I was first introduced to Civitas through my middle school gifted program. My teacher had us participate in the Civitas Model United Nations program, which I found both stimulating and engaging. Since my mother is from the island nation The Kingdom of Tonga, I opted to represent Tonga in the Model U.N. program. This would be a trend that continued as I sustained my participation in the Model U.N. program throughout my high school career.

One of the early resolutions I drafted was focused on providing clean water sources to under-resourced communities throughout the islands. The plan of action was to bring over LifeStraws, a water purification and filtration device that can provide an individual user with clean drinking water for approximately five years. Doing research and drafting this resolution opened up my juvenile mind to real issues that citizens face in Tonga, and for the first time ever, as a thirteen year old, I began to think about plausible solutions.

Fast forward 9 years. I graduated from the University of Missouri – Columbia with a degree in International Studies with an emphasis in Peace Studies and a minor in Leadership and Public Service. Following my May 2018 graduation, I went off to Tonga in August to serve as an English Literacy Facilitator with the United States Peace Corps. It was decided by the Peace Corps that I would serve on the outer island of ‘Eua in the most remote and under-resourced village on the island. They hadn’t sent a Peace Corps Volunteer to this village in over 10 years.

My primary assignment was working at the village’s government primary school, G.P.S. Houma. There were only 3 staff at the whole school, with a student body of approximately 47 students. Each staff person was a teacher for one of the composite classes (grades 1 and 2, grades 3 and 4, grades 5 and 6), and the grade 1 and 2 teacher also doubled as the school principal. My chief role within the school was to teach English to grades 3-6.

While working at the primary school I quickly noticed that the principal was calling half-days most days of the week. When I inquired with her why this was the case, she said it was because there was no drinking water for the children on the school compound, and that the only water available was reserved for the use of teachers and their families living on the school grounds. Given this information, I constructed a grant proposal to install rainwater tanks on the school compound. My grant proposal received many rejections from various organizations. Eventually, I was able to pitch the idea to a Rotary Club in the United States and obtain funding for the purchase and installation of rainwater tanks over two fiscal years. 2020 is the second fiscal year, and as of September the Rotary Club has already initiated the second installation of rainwater tanks in the village.

Participating in Model U.N. and other enrichment activities with Civitas has greatly influenced how I have showed up in the world in my adult life. Had I not begun thinking about global issues at age 13, I may not have completed my first global aid project by age 23. I strongly believe that having conversations with young people about the impact they can have on the world will encourage them to become active global citizens.

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Togo is not Tonga. I had not thought about either of those tiny nations until, literally, yesterday, when I wrote a post about a Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga. I didn’t know where these countries were, and I’m not sure I knew which was which, or even if one or both of them was a mythical, invented, Wakanda-esque place that occurs only in literature, comic books, movies or bedtime stories. I only became lightly acquainted with Tonga because of my personal connection to that Peace Corps volunteer, and I wondered, as I wrote that post, what other places I was missing out on because I had no perceived connection to them. I find myself embarrassed by my ignorance and ethnocentrism. So today, I’m calling my own bluff and looking into Togo, simply because it sounds a little like Tonga, and because I need to be more curious. Here are some things I’ve learned and impressions I’ve formed — not claiming to be comprehensive:

Basics: Togo’s capital city is Lome. It’s one of the smallest countries in Africa, covering just 57,000 square miles, making it about the size of Georgia. It has a population of about 7.6 million. [That may not sound very small, but remember how big Africa is by comparison: 11.74 million square miles.]

The history of Togo is a familiar, sad story of colonization and exploitation by European powers. Starting in the 1500s, and for the following 200 years, the area was a major trading center for Europeans in search of slaves, earning Togo and the surrounding region the name, “The Slave Coast.”

Germany established “Togoland” as a colony in 1884, toward the end of the period of European colonization in Africa generally known as the “Scramble for Africa,” according to Wikepedia. 

More than once, what is now Togo was divvied up and passed around, without permission. In World War I, both Great Britain and France invaded, to vanquish the Germans. They “got” Togoland as reparations from Germany at the end of the war. Later, when they couldn’t agree on joint rule, they split Togoland between themselves. After World War II, citizens of the British sector voted to become part of Ghana. Citizens on the French side opted to become an independent republic of France, and gained independence, as Togo, in 1961.

Unfortunately, Togo’s more recent history is an ugly saga of democracy denied—the kind of story that adds credence to the unfortunate stereotype of corrupt, despotic African leaders. Togo’s first elected leader ran a dictatorship disguised as a democracy—and retained power for 38 years, making him the longest ruling dictator in modern Africa. When he died suddenly, in 2005, the Togolese military installed his son as the head of government. The son was re-elected in 2010 and 2015, in elections that were widely regarded as rigged, sparking violent demonstrations that caused hundreds of deaths and causing as many as 40,000 Togolese citizens to flee to neighboring countries. A legislative election in January 2018 sparked more protests, as 14 opposition parties boycotted the vote. The country’s struggle to democratize has resulted in on-again-off-again sanctions from the European Union and denunciations from human rights organizations.

But it’s not all bad in Togo. Its citizens have a relatively decent standard of living, thanks mostly to the country’s valuable phosphate deposits. Togo is the world’s fifth largest exporter of phosphates, which are used in a huge range of everyday products, such as pharmaceuticals, personal care products, industrial and institutional cleaners.

