A week in Sāmoa

Part 1

Sunday

Lagi met us at Faleolo Airport, wearing a red hibiscus behind her ear and proffering ’ula (flower garlands) for us to put on then and there. ‘LADIIIIEEEES!’ she exclaimed. ‘WELCOME TO MY ISLAND HOME!’ She had come out on her day off to collect us. Her message to say she was waiting at arrivals contained seven emojis. How could you not love someone like that? ‘A photo, girls!’ she insisted. We posed, sweating, in our ’ula. We had been awake since 3.30 that morning and had recently eaten the terrible Air New Zealand scrambled eggs. Nonetheless, we smiled for real.

Nat and I were in Sāmoa for the first time. We’re colleagues at an organisation called Volunteer Service Abroad (VSA), which sends skilled volunteers from Aotearoa to work across the Pacific (and in Timor-Leste). Staff get the chance, now and then, to visit one of the countries where we send volunteers; I still can’t believe this luck.

Lagi, VSA’s Programme Manager for Sāmoa, drove us for an hour to reach our hotel, pointing out various attractions: open-sided fales, breadfruit and pawpaw trees, Chinese supermarkets, blue-and-white churches. Billboards flashed by advertising child life insurance and mobile coverage. All of the buildings were brightly painted, perhaps to contend with the luminous green of the land. The coconut palms made a light, shifting sound in the wind. It seemed like the sort of place it would be hard to be a pessimist.

Lying beside the hotel pool, I started reading All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg, a (great) recommendation from my friend Mikee. In my stupor I seemed to exist half in 1930s Italy with siblings named Ippolito and Concettina and half beside a turtle-shaped pool in Apia, dreaming of dinner. Eventually, dinner became a reality – a burger and a Sāmoan beer – before Nat and I walked back along the sea wall. The centre of town lay on one side of us, the Pacific Ocean on the other. Never has human life seemed so fragile. The sea wall barely cleared the tide. If there were a tsunami – but I wouldn’t let myself finish the thought.

Monday

After breakfast in the hotel restaurant – banana muffins, banana pancakes, crescents of pawpaw, caramelly bananas – Miri, the VSA Sāmoa Country Programme Coordinator, came to take us for a Sāmoan bus ride. 

I think I’d been imagining some kind of sub-par hop-on-hop-off experience of the sort you get all over Europe, but how wrong I was. Buses in Sāmoa resemble elongated SUVs that have been through a Pasifika version of Pimp My Ride. Each one has a name like ‘QUEEN BLESSING TRANSPORT’ or ‘SUNRISE MOJO’, which is painted on the side, alongside portraits of pop icons such as Eminem or Mr Bean. The wooden interiors are hung with fake fur and weavings; the music – exclusively Sāmoan love songs or nightclub RnB – is loud enough to shake the seats. High schoolers in dorky uniforms, old men in lavalavas and jandals, and young men in Boston Celtics shorts sit shoulder to shoulder without any qualms about personal space, and once all the seats are taken, people sit on each other’s laps. To get off, you yank the bell and the driver pulls over immediately, regardless of where he is or who’s behind him. The whole bus squeezes up to let you trip out the doorway (there is no door, just a hole). 

The bus took us all over Upolu, past the sports training complex and the hospital, past the beer factory and the plantations, past hundreds and hundreds of ramshackle fales. What does it mean to travel with open eyes? What valences was I missing? All I can tell you is it was beautiful – everywhere that profound, luminous green – and I was both delighted and uncomfortable. The whole notion of touring a foreign place when you are more privileged than most of its inhabitants is, and should feel, complex.

We did a little work, then headed out for dinner with Lagi, Miri, and most of the volunteers currently in Sāmoa. The dinner had the kind of superficial but pleasant vibe that exists among a large group of nice people who know each other to varying degrees and are united by a figure of unparalleled charisma (Lagi). I ate my incredibly fresh fish and came over all existential. Who was I? What did it mean, to sit at Seafood Gourmet under twenty-five ceiling fans and listen for the coconut palms? No conclusions were reached.

Tuesday

I slept badly. I lay awake tossing and turning over a situation back home, then cursing myself for caring about a situation back home when I am, in fact, in paradise. Luckily, when I rose at 7, I found I was still in paradise, and maybe the situation could be laid aside for a bit. The day began with another fifty excellent pages of All Our Yesterdays (things are not going well for Ippolito), plus more bananas and banana products.

After visiting one of our partner organisations – the Sāmoa Tourism Authority, where we have a volunteer working in climate finance – Nat and I were off to attend a ‘Sāmoan Cultural Experience’. This turned out to be three packed hours encompassing a musical performance, a weaving lesson, a kava ceremony, a traditional Sāmoan umu, a chat about woodworking, a tattooing demonstration, a stencilling workshop, and finally a wonderful dance show, watched while we all ate taro and palusami out of the bowls we’d woven. The star of the show was our harmlessly flirtatious MC, who at one point sang you are so beautiful at Nat while splitting a coconut for her. I was made to drink rather a lot of kava during the kava ceremony and spent the rest of the festivities feeling swimmy; during the final dance number I had to ferret a Panadol out of my bag but I think I managed to pass it off as a sort of whoopee hand signal. At the very end, our MC somehow tempted two young white guys on stage from the audience, got them to take their shirts off, draped them in banana fronds, and induced them to climb the poles either side of the stage to general cheehoo-ing from their Sāmoan counterparts and applause from the middle-aged women in the audience.

