"Kataki Kole Mai..." ("Please, can I borrow...")

Standing at the kitchen counter as I boiled some water for a pot of tea, I looked at all of my neighbors’ children—on average about a dozen or so at any given time—playing in my home: a trio flopped on the couch using my laptop to watch Mulan for the fifth time that week; two girls, class one and two, sat on the floor divvying out my deck of Frozen-themed UNO playing cards, enraptured by the beautiful princesses, cheerful snowman and goofy reindeer pictured on the different sets of numbers; Sela, the wildest of the bunch, had scooped my jump rope from the shelf and was testing it out just inside the doorway; Mosikaka, a little bit older, somewhat more reserved, and much more dutiful, sat at my table helping herself to my school supplies to meticulously paste a worksheet with her assigned reading and comprehension questions from that day’s lesson into her English notebook; the light from my porch framed Sefita’s silhouette where he stood indiscriminately strumming my ukulele while watching his brother, Sione, ride up the path on my bicycle.

“Te u kole ‘eni he taimi te ke foki ki ‘Amelika,” Seifta said, turning to me, a smile splitting his face. “I get this when you go back to America.”

My things are not my own, I thought, shaking my head as I took in the frenzied scene around me. How did that happen?

I take it as a sign of where I’ve gotten in terms of my integration into my community. I have found that in Tonga, the more integrated you are—the more a part of the community, the better the relationships you have with the people living around you—the less you tend to draw boundaries between what is yours and what is theirs.

That goes for just about everything you once thought was yours alone, whether that be material possessions, your talents, your time or even your personal space and privacy.

According to the Tongan Dictionary the Tongan word “kole” means “to make a request, to ask (for)…or to borrow.”

We do that back home, right? People ask for things, people make requests, people borrow things…

…sometimes, right?

A year living in Tonga has taught me that kole is not so much a simple verb, as its definition would suggest, as it is a very intricate and, at times, confusing way of life.

In some cases, it can be a bad thing. Like anywhere in the world, people can cross a line. They can ask for too much. They can ask far too often.

But, in so many ways, it is a good thing. It’s a way of sharing your life with your neighbors; of learning to be comfortable depending on each other; of openly giving and receiving help. It reminds you maybe of why and how communities developed in the first place.

Everything that is theirs becomes yours and everything that was just yours becomes, at least partially, theirs.

I asked some of the volunteers and staff from Peace Corps Tonga to define what kole means to them, to share some of their best stories about how it has affected them in their communities, and to explain their opinions on the kole culture in Tonga. Their responses are compiled in the following video:

"Kole" Culture: Kingdom of Tonga