Random High School Essay
Draft of an essay I wrote at some point in high school
I was thumbing through an old flash drive looking at ancient files when I found this one called ‘Kingdom of Tonga Essay Draft’. As a grown-ass 32 year old, I don’t know if I want to make a habit of sharing my cringy teenage writings on the internet, but I thought this one was about an interesting event in my life, so here we go. Although I’m sure that I wrote this for a class and that would have affected how I presented the events, I also know that looking back, I really was kinda like this.
When I went on the original mission trip, I would have been an extremely devoted evangelical christian, but by the time of writing this essay two years later I would have been in a really weird transitional stage where I was becoming a closet atheist but keeping it a tight secret from my friends and family. I recall that I often put on a very strong outward face about religious experiences while hiding my atheism, so it’s hard to say how much of this was written for the essay, how much was hiding my atheism, and how much was the genuine emotion of a quixotic teen.
Memory is a weird thing, and maybe I’ve belabored this with too much context, but anyway, here’s the draft of the essay, complete with the original spelling errors… (though for the reader’s benefit I have removed the jarring double spaces that everyone seemed to use between sentences back then…you’re welcome.)
In the summer of my sophomore year in high school, my dad asked me if I would like to go on a mission trip to the Kingdom of Tonga. I had always wanted to see the world, and I figured that any place with the word kingdom in its name has to be interesting, so I agreed without hesitation. I had no idea what I was getting into.
If you had told me then that going to the Kingdom of Tonga would be the most difficult, amazing, and revealing experience of my teenage life, I would have thought you were crazy. You see, I wasn’t exactly a world traveler, but I had definately been my fair share of places. Having traveled to Germany, Latvia, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Costa Rica and almost every state in the U.S., I considered my self to be a pretty well-traveled 15 year old. However, going to Tonga would leave lasting effects on me; to go I would achieve a goal I had thought was unobtainable, I would learn to sacrifice my own time and desires for someone else, while there I would see things more beautiful than I could have ever imagined, I would learn to appreciate the little things in life, and and I would see how to be carelessly happy.
As with all of the mission trips I had been on, it was mutually understood that that I would have to pay my own way. Since I didn’t have a job this meant I would have to raise the money. Previously the most I had raised was $3, 000, during my eighth grade to go with People to People to Australia, and that experience had left me confident that I could raise any amount of money. That confidence was shattered when I realized that to go to Tonga I would have to raise the same sum, but this time I would have only three weeks instead of a year.
To make matters worse, I realized that even if I could raise the money, I would have to sacrifice three full weeks of my summer to do it. For three weeks, I would have to give up BMX and swimming and friends and all the other fun things a kid does during the summer so that I could exhaust myself raising money. Was helping people I didn’t know on an island that I couldn’t even find on a map really worth it? Looking back, I know it was, but then I wasn’t so sure.
Usually it is the mission trip itself that teaches a person, but here I was about to learn experience the magnitude of sacrificing your time and money for someone else’s benefit, and I still hadn’t even gone! An enormous amount of work went into raising the money; I sent hundreds of letters of introduction, knocked on the doors of hundreds of houses, made hand-written thank you cards for every single person that donated, and made enormously detailed spreadsheets tracking my every sale and rejection, and all that barely scratches the surface.
However, the logistics of raising the money was only half of the battle; the mental side was another thing entirely. As a rule, I hate selling things door to door, and I especially hate just asking for people’s money. When I’m lying in bed in the morning, there is just something about the knowledge that I’m going to spend the rest of the day in a suffocating hot polo shirt, ringing door bell after door bell only to find that out of every fifteen people only one will donate that makes me want to just lie back down and go to sleep. But during that summer, even when those thoughts flashed through my mind, when I though about all the fun stuff I could be doing instead, when I was faced by the fear that I would never be able to raise the money in the allotted time, something in me fought back. It was over this summer that I learned how to truly sacrifice, how to decide every morning that people I didn’t know on an island I couldn’t even find on a map really were worth it.
So every morning I got out of bed and beat down my doubts so I could do something I hated, and at the end of three weeks, against all odds, I had raised every penny that I needed. I had learned how to sacrifice my own time and desires for a worthwhile cause, and in doing so, I had done something that I could truly be proud of.
