A week in Sāmoa
Part 2
Thursday
Terrible sleep. The hotel bar was hip-hopping late into the night and I woke at four to the clunk of my air con dying. I switched on the light, watched several cockroaches scatter, and lay on the cool tiles of the floor to read more of All Our Yesterdays, which has become so good I can’t bear to finish it. Ten pages from the end I headed to breakfast, a shell of a person, and made an instant coffee and a tea with three teabags.
Lagi, Miri, Nat, and I headed out to a partner organisation on the other side of the island, an hour’s drive away. Hooning along at top speed and beeping stray dogs out of the road, Lagi pointed out the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum and various embassies. Apparently this arterial road will be closed in October, when King Charles visits for CHOGM. How on earth will ordinary Sāmoans get to work? I wondered. This was no concern; Sāmoa was very proud to host CHOGM. Even in my compromised state – woozing in and out of functionality in the back seat, inhaling a bag of panikeke and two bananas – I noted all sorts of beautification projects underway.
The houses got fancier and fancier – until suddenly the road became a different sort of road entirely, and the houses turned into coconut palms and beds of taro, waving their heart-shaped leaves. We clunked in and out of potholes. Children in fields watched us as we passed. Eventually we arrived at a series of ramshackle buildings backing onto miles of ocean. The organisation we were visiting seeks to boost the earning potential of the local community, offering things like music lessons and sewing classes and leading social development and environmental initiatives. All the buildings we could see had been rebuilt from rubble after the tsunami in 2009, which lifted cars onto the tops of trees and killed 149 people, including the director’s wife and mother-in-law. It was a pretty devastating visit. The staff explained how hard it was to interest local parents in extra-curricular activities for their children, partly because they cost something (3 tala, about NZ$1.80), partly because transport can be an issue, partly because sending your children to piano lessons is not already seen as useful or valuable. On the whiteboard behind the director’s head was a musical stave counting out Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit. How small you have to start, to do anything at all. How much luck goes into education; into where you are born, and with how much.
On the drive back, Lagi pulled in at Sinalei, the fanciest resort on Upolu. She had some contacts there, who said we could swim. The beach was a pristine crescent of white sand; a palagi guest was drinking a coconut cocktail on a lounger. In the clear water it didn’t seem right to worry about anything, but worry I did, because I hadn’t slept properly and I felt lonely and sad. I watched the dissolution of all meaning into miles of light blue water, always moving, never confirming, and thought about the things I had to do when I was back at my computer. What the hell was going on today? Eventually, Lagi dropped us back at the hotel and I had some lunch and felt better. I closed the curtains in my room and fell deeply asleep.
I had to nap, because that evening we were off to a fiafia night at Le Manumea Hotel. Seated at a table of twelve – a bunch of volunteers, plus four Kiwis from the High Commission, one of whom I turned out to know; this is the thing about Wellington – we all ordered wild drinks, then enjoyed an equally wild buffet. The standout was some zippy oka, a dish of raw fish marinated in coconut cream and citrus. Meanwhile, a dance group were putting on a spectacular show. The final dance-off involved unsuspecting audience members: Matt, one of the High Commission set, did us proud with a spot of salsa, but was beaten out by Callum, a headbanger from Napier.
Friday
This morning I finished All Our Yesterdays. Well, I cried and cried. I finished the last page and then closed the book and lay with it clasped to my chest in bed for a while. Then I read the first few pages again to try to understand how on earth you write a book like this (I didn’t get to the bottom of that).
After breakfast, Nat and I headed to Palolo Deep. After a delightful swim/snorkel – I kept saying ‘Wow!’ underwater and choking – I sat on the beach and read sixty pages of Emma Ling Sidnam’s Backwaters. I think I’m exactly the target audience for this novel, which follows a fourth-generation mixed-race Asian New Zealander who cannot speak her ancestral languages trying to disentangle her family history while contending with a boppy flatmate/sister, a beloved grandparent, and various romantic entanglements. I don’t know how much I should let this influence my enjoyment, but it’s disarming how different it feels to be the target audience for a novel, like the book is looking back at you.
