but soon ‘Uta went back to sleep. She seems adept at falling asleep anytime, anywhere. Outside, the hammering of boards over windows continued.

----------

Having been up late the night before, I took a nap between 1400 and 1700. By then, conditions were noticeably worse. Also, Melelini and I had acquired three more house guests: ‘Uta’s sister Tai, and Tai’s daughters, Tapuaki age 13, and Joy Lily, age 8. The extended family was becoming more immediate. Like ‘Uta’s husband, Tai’s husband was out of the country (there are more Tongan subjects living overseas than in the Kingdom). Melelini said that the five other women were frightened by the storm, and that I needed to stay in the main part of the house to reassure them. I was The Man.

Melelini, ‘Uta, and Tai prepared dinner, and since “everything is in the crate,” and we did not have chairs for everyone, we sat on a fala (a pandanus mat) on the floor in traditional Tongan style around 1800 hours. Of no particular relevance to our situation, I noted with irony the Orwellian plates off which we ate: in China, what more could “Freedom” mean than the brand name of an export product? As far as we knew, the eye was passing us and the worst was over. Then Maikolo sent another text message at 1830 to update us on the situation. René had slowed and turned. The new projection was for the passage of the eye 50 kilometres to the west around 2100 hours. Expected winds were 125 knots, or 220 kilometres per hour. Some enchanted evening. Around 1900 hours pieces of ‘Uta’s metal awning to her porch broke away, and it seemed that the failure of metal roofs was imminent. It sounded like Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart were jamming on our roof. Tai knelt on the fala and lead us in prayer in the candlelight. I ventured outside to fill a pail of water so that we could keep flushing the toilet. No power meant no water pump, and therefore no water pressure. Our yard was almost entirely under water, as much as 20 centimetres in some places. I thought of New Orleans during Katrina, as I had seen it on a wide-screen TV in a hotel lounge in Long Beach, California while attending an aerospace conference. Suddenly, it was my turn. The escalating wind sounded more threatening given that René was bearing down on an island that was small enough to slip in his pocket and walk out the front door without tripping a security alarm.

Around 1930 the storm began to taper off, and by 1950 it was dead calm. We were in the eye of the cyclone. ‘Uta said, “Maybe the storm is over.” No, this wasn’t the end. This wasn’t even the beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning.

I spent most of the next hour standing on the front porch, absorbing the contrast between the peace of the present and the violence of the past 24 hours. I had heard that in the centre of an eye the sky is clear and that one can see blue sky in the daytime or the stars at night. We didn’t appear to be in the exact centre; the sky was still cloudy, although no rain was falling. I moved my head slowly from side to side while focusing on the sky, as I had learned to do as an Air Force back-seater, and the stars were there, although very dim. Joy Lily offered me a mango. They were all over the place, shaken out of the trees. Around 2110 the wind began to pick up again. That seemed an hour early by my calculations, for if the eye passage really had been at 2100 hours, and given that we had had more than an hour of calm before that, it seemed to me that we should have had more than an our of calm after eye passage. That the wind came up an hour ahead of schedule I took to mean that eye passage had actually occurred about 2030. I also expected that as the wind came up, conditions would deteriorate as rapidly as they had improved, but by 2215 there was still only a steady wind with occasional gusts, but nothing very threatening, and no rain. The trailing half of the cyclone appeared to be much less violent than the leading half. Of course, René had been predicted to weaken to a Category 2 cyclone as it continued south into cooler waters. As I drifted to sleep, the wind in the trees sounded like the gentle surf of Monterey Bay.

I awakened Tuesday morning to the trailing wake of René: light breezes and steady rain that one associates with a warm front in temperate climates. Melelini, ‘Uta, and Tai prepared a morning meal for all of us, and again we sat on the fala. I will note here what, as far as I know, is fairly standard Tongan flooring. Forget about carpeting; in this steamy climate it would only provide an environment to be colonized by God knows what. And, with all the rain, one needs flooring that will stand up to constant moisture. The solution is a simple one: cement. The material covering the cement floor is equally utilitarian; it is plastic sheeting that is available in a half-dozen or more decorative designs.

