Mon, Feb 19, 2007; The Amazing Race Tonga & Other News
'Alani giving some kids a piggyback ride during the Amazing Race Tonga
Carly & 'Alani at Friend's Cafe during the Amazing RaceHello Everyone!!
Wow - life has been very busy but very fun here in Tonga!! And, of course, rewarding!!
As for my job, it is going very well despite many challenges along the way. We currently have 11 students enrolled in the classroom and just this afternoon we got approval from the school PTA committee to use the school photocopier and they approved us to buy supplies for the class. The PTA usually provides all the teachers with white paper and glue to cover the walls with and maybe some chart paper in order to make posters with. The previous principal had refused to let us use the copier or to get supplies from the PTA because some of our students are not from the school district, but she left to work at another school last Monday so the acting principal said that we could ask for supplies from the PTA at the meeting today. Lesieli (the teacher I am working with) presented our case to the committee (my Tongan is definately not that good!) and they approved us - yeah!! It makes us feel much more welcomed at our school, which is nice. And now we will be able to cover up last year's mess - i mean work - and make our classroom our own. And we can photocopy things! Yeah!
Another wonderful thing that happened today...one of the parents of a student in our class came up to me before the meeting to tell me how happy she is because now her son knows his name and can spell and write his own name and he is happy to come to school and wants to come everyday and is making friends. Her son had actually already been "attending" school at NGele'ia G.P.S. (where I teach) for 2 years but he would always run away from class and no one would ever stop him or go get him. The teachers would just be happy he was gone. So now he is just learning how to write his name and all that but he comes to school every day and even stays after in the afternoons. It's great to see the kids progressing already! However we are encountering a lot of transportation issue and accessibility issues with some of our students. One of the teachers at the school asked if we would accept his niece into the program, which of course we said yes to, but unfortunately she is in a wheelchair and so it is very difficult for her to get to the classroom - she has to cross a rocky field and then get up a big step onto the veranda outside our room and then another step inside. To go to the bathroom she has to go back down the two steps, across the field and then up a step into the toilet area and into the bathroom where there is no such thing as a handicapped stall. It takes two people to get her wheelchair across the field which means we either have to recruit parents who are outside the classroom to help us get her to the bathroom whenever she has to go and it is a long process for her to even get to class in the morning. We have another student who isn't in a wheelchair but could really benefit from a walker, although I have never seen a walker anywhere in Tonga, so alas she does not have one. She is extremely unsteady on her feet and unable to climb up and down the step to our classroom unassisted and pretty much falls at least 5 times a day going over all the rocks and up and down the step, etc. Accessibility issues and lack of materials such as books and paper and crayons and pencils are definately big challenges, as is the concept here that disabled children cannot learn...however I feel like people are already pleased with the work that we are doing with the students in our class and the teachers seem interested in learning more techniques for working with different students and using sign language for learning, etc. It's very exciting!!
In other work news, Malakai (my supervisor) and I are working on funding proposals for an Early Intervention Program, a Case Management and Referral Management System, Teacher In-Service Trainings, Week-long Teacher Workshops throughout Tonga, a Special Education Resource Center, hosting an International Teachers Conference in Tonga, post-school vocational training, Inclusive/Special Education adaptive and assistive technologies, retro-fitting the school buildings and local businesses being re-built after the riots with wheelchair accessibility and a public awareness campaign including fun runs and a children's fair and a christmas show. Like I said, it has been busy!!
NOW...onto the fun stuff!
This weekend I participated in a very fun event....The Amazing Race Tonga!! It was soooooo fun!! We were in 9 teams of 2 and it was a two day event. My teammate 'Alani (Alan) and I comprised the only full Peace Corps team and then one other team was an Australian volunteer and a Peace Corps girl. All of the organizers were Australian and some of the other teams, and there was a Tongan team and a team of Japanese volunteers and a couple from New Zealand that I think run a business here. Anyways, we started at 10:00 with pre-race interviews - we all made up stories about our characters - 'Alani was a redneck truck driver and i was a spaced out hippie girl who fell asleep in his truck and didn't even know that we were in a race, i just kept making peace signs everywhere we went. One other team's story was that he was a priest and she was a nun and they had a baby together and she wore a t-shirt with a big A on it for the whole game, another group dressed up in traditional Tongan dress with fake gold teeth and pregnant bellies and called themselves The Fakapikopikos (lazies), etc. You get the idea.
Anyways.... here was our race course...