My most poignant experiences would come while I was actually in the Kingdom of Tonga, working with the natives on the small, isolated island of Hunga. Although it sounds like it should be in Africa, the Kingdom of Tonga is actually an island two hours by plane off the coast of Fiji. Other than having a real, functioning king, the people on the main islands of Tonga are fairly modern, with cars and TVs and cell phones and Wal-Marts. But, my church was not going to a main island, we were going to an island so small and isolated that it could only sustain one small village. The island was only seven square miles large, and it was a two-hour boat ride from anything that could even approximate civilization.
Even with modern airplanes and speedboats, just getting to the small island of Hunga was a chore. After more than twenty-four hours in the air on five different airplanes, we still hadn’t arrived. The tiny island of Hunga was literally in the geometric center of nowhere. Having slept on the planes, it wasn’t until the final two-hour boat ride that I finally got a chance to look at my surroundings. What I saw was amazing. The ocean was like a mix between the Caribbean and something out of Jurassic Park. The bottom was clearly visible seventy-five feet below through the crystal clear blue water, and fish and dolphins were everywhere. Looking around it seemed as though God had had a heyday tossing massive rocks into the ocean willy-nilly. Spires of stone twelve stories high jutted straight out of the water, filling in the gaps between massive islands comprised entirely of huge cliffs that rose up on every side. Riding upon the crystal waters, staring up at the towering cliffs, I couldn’t help but be amazed by what I was seeing.
Upon reaching Hunga, I found that the people were equally impressive. Before British colonization in the 1700’s, most Tongans had been warrior people, and the villagers on Hunga still looked the part. Although some were normally built, at least one fourth of the adults were HUGE. They were like sumo wrestlers, fat but incredibly muscular, with calves and biceps bigger than most peoples’ thighs. They were also incredibly strong. Teenagers that couldn’t have weighed more than 180 lbs flipped fifty pound supply crates we had brought onto each shoulder and then raced each other back up the slippery, one-hundred-yard-long hill to the village. Needless to say, I was more than a little intimidated by these hulking Hungans.
However, as the saying goes, you should never judge a book by its cover. The Hungans turned out to be some of the nicest people I have ever known. They were also some of the poorest. The average adult living on the island made less than $150 a year, and as such, they had very few worldly possessions. The only electricity on the island came from a generator we had brought to run the power tools and the only water from rain that the villagers collected in giant cisterns.
However, despite their incredible poverty and extreme lack of possessions, as I came to know them I was struck by how unrelentingly happy they were. They took pleasure in the simplest of things. Even the children, who went to school on the main island and were exposed to the outside world, were incredibly happy. They knew that kids in other countries had running water and electricity and Xboxes and televisions, yet they were completely satisfied with what they had.
When I left the island ten days later, I was amazed at what I had experienced. Coming into the trip I had thought that I was making all the sacrifices, but when I got to the island, I couldn’t help but notice that no matter how little they had, they were always ready to share. They invited us into their homes, gave us their homegrown food, their sparing water, and showed me the joy of living. Having been taught what it meant to give and to sacrifice, when I left the island I left the kids both pairs of my shoes, half my clothes, and what was hands down the best knife I had ever owned. Nevertheless, walking barefoot on the streets of Tonga’s main island, knifeless and wearing the same dirty shirt I had worn the entire ten days, I was the happiest I had ever been. I was actually sad when my dad flipped on the TV in the hotel room.
Now, two years later, I know that those weeks in Tonga were the most incredible weeks of my life. I still love my TV and cell phone and all the other trappings of a modern life, but every time I flip on a light switch or turn on the water, I remember the friends I made back in Tonga, and I can appreciate the things I have. I’m far more willing now to take pleasure in the little things of life, and to be happy just because. When I agreed to go on a mission trip to the Kingdom of Tonga, I may not have known what I was getting into, but I’m sure glad I did.
I had just gotten my first real camera before going on this mission trip, a point and shoot cannon. I won’t give too much commentary, but I’ve smattered this post with photos I took during the trip, including the cover photo.
children in Tonga, one of my favorite photos
the whole ocean around the island was scattered with these impossible chunks of stone
Boats were an essential part of life, both old and new.
Me with the kids of the island
sunset in Nuku’alofa