After breakfast, ‘Uta resumed a task that had busied her for part of the previous evening by candlelight, meticulously picking through her daughter’s hair. I hadn’t taken much interest in this, only wondering in passing whether this was what it appeared to be, as the weather conditions were more than enough to satisfy my curiosity. In the calm of morning and the light of day, however, I gave a bit more scrutiny, and saw that occasionally ‘Uta was pinching her thumb and forefinger, drawing them along the length of a few isolated strands of Mata’s hair, then bringing her pinched fingers to her lips. As I observed this ten million year old hominid ritual, there was the 21st century sound of a chainsaw in the distance cutting away trees felled by the cyclone.

Melelini wanted to know from Maikolo whether there would be classes today. Being more experienced at text messaging, I handled communications. Maikolo said that roads were impassable and students couldn’t get to campus. He asked whether we had water. We had potable water, but water for flushing the toilet would become a problem because the bucket outside the house was no longer filling up quickly enough to keep up with the demands of seven people.

I offered to do a damage assessment recon mission to the campus, and Maikolo, who lived about six kilometres from ‘Atenisi, took me up on it. Our house was no more than a kilometre from campus.

Nothing could shout louder that we were in the Third World than the dilapidated condition of the ‘Atenisi University campus, yet it also communicated something else. Somehow it had the feeling of a Mediterranean archaeological site, of a place that had been built to be much more than it was now, although the buildings were largely intact, and fresh coats of paint all around would have considerably improved appearances. One could walk around and easily imagine what the campus must have been like in its heyday 30 to 40 years earlier. It was also a place where still another historical period could be sensed; Futa Helu had built this campus largely with his funds, with his own intellect as an architect, and even with his own hands to some extent, as a temple of the classical philosophers, in the belief that philosophy and mathematics were the foundation all other learning. Against one building leaned several columns ingeniously fabricated from aluminium sheeting, scoured in regular interval with parallel lines to suggest fluting, and turned into tapered columns. Also, the loose-fitting clothes of the Tongans suggested Greco-Roman tunics. It was a tableau out of an H. Rider Haggard adventure, a lost civilization in the jungle. Here in the tropical steaminess stood a tarnished treasure, still standing, not in the aftermath of barbarian rampage, but against the merciless and unrelenting onslaughts of time and poverty. Here one saw Futa’s struggle to ignite a spark of learning and to keep it alive on an impossibly small budget, a struggle that Maikolo had inherited.

The physical state of the campus was also a monument to the neglect of the modern age, of a world that is forgetting the value of classical learning, that is training workers rather than educating students. We had seen no barbarians here, but we had seen their work in America. The “corporate model” was inexorably wresting the reins of academia from the soft and enervated hands of benevolent government. Under the guise of keeping learning alive, they were busy bending the educational system to their own immediate purpose, to create an advanced race of widget producers and consumers without the critical thinking skills to question the direction in which the elites might be taking civilization.

Fortunately, in the aftermath of René, there was no obvious damage to any buildings except to the science building, which Maikolo wanted to tear down anyway. The science classroom itself was usable, and Firitia started teaching classes in it two days later on Thursday. The “laboratory,” as it was called, had pools of standing water and very poor exterior lighting, which was the only light to be had during the power o’Utage. A lone wasp did his best to ignore my intrusion. In the dimness stood a telescope; all of the optics were missing except for its four-inch mirror, and that was either dirty or was losing its reflective coating. There were several microscopes on the shelves, the skull of a large mammal, and row upon dusty row of bottles labelled with ominous sounding chemicals. It is strange how things long disused silently cry out to the imagination of how they were once handled, of how they themselves were participants in processes of discovery by eager young minds. “We remember when….” One can look up at an unflown Saturn V launch vehicle on museum display in Huntsville or in Houston and hear her say, “My older sisters took men to the Moon; and I was ready to take them to Mars.” In this dank laboratory on an obscure island in the South Pacific, neglected instruments and bottles gave their own mute testimony to dusty dreams of discovery.