1. We started at the Australian High Commission and had to bike over to the market by the wharf and look for a clue box hidden in one of the stalls (keep in mind the market was happened at this time so it was quite crowded), the clue told us to buy a coconut and bring it back to race central (the Aussie High Com).
2. Once there we had to pick a teammate to do the next task. We picked 'Alani - he had to break open the coconut and then eat the whole thing and then we got the next clue.
3. The next clue told us to bike to Teufava Stadium where we had to find the clue box. The clue was to choose to either each kick two field goals or to each catch 3 crickets balls hit by Todd (one of the organizers). Since 'Alani wasn't wearing shoes we decided to go with the cricket balls, and yes - i caught 3 in a row!! Yippee!!
4. The clue we got after that was written in difficult Tonga so we had to get someone to translate. It also contained a picture. Apparently it told us to go find the place where the sign is and take our picture there and then go to some guy's house (Polokavia Faka-something or whatever) in Tofoa. Well, we went searching around the city for about half an hour before someone could tell us where the sign was because of course the one clue written in Tongan pointed us to a school where hardly any Tongans attend that is maybe 2 miles out of the city. It is the Bahai School where luckily one of my friends work because otherwise the only directions we got were "go that way and turn left after a while - oiaue!!). Once we got there (now dropped down from 1st place to 4th place) we took our picture and were about to leave when 'Alani decided to ask at the falekoloa (little store) if they knew the guy who's house we were supposed to find. At the store the man told us the house belonged to the brother of the security guard at the Bahai school so we went back to the Bahai school to find directions. The brother, Sione, was missing but some teachers thought they knew the way but then just kept telling us it was too hard to give directions and then wanting to chat with us about America!! I don't know why it was so hard because when they eventually drew the map it was just take the back road to Tofoa and turn right across from the mango tree at the third dirt road after the primary school. Those are actually really good and really simple tongan directions. Most are far more confusing than that since most roads don't have names.
5. Once we got to the house we had to show them our picture from the Bahai school and they gave us a clue that pointed us back to the Aussie High Commission
6. At the High Com, the person who didn't eat the coconut (me) had to either drinks 2 liters of cordial or eat 8 passion fruit. I went for the passion fruit and ate them quite quickly if i do say so myself. Then we got a clue to search the High Com grounds for a number to determine the order of our send-off.
7. Once everyone arrived (some over an hour after us, the Bahai school threw everyone off), they blindfolded us one team at a team and drove us in circles and eventually dropped us off at a kava house where we had to sit in the kava circle and drink a full cup of kava and then we were given a soduko puzzle to complete and then find our way back to the High Com. Luckily 'Alani love soduko so he finished it in record time with me piping in with maybe 3 numbers, we ran back to the High Com.
8. At the High Com they showed us a picture of a statue of three dolphins and we had to go find it - again, luckily 'Alani has been here for almost 2 years now so he knew the statue - over by the wharf and we biked over.
9. There we were given the choice of three tasks:
Fast Forward - if you completed this task you got to skip all tasks and go to the end, however it was really a fake task and directed people to the Robert Lewis Stevenson museum in Samoa to go get the purple monkey statue. It didn't say it was in Samoa though, it just gave a town name. The funniest part though was that the only team who decided to go for that one was the Tongan team and they really should have known better!
Our other choices were to swim from one pier to the other and run back for your teammate or to bike to the NZ High Com and bike back for your teammate. I was willing to swim but 'Alani is super speedy on the bike and was anxious to go so i sent him off and he went flying out there and flying back.
10. Then we had to do a photo scavenger hunt throughout the city, taking pictures of about 20 different things such as a live pig, a virgin mary statue, a teammate shaking hands with a military officer, a teammate giving a child a piggy-back ride, a peanut seller giving one of your teammates peanuts, a bougainvillea flower, the Bahai National Office (one of the organizers is Bahai), a picture of us in Friend's Cafe, a "Pass the Palm, Please" advertisement, etc.
11. Once the photos were done we had to bring them to the High Com for approval where we were then given a bunch of letters and told to make 2 words in order to figure out where to go next. This took forever but eventually it spelled out "Pointy Pescine" which we figured out meant the Billfish (the local pub) and so we raced over there on our bikes and 'Alani and I won the first day!!
The second day we all took the boat over to Pangaimotu, a "resort-ish" palongi island nearby so that we could continue playing without being too scandolous in Tonga where you are not supposed to play games or do any physical activity on a Sunday. These were the Sunday events:
1. Table tennis - we had to pick a person first and so I decided to give it a try before i knew the task. Then i was doing terribly because i've never really played table tennis before so they let us switch it up. Everyone is always talking about how good 'Alani is at table tennis, but he wasn't doing that well so then we switched table sides and he immediately won. There was a lot of wind that day and i guess i had picked the bad side, so maybe my table tennis skills aren't so terrible - i did almost win the firrst match.
