More nostalgia.......

In deference to the older girls I think it only fare that I share yet more nostalgia with you…and so I turn to Samoa…where they spent some of their formative years…

Miss Independent was not quite 4 when we arrived and Miss Nearly Independent nearly 2…just two incredibly cute and sweet little girls! The eldest was as always strong willed and forthright and the younger a curly haired little charmer….

When we arrived it was dry season which was a nice entry…a little less humid (90 percent instead of a hundred!) and I began by teaching English at a secondary college for Samoan boys….some of these ‘boys’ were nearly men…and it was quite different from any teaching I had done before….the ‘boys’ love wearing nail polish, all wear lava lavas and no shoes or thongs to school and have a habit of taking off their shirts in class to reveal some very glossy and well developed abs …they love telling a good tale and taking the micky out of unsuspecting westerners…they often fall asleep in class because they have been up since before dawn preparing the family Umu, doing other necessary tasks or just travelling from the other side of the Island so they can attend school…, they also have in their midst a fafafini or two, who are boys that have been brought up as girls( this cultural occurrence happens when the balance of sexes is not available in a family and due to work delineations needs to be readdressed….) these guys are feminine in manner and treated differently by the other boys…they are colourful and sometimes hard to recognize as boys…( later when I was administrator of a college for intellectually impaired students I mistook one such young man for a year before being better informed)…and they have trouble taking anything ( I mean anything) too seriously!....establishing my twenty- something authority was quite a feet in such circumstances!! I do believe I did though through a mixture of firmness, friendship and humour…

The girls often came to class with me and busied themselves drawing and playing in a corner of the class room……( when I arrived this was not completed and I painted walls in blackboard paint and generally organised a semblance of a room to work in)…sometimes they would ride trikes up and down the cement walkway or pick flowers and play imaginative games outside…eventually we organised preschool for them with some Nuns who ran a little class under the eaves of an old German built church…Sister Magdalena was a favourite, a young Samoan Nun with an infectious smile…some days the girls would go up to the Nun’s quarters before preschool began as I had to get to class as well….( my pay back was organizing jazzercise classes which I taught voluntarily in the evenings to the nuns and other western expats looking for something to do)…sometimes after the heavy tropical rains or at the tail of a hurricane we would battle flooding to get to preschool and walk over the top of the cemetary gravestones... the only things above the water line!The girls were the only non-Samoan kids in preschool…and they learnt to speak Samoan in a week! They spoke it better than I did and would rattle off with their little Samoan friends and soon would disappear down the street and next door to play with their Samoan neighbours…

We all learnt the value of Faa Samoa or doing things in Samoan time which is lacking in the usual restrictions of western time! If you plan a meeting ate 12 pm this can mean anything an hour or two either side, no one hurries and everyone is into Bob Marley and the saying, ‘Don’t worry, Be Happy”. If you can let go of your Western tightness and obsessive need to control…then Samoa is a magical place…truly…and a place Hubby and I hark back to with fondness, often, fuelled again by our return visit last year….of course it is where we connected and that is another story…..

I arrived in Samoa with the older girls Dad, J…..who eventually left Samoa before me, having had Dengue fever and a bout of typhoid through which my now hubby and I nursed him…putting in drips while being given directions by a WHO doctor from Burma over the radio phone…administering medicine against his fevered belief that we were trying to poison him and once giving mouth to mouth in order to resuscitate his stiff form…it was harrowing for us all and the slow and tiring recovery did not help our already dissolving marriage…it must have been hard for J and I have great compassion for his journey at this time, but in the midst of it all I was surviving an inner life crisis, in love with Samoa and Samoans and not ready to leave for the hum drum of suburbia ( which yes, I had craved after the errant youthful globe trotting, high adventure, shady partners and a foray into anything that touched upon the dark and mysterious) and I was trying to smooth over the transition for my girls whilst slowly, slowly forming what would end up to be the friendship of a lifetime…….with my now hubby

J and I have remained firm friends and doting parents for the older girls...our over lapping families call J 'uncle J' and me 'Aunty'....his sons and present wife have visited us and we them...in fact we plan to hang out early next year.....but at the time it was not always so easy....

