Oh, the guy with the poofta haircut

After Fiji, we moved on to the nation of Tonga. Although it was a British-protected state for about 70 years, Tonga is the only island nation in the region to not have become a colony. Instead, it has been ruled by a constitutional monarchy since the 1800s. Tonga is not as developed as many of the other Pacific island nations. Most of its citizens are subsistence farmers and many rely on money sent from the half of its citizens who live abroad, mainly in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. 3

Sometimes in the ship community, we didn’t see our parents all that much. My dad was also travelling from time to time. One day someone asked me when my dad was coming back. Either I hadn’t been listening, I forgot, or I really didn’t know but I answered, “Is he gone?” Apparently, he was in Florida at the time.

Once again, in Tonga we delivered the relief supplies we had brought for the recent hurricane damage and focused on evangelism. The DTS that had started when we left California had ended and a new one had begun. Being in New Zealand, a lot of students and crew joined us from there. But there were still a lot of students from the United States.

Some of us kids started hanging out with some of the “cool” DTS students. One day, I was chillin’ with one of the young guys and he was asking who my father was. My father had pretty straight, difficult hair that he had brylcreemed or hairsprayed back most of his life. But our hairdresser friend on the ship suggested my dad get a perm. It was nice for him to have a change to something that didn’t need so much work. So at the time, my dad’s hair was a little more puffy than usual.

As I was explaining to this guy who my dad was, in a derisive way he said, 

“Oh, the guy with the poofta haircut”. 

I didn’t quite know what to say. I was kind of stunned. I loved my dad and was proud of him. I would never have said anything demeaning about him. But here was this guy who knew nothing about him, calling his haircut poofta.

Up until then, I had never really run into disrespect for parents. I’m guessing this guy didn’t have a good relationship with his own father. It actually gave me mixed feelings. On the one hand, I had been raised to respect those older than me but here was this cool guy who seemed hip in the ways of the world, talking smack about an elder. Once again, I had to question my choice of friends. I still hung out with him but from then on I looked at him in a different light.


3. “Tonga.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia Foundation, Inc.. last edited 12 July 2018, at 14:33 (UTC). Web. July 19, 2016. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonga>.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bit of A Wander

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines. From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights.  We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have a...
Read more

A Challenge

Image
That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...
Read more

Outer Banksious

Image
We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...
Read more