Today I my group of people were reading about ngatu.
Firstly we started reading the first small paragraph and it was talking about what the women do while making the ngatu. They all speak lea faka - Tonga (the Tongan language), And laugh a lot. Also they sing traditional songs as they put their hands into gooey and slimy white paste which is made from potato or cassava, flour and water.
The second paragraph was about to little girls Lita and Megan from New Zealand learning about the tongan cultural ngatu making. On the saturday in the school hall in Taita, with their grandmothers, mothers, cousins and siblings at a workshop making ngatu. The two cousins spend a whole day with their grandmothers and they had lots of fun.
The process of making ngatu is they chop down the mulberry tree after they chop the mulberry tree down the women are to peel off the bark with their teeth. After they've peeled the bark off they hang it in the sun to dry, when it finishes drying they soak it in water to soften it after it softens they use a wooden tool to beat the bark to make it thinner. When they finish beating the ngatu into nice wide and big pieces they leave it out to hang to dry in the sun.
Lastly they use brown dye and use the husk of the coconut as utensils. It takes an entire group of women to dye or paint the ngatu because it's gigantic. After they've made the epatterns they leave it out to dry in the sun one last time and the ngatu is finished.
I enjoyed reading about this story it taught many things about how to make ngatu and whats it's used for. The story was very interesting it also taught some of the tongan kids in our class what some of the words mean in the story in tongan.
