In this interview, you’ll hear from Walker Heard, a Peace Corps Environment volunteer in Tonga. Walker shares what daily life looks like, the work being done, and how service has shaped their personal and professional growth. You’ll learn about housing, cultural differences, project work, language learning, and what it’s like to live and work in a new country. This interview offers a real look into Peace Corps service and what future volunteers can expect.
Table of Contents
- Volunteer Experience and Motivation
- Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
- Surprises and Challenges
- Advice and Support
- Practical Tips and Language Learning
- Final Thoughts
Volunteer Experience and Motivation
1. What do you do as a Peace Corps Environment volunteer in Tonga?
The environmental volunteers in Tonga are typically partnered with local district governments. A typical district is about 10 villages with usually 200-1,000 people each. Each village has a Town Officer (the Tongan equivalent of a mayor), and each district is overseen by a District Officer. These local government officials often work part-time in addition to their main job, which is usually farming, and typically do not have any staff. Our roles are to assist the district and town officers of our district with their environmental projects.
Because each community has different needs and priorities, and because we typically have to work around the schedule of our counterparts’ main jobs, the day-to-day experience and workload of a volunteer can change a lot. Also, since most Town and District Officers are one-man (or woman) bands, we usually assist in all stages of a project from start to end. Volunteers in Tonga have worked on improving village water infrastructure, running environmental/science education programs, assisting with local gardens and agroforestry, planting mangroves to protect coastlines, promoting disaster preparation, facilitating recycling and waste management, etc.
2. Why did you decide to join the Peace Corps and serve in Tonga?
I actually applied to the general application, and I feel extremely lucky to be placed in such a wonderful country. I studied International Affairs in college and always felt happiest when I was learning about other places and cultures, so my goal was always to work somewhere in the diplomacy/international cooperation sphere.
My grandmother was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana, so it had always been in the back of my mind, but it didn’t really click until I talked to a recruiter in my junior year of college. Peace Corps’ mission of international exchange and helping others was everything I wanted to do in the first place, while the opportunities that being a Peace Corps volunteer could open up for me, both for grad school and with noncompetitive eligibility, would help me get closer to being able to do the same long-term. It was just too good to pass up!
Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
3. What is your housing like in Tonga?
Some volunteers in Tonga live in home-stays, and some live alone. I personally live alone in a beautiful little house with a very large yard. Almost every plant on the property serves some purpose. I have two mango trees, two taya trees (kind of like a lychee), a lime tree, and a bunch of traditional medicinal plants.
Right now, my nemeses are three giant breadfruit trees that are producing enough breadfruit to feed a medium-sized army, and enough fallen leaves to keep me raking almost constantly. Tongans put a lot of importance into appearance, both in personal dress and in an immaculate yard, and my house lacks time-saving creature comforts such as a dishwasher, a washing machine, or a leaf blower.
I enjoy the ability to take some time alone that living by myself affords me, but the tradeoff is that I spend much of that alone time doing chores
4. What moments or interactions stand out during your service?
The interactions that have stood out the most to me have been due to just how welcoming, connected, and supportive Tongan communities can be. So many people that I barely know have opened their houses to me, invited me to share their food, driven out of their way to drop me off at a place I was traveling to, or even just said hi to me whenever we were passing on the street.
One of my neighbors has been bringing me meals unprompted almost weekly because she says I need fattening up, and when I traveled back to the US for my sister’s wedding, the community surprised me with traditional Tongan wedding gifts for me to give to my sister from them.
While I think some of this kindness comes from the Tongan culture of hospitality and kindness to strangers, my experiences and the support I have received from my community are not very different from those of an everyday Tongan. For example, the high school and university tuition for students of my community are very commonly paid for by the whole community through fundraisers, and whenever a funeral happens, the whole community will attend to support the deceased and their family.
I come from the northeast, where the prevailing approach to community is “good fences make good neighbors,” so seeing just how much the community here supports not only each other, but also outsiders like myself, has been very, very moving.
Surprises and Challenges
5. What has surprised you most about living or working in Tonga?
I think the biggest surprise for me has been the pace of work in Tonga, which is often slow but steady. Most Tongans juggle multiple responsibilities, to their work, their families, and their communities, and the philosophy of work here seems to favor waiting for opportune times to complete a task, rather than the more American approach of sticking to a rigid schedule regardless of whether or not said schedule is convenient or opportune.
As a result, project scheduling and pace can be sporadic, slow, and unpredictable. When I started out, this often frustrated me, and many of the projects I had hoped to complete, seemed to have fizzled out. However now that I am two years in, I have not only adapted to be more comfortable with a slower pace, but many of those projects that I had assumed had died have now sprouted up again!
Looking back one of the things that has surprised me most is that it seems like the Tongan approach of waiting for the best time to complete a task, has actually resulted in about the same number of projects being completed in the long run that I would have expected from the American approach of doing things as soon as possible.
6. What challenges have you faced in your Environment work, and how did you respond?
Development Aid
Tonga receives some of the most developmental aid per capita of any country in the world, which is a product of its small population, outsized need, and strategic importance. While this is a benefit to Tonga and the Tongan people, one of the challenges that arises is that most of their experience with development has been through outside organizations and outside funding. As a result, many communities believe that the only way to solve some of their environmental problems is to apply for help from outside organizations.
This can be an issue as many of these applications are rejected, or if they are accepted, the solutions these outside organizations provide are often not sustainable or not well-suited to the contexts of the community. As a result, some of the biggest challenges of my service, and some of my biggest wins, have been working with the community to identify ways that the community can achieve its environmental goals itself, without relying on outside assistance.
