Lea'a Lina/Lina's Line

by Katrina Nellisa Twila Tuokoi/PNN Indigenous Scholar

My mother is a descendant of Tongan Chiefs, Fijian princesses, German-Irish businessmen and whalers, Portuguese sailors and British midwives and Anglo-Indian housewives. She was born in the capital city Vava’u, in the Kingdom of Tonga. The island which I consider my homeland is made up of lush greenery and wide sandy beaches.

My father was a teacher, his father was a teacher, his father was teacher [whose mother was pure Samoan from Apia], and his father started the first school in Haafeva which is another in Tonga.

My ancestry and my family have always played a significant role in my identity. I always identified myself as Tongan but never lost sight that my lineage is from all over the world. But my heart is Tongan because the values Tongans cherish are the ones I cherish too. A huge value is humility, which deals with a wealth of spiritual and Godly knowledge and values rather than material and physical worth. We didn’t always have a tola, which is our equivalent of a dollar. We’ve mainly relied on the barter system, which is like a fisherman trading a bag of fish for a bag of yams from a farmer. Now we deal with white European capitalism.

However, Tonga wasn’t always this way. In fact Tonga wasn’t always Tonga. Chiefs from as far as the Solomon Islands, New Zealand and Samoa sent warriors to defend the islands. However the Dutch in 1616 came and were followed by an onslaught of many European countries to settle, send missionaries, spread their gospel, form colonies and eventually destroy the culture.

Today we have the last Polynesian Kingdom in the world. On the other hand, we have the poorest country in the South Pacific but we have the strongest cultural indentification throughout the islands. I myself was raised in America as a McDonalds kid, and all I know of my ancestry is what I’ve read in books and my one visit to Tonga at the tender age of twenty. Now I write of the degradation of these islands that outside forces have pushed upon them. What I recall now which sums up the poverty of the islands is my aunt’s paycheck when she was a nurse of twenty five years for two hundred pa’anga for two weeks, which adds up to one hundred US Dollars which U.S. nurses get paid twenty times as much.

Her husband also has been working in the medical field for almost three decades as a Physician’s Assistant and he makes a little more than she does. Though they do not make the “big bucks” that the American doctors and nurses make, they live comfortably in a split-level two-story home with three bathrooms and seven bedrooms that are inhabited by their five children, two grandchildren and various extended family and visitors from overseas. The plantation that the house sits on is home to many little gardens where the family grows several groves of food such as taro, yams, bananas, plantains, which are just to name a few. Therefore, although this “little” family that is headed by parents who are professionals makes perhaps less than a tenth of what they would in the United States and subsist off of less than $US20,000 a year for a family of 10-15 people, they are not only surviving but they are thriving.

Thus far, makes poverty not only a global issue but also a matter of perspective.

Lea ‘a Lina/Lina’s Line leaves this question for all you readers out there – What is poor? In essence, how do you define poverty? What does being poor mean to you?