Farewell Dinner: Part VI

At the ceremony, Phil gave me some exciting news. There was to be a formal farewell dinner for the naval officers and ranking members of the Pacific Partnership that evening at Ha’apai High with the Prime Minister of Tonga and other important ministry heads, and they had invited two Peace Corps to attend. Since Grant and Phil were in their second year, they received official invitations. However, Grant was still out on his island and wouldn’t be coming into Lifuka, so Phil passed on the invitation to me. The PR officer heard about this, and then invited Kate and Brett as well so that all the PC in Lifuka would be able to go together, so that evening we all headed up to the high school, unsure of what the evening would entail.

Initially, it was a bit awkward. The Prime Minister’s office had organized the whole event, and they intended it to be a very formal and official dinner. They had assigned seating and guest lists (we had to show our invitations at the door to be let in), and, as luck would have it, Phil, Brett, and Kate were all at one table, and I was at another. However, when taking into account decorum for the evening, they didn’t factor in the open “bar” that the navy took their own initiative in providing. True, it was just regional beer and wine, but sailors, even military ones, even commanding officers, can drink. The dinner itself was delicious, and the prime ministers office did a great job of combining local Tongan feast food (roast pig, root crop, raw fish) and Americanizing locally available foods (lobster bisque, lobster in butter sauce, bread (!), salads) and the high school provided dancing throughout the meal, which the boys doing traditional war dances and the girls doing some remarkably graceful tauo’lunga. I was seated next to the minister of cultural affairs, across from one of the civilian dentists I had met while translating at the hospital, and next to an officer who actually went to GW, a fact that grew more and more amusing as our wine glasses continued to be refilled. Throughout the meal groups of Tongans began to gather outside and look through the windows until, at the time we left, the crowd was at least 10 people deep around the whole building. Everyone was talking and mingling and having a good time until disaster struck: there was no more beer left. Some members of the US navy even crawled under the table that served as the bar and dug through the trash trying to find more to drink, but to no avail. That’s when we decided to move the party over to Mariner’s.

Somehow all the Peace Corps and a few soldiers got a ride in one of the buses the navy had brought for transport the two block to Mariner’s Café where the crowd was absurd. Soldiers were spilling out onto the street and everyone was drunk- I felt like I was back home! We all had a fun night talking with American, Australian, and New Zealander navies and the Japanese volunteers who live here, and various soldiers kept buying us drinks. Some Tongans even made a little dance club-ish area by setting up a hut of coconut leaves down by the wharf where a lot of Tongan youth joined the soldiers in drinking and dancing. To date, it’s still the only time we’ve really been “out on the town” so to speak, and it was great just having other Westerners around to talk and joke with.