"The rote of the sea surging in over coral reef and beach mingles with the shouts of high school boys playing rugby just over the hill and giggling children splashing about at the tide’s edge. A soft island breeze tugs at my wrap skirt and flirts with the damp wisps of hair curling about my face and neck. I’m trying to finish a report for the home office, but the distractions are hard to ignore. A brilliant blue ice bird came to sit atop the fence. He cocked his head at me as I stared back. I am surrounded by flowers, a riot of color and heady scents; bougainvillea, hibiscus, frangipani and others I can’t name. So, this is the Toughest Job I’ll Ever Love, huh?"
Skye Taylor writes: Two Years in Tonga
Two Years in Tonga
By Skye Taylor
CAMDEN/ROCKLAND (June 29): The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love
The rote of the sea surging in over coral reef and beach mingles with the shouts of high school boys playing rugby just over the hill and giggling children splashing about at the tide’s edge. A soft island breeze tugs at my wrap skirt and flirts with the damp wisps of hair curling about my face and neck. I’m trying to finish a report for the home office, but the distractions are hard to ignore. A brilliant blue ice bird came to sit atop the fence. He cocked his head at me as I stared back. I am surrounded by flowers, a riot of color and heady scents; bougainvillea, hibiscus, frangipani and others I can’t name. So, this is the Toughest Job I’ll Ever Love, huh?
Oddly, that was the first thought I had when Peace Corps told me where I was going. Okay, so it was my second thought. Tonga is a Polynesian island group – 172 of them and if you put them all together, so my guidebook told me, they’d be about as big as the city of Dallas. So my first thought was, “how far away can the beach be?” For a woman who loves the sea, this didn't seem like a tough gig at all. And then there was my job.
The job description for my position with the Red Cross was to set up, organize and run an office for the newly created Vava’u branch. I’d been there almost two months and we had yet to have an Annual General Meeting, which all the prominent committee members assured me was required before we could make any decisions on what programs to run or how to raise money to run them. Since the co-chair people for this committee were the Queen and one of the elected members of Parliament and since neither of these people wass ever free to attend an Annual General Meeting, the meeting never managed to get on the schedule. Thus, there was no office to set up, organize or run and no staff to train.
At my other primary assignment, with the handicraft cooperative, I spent most my energy trying to impress upon the members that visitors to the island who were in the market for souvenirs would be looking for the best quality and at reasonable prices. Unfortunately, for Tongans, quality is rarely an issue – only quantity. The cultural way of marketing and production is to make things as you feel like it, then drag a few items to town when you need immediate cash. They have a really hard time with the concept of retail verses wholesale and even after repeated explanations, I don’t believe some of them ever understood. Sometimes they take the lesser amount offered and leave with long faces and grim mutterings intended to make the clerk at the co-op feel guilty and change her mind. Other times, they repack their baskets into battered totes and go sit outside the vegetable market in the hope that someone will see their wares and be interested enough to stop. In neither case do they go home with the dollars they needed for the shopping they needed to do. The most discouraging part is that the next week, they would repeat this process all over again.
While Tongans don’t have a corner on the market certainly, they are world-class procrastinators. In my career, I have put on dinners for over 250, run state championships with hundreds of competitors, judges, score-keepers and parent volunteers, organized religious retreats, managed a thrift shop and chaired a governing board. Never have I had so much trouble inspiring people to organize themselves or plan ahead. Napping on the job, two-hour lunches, tardiness, leaving early, days and weeks of sudden disappearance on the slightest pretext are all a normal part of the Tongan work ethic. Unless there is a deadline looming, there appears to be no serious effort to get anything done. Everything seems to happen at the last minute with a fast and furious scramble, and I have to admit that I was always amazed at the way they pulled it all together.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of all, is the cultural distaste for controversy that translates into half-truths, evasion and outright lies. Tongans hate to disappoint or seem uninformed so rather than say they don’t know, they will tell you what they think you want to hear. If you confront them with evidence of unacceptable work or behavior, they will immediately present you with a series of excuses some of which may be true, but unrelated to the issue, and others that are patently untrue. Even when your questions are just a genuine effort to understand a custom or to conform to the culturally correct way of doing things, they will try to guess what you want the answer to be rather than tell you what you need to know, which, often causes the ill-advised volunteer to end up embarrassing themselves and their Tongan counterparts.
Fortunately for me and my sense of purpose, the Peace Corps also encouraged us to develop a secondary project of our own choosing. For me this was teaching English. I read at a story hour at the library and in my village each week and I taught English at the primary school. Becoming fluent in the English language is an important and challenging aspect of a child’s education in Tonga. Without reasonably good English skills, the youth of Tonga have difficulty even graduating from high school. Without English a decent job and career are also out of their reach. The Tongan devotion to learning by rote memorization, differences in discipline styles and the acceptable, even expected, practice of having someone else do a child’s homework for him or her, make this just as challenging as my other jobs, but my love of children, the eagerness with which they greeted me and my efforts and the gratitude of the teachers with whom I worked made it truly “the toughest job I’d ever love.”
