| Samoa
|
click on map for more detailed version
|
| Samoa
|
click on map for more detailed version
 |
Talofa! |
|
Training
As per the usual Peace Corps schedule, I spent my first two months
living with the Tu'u'u family in the village of Si'umu, on the south
coast of the island of 'Upolu, learning the language and
customs. There were three other Peace Corps trainees in our village:
Brenda Koerner, John Healey, and Andrew Hughes. We had language
lessons for several hours every day with our Samoan teachers,
including Fagalele Lino (aka Funky), Suluga Lameta, Honolina Smith,
Leata Lima, Faleseu Pita, and others whose
names escape me at the moment. Silao Kasiano, director of training,
took care of us when we had any problems and also delivered our mail!
After class each day, we usually walked to the beach for a swim or
played cards in the fale (open-walled one-room structure) and then
went home to our respective families for evening prayers and
supper.
Food
Foods included rice, ta'amu (starchy root vegetable, usually
boiled), ramen noodles, palusami (greens in coconut cream), soup with
some kind of meat, fish fish fish, chicken, freshly baked bread,
crackers and butter, papaya, pineapple, bananas, avocados, supoesi and
suafa'i (sweet soups with papaya or banana, coconut cream, and
tapioca)... all cooked over an open fire or, on Sundays, baked in an
earth oven. To drink, there was boiled water, fruit juice, extremely
sweet locally bottled soda, Coke/Sprite/Fanta from the local shop,
sweet black tea, and koko Samoa, thick dark sludgy cocoa made from
scratch (i.e., from dried ground cocoa beans) bearing absolutely no
resemblance to Western-style hot chocolate, but still very tasty. The
most exotic things I ate were snails and raw sea urchins (straight out
of the water, bashed open on a rock); I decided not to try the bottled
sea-slug innards or the fried coral worms.
Church
Every week I went to church with my family, which
was something of an ordeal, as I'm Jewish and tend to think Sunday
mornings are meant for sleeping in and reading the newspaper. Instead,
I had to get up earlier than usual, put on a white dress, and ride
over dirt roads in the back of someone's pickup truck to sit in a hot
room for an hour or two, listening to a sermon in a language I barely
understood. The singing was lovely, though, and I did a lot of
thinking while sitting in the pews fanning myself with a
woven-palm-frond fan. The best parts: Driving to an evening service
one night around Christmas time, with little Christmas lights on all
the houses and stars overhead; going to choir practice with my sisters
and having all the older ladies try to set me up with the minister's
son (not so fun then, but a good story); and the children's pageant in
which all the adorable little kids wore fancy white clothes and
flowers and performed little songs and skits. And by the way, I can
say grace and recite the first few lines of the Lord's Prayer in
Samoan, which I just know will come in handy some day.
Weekends
Every Friday, all of us trainees were loaded into a bus and driven up
and over Cross-Island Road into Apia, where we stayed at a hotel in
town for a night, went out dancing, ate slightly more familiar
food, and generally decompressed for a little while. We read our email
and enjoyed the air-conditioning at the Peace Corps office; went
out for dancing, darts, drinks, and sashimi at Otto's, The Crystal,
and the RSA; ate fish and chips (mmm, french fries with mayo) at
Gourmet Seafood; bought stamps and aerogrammes at the post office;
changed money at the bank; bought soap and toilet paper and other such
necessities at Molesi's grocery store; and most importantly, exchanged
stories with each other and the older volunteers, who usually told us
something along the lines of "That happened to us too, and this is how
we coped with it." Best of all was the discussion of How To Respond To
Unwelcome Male Advances.
Model School
The last two weeks of training were spent in "model school", where we
could all practice our teaching skills before the school year
began. It was fun, though it's really hard to write lesson plans or
get enough sleep when you live in a house with nine other people and
very thin walls. I took a bunch of pictures of my students, who were
all incredibly photogenic and who loved posing for the camera. I'll
post them here when I get my hands on a scanner.
Real School
After training ended, I moved to Lalovaea, a "suburb" of the capital,
Apia, and started teaching high school; my schedule included Year 13
Computing, Year 12 Physics, and Year 7 General Science. I also taught
an introductory-level computing class for adults at the National University of Samoa. I was lucky: my
students were mostly well-behaved (though the younger kids tended to
throw things at each other and once started playing with matches in
class...) and they all wore nice blue uniforms instead of, say, the
blinding yellow-red combination of Samoa College. Samoan schools are
all run on the standardized-testing model of New Zealand and
Australian schools, so the poor kids have to take these nasty tests at
the end of every other year, in English, and if they don't pass they
usually leave school and go back to work on the plantation. It's a
terrible system (especially because it stifles any creativity on the
part of the teachers) and I hope the US stops this ridiculous trend
toward more testing.
Entertainment
In my spare time I rode my bike all over town, learned to cook
wonderful things with my friend Suzanna
Randall, climbed to the top of Mt. Silisili (the highest peak in Samoa, at 1857m, accessible by a poorly cut and very muddy trail through heavy jungle),
went running with the
local Hash House Harriers,
became a fish&chips connoisseur, hung out in the air-conditioned
lounge at the Peace Corps office with the other Volunteers, and read a
whole hell of a lot of books. Sometimes we'd go out dancing (usually
to the Crystal), have barbecues/baseball games with the Japanese
volunteers, or throw parties (involving much Vailima, the local beer, and
'ava, the local drug, which is now, much to my amusement, being
marketed in the US as an herbal supplement to help stressed-out
yuppies relax), or go watch really bad movies ("Escape from LA," "The
Arrival" starring Charlie Sheen) at the air-conditioned
movie theater which also sold tasty ice cream. Once in a while we'd
save up the money to take vacations; I went to American
Samoa a couple times and Sydney,
Australia (with my mom) over summer break.
I can't remember everyone's name. This is terribly embarrassing. But I'll write down what I know anyway, and then I'll go home and look it up in my notebooks and training handbooks and all that.
My fellow PCVs in Group 57: Laura Brown, Lora Kasselman, Brenda Koerner,
Sarah Owen, Deb Short, John Healey, Andrew Hughes, Meloni McDougal, John Nicholson,
Chip Kelley, Lori Lai, Dan and Elizabeth Knight, Dan Warco, Paula Randisi,
Mike Kolasinski, Jay Gebauer, Greg Lahr, Stefan Huh, and Barbara O'Meallie.
Others who weren't in my group: Suzanna Randall, Steve Williamson,
Kristina Dahlen, Jessica Hughes, Cassandra Gilbert, Sara Russell, Eric
Wilson, Sally Green, Deirdre Kiernan, Christine Anderson, Margaret
Moore, and the Niue PCVs: Rich St. Clair, Doug Sonnek, Rita Levy, and Amy.
Non-PCV friends: Gary Schwalger, H.P. Tamasese,
Mau Simanu, Junior Taua Fa'aso'o, Russell Burke, Andrew Steer, Thom
McDade, Krista and Holger Maier, Yozo Taneda, Satoshi Ishii, Mikio
Shimizu, James Atherton, Rino the restaurateur,
and our charming neighbor Brenda the Attorney General.
Here are a few photos to look at.
Various information and tourist sites:
There's plenty of advice in the guidebooks, but here are some random pieces of advice, as a former resident with a better view of island life than a tour book writer who spends two nights in Apia before dashing off to Fiji:
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Soifua |
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