2. Darts - we had to score an exact total of 57 points with 3 darts to move on. Eventually they let us aim for the first P in championship and if you got that it counted for 57 points. I got it on my second try - yippee! even i was amazed!!
3. Scavenger Hunt around the island - we had to find 6 parts of a picture hidden around the island. This killed us because we went the opposite way from most people and the second to last clue was virtually impossible and we spent ovr 30 minutes looking for it but apparently some other people went to complain so after we gave up and moved on they put up a big arrow pointing everyone else to it so it only took like a minute when we went back to go get it. grr. one clue was buried in the sand, the hard one was inside a tree trunk, one was hidden in this nasty swamp area, another in the mangrove trees, etc.
4. Once we got all the pictures we brought them back to race central and completed the picture and then had to do the following:
- the limbo
- write a song that had to rhyme and be at least 60 seconds long and contain the following words: Kylie, orange, purple, faka'ofo'ofa, fakapikopiko, hippopatumus, puaka, etc - you get the idea & then perform the song and dance for the judges
- swim out to the ship wreck and climb at least halfway up and jump off (this was a little scary but i did it! several people cut up their feet on it thoug)
- swing on the rope swing out to water
- swim out to the floating dock, climb on, dive off, and swim back
- complete a coconut shot put event and the coconut had to land inside a circle that we couldn't even see!- hop around the volleyball courts
- run to the end of the pier and dive off
- swim in to the finish!!
In the end 'Alani and I got fourth but we like to think we won the more important day!! No matter what it was soooo much fun and I am definately doing it or helping set it up if they do it again!! It was especially interesting for me since i've never seen the amazing race and haven't truly been on a bike since i was about 14 years old so i had no idea what was going on and was not very used to being on a bike so much. I bought my bike friday and then just went for it. woo-hoo!!
If anyone would like a copy of the DVD that they are making of the event, please let me know. Also, if i can ever find my cord to download pictures with, I will try to post some of the event. And if you want to play your own personal amazing race game when you come to visit i can totally make that happen!
Cheers!-carly
Wow - life has been very busy but very fun here in Tonga!! And, of course, rewarding!!
As for my job, it is going very well despite many challenges along the way. We currently have 11 students enrolled in the classroom and just this afternoon we got approval from the school PTA committee to use the school photocopier and they approved us to buy supplies for the class. The PTA usually provides all the teachers with white paper and glue to cover the walls with and maybe some chart paper in order to make posters with. The previous principal had refused to let us use the copier or to get supplies from the PTA because some of our students are not from the school district, but she left to work at another school last Monday so the acting principal said that we could ask for supplies from the PTA at the meeting today. Lesieli (the teacher I am working with) presented our case to the committee (my Tongan is definately not that good!) and they approved us - yeah!! It makes us feel much more welcomed at our school, which is nice. And now we will be able to cover up last year's mess - i mean work - and make our classroom our own. And we can photocopy things! Yeah!
Another wonderful thing that happened today...one of the parents of a student in our class came up to me before the meeting to tell me how happy she is because now her son knows his name and can spell and write his own name and he is happy to come to school and wants to come everyday and is making friends. Her son had actually already been "attending" school at NGele'ia G.P.S. (where I teach) for 2 years but he would always run away from class and no one would ever stop him or go get him. The teachers would just be happy he was gone. So now he is just learning how to write his name and all that but he comes to school every day and even stays after in the afternoons. It's great to see the kids progressing already! However we are encountering a lot of transportation issue and accessibility issues with some of our students. One of the teachers at the school asked if we would accept his niece into the program, which of course we said yes to, but unfortunately she is in a wheelchair and so it is very difficult for her to get to the classroom - she has to cross a rocky field and then get up a big step onto the veranda outside our room and then another step inside. To go to the bathroom she has to go back down the two steps, across the field and then up a step into the toilet area and into the bathroom where there is no such thing as a handicapped stall. It takes two people to get her wheelchair across the field which means we either have to recruit parents who are outside the classroom to help us get her to the bathroom whenever she has to go and it is a long process for her to even get to class in the morning. We have another student who isn't in a wheelchair but could really benefit from a walker, although I have never seen a walker anywhere in Tonga, so alas she does not have one. She is extremely unsteady on her feet and unable to climb up and down the step to our classroom unassisted and pretty much falls at least 5 times a day going over all the rocks and up and down the step, etc. Accessibility issues and lack of materials such as books and paper and crayons and pencils are definately big challenges, as is the concept here that disabled children cannot learn...however I feel like people are already pleased with the work that we are doing with the students in our class and the teachers seem interested in learning more techniques for working with different students and using sign language for learning, etc. It's very exciting!!