----------

The scene at the shipping company, east of downtown Nuku’alofa in the light industries area, was something akin to Gilbert and Sullivan, Monty Python, and Douglas Adams. None of the customs officials seemed to know how to do his or her job. Nearly a week earlier, we had come to an agreement with Peter Nash, the head of customs for the entire Kingdom, but rather than put it in writing, he had simply given us his card and had told us to phone him if the customs agents at the shipping company gave us a problem. They did. No one wanted to stick his neck out and take our word for what the boss had said. So, phone calls were made, then everyone had to go to lunch, and after lunch several hours were wasted entering numbers into computers and printed out on forms that Mr. Nash ignored when we brought them to him, because his people had entered the wrong codes. I hate to say it, but there are times when Tonga appears to be the B Ark, but I daresay that the reasons for this are complex, having to do with, inter alia, cultural differences and language barriers. At least this time, Mr. Nash annotated the form to note the fees that we were to pay, but there was yet more bungling when we returned to the shipping company. When we finally did get our crate home, we emptied it in probably not much more than an hour, so eager were we for its contents.

----------

On Friday morning, Tai, ‘Uta, Melelini, and I went off on yet another shopping trip. First stop was the duty free shop at the International Dateline Hotel to pick up a bottle each of gin, vodka, and bourbon; the credit card reader wasn’t working, so we had to go draw cash out of the bank before we could complete that transaction. On this shopping trip I decided it was time for a haircut; this climate was definitely made for short hair. The hairdresser at the hotel had the price of 20 pa’anga posted, but Tai had a better idea. She dropped off ‘Uta and Melelini at the Maketa Talamahu, a fruit and vegetable market on Salote Road, and then she took me to a barber next to the Immigration Office, which was about a block from the market. I had overlooked this business establishment when Melelini and I were working out visa issues two days earlier; the barber carried out his trade in a tiny shack made of corrugated metal and plywood which looked to have been constructed back in the days when my paternal grandfather had made his living as a barber. The shack stank as though something had been trapped underneath and had drowned during the flooding from René, and was now rotting in a stagnant pool. Even Tai commented on the smell later. I was glad that the only lighting was from the daylight outside, as I preferred to see as little as possible. However, the elderly Paola, whose command of English was perhaps slightly better than my knowledge of Tongan, did a first rate job for five pa’anga. In Tonga one learns to appreciate people for who they are, not for what they have. At Paola’s age, my grandfather was dying of heart disease, but owned a barber shop on San Francisco’s Mission Street that employed several other barbers, including my uncle. I reflected on the fortunes of families across generations and national economies. I, the grandson of an illiterate Calabrian barber, was in Tonga to earn my doctorate. Where were Paola’s grandchildren heading?

Thomas Gangale's Tales of Tonga

11 March 2010

The Departed

Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Gangale
@ThomasGangale

The island of Tongatapu is a triangular coral atoll with a central lagoon that opens to the sea through a channel on the north side of the island, east of the capital city of Nuku’alofa. There are trees everywhere, especially palms, of course. This is one of the poorest places on Earth, and the outer neighbourhoods can be terribly squalid; however, here and there one sees new and well-maintained homes. Some are veritable palaces by comparison, although they would be unremarkable in an American middle-class neighbourhood. The streets are in very good shape, better than in Pothole-uma for the most part. The word is that the roads are the beneficiaries of an infusion of Japanese money; they probably figured they could sell more cars if people didn’t have to ride on shitty roads. There are no sidewalks except downtown, and these can be rather narrow. There is quite a bit of ongoing construction downtown; a riot here in November 2006 destroyed about half of downtown. So, humidity, poverty, political instability… this could pass for a lot places in Latin America, except for the language, which I would understand better. The climate and the state of economic development, together with ubiquity of metal roofs, suggests the eventual rise of a Tongan Tennessee Williams, although I have yet to see even one cat on this island.

----------

When Melelini and I returned to the house, the evening sky was clear enough for me to identify the constellation of Orion. Off to the right, almost in line with Orion's belt, was a bright white object, which I first took to be Jupiter. But when I looked to the left of Orion, Sirius was not there. Immediately I realized that I was looking at Orion upside down, and that Sirius was on the right, not the left. Thus I was able to confirm by observation that we are indeed in the southern hemisphere.