Data Collection
I can’t say with full confidence that I have figured out the best way to respond to this challenge, and I can’t say that I have fully overcome it. One of the strategies that I have found to be very helpful has been gathering as much hard data about an issue as I can. If a problem is genuinely beyond a community’s scope to address, this data often gives the outside organizations a much better idea of how to appropriately tailor their solutions to the community. If there is a way the community can address it themselves, finding out more about the causes and impacts of the issue often makes it easier to identify ways to solve it locally.
Water shortage example
For example, pumped water shortages are a perennial problem in many of my communities. To solve this, most of the communities have applied to outside programs that are designed to address this issue by providing water pumps to communities, thereby increasing supply. Given that the need for more water is common throughout all of Tonga, the chances of a community’s application being accepted are fairly low, and communities often go for years with regular water shutoffs because of it.
At the beginning of my service, I initially focused on helping my communities with their applications to these outside orgs. After a long time of no success, I decided to conduct a water consumption survey on one of the hardest hit villages in my district in the hopes that the extra data would help better communicate the need to the donor org.
However, when I analyzed the results of the survey, the data showed that the main issue the town faced was not a lack of pumps but instead an abundance of undetected leaks in the pipes that were draining the water away faster than the village’s pump could pump it in.
After explaining that to the community, we have now started focusing on finding and fixing these leaks, which is a task that is both within the community’s wheelhouse and is something they can affordably fund themselves.
7. What secondary projects have you worked on during your service?
The secondary project that I have worked the most on has been with my village’s community savings plan. I am working with the plan’s administrators to develop computer-based bookkeeping methods, which have been faster and more accurate than the previous paper-based methods.
Advice and Support
8. What advice would you give to future Environment volunteers in Tonga?
For me, my biggest advice would be to slow down and focus on integration and building credibility with your community as much as you can before focusing on projects. This can often be tricky as communities are often eager for you to hit the ground running, but if you can pull it off, it’s going to help you be much more effective in the long run!
9. How did Peace Corps training prepare you for service?
The language and cultural classes and experiences I had in PST (Pre-Service Training) were invaluable in helping me integrate into my community. Since the environmental volunteers in Tonga primarily work directly with communities, rather than say a ministry or other organizations, I was very grateful for having those two months of training, especially the language lessons, to have that foundation to be able to build off of when integrating.
My only regret is that I did not take as much advantage of the post-PST training opportunities, like finding a language tutor in my community, to continue strengthening my language and integration abilities.
Practical Tips and Language Learning
10. What would you tell future volunteers to pack—or leave behind?
I wouldn’t recommend bringing anything to Tonga that you’d be heartbroken about if it got lost or broken. In the heat, humidity, and sea air here, so much of my stuff has molded, corroded, or rusted! This makes packing to go home a lot easier, but there are quite a few of my favorite things that have not survived my service that I wish I had left at home.
I would bring at least one all-black and one all-white outfit, as funerals and some community functions require certain color outfits.
I would also bring some foam earplugs. Between the dogs, roosters, and the all-night ragers at the LDS churches (I’m not kidding), Tonga can be really loud at night, especially when you’re starting out. Now I can sleep through everything, but during PST, earplugs saved my life.
11. How has language learning been for you in Tonga?
Before coming to Tonga, I’ve tried my hand at learning a fair few languages, and in my experience, there is at least one thing in each language that makes it awful to learn. In English, for example, it’s the spelling. I mean, there’s a reason I, as a native speaker, still can’t write this without the generous help of spellcheck. In German, it’s the grammar, and in Japanese, it’s the whole dang language. I used to think that it must be impossible for us humans to create a language that made sense and stuck to its own rules until I came across Tongan.
Liguistic heaven!
It’s such a wonderful language, I thought I’d died and gone to linguistic heaven! Its spelling is 100% phonetic, which makes it a breeze to write correctly. Its grammar is devoid of all the unnecessary fluff that other languages seem to have invented to make life harder for students. It has no verb conjugations, no tense conjugations, no articles, and no accusative, dative, genitive, or formal cases, just simple, understandable sentence structures that follow the same rules every time! Many of its words are constructions of other smaller words, which makes it relatively easy to build a vocabulary, and even its number system is intuitive – you mainly just say the number’s digits in the order they’re written. Eat your heart out, French!
The main problem with Tongan is that since it is spoken by so few people, there are very few resources out there to help you learn on your own. The resource I use the most is the Tongan-English Dictionary app by Jordan Gardner.
For learning the language, I would definitely not stress about it until you start PST. The Peace Corps LCFs (Language and Cultural Facilitators) here have been teaching Tongan to wide-eyed trainees for longer than I’ve been alive in some cases, and they do a really good job. Once you are at your site, you will have a strong enough foundation in Tongan, and English is widely spoken enough in Tonga, that you should be in a very strong position to communicate effectively.
Final Thoughts
12. What final advice or thoughts would you share with future volunteers?
I would really encourage you to treasure and make the most of your experience here in the Kingdom! Before you know it, you’ll blink, and you’ll be packing up to go home. Tonga is a really special and welcoming place, but as a volunteer, it can be easy to get bogged down in your work so that you don’t appreciate it.
A wise volunteer leader of mine told me that one of the best pieces of advice for working in Tonga is to never lose sight of the fact that you’re living on a beautiful tropical island paradise. ‘Ofa ‘atu!
Are you thinking about joining the Peace Corps? If you’re curious about service and ready for something new, apply today. Like Walker, you can live abroad, work with communities, and grow in ways you didn’t expect. Apply to the Peace Corps and take the next step.
The content of this post does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or Tonga Government.