Also, a nascent entrepreneurial spirit has emerged around the Lome port—one of the largest in Western Africa—where 500,000 tons of mostly European e-waste arrive every year. Local innovators scrounge the piles of dead computers, printers and tvs for parts and precious metals, sometimes MacGyver-ing them into working equipment for resale. It’s ironic, of course, that the same countries that pillaged Togo for centuries are once again exploiting it—this time as a dumping ground for electronics.

The latest news headlines from Togo point to an improving economic picture, sparked by improvements to Lome port. In fact, Lome now hosts West Africa’s leading container port, snatching the position from Lagos ports in Nigeria in the last quarter of 2018. On the flip side, other recent events have echoes to Togo’s past, when slave ships used Lome as a hub. In early March 2019, pirates—whose nationality has yet to be determined—seized a container ship near the port and kidnapped three Romanian sailors.

I wish there was a positive ending to this story. But there’s not. Every year, the BBC conducts a “Happiness Survey,” ranking countries “based on data from the Gallup World Poll and taking into account variables such as the real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, corruption levels and social freedoms.” In 2015, the study ranked Togo as the saddest nation in the world.

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Where’s Tonga? That’s a question I had never before asked, until a young woman I know joined the Peace Corps, was assigned to the Kingdom of Tonga, and sent home desperate requests for basic school supplies for the children she is charged with teaching.

“I often have kids showing up to class or private tutoring without a writing utensil. Anything arts and crafts related is non-existent,” she wrote in an email soon after arriving in her assigned village. “There are no flashcards available on my island, but I think those would be helpful. Also, a world map!…The closest thing I’ve seen at my school is a torn-up globe.”

“My school has had half days for the past three days because there is no water (without tapping into the rainwater tanks of the teachers who live on the school campus. The teachers and their families use the rain water for cooking, bathing, etc., because our water supply is completely reliant on solar energy and the rainwater tanks),” she wrote in another email. “I find it difficult [though important] to explain to people in my village that there are large conflicts occurring in the international sphere, as well as unprecedented technological advancements, when the local villagers here are still concerned about finding a regular water supply.”

I now know that the U.S. Postal Services charges $123 to ship a 20-lb. box—filled with pencils, crayons, markers, a ream of office paper, pads of construction paper, a [we hope] two-year supply of pencil sharpeners, plus balloons and balls from St. Louis to Nuku’alofa, the capital city of Tonga. [As compared to more than $400 to send the same package by FedEx or UPS.] I do not know how long it will take that package to get to its destination—one of the 169 islands that make up the archipelago that, collectively, constitutes the Kingdom of Tonga.

One thing I also don’t know is how that package will actually get into the hands of our Peace Corps volunteer. The only address we have is her name, a post-office box number, and the address, “Nuku’alofa, Tonga.” She’s working on a different island, living in a solar-powered hut. Is Tonga so small that everyone knows where the Peace Corps volunteer is, without a specific address? We’ll probably get an email thank-you note when it arrives, but with the communications issues that plague Tonga [see below], who knows when?

My new-found interest in Tonga has also led me to learn that this tiny-dot[s]-on-the-map nation of 90,000 people is imperiled by the rising waters of climate change. Some Tongans have already become climate refugees, relocating from some of the most minuscule islands in the archipelago to others that are only slightly less tiny—but still endangered. [Tonga’s northernmost island — Niuafo’ou — covers an area of just 5.8 square miles.]

Tonga, I have learned, has a very weak economy, based to a large extent on remittances from expatriates, and on foreign aid. Agriculture is mainly at subsistence level, and people fish using  spears. Tourism? It’s almost non-existent on the main island of Tongatapu, which is home to 70,000 of Tonga’s residents, and where most land is owned by the King and the nobility (33 families), says a news report from BBC.

In addition, I now know that Tonga relies on a 500-mile-long undersea communications cable for its contact to the world beyond its sandy borders. It runs from Tonga to Fiji. That lone link broke late in January 2019 [possibly severed by a ship’s anchor], cutting Tonga off completely for a week.

Reuters reports that “the outage knocked out overseas phone calls, hampered transfers, airline bookings, university enrollments, as well as Facebook and internet connections to family and friends.”  While waiting for a repair ship to arrive, “…officials hastily put up a satellite dish to provide “limited and slow backup connectivity, prompting hundreds of people to line up outside a government telecom office, where the signal is most reliable.”

I’ve also learned that the cable is owned by a private company—a fact that makes me think about the perils, everywhere, of privatizing essential services.

I also know that, given evidence of kids in need, other kids will rise to the occasion—although this is not new information, if you hang around some of the teenagers who attend Civitas programs here in St. Louis — or if you just watch the news about teenagers fighting for climate-change and gun-control legislation. More specifically, I know about this particular instance of kid-to-kid caring because a group of St. Louis-area high school students has adopted that tiny Tonga village school as part of an endeavor called Magnify, which uses social-media-like connections to enlarge the reach of civic-engagement projects.

Only a few months ago, Tonga was invisible to me, and now I know a few things about it—my new, but limited, scope of understanding sparked by a personal connection.Isn’t that how it often works? It’s not a “problem” until it’s our problem. But what I know now makes me wonder: How many other things don’t I know because, in the absence of a perceived personal link, I just haven’t bothered to find out yet?

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