----------

When Melelini and I returned to the house, the evening sky was clear enough for me to identify the constellation of Orion. Off to the right, almost in line with Orion's belt, was a bright white object, which I first took to be Jupiter. But when I looked to the left of Orion, Sirius was not there. Immediately I realized that I was looking at Orion upside down, and that Sirius was on the right, not the left. Thus I was able to confirm by observation that we are indeed in the southern hemisphere.

----------

On early Thursday afternoon we took a taxi to the Customs Office on the wharf, only to find that it was closed for lunch. No staggered lunches, everyone leaves at the same time, and everything shuts down. So we went to a nearby place on business that would not be shut down for lunch, but rather would be serving lunch, the Reef Café on Vuna Road; it had three or four tables inside and as many outside. Serendipitously, the cafe had a wi-fi router, and it was from there that I sent Tonga Dispatch #1. Melelini and I ordered a couple of drinks. We happened to overhear a palangi at the counter explain that he was in the Kingdom to give testimony at the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Sinking of the MV Princess Ashika in Tonga. As he passed, I explained him that I was a doctoral student at 'Atenisi, and that I was studying the cultural response to the accident. He offered me some advice about Tonga, "Don't believe anything that you hear, and only half of what you see."

Meleini and I had already seen how the arrangements for Futa Helu's funeral had changed several times a day. "It’s interesting that you say that. We've only been in Tonga a week, and I said to Marilyn the other day, 'Don't believe anything you hear until it actually happens, and then check with someone else who was there to make sure it really happened the way you think it did.'"

"You learn very quickly."

"That's why I'm a doctoral student."

Another gentleman sitting at what was probably the cafe's computer, resembling Mister Allnut in The African Queen in dress and demeanour, right down to the same uncouth, toothy grin, decided to join us at our table just as Meleini and I had packed up our computers and were about to leave for the Customs Office. But he was an engaging character, so we spent 20 minutes or so with him; that just seems to be life in the South Pacific. Hans-Dieter offered to buy a round of Victoria Bitter, but we declined, explaining that we had to get to the Customs Office. He told us of how he had been a transport skipper on boats out of Jakarta for 40 years, and that he had just come in from the Seychelles. He pointed out his boat. Across the Indian Ocean in... that? I was duly impressed. "If Ernst Hemingvay ver alive today, he vould kiss my ahss!" Because you live the sort of life that he only wrote about. "Exactly!"

We squared matters with the Customs Office regarding our crate that had arrived by ship from Oakland. Melelini and I were hoping to get our crate delivered to the house on Friday afternoon, after Futa's funeral, but a series of miscommunications foiled that, so now it will be Monday at the earliest. Taimi Tonga. On Saturday, Melelini and I took ‘Uta to the Tu’imatamoana Market near the wharf (the one with suspicious American goods). We had planned an Internet stop at the nearby Reef Café, and maybe run into Hans-Dieter again, but ‘Uta advised that we get downtown before stores closed, as some will close early on Saturday. So, no Internet stop on account of our lack of familiarity with the pattern of the trade winds. Maybe Tuesday. There are times that I feel that I'm on the bridge of NCC-1701-B: "It'll be here on Tuesday."

----------

All the walking we do between taxi rides is killing my knees. I’m hoping I’ll acclimate over time, but I need anti-inflammatory meds in the afternoon and evenings. I stay away from the vicodin, but that means I don’t sleep well. Losing weight will make walking easier, of course. My knees just have to grunt and grind under the strain until then. A radical departure from the American consumer culture, every place of business is closed on Sunday, which means a forced respite from walking all over hell and gone.

I should write something about Futa Helu’s funeral; there is little that I can say about the man himself, as I wasn’t fortunate enough to know him. There was much singing of hymns in Tongan, and it was very beautiful. There were a number of eulogies, some in Tongan, some in English. The King’s sister, Princess Pilolevu, attended both the Thursday evening and Friday morning services; King George Tupou V himself was out of the country. Melelini and I were in traditional Tongan mourning dress, graciously provided by ‘Uta: black shirt, black tupenu (wrap skirt), and ta’ovala (a waist wrap woven from the leaf of the pandanus). The Police Band led the Friday morning procession from the Centenary Chapel to the cemetery on Albert Street. Now, it seems odd to me that a reputed atheist would have a church funeral (different churches for the evening and morning services) and be buried in hallowed ground. When I read of his Wesleyan roots and his cultural sensitivity, I find it impossible to believe that he was an “in your face atheist;” indeed, in the privacy of his own thoughts, he may have contemplated the nature of the gods, while publicly showing no devotion to any particular religious tradition, thereby perhaps endeavouring to appear unbiased to all, possibly appearing secular to many, and apparently being mistaken for an atheist by some. I am reminded of an epigram by the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, with which, as a scholar of the classics, Futa Helu was undoubtedly familiar:


Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.


The evidence available to my eyes is that Futa lived according to this wisdom.

----------

Someone is always burning their rubbish somewhere in our neighbourhood of Longolongo. Rubbish pickup was supposed to be on Wednesday, but it didn’t happen… just another day on the event horizon, which is what the International Date Line may really be. So, the rubbish gets burned. No one is concerned about the air quality, because it’s excellent. It does smell like dope smoke sometimes, however. Good thing I downloaded a couple of hundred Grateful Dead concerts last month before we left the States. But so far, in the afternoons, as we’re unwinding for the day and having dinner, I’ve been playing selections from “Atomic Platters,” a collection of songs from the first two decades of the Cold War about the threat of godless communism and nuclear war, and I realize that for the first time in my life, I’m living somewhere that was never on a target list. If a nuclear war happened, Melelini and I would be the last to know; we have neither a television nor a radio receiver. If I saw a US submarine come into the port, I’d start worrying about the rubbish that got burned in the northern hemisphere falling out through our atmosphere.

Melelini seethed throughout the weekend about the FUBAR with our crate not getting delivered on Friday. There are many items in it that we could use and it’s an inconvenience to be without them, but Melelini really, really wanted our printer for reproducing syllabi for her classes on Tuesday. It may turn out to be a blessing that we didn’t get the crate delivered. About 1700 on Sunday, 14 February, Maikolo stopped by with the pleasing intelligence of a Category 4 cyclone bearing down on us. The weather map that Maikolo brought on his flash drive was a few hours old, and showed a nearly direct hit around sunset the following evening. No tropical experience would have been complete without a cyclonic storm, and it looks like we’re getting the four-star package. Maikolo told us to expect the campus to be flooded, but on his recommendation we had bought knee boots before leaving the States. The crate is better off at the shipping company’s warehouse than sitting outside our house. Meanwhile, many topics of discussion end with the phrase, “It’s in the box.”

We can expect the power and the cell phone services to be down for a week, give or take. The major concern will be the roof blowing off, but if the roof holds, we’re pretty set. The stove runs on propane tanks, which we filled a week ago. The first thing we’ll cook and eat is the two kilos of swordfish we bought on Saturday, then the chicken, then the lamb. Then we have some canned goods, as well as an ample supply of rice, pasta, and dried beans, the hydrating of which will be no great feat… just put a bucket out in the driving rain.

----------

As I write, the wind is picking up and darkness is descending. We’re drinking martinis until the dry vermouth runs out, which is more than can be said for guests at the International Dateline Hotel.

Thomas Gangale's Tales of Tonga

03 March 2010

The Palangi

Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Gangale
@ThomasGangale

Marilyn and I almost didn't make it out of the United States on 2 February. After we had checked our bags at SFO and were inside the security area, Marilyn's cell phone rang and it was a message from Maikolo, the dean of 'Atenisi University. There was a last-minute hitch. Since we had one-way tickets to Tonga, we needed laissez passer letters before Air New Zealand would let us board at Los Angeles. Fortunately, we had several hours' layover at LAX in which to work the problem, which involved tracking down the university's associate dean on his cell phone and giving him a fax number for Air New Zealand at LAX. Marilyn worked the problem in about a half hour. "Do you know how important these are?" she asked me when she had them in hand. "These are our letters of transit!" Fortunately we didn't even have to shoot a German officer or to bribe a corrupt French policeman to get them. Otherwise we would have had to wait in Los Angeles... and wait... and wait....

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.


---------------

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.

---------------

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.

---------------
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.


---------------

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