I’m not sure whether I think it’s a good thing to put culture on display like this, whether it should be monetised and paraded for mostly white audiences. For whose benefit is the show? Do both sides, as one would hope, have equal power? But then again, isn’t it a good thing for different cultures to meet, and what if it’s also empowering and fun for the performers? I suppose I’m overthinking it. I was overthinking even at the time. Part of my brain was enjoying the extraordinary dancers and part of it was wondering about the politics of tourism. Beyond that, another part was thinking about the fact Kamala Harris will probably be the Democratic nominee, and another was worrying about my tricky situation back home, and yet another was trying to figure out whether I was getting a migraine or if that was just what happens when you have kava so early after a breakfast of 90% bananas – you know how it is. Anyway, I got some good photos for our marketing team. 

After an afternoon at the office, Nat and I went for dinner (fish) and were back at the hotel by 7. I was beginning to understand how slowly time moves when you’re alone and internet-less and trying not to read your book too fast. After a walk, some writing, and rereading all the messages I could open without wifi, I remembered there was a TV in the room, so I flicked through the Sāmoan channels (all news or Jesus). I happened to land on a channel just as a movie was starting. The Walt Disney logo drew its rainbow. What incredible luck! It was 8.37pm; a movie would get me all the way to bedtime. Then some text appeared and it said VIN DIESEL and then, oh hell, THE PACIFIER. I sat through fifteen minutes of Vin running around in a wetsuit before giving in to Ippolito. 

Wednesday

After the customary banana extravaganza, Nat and I walked to the office. Is there anything better than walking through a foreign city? It’s such a full-package pleasure: the smell of the salt and plants, the roaring foreign buses, the strangers who say malo for no reason other than to be friendly.

Miri took us to visit another partner organisation, a church NGO that rehabilitates youths who have committed crimes. As a definite agnostic, I’m never quite sure how I feel about faith-based rehabilitation, but surely any rehabilitation is a good thing and better than imprisonment. The lovely staff invited us to watch the start of their study session, which took place in a huge hall, the youths sitting in the middle with their bibles. After roll call, a visiting group from California took the stage. Open the eyes of my heart, they sang, and I thought, yes, who among us has not longed for epiphany? 

Then I noticed two people at the end of the row who looked exactly like American baker Rose Levy Beranbaum and her husband Woody. It was uncanny, the woman was even wearing the kind of oversized visor I’ve seen Rose wearing on holiday on Instagram. I started to say to Nat, doesn’t that look like Rose Levy Beranbaum, celebrated author of such classics as The Cake Bible and Rose’s Ice Cream Bliss? and then remembered that Rose is Jewish so there’s no way she’d be travelling to Sāmoa with the West Valley Christian Church, wearing a blue lavalava and singing about Jesus. Also, she’s not exactly a household name. The reason I know about Rose is because the Christmas we were seventeen, my friend Nicole and I made Notre-Dame out of gingerbread, complete with stained glass windows and flying buttresses, from her book Rose’s Christmas Cookies. The project required a trip to a specialty cake-making store, six days of our lives, and exquisitely fine motor skills to carve out the panes of the rose window. At the end, my dad forced us to take a series of photos with our chins on the dining room table, level with the cathedral. I can’t really remember carving the rose window, but I definitely remember the photos, which still exist, and in which we are visibly covered in icing sugar. Isn’t it ridiculous that you don’t get to decide what to remember? Such are the flights of fancy that “Holy, holy, holy, holy, holy” occasioned.

Back at the office, we had a traditional Sāmoan feast from the market for lunch. Holy moly, it was great: plush palusami, taro and breadfruit, some chicken curry with egg foo yong on the side (a rogue inclusion, but the Chinese influence is strong), and the standout, an ambrosial dish called faiai i’a (fish cooked with onions, spices, and coconut cream). All afternoon, I typed one-fingered replies to emails with a drinking coconut in my other hand.

That evening, one of the volunteers, Michaela, generously drove us out for a beach swim, then on to a popular restaurant for pizza (wood-fired, but with lowbrow toppings – it was perfect). Over dinner, we got talking about Sāmoan TV. I mentioned Vin Diesel and how strange I’d found it to be starting a movie at 8.37pm. ‘Oh that’s normal,’ said Michaela. ‘Honestly, it’s better to catch the beginning of a movie. Quite often they end up cutting off the last fifteen minutes because they’ve run into the next programming slot.’ 

This is part one of a two-part account. You can read part two here. None of the views expressed above reflect those of Volunteer Service Abroad or any of its other employees.