In Which I Found Myself Toa-ing, and Serving Kava to 30 or so Men for 4 Hours, for the Cause of Girls’ Empowerment in Tonga

For the past 6 months I have been working on trying to have a Camp GLOW here in Ha’apai, and have slowly been losing my sanity and probably my pride, as I have been desperately begging any and everyone for money and cutting the budget for this project left and right. To supplement the amazingly generous donations from all you incredible readers, we realized we would have to do some local fundraising, as we should, given that it’s a program in Tonga to help Tongan girls. Immediately, we decided to run a BINGO fundraiser- BINGO is very big here, despite the Tongan alphabet not containing the letters “b” or “g”, especially among Catholics (some things really are universal!). But, scheduling conflicts and activities in the church kept pushing us back, and while we’re still going to do the fundraiser 2 days before the camp starts (!) we realized we would have to run another one in addition to asking businesses for donations.

Enter kava, the preeminent form of Tongan fundraising, an activity I have been actively avoiding participating in (remember me hiding in various places around the school during the class 6 exam last year to get out of kava?) since I was forced into doing it during our training and had a miserable experience. It’s not that I actively hate kava, it’s more that I in no way want to be taking part in it. Drinking kava is a men-only activity, except if a woman agrees to sit alone at the head of the circle and ladle out copious amounts of the appetizing water and be the brunt of flirtations and jokes, a position known as the toa. Now, and here’s where it gets pretty funny, a woman can only toa if she is not related to any of the men who will be there drinking kava. This being a small island society where absolutely everyone is related, it’s very difficult now to find someone to toa without having to ban half the kava group- part of the appeal of having a foreigner toa. All of you, I’m sure, are shocked as to why I haven’t been jumping up and down to take part in this.

But, as the cliché saying goes, desperate times call for desperate measures, which is how I found myself last Friday night downing a bottle of pretty good wine (especially for Tonga) with Juleigh, the volunteer I’m organizing this camp with, in the convent where she lives (yes, convent with nuns) finding out that while Tongans are late for absolutely everything, they somehow show up 30 minutes early when it’s kava with palangi toas. Why the wine you ask? Well, as organizer of the kalapu I would be required to stay for the entire time, from 8:30ish to 1:00am (a harder task than you may think, given that I’m used to being in bed by 10:30) and it was general consensus that a good wine buzz would be fairly essential to make the first few hours bearable.

The rules of the relationship between the kava circle and the toa are pretty simple: the woman serves the kava to the men, and the men, in turn, are supposed to amuse her and make sure she is having a good time. The man sitting to the left of the toa has the expressed responsibility of making sure she is happy, and in traditional Tongan culture, this is how a date happened: a girl would toa and the boy she was interested in would deliberately sit next to her on the left. The man to the left of the toa is required to stay as long as she does, and fill in any lapses in amusement form the group at large with conversation. This previously mentioned amusement can take the form of jokes, stories, (muscle flexing contests, in the instance of the circle I was in) and music.

When Juleigh and I arrived at the hall we found it already filled with men from various kava kalapus (kava groups/clubs). Most men in every community belong to a kava group. Some of them only drink kava on Sundays and special occasions, but most of them are ‘savings groups’ and meet to drink kava at least once a week on a week day. Since Tonga is a communal society and you’re required to give anything to anyone who asks, especially your family, it’s often difficult to save money (something we’re having a big session on at our camp: Budgeting and Savings!). The way the savings kava groups work is that each week/month/predetermined period of time, one man takes home all the money that has been contributed up until then; generally each man pays $5-10 to drink kava for the night. To get a large number of people to come to our event, we went around to every kava group on our island and asked them to come to our fundraiser, essentially by-passing a night of one of their members going home with their money. We would provide the kava, since we were hosting the event, and they would come and donate their group’s intake from the night. This is a big thing to ask for, but the turnout was amazing. Hoping out of the back of the truck we had hitch-hiked to the hall in, I was shocked to find myself staring at over 200 men from 8 different kava clubs, all of whom had come to our fundraiser.

I was seated in the Ha’apai High School kava circle, which somehow included men and youth from the village next to mine. There were about 30 men in my circle, all of whom were very happy I was there, and took great delight in teaching me (and listening to me butcher) elaborate and traditionally appropriate phrases to say in Tongan thanking the men for drinking kava and playing and singing for me. The best part about the evening, by far, was the music. Because men came in their clubs, there was a little bit of competition with the added need to thoroughly entertain and amuse the palangi toas (along with Juleigh and I, another volunteer and her friend from home who was visiting and a Japanese volunteer came and toa-ed!) and most of the groups came with a fair number of guitars and ukuleles. My group even brought a binder of music, and for this special occasion, deviated from the usual repertoire and played some amazing traditional songs. Because of these factors, the night was a continuous rotation of songs played by the different kava clubs, and it was beautiful and amazing. It still shocks me every time of group of men, most of whom work in the bush and come in their work clothes, collectively open their mouths and sing. It’s incredible. My group had two guitars, three ukuleles, and it was lovely and made the night far better than anticipated. Also, because so many different groups came there were quite a few priests and ministers and town officers and other well-respected men, and that gave the whole event an air of being important and special, and as a result none of the teasing or joking really degraded into inappropriateness.

As a fundraising effort, we did very well: all told we raised $650 pa’anga (Tongan dollars) after having paid $400 for all the kava that was drunk (yes, these men can drink kava) and $50 to rent the hall. What was even better though was the turn-out and support. It was really encouraging and it makes me very thankful to be in such a place where, when push comes to shove, the community will rally around a project to make it happen. And, while I’m not exactly rushing to toa again, it was a far better experience than I thought it would be, and having 200 men serenade you beautifully is not something one forgets.

So, the countdown is on. We have 8 days until the camp and need to raise $1000 pa’anga, which I really think we can do. Wish us luck, and I’ll be sure to post after Camp GLOW is over and tell you all about it!