It’s probably about 5:30am and I’m lying awake looking up at my mosquito net. I have to go to the bathroom. In my head I’m debating how badly. I will get up in an hour and I wonder if I can hold it that long? Possibly, but if I try, I definitely won’t fall back to sleep. I know that my host mother is sleeping right outside my door, and if I do get up, so will she. (She was up late worrying over my coughing–I caught a cold in the middle of a sauna. How strange is that?) She will turn the light on (despite the two kids asleep next to her) and will go outside with me, calling to anyone asleep in the fale to turn on the bathroom light (some nights they will leave it on for me, but not always) which means that now the whole family is awake and involved in my trip to the faleuila. Is it worth it? I wait as long as I can, but it’s been 2 weeks of unfamiliar food and water, so we’re in a pretty non-optional situation. I asked my language teacher how to say “Please don’t get up” and “Please don’t turn on the light.” so I guess I’ll get to practice.
Incredibly, once I get back into bed I do manage to fall back to sleep and my alarm wakes me up around 6:30. I brush my teeth, wash my face and underwear in the shower (a trick I learned from a current PCV in Samoa–keeps one’s laundry situation from ever being super urgent) and walk back to my room wrapped in a lava lava (sarong.) While I get ready in my room, my family makes and lays out my breakfast. Usually they will spread it out like a picnic on the bamboo mats and let me eat sitting cross-legged on the floor like a Samoan, but sometimes they’ll set up a table and chair for me. The first few nights, they let me eat with my hands, but now they always give me silverware.
Meals are my greatest struggle–and not because I don’t like the food! (There is this one thing they make: coconut cream wrapped in taro leaves and…baked, maybe? roasted?–it tastes a little like creamed spinach but with about 400% more flavor. The taro leaves are strong and savory, a little bit tangy and the coconut cream is sweet–it is so lovely!) But there is just. always. so. much! I have a quasi-dysfunctional relationship with food at home, and here it is almost debilitating. If I’m feeling really any emotion, but especially any anxiety, my appetite disappears. If I try to eat when I’m not hungry, I feel sick–my throat sort of closes up and I can’t physically force anything down. Every meal is 3-5 plates full of different things: a starch (usually boiled bananas or taro) a meat dish or two (so far I’ve had mutton with pumpkin, various iterations of chicken [which I always feel a little strange eating while live chickens wander freely past], corn beef, whole fried fish–bones, eyes, fins and all, canned tuna, hot dogs, and a few others I didn’t recognize) and rice or noodles and vegetables and/or fruit. At breakfast it’s several fried eggs, crackers or toast with butter, jam, peanut butter, corn beef or tuna, sometimes french toast, spaghetti sandwiches, tuna sandwiches or instant noodles, and always tea and fruit. They give me a plate of cucumber slices with just about every meal because it is the only thing I will finish. I will try a little of everything (and enjoy nearly all of it), but I have rarely ever been able to finish anything other than the vegetables and fruit. I’ve gotten great at chewing slowly, stirring a lot, moving things around and always eating cucumber slices. My host mother is not fooled, however and worries. Other mothers are so proud of how much their “Pisikoa” can put away. I’ve never felt that she’s disappointed in me, but always that she is worried to distraction. I tried to explain to Jia that in America I will usually eat only once a day. They used to try to feed me about 5 or 6 times a day–now they’re down to about 3 or 4.
After breakfast, one of my sisters will walk me to “school” (the hall where we have our training sessions, less than 5 minutes walk.) A few of the boys are allowed to walk themselves to and from training, but the rest of us are escorted every day. We wander in slowly, enjoying each-other’s outfits. Our families take great pride in dressing us. Thankfully, my family has been fairly conservative on this front–providing me with a few lava lavas and one pretty spectacular outfit (a hot pink shirt that reads “Give off Vibrations in Good Grooyx,” a pair of silky black bloomers with white polkadots and a yellow and orange lava lava. A few days later she gave me the exact same shirt in blue. So now I have 2.) I’m excited about the puletasi they are having made for me in a bright red-orange and black floral pattern. My family also doesn’t try to actually physically dress me (unlike some of the others), for which I am grateful. Some girls show up in bright new (or borrowed) puletasi every day. Several of the boys will have new flower necklaces and crowns. One guy has a new lava lava waiting for him every time he takes a shower. His host mother also likes giving him skin-tight tank tops. Another kid (over 6’2″ and *maybe* a buck-fifty soaking wet with his shoes on) has a loud new XXL shirt and lava lava every day with several necklaces and a flowery headdress. He says he’s bringing everything back home to keep for his retirement.
After the first week, our families were told that we would be eating lunch at school and to give us food to bring with us. We were very briefly hopeful at the prospect of an un-observed meal, a chance to relax a little and speak English to each other. The first day, 1-3 people from each of our families showed up at lunchtime with huge meals to lay out and watch us eat. And so it goes every day. It is so kind hearted that we can’t bring ourselves to be annoyed. There are maybe 3 people who actually bring their lunches in the morning.