Eventually, on my own with the girls, I took the job at the school for intellectually disabled…..I loved the challenge….and we moved to a simpler dwelling…here we watched for the giant centipedes that crawled out from everything and found chicken eggs in the bushes laid by the free ranging village chooks…

On weekends and afternoons we’d go to the falls and rock pools and the white sandy beaches on the other side of the Island…

Miss independent eventually started school in Samoa, in Samoan…. and the subject she most took to was Samoan drumming!! She was quite a standout at morning assembly, sitting with the other darker children drumming furiously!

Favourite foods of the girls were boiled green bananas (which I never could learn to stomach), Taro and palusami (which is actually my favourite along with Oka or raw fish) and the little hard green Samoan apples that have a tart flavour. For a treat from the markets I would bring home Taro chips and pankeke…a Samoan answer to the doughnut! However I am sure it was the experience of the goats killed on the front lawn of our neighbours (who were Fijian Indians) for their weekend feasts or perhaps the squeals of the pigs as they struggled in the hessian bags whilst being suffocated or hit on the head by Samoans preparing the Sunday Umu, that has influenced our now largely vegtarian family..........

After one such trip to the markets, where I had left the girls with neighbours, playing in amongst the palms, I returned to find that Miss independent had been bitten on the lip by a stray dog… (Stray dogs have always, it seems been a part of Samoa, they are stringy, mean creatures who are used to being treated badly and roam the streets in packs) I was mortified, rabies exists here and the kindly Samoan had put a dirty old rag to her mouth to stop the bleeding……could it get any worse???

I called my now hubby for help as he had a small car. He came quickly and we sped to the town hospital…( It is an interesting place staffed mainly by World health Doctors and other temporary volunteers, along with a team of Samoans…hygiene is questionable, equipment is limited or rusty and medicine is usually out of date) …never the less it was a hospital…There Miss independent received rabies shots and had her lip attended to…and to my relief she recovered in no time with little, it seems effect!

I spent a week or so in this hospital with bad cystitus....at first they were wheeling me in for an apendectomy and getting wind of this I valiently put up a verbal fight....( my appendix had been removed years before) ...but the language was hard, I had Burmese doctor who did not speak english only some Samoan and a Samoan nurse who did not speak Burmese only some English and I only knew spare Samoan......you can guess the difficulty! It was an interesting time...my rooms had no walls built like a tradtional fale...cats and dogs joined the patients and ran in and out at will...my now hubby had to bring food for me and bathing requirements...bathing was in a bucket on the cement at the end of the ward...some patients had family camp out with them and sleep under their beds....I needed a drip so I was stuck...but the rusted drip was a worry in its self.....I was sure I'd pick up something far worse through this.....but actually I didn't....and I did get better after all.....we westerners are so prissy!

Later Miss Nearly independent would have her own drama when she fell off the ferry going from Savaii to Upolu…into shark infested waters off a ferry that could not turn to retrieve her and carrying a backpack….she was three….I was hysterical, but my now Hubby and then friend was with us and he again came to the rescue leaping off the ferry and reaching her as in her words, she was ‘just going down with the fishes’ ……luckily some fisherman closer to shore had also witnessed the event and they paddled out in their pau paus to pick the two up…

Then we all weathered cyclone Offa together, huddled in my house with some Peace Corps volunteers and an Austrian friend, because my house was the only one with a roof still partially on….we sat up on top of furniture (there was knee deep water in the house) in the main house area covered by a flapping but still hanging in there roof…miss nearly independent had large saucer eyes and would not go to sleep…..miss independent may have been a tad scared too but she would not let on! Later we adults fell asleep only to awaken to the girls wild cries as a bread fruit tree fell through our remaining roof…no one was hurt but we were all shaken ….for much time after I would cook over a coconut shell fire that was a feat to get going….our choices were generally should we have hot or cold baked beans…..food was scarce as all was pretty much flattened and the harbour was destroyed for incoming ships and so too the airport, there was no electricity and fresh water was precious…….we queued with stranded tourists, Samoans, expats and volunteers to use the few intact phone lines in Apia to let family back home know we were alive and safe….

But we survived and game-fully helped to repair the Island’s damage…some of my teachers had been swept out to sea so there was some tragedy too…

All in all it was a time of much upheaval for my girls…I’ll never be sure just how well I addressed this…but they have a rich journey behind them and I believe this stands them in good stead for a rich journey to come…..

Hubby and I returned and became Hubby and wife sometime later with my girls as bridesmaids.
They are lucky, they have two besotted Dads who would do anyting, fulfill any request, drive to the ends of anywhere and always be there for them.......