In other work news, Malakai (my supervisor) and I are working on funding proposals for an Early Intervention Program, a Case Management and Referral Management System, Teacher In-Service Trainings, Week-long Teacher Workshops throughout Tonga, a Special Education Resource Center, hosting an International Teachers Conference in Tonga, post-school vocational training, Inclusive/Special Education adaptive and assistive technologies, retro-fitting the school buildings and local businesses being re-built after the riots with wheelchair accessibility and a public awareness campaign including fun runs and a children's fair and a christmas show. Like I said, it has been busy!!
NOW...onto the fun stuff!
This weekend I participated in a very fun event....The Amazing Race Tonga!! It was soooooo fun!! We were in 9 teams of 2 and it was a two day event. My teammate 'Alani (Alan) and I comprised the only full Peace Corps team and then one other team was an Australian volunteer and a Peace Corps girl. All of the organizers were Australian and some of the other teams, and there was a Tongan team and a team of Japanese volunteers and a couple from New Zealand that I think run a business here. Anyways, we started at 10:00 with pre-race interviews - we all made up stories about our characters - 'Alani was a redneck truck driver and i was a spaced out hippie girl who fell asleep in his truck and didn't even know that we were in a race, i just kept making peace signs everywhere we went. One other team's story was that he was a priest and she was a nun and they had a baby together and she wore a t-shirt with a big A on it for the whole game, another group dressed up in traditional Tongan dress with fake gold teeth and pregnant bellies and called themselves The Fakapikopikos (lazies), etc. You get the idea.
Anyways.... here was our race course...
1. We started at the Australian High Commission and had to bike over to the market by the wharf and look for a clue box hidden in one of the stalls (keep in mind the market was happened at this time so it was quite crowded), the clue told us to buy a coconut and bring it back to race central (the Aussie High Com).
2. Once there we had to pick a teammate to do the next task. We picked 'Alani - he had to break open the coconut and then eat the whole thing and then we got the next clue.
3. The next clue told us to bike to Teufava Stadium where we had to find the clue box. The clue was to choose to either each kick two field goals or to each catch 3 crickets balls hit by Todd (one of the organizers). Since 'Alani wasn't wearing shoes we decided to go with the cricket balls, and yes - i caught 3 in a row!! Yippee!!
4. The clue we got after that was written in difficult Tonga so we had to get someone to translate. It also contained a picture. Apparently it told us to go find the place where the sign is and take our picture there and then go to some guy's house (Polokavia Faka-something or whatever) in Tofoa. Well, we went searching around the city for about half an hour before someone could tell us where the sign was because of course the one clue written in Tongan pointed us to a school where hardly any Tongans attend that is maybe 2 miles out of the city. It is the Bahai School where luckily one of my friends work because otherwise the only directions we got were "go that way and turn left after a while - oiaue!!). Once we got there (now dropped down from 1st place to 4th place) we took our picture and were about to leave when 'Alani decided to ask at the falekoloa (little store) if they knew the guy who's house we were supposed to find. At the store the man told us the house belonged to the brother of the security guard at the Bahai school so we went back to the Bahai school to find directions. The brother, Sione, was missing but some teachers thought they knew the way but then just kept telling us it was too hard to give directions and then wanting to chat with us about America!! I don't know why it was so hard because when they eventually drew the map it was just take the back road to Tofoa and turn right across from the mango tree at the third dirt road after the primary school. Those are actually really good and really simple tongan directions. Most are far more confusing than that since most roads don't have names.
5. Once we got to the house we had to show them our picture from the Bahai school and they gave us a clue that pointed us back to the Aussie High Commission
6. At the High Com, the person who didn't eat the coconut (me) had to either drinks 2 liters of cordial or eat 8 passion fruit. I went for the passion fruit and ate them quite quickly if i do say so myself. Then we got a clue to search the High Com grounds for a number to determine the order of our send-off.
