Latter Day Saints

Chickens in Tonga: How to outlast a lockdown

“A lot of people ran out of food,” said Sam Fonua, first counselor in the Nuku’alofa North Stake presidency.

I met Fonua in May 2019 when I covered President Russell M. Nelson’s trip to Tonga and wrote a story about how his stake was building 95 homes from felled coconut trees to replace ones destroyed by Hurricane Gita.

I recently called him to profile what life in the pandemic has been like in Tonga. It’s remarkably different from the American experience.