It's been quite some years since I last heard from my Austrian friend in Tonga whom I first met in 2006 when I travelled the islands to recapture some of the joie de vivre of my younger days. Not so my friend who only came to the islands in 1995 at the ripe old age of thirty-nine, following a workplace accident which gave him a tiny pension to live on, but only island-style.
Of course, the islanders think all white men are rich, and so, of course, an island girl was keen to move in with him. A few months later, she announced that she was pregnant which turned out to be a false alarm, but by that time he had already done the right thing and married her.
Then came two more alarms which were no longer false, which meant that his tiny pension had to support a family of four. His small savings had already been claimed by his in-laws so that when I met him he had been reduced to the life of a pauper and lived, estranged from his wife and two kids, in the kind of native hut even the locals no longer live in. He made light of it with the rhetorical question "What else do I need?"
He'd fully adopted the islanders' approach to life, a life that is lived from day to day, secure in the knowledge that he has sufficient to keep body and soul together, that between the sea, the land and the small community around him he is well provided for and that, with no need to plan for the future, the passage of time has become inconsequential.
As he wrote to me in one of his last letters (loosely translated by me from German into English): "My 6 x 3.8m 'fale Tonga' is not waterproof but water-resistant and made entirely with local material using traditional methods: the floor is beach sand, the framework coconut palmtree trunks, walls and roof coconut palmtree fronds. The only concession to modernity is the use of 100 iron nails. The 'furniture' consists of a bed, a cupboard and two small tables, all made from old wooden boxes, and a small gas stove. Under the bed is a wooden box which contains my 'power station': a 12V-battery and a 500W inverter which feeds my 10W-12V Halogen light.
Outside, on the northside, is the all-important solar panel. Next to it is a small space to wash and dry my laundry and a few steps along my small workshop which contains tools and fishing gear. To the left is the toilet and outdoor shower. On the westside of the house, next to the entrance door, is my 'kitchen' as I normally cook outside (the gas stove is for rainy days or when it is too windy or to bake bread with)."
However, even he had to admit that "natürlich sehe ich auch Nachteile in einem 'natürlichen Haus' zu wohnen aber auch damit kann man leben." ("of course, there are disadvantages to living in a 'strawhut' but I can put up with them"). There, but for good wine, creamy Camembert, Pavarotti, private health insurance, and a million other things, go I.
Speaking of health and insurance, when it comes to medical services, Tonga is no better than every other third-world country, and my friend knew it. As he wrote, "Als ich 1995 in Tonga gelandet bin und erst nach drei Wochen das Vaiola Hospital gesehen habe dachte ich mir, 'Horst, krank werden darfst Du hier nicht, sonst ist's aus.' Daran hat sich nichts in meinem Hirn verändert - egal ob ich in Tongatapu oder eben auf Uiha Island lebe - ernsthaft krank = sterben. Aber das ist mir voll bewußt und damit habe ich auch kein Problem." (for a translation, click here)
Those were his words almost twenty years ago when he was still a healthy fifty years of age. He'd be approaching seventy now which may account for his silence. As he wrote then, "... seriously ill equals dying".
Not having heard from him, I'm left wondering whether his story is right out of Boy's Own or more like Somerset Maugham's "The Lotus Eater"
