First Church Missions

A Mission to Tonga includes Scuba Diving and Blowholes

My wife and I traveled the Kingdom of Tonga for a two-week mission at a public school run by the Methodist church. The First United Methodist Church in Wenatchee selected the mission because the school needed help upgrading their classrooms and teachers’ facilities. The school has 700 students and a new principal who wants to upgrade teaching facilities to motivate her teachers.

Tonga is tiny Kingdom south of Fiji and approximately 300 miles north of New Zealand. It has 170 islands on land mass is 1/7^th the size of Douglas County. Islands surface and submerge as tectonic plates crash into each other. Our mission was on Tongatapu, a 100-square-mile island that rises to a maximum of 50 feet above the water.

A beloved royalty oversees a Constitutional Monarchy by appointing the Cabinet, Prime Minister, and most of Parliament. Royalty allowed property rights such as home and car ownership. Tourism and money from relatives abroad are the main economic commerce. Schools and medical service are free and have been modernized.

Seventy thousand people squeeze into Tongatapu Island. The moderate, moist climate has produced abundant marine life, vegetables, and farm animals to grow their populations. When they overgrow the islands, they have followed trade winds east to populate more islands, and now Tongans export labor to New Zealand, Australia, and the United States.

Our team consisted of 11 other members including James Jantzen M.D. and his wife Amy, a nurse, both from Wenatchee. While Jim and Amy gave medical services to students, staff, and family members, work crews replaced corrugated roofing, built shelves for books, sanded and stained furniture, and remodeled two offices. We worked hard but had time to explore the island on a couple of Saturdays. The two most unique tourist attractions for me were blowholes and snorkeling.

Blow Holes

For millions of years waves pounded the reefs until blowholes allowed spray to surge twenty feet into the air, almost halfway up the cliffs below us. As far as we could see along that rugged coast, we saw blowholes shoot spray into the air. We watched dramatic majesty undisturbed by any development.

To get to the edge of the cliffs we walked across a spongy wide-bladed grass that protected the unseen soil beneath its cover. It reminded me of the farmers in the movie “Biomimicry” who harvest natural buffalo grasses, a grass that conserved the soil and fed buffalo for centuries. After farm settlers replaced it in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the ecological disaster of the dust bowl followed. These farmers are feeding the grasses to cattle and buffalo. I wondered if investors who would plop down a resort on this spectacular outcropping would replace the natural grasses.

Later on a beach at water level we watched incoming waves slam into outgoing waves, pushing peaks high in the air until white spray rolled down. The peaks of the waves looked like snow-covered mountain ranges. It was a liquid demonstration of tectonic plates colliding to form titanic mountain ranges.

While I enjoyed the pounding power of the waves a nearby Tongan roamed on top of the reef where the water calmed down into pools of rippled glass. He flicked a three-pronged spear into the water to catch a string of fish for dinner as Tongans have done for over two thousand years. We stayed there until the sun dropped below tree lines to the west.

Snorkeling

Reefs around Tongan island provide snorkeling in clear and calm waters. Tongan lobsters, shellfish, and fresh tropical fish are available year round and more abundant than land based animals. James Jantzen, M.D., from Wenatchee, an experienced snorkeler and scuba diver and I, a novice, planned to snorkel on one free Saturday.

Our boat was scheduled to pick us up at 8:30 am, but since time is a relaxed concept on Tonga, I wandered over to the fish market. Lobster, shrimp, octopus, cod, clams, crab, and a number of unlabeled varieties were for sale, many from Styrofoam ice chests. When we arrived at our destination, we saw over twenty people with those ice chests wading in the waterways between the islands. They would pluck seafood from the sea or in fishing nets set up offshore and toss their catch in their floating treasure chests.