The afternoon involved the first real work of the week – making a video of Lagi for our newsletter. Really, it was very little work because Lagi is so charismatic, she needs no direction. Then, while looking up the address of our hotel on the office wifi, I happened to notice that free wifi was promised, despite all evidence to the contrary…so I inquired at the desk. It turned out that there is, in fact, free wifi, you just have to ask. I suppose there’s a lesson in this. I spent the evening watching cooking videos of how to make oka and writing a rave review of All Our Yesterdays to Mikee – at last.
Saturday
When I woke this morning I knew I needed a real coffee. Not one of those instant packets at the breakfast bar, not a three-bag tea, and preferably not one more banana. With the newfound wifi, I located a likely-looking café on the way into town. Nat and I trekked over and had an iced latte and a croissant that was really more a species of bun (as Geoff Dyer would say), but nonetheless enjoyed. We spent the morning at the market, where I was mesmerised by a clutch of women making bouquets of brilliant tropical flowers – raspberry anthurium, palest apricot hibiscus, frangipani almost too tender to be in public – and had to talk myself out of buying one to enjoy for all of one day.
Later, volunteers Michaela and Eileen drove us to Sauniatu Waterfall, a swimming hole on the other side of the island. For a couple of kilometres we were pursued by the sound of a perfectly harmonised hymn with no obvious source. Then we were overtaken by a bus with its hazard lights on, thirty teenage boys hanging out the windows waving lavalavas and, having finished their hymn, cheehooing with full-body involvement. ‘PALAGI! PALAGI!’ they whooped after us; ‘CHEEEHOOOOO!’ At one point we ended up driving close behind them and a waving war began. The boys waved through the back window, four, ten, twenty hands going; some of them pressed portraits of Jesus to the window (a youth camp?). Then it became apparent we had intercepted a cavalcade: two more busloads of boys waving Sāmoan flags and stray items of clothing appeared. The buses overtook us, then engaged in a game of overtaking each other. All in all, events made it impossible to be in a bad mood — a situation only enhanced by the dark green waterfall when we got there, and an ice cream on the way home.
Sunday
The final day, the final banana. Lagi insisted on dropping us off at the airport. ‘Malo ladies,’ she said, helping us settle our suitcases in the ute. She was dressed extra brightly, for church. ‘I can’t believe it’s the end!’ Neither could we.
The drive back was still in a way I hadn’t noticed last week. Sunday is a holy day in Sāmoa and most shops don’t open; at eight in the morning, everybody was preparing for church. We passed hundreds of people dressed in white, wearing hats covered in flowers. Just outside Apia, a woman wrangled twin boys into tiny white lavalavas on the side of the road.
I asked Lagi why so many people wore white to church. Lagi explained it was a tradition linked to the original Western missionaries who brought Christianity here – but this soon turned into a discourse on the problems of religiosity in Sāmoa. There were lots of people, Lagi said, who observed all the trappings of religion but did not really live their lives in a moral way; people who privileged looking like a good person over being a good person. She described the way people gave more than they could afford to their church because there was a tradition of publicly reading out how much each family had contributed – and how this sometimes meant parents could not pay school fees.
‘But girls,’ said Lagi, ‘just because you go to McDonald’s doesn’t make you a hamburger.’ She beeped the final dog out of the final road. ‘And just because you wear white to church doesn’t make you a good Christian.’ On such a philosophical note, we pulled into the airport and parked the car. Lagi gave us each a last hug. How could we ever repay her? ‘Manuia!’ she called, as we rolled our suitcases away into the humidity. She was blessing us, as if she hadn’t been all week. ‘Manuia, manuia!’ The hibiscus behind her ear winked in the sun.
This is part two of a two-part account. You can read part one here. None of the views expressed above reflect those of Volunteer Service Abroad or any of its other employees.
Other things of note
The brilliant Flora Feltham has her first book out this month with Te Herenga Waka University Press, a collection of essays titled Bad Archive. You can and should buy a copy online, or at your local independent! I wrote a rave review here.
While not writing this newsletter, I’ve been writing some other things: most recently, an essay about my mum for Wasafiri, a piece about opera, inherited love, and cake for takahē, and an article about lollies for Metro magazine (issue #443, currently in local supermarkets). I hope you might enjoy one of them.
Finally, my sewing book is now available for preorder here (if in Aotearoa) or here (if abroad). It would mean so much to me if you ordered a copy! Readers in Aotearoa, it will also be available in bookshops, but a few weeks later than the 10 October publication date. No word yet on an NZ launch, but I’ll keep you posted.