Training is truly brutal. Necessary. But brutal. A few of us were laughing the other day that we’re essentially babies again – we eat, we sleep and we learn. 10 hours a day sweating and learning together. I found a left-handed friend to sit next to so we can take turns fanning ourselves with the woven hand fan my family gave me the first day. The language is a poetic nightmare. It is so beautiful–rolling over and over like waves on a beach–all vowels and l’s and f’s. But it doesn’t really translate into English, at least not structurally–the closest approximation is all we get. This week, we started learning personal pronouns. In English we have I, me, you, we, they, he she, and that’s really kind of it. Samoan culture is built around family and relationships so they have I, me, we (me and you,) we (me and this person, but not you,) we (the 3 or more of us) we (the 3 or more of us, but not you) you, you two, you three (or more,) those two, those three (or more) and “that guy”–they don’t have separate masculine/feminine 3rd person singular pronouns. Those are just the dependent pronouns, there’s a second (smaller) set of independents as well. My brain pretty much always hurts.
I come home from school, wave a quick “Malo” to my family and usually head straight into the shower. Nothing feels better than a cold shower. Nothing. I put on clean clothes and rest for about a half hour – 45 minutes then meet up with a few other volunteers to study until Lotu (evening prayers.) Then a little more studying, then dinner. My family has learned my routine and are so understanding. They notice when my eyelids start to droop and will send me to bed. So I go find Ana to brush our teeth. For the first few days, our conversation would be like this:
<I make the brushing teeth hand motion.>
Ana: “Fufulu o nifu?”
Me: “Foo foo foo foh fee foo?
Ana: laughing, “Fufulu o nifu!”
Me: “Foo fee foo fee foo foo!”
and she would laaaaaugh! And then we’d go brush our teeth. Even though I can say it correctly now, it’s still one of my favorite phrases.
And then sleep. By like 8:30 or 9. Until 5 am when I have to pee.
It rains almost every day here, but only for about 30 seconds at a time, then it stops. There are very few truly rainy days. Today (Sunday) was one of them. It came down in waterfalls all morning, rarely even lessening. My sister and I walked to church (I can’t tell if everyone else in my family stayed home because they’re just not that into church, or because of the rain) under one tiny umbrella, and I foolishly didn’t take my flip-flops off so by the time we arrived, my ie (wrap skirt) was pretty thoroughly soaked. I figured it was just par-for-the-course and was about to walk inside to sit down when my sister held me back and said something in Samoan. I looked at her confused and she just said, “Wait. Change your ie.” There was another woman hanging out nearby, holding a baby. I’d never met her, but she made eye contact and I got the impression that it was at her behest that my sister kept me out. People were still wandering in, and all of a sudden a kid ran up with a blue bundle and handed it to the woman who handed off her baby to someone else. My Puletasi (a hand-me-down from the current volunteers) was blue, and this wad of fabric matched oddly well. She said something along the lines of “Here, change your ie. That one will give you a stomach ache.” tugging on my wet skirt. I *think* she was concerned because it was wet, but she may also have thought it was too small? or because I’d tripped on the way to church, it had a little smudge of dirt on it? I’m pretty sure it was the wet thing. Anyway, she asked if I had shorts on, which I did not. (I’d figured the one day I was wearing something that actually tied and therefore was not in danger of falling off at any second, I could forego the shorts.) Almost everyone else was inside, so we stepped off to the side of the porch and she wrapped the new skirt around me while I untied the wet one and sort of awkwardly hesitated unwrapping it for modesty. But she reassured me, “Don’t worry. I am your sister.” And so we changed my skirt right there in broad daylight in front of church–very cleverly so she was the only one to get an eye-full and she was substantial enough to block anyone else’s view. I spent the entire service trying to figure out the series of events had to have taken place in the less-than-10 minutes between when I arrived and when my replacement outfit arrived. After church, I thanked the woman again and told her I would get it back to her, to which she replied, “No, don’t worry! It’s for you!”
Before we left the States, they told us over and over again not dive in ready to fix everything. “Be a learner, be humble, listen, observe, don’t think of yourself as the “expert” coming in to help.” In our present state, the advice is kind of hilarious. We are currently so utterly useless that it is laughable to think we could fix anything. We don’t even feed or dress ourselves–we communicate like toddlers. Vast networks of caring eyes conspire together to keep us in dry clothes. If we ever become functional adults again, it’ll be a pretty big win.
Yesterday we hiked to the waterfall. Our training village is farther inland than most on the island, so instead of being near the ocean, we have a river flowing through the center of town. We followed it about 45 minutes into the jungle (along the way something large and buzzing flew up and stung me then flew away unscathed. Rude.) until it opened at the foot of a hundred foot fall pouring into a pool surrounded by rocks and cliffs. Apparently the locals believe it to be a very sacred place–many spirits and ghosts live here and the pool is so deep in one place that maybe leads into the underworld. A few of us did try to find the bottom and none of us could. But quite a few of our local siblings came along with us and didn’t seem too worried about it. We jumped off rocks, (and cringed a little watching our brothers and sisters jumping of much higher scarier rocks) and swam and floated and looked at each other with wide eyes. “Think about your life right now!” Julia shouted at me on the hike. I laughed, “That’s stupid!” I shouted back–it’s a Julia phrase. Last Sunday I leaned over during church and whispered in her ear,
“Wanna hear something weird?”
“Always.”
“We all just met each other 10 days ago.”
“Haha, that’s stupid.”
Because two weeks ago we put on our yellow rings and dove into a pool in the Wood Between the Worlds and now all other worlds feel like a dream.
not all who wander 