Thursday, June 21, 2012

22 June 2012

What a week I've had! It started out seemingly slow. Monday was good because we got to go to town and I called my family. This Thursday (yesterday) marked the HALFWAY POINT! I can't wait to be going home, but there is still so much to do here. On Tuesday the ward joined in an all day fast because Sunday is our ward conference. We fasted until 6 that evening; I don't think I've ever done that before. We were so starving and made egg salad sandwiches and ginger chicken. I got really frustrated with our host parents mostly because I was hungry, but also because we had to pay for the food and they didn't seem happy with it. Our relationship with them is getting more complicated.. I'll get into it more a little bit later.
Anyway, the fast went well besides that and we happily broke it. On Wednesday night there was supposed to be a Family History activity, but the computer was broken and almost no one showed up. It turned out that there was a practice for a hula dance that will be taking place next week for the Saineha alumni reunion. Our host mom encouraged us to join in, so now guess what? Victoria and I will be in two dances next Thursday, one of which is a hula. Needless to say, we are terrible, but I'm very excited to learn how to dance like the natives. Things like this are a lot easier for them, but I think I could be good with practice and instruction. The thing about Tongans, though, is that they aren't very good with instruction. You have to watch and observe in order to learn, rather than have the steps taught to you one by one. It's really odd and it makes things a lot harder to do. They also said that because we're palangi we don't need to do everything perfectly, so they aren't going to spend as much time with us working on the steps and hand motions. That annoyed me a little bit. But we'll still practice a lot in our free time and I'll film the dance so you all can see it.
Yesterday was Thursday. Victoria and I went to kindergarten in the morning and met some white people from America who came to help out. They were older, with kids and kept saying "Malo, Sisu (Thank you, Jesus)." They're here on a church thing I think. One guy was actually from Vallejo, California, which is like five minutes from where I live. We talked to them for a little bit, and they invited us to dinner, so hopefully we'll go there sometime and eat some lu sipi (my favorite dish). That afternoon Victoria and I got some rolls and popsicles and walked to a nearby cemetery with a great view to eat them. It was nice and humid, but cloudy. Things like that help me to appreciate being here because I am reminded of how beautiful the island and the people are. That night we went to a dance. Our host mom seems to be ashamed of how we look sometimes. We don't want to embarrass her, but she always wants to give us her clothes to wear (which happen to be 10 sizes too large) and she wants to do our hair. But I'm not always comfortable with her sense of style and its difficult to tell her so. Hopefully we'll find some way to meet her halfway. There's a retarded kid here who always asks either me and Victoria to dance, and after a while we just had to say no because he wouldn't stop asking us. And he'd keep asking even if we said no, and get really frustrated when we wouldn't stand up with him. Sometimes our host dad would dance with him. Ha.
We've been eating to much bread lately. Yesterday breakfast was a slice of bread, lunch was these small donut type of things, dinner was candy, and after the dance was more bread. This morning we woke up at 6 to go to another hula practice and got rolls to eat for breakfast afterwards. We're in town today for a rugby tournament that our host dad is in. It's really exciting because I've never even seen rugby before, and it's much rougher than I imagined. We spotted this guy who was really thickly built and had big crazy braided hair and so we called him "The Warrior." I finally got a picture with him and he picked me up! I was so pleasantly surprised. Mostly because it makes a good story, but also because I thought we would kill me if I tried to talk to him because of how tough he looked. Other than that, things are pretty bland because school is beginning its two week break, so we'll be finding other ways to spend our time.

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