7. Once everyone arrived (some over an hour after us, the Bahai school threw everyone off), they blindfolded us one team at a team and drove us in circles and eventually dropped us off at a kava house where we had to sit in the kava circle and drink a full cup of kava and then we were given a soduko puzzle to complete and then find our way back to the High Com. Luckily 'Alani love soduko so he finished it in record time with me piping in with maybe 3 numbers, we ran back to the High Com.
8. At the High Com they showed us a picture of a statue of three dolphins and we had to go find it - again, luckily 'Alani has been here for almost 2 years now so he knew the statue - over by the wharf and we biked over.
9. There we were given the choice of three tasks:
Fast Forward - if you completed this task you got to skip all tasks and go to the end, however it was really a fake task and directed people to the Robert Lewis Stevenson museum in Samoa to go get the purple monkey statue. It didn't say it was in Samoa though, it just gave a town name. The funniest part though was that the only team who decided to go for that one was the Tongan team and they really should have known better!
Our other choices were to swim from one pier to the other and run back for your teammate or to bike to the NZ High Com and bike back for your teammate. I was willing to swim but 'Alani is super speedy on the bike and was anxious to go so i sent him off and he went flying out there and flying back.
10. Then we had to do a photo scavenger hunt throughout the city, taking pictures of about 20 different things such as a live pig, a virgin mary statue, a teammate shaking hands with a military officer, a teammate giving a child a piggy-back ride, a peanut seller giving one of your teammates peanuts, a bougainvillea flower, the Bahai National Office (one of the organizers is Bahai), a picture of us in Friend's Cafe, a "Pass the Palm, Please" advertisement, etc.
11. Once the photos were done we had to bring them to the High Com for approval where we were then given a bunch of letters and told to make 2 words in order to figure out where to go next. This took forever but eventually it spelled out "Pointy Pescine" which we figured out meant the Billfish (the local pub) and so we raced over there on our bikes and 'Alani and I won the first day!!
The second day we all took the boat over to Pangaimotu, a "resort-ish" palongi island nearby so that we could continue playing without being too scandolous in Tonga where you are not supposed to play games or do any physical activity on a Sunday. These were the Sunday events:
1. Table tennis - we had to pick a person first and so I decided to give it a try before i knew the task. Then i was doing terribly because i've never really played table tennis before so they let us switch it up. Everyone is always talking about how good 'Alani is at table tennis, but he wasn't doing that well so then we switched table sides and he immediately won. There was a lot of wind that day and i guess i had picked the bad side, so maybe my table tennis skills aren't so terrible - i did almost win the firrst match.
2. Darts - we had to score an exact total of 57 points with 3 darts to move on. Eventually they let us aim for the first P in championship and if you got that it counted for 57 points. I got it on my second try - yippee! even i was amazed!!
3. Scavenger Hunt around the island - we had to find 6 parts of a picture hidden around the island. This killed us because we went the opposite way from most people and the second to last clue was virtually impossible and we spent ovr 30 minutes looking for it but apparently some other people went to complain so after we gave up and moved on they put up a big arrow pointing everyone else to it so it only took like a minute when we went back to go get it. grr. one clue was buried in the sand, the hard one was inside a tree trunk, one was hidden in this nasty swamp area, another in the mangrove trees, etc.
4. Once we got all the pictures we brought them back to race central and completed the picture and then had to do the following:
- the limbo
- write a song that had to rhyme and be at least 60 seconds long and contain the following words: Kylie, orange, purple, faka'ofo'ofa, fakapikopiko, hippopatumus, puaka, etc - you get the idea & then perform the song and dance for the judges
- swim out to the ship wreck and climb at least halfway up and jump off (this was a little scary but i did it! several people cut up their feet on it thoug)
- swing on the rope swing out to water
- swim out to the floating dock, climb on, dive off, and swim back
- complete a coconut shot put event and the coconut had to land inside a circle that we couldn't even see!- hop around the volleyball courts
- run to the end of the pier and dive off
- swim in to the finish!!
In the end 'Alani and I got fourth but we like to think we won the more important day!! No matter what it was soooo much fun and I am definately doing it or helping set it up if they do it again!! It was especially interesting for me since i've never seen the amazing race and haven't truly been on a bike since i was about 14 years old so i had no idea what was going on and was not very used to being on a bike so much. I bought my bike friday and then just went for it. woo-hoo!!
If anyone would like a copy of the DVD that they are making of the event, please let me know. Also, if i can ever find my cord to download pictures with, I will try to post some of the event. And if you want to play your own personal amazing race game when you come to visit i can totally make that happen!
Cheers!-carly
posted by Carly @ 8:44 PM
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