Help in the Garden.

Oh, how lucky we are to grow our own vegetables, and how lucky to have so much help. A local pig was kind enough to help us harvest our kumala (sweet potatoes) and asked only a small payment – the said kumala – for her efforts. She also thinned out the pumpkin leaves for us, which were getting totally out of hand and hiding all the pumpkins. Thanks, pig!
The family who own the gardening pig heard of her efforts and decided that her fee was a bit too high so they reimbursed us with a table load of food from their gardens.

This “reimbursement” is, in fact, a local custom known as a “sorry ceremony” and is used for all manner of smoothing the waters when a wrong has been done. It can be much more complex than this, of course, involving payment of slaughtered pigs and kava. In our case we didn’t feel that the lost kumala was that significant but the people of Nikaura felt it was important to repay the “debt”. Of course, we were most happy to accept the offered goodies (and if you check the number of bananas on the table, the $ amount is probably well into the 100s! Possibly enough to repay our mortgage!!!)