Soft and hard corals provide life for a wide variety of fish, anemones, starfish, Snorkeling on offshore islands reachable by boat and plane offer perfect white sand beaches, limestone caves with open entrances to lagoons, and in season, cavorting with Humpback, Sperm, and Pilot whales and dolphins. We visited a lagoon on the main island but did not have time to snorkel. Those trips would be worth a return visit.

Our boat ride was twenty minutes to Pangaimotu Island where a resort had a boat and two drivers to take us snorkeling. We walked around the entire island in 45 minutes. Off shore from the beach, the resort sunk the bow of an iron shipping vessel and the entire wood hull and cabin of a fishing boat. I swam over and through the cabin of the shipping boat, disturbing a school of small black and white fish among others. They were used to visitors. I grabbed the wheel but could not make any headway.

I headed out to the larger hull and floated in and out with a variety of small deep blue fish and larger single tropical fish. The only surprise I had was when Jim tapped me on the shoulder from behind. He pointed out cucumber anemones on the bottom.

We took the boat ride to a coral reef ten minutes away from the resort. The water was disturbed by the overcast winter season and visibility was about fifty feet, both lower than normal conditions particularly at the outlying islands.

Still the coral was twenty feet at the deepest and frequently within 10 feet. The coral soared upward, or spread out like a giant pancake, or waved at me from soft coral outcroppings. Blue, black and white, yellow, and other colors of fish ranging in size from a raffle ticket to an Applesox banner surrounded us.

The water was choppy enough that I swallowed saltwater and cold enough that I was pleased to see Jim climbing in after 20-25 minutes. We warmed up quickly and got back in the sun. Jantzen was pleased with the variety of coral we saw compared to the snorkeling and scuba diving he has done.

Tongans and the islands were pleasant and time to visit again would include a snorkeling and scuba diving on outlying islands. And I like the feeling of helping out their school system and working in a little bit of leisure for our good life.

The Gift Given Robin Gates in Thailand

    Robin Gates is one of the Wenatchee women stranded in Bangkok, Thailand when protestors closed the airport. Willing to help, she was handed Cho, an incredible gift.
    Sunday, November 30 she felt safe walking alone to an English Protestant worship service at nearby Christ Church. At coffee hour she heard about volunteers who were was bussed every Tuesday to the campus of the Pakkred Orphanage run by the Christian Care Foundation of Thailand. The church had supplied equipment for abandoned children with cerebral palsy, built a facility for their perceptual-motor development and established playgrounds.
    Robin wrote, “I didn’t know what they did but my motto is just show up.”
    Even though she has a 12-year-old grandson with handicaps, she wrote, “I was stunned to see a very large bare room full of approximately 50 children lying on pallets on the floor, side by side, on their backs, none of them with language or motor skills. The room was neat and clean with aides seeing to the children. One day a week, 14 of the children would be worked with and loved. The regular volunteers had the same child each week.
    “I was given Cho. I held a twelve-year-old boy, about 40 pounds, in my arms. His legs and arms dangled. His head was flat and misshapen, as was each child’s from lying on their backs all the time. He smiled at me and his big brown eyes shone. He was so happy to be held and to be going to the activity room.
    “We took them in strollers for a ride to the activity building. There we stretched their arms and legs on bean bags and played with a variety of objects to stimulate their muscles. Then we put them in special chairs each with a little table. Cho and I played with soft blocks that he somehow got to fall on the floor and laughed because I had to pick them up. At lunch a volunteer gave me orange sections to feed him, which were really extra. He loved them. At the end we played games with other boys in their strollers. Like all boys they loved racing.
    “We shared our lives that day, Cho and I, with love and touch, smiles and eye contact. This young, bright Thai boy who will never walk, or talk, or feed himself, or leave his matt on the floor, gave me the greatest gift of pure joy. My prayer is that another volunteer will come to take him out every Tuesday. I cannot tell this story without tears.”
    I could not write this without tears.
    My wife Karen visited an orphanage in Guatemala. Afterward she said it was a gift and I should have gone. Now I get it.
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