Written November 21, posted December 3, 2007

Back to School

It has been busy term (and year) finishing up school. Since our return from New Zealand, we have been prepping for classes and tests, conducting classes and tests and preparing to leave! I will see if I can catch you up on the past eight weeks:

Our friends who are year of service students have been jockeyed from house to house as various home-stay plans have crumbled. They have remained flexible and patient waiting for their own house to be built. At long last, after months of “discombobulation,” they finally moved into their own accommodations. They are happy to be settled in even though they will all be finishing their year of service soon. It is great to see such great youth ready to do anything, try anything and work through anything. I think, despite all the changes, and maybe because of them, they have had great experiences and have grown a lot.

Cliff has been frustrated but patient. He was supposed to have copies of the big Cambridge Exams before the end of Term 3 so that he could prepare the computers and his students for the exams they were to take in the beginning of Term 4. The exams were not forthcoming, until he begged, pleaded and finally pulled some strings to get the exams a few days before he had to administer them. They exams are difficult to administer and take. They include a written theory exam and two practical components on the computer. With a few Cliff-style miracles, he managed to prepare the computers, exams and his students in short order and submit the exams to England. With such a comedy of errors, we can only hope that the official office in England received them! He has since been grading, helping students finish projects and writing student reports. That doesn’t include getting the computers in shape for the next computer teacher and school year.

Meanwhile, Jennifer spent the rest of her vacation preparing packets of activities and worksheets for students to do independent studies for Term 4. It was a lot of work, but it is a good way to let students work at their own pace. Some students have been chomping at the bit all year. Now, they can go be as accelerated learners as they please. Others have been dragging behind. Now, they can go at a slower pace, get the help they need and practice working independently. This is a bit different. All year we have been stressing how to work in a group. Now, its time to see what we can do alone and not depend on others to bail us out. (Some students like this better than others.)

The Mormons have a huge presence here. I think I mentioned them before when I spoke of the help they gave us when Class 5 was practicing for their dance. Well, they have become such an important center of the worldwide missionary effort, that they built a huge temple here on Tongatapu Island, in a town called Liahona. I am not sure if it is a new building or just updated and renovated, but I do know that they put a huge amount of money and overseas expertise into the building. When they finished they had a huge dedication. This is the only time that non-Mormon, non-recommended people can enter the temple. It is meant to stay pure and only pure souls are allowed to enter. So, for a period of about two weeks, the Mormons offered tours and explanations in their new Temple. We were invited by our Mormon friend and fellow teacher, Ouite. She escorted us on the tour and filled in the gaps as we learned more about the Mormon faith. It was very interesting, though not necessarily a faith we would pursue. Nonetheless, it was fascinating to learn about the significance of the building, and various practices. The more we learn about world religions, the more we note the important, to us, similarities. If only all the faithful of all the world’s religions could follow the good and common precepts.

We were invited on the tour on a Friday after school, so we drove to Liahona directly after school. After the tour, we continued a bit further to explore a new beach. It think it was called Hingaveta. It was a bit hard to find because all the dirt tracks through the fields and palm trees to the shore look the same, especially from the main road. We drove as far as our little car could go on the bumpy road, then we walked another ¼ mile (past a pile of garbage) to coral bedrock covered with ground-hugging brush. The coral dropped off suddenly to a pool protected by an outer coral reef. This is very typical on this island. The whole southern side of the island has been uplifted so some places have a cliff. There is sometimes a beach and sometimes rocks, but there is almost always a coral reef that breaks the waves about 20-30 yards off shore. The reef creates a protected pool that is swim-able if the tide is high. When the tide is low, you can walk out on the sand-filled coral to the reef and sit in the pools atop the reef as the waves crash over them. It is an amazing site. And every southern beach is a bit different.

Hingaveta was fascinating because the coral cliff went right up to the protected pool. It dropped off about 10 feet down to a beautiful pool that would be great to swim in... if you could only get down to it! Low and behold, no matter how hard Jenny tried, she could not climb down the sharp coral. Or more to the point, if she jumped the last bit off the cliff, she could not climb back up with out getting cut up on the coral. So, we had to settle for admiring the beautiful scenery. There were crabs – tons of big crabs – scurrying in the nooks and crannies of the cliff. There were amazing blow holes where water squirted up from the holes of the coral reef. And there was a breathtaking sunset as we finally tore ourselves away from this natural work of art.

As we walked back over the coral to the dirt track and the car, we looked back over our shoulder. What did we see, but whale spouts! The whales squirted a few times then arched their backs above the surface. Then, they went on their way, feeding as they paralleled the shore. What a great day: a hard week back at school, an interesting tour in the Mormon temple, and a beautiful scene at the beach. We went home happy. When we got home, we put our bags down, and sat down, just long enough to look up and see a big black cloud cover the sky and rain started pouring down. This is the story of our lives here in Tonga. We have been most fortunate throughout our stay. It seems we are blessed day after day.