Saving the world, Samoa-style

A couple of weekends ago we farewelled a group of volunteers, our friends, who had finished their year here and were heading home. It was something of a milestone, as it was the first group we have seen leave that we were also here to greet as they arrived in country. Previous volunteers have left but they had all arrived before us; we’re now the longest-serving Aussie volunteers in Samoa. (See the pics of the farewell weekend at Vavau, complete with coconut tree climbing demonstrations).

We certainly know the island inside out by now, helped by a recent flush of visitors. Ed’s family arrived to stay in July, toddler Jasper in tow on his first international holiday during which he also had the excitement of his first ever ice-cream. We spent a lovely time at various beach spots and also got a little bit more active over on Savaii, checking out the blowholes and traipsing up and down a volcanic crater or two. A few weeks after bidding them farewell we were welcoming friends Kellie, Hamish and Karyn; and managed to grab a great weekend away with them at Samoana Surf Resort. No sooner than the three of them were checking in at the airport to leave, my parents were checking in at Sydney on their way over, and we had another lovely break lazing around on some more beaches. Wild Thang was up to its usual tricks, dropping its exhaust pipe in the middle of nowhere, but a handy truck full of men with tools happened by and Wild Thang managed to struggle back to civilisation.

Work has been, to put it politely, challenging recently. A couple of weeks ago I was asked to be on a committee of seven people to draft the office answering machine message. Yes, you read that correctly, a COMMITTEE of SEVEN people to draft the office answering machine message. Our draft was apparently supposed to then be submitted to management for their approval. I responded to the initial email with a suggestion that we post our task on the global intranet and request examples from other country offices, so that we could determine global best practice and have harmonisation of answering machine messages. Unfortunately this backfired, someone took me seriously and I had to explain that I was joking just before they posted the request. Welcome to my office. This week, I was chasing up a request from headquarters in New York for a Samoan recipe; again for the staff intranet. That’s right people, I’m saving the world, one answering machine message and recipe at a time.

All this was thrown into stark relief today when our security advisor returned from mission travel and provided morning tea for everyone. He regularly goes on training trips overseas and this time started talking about hostage negotiation. Then as he went on I realised he hadn’t been to training, he’d actually been conducting negotiations over two staff members who had been taken hostage in Somalia. One he managed to secure a release for, the other is still being held hostage and presumably someone else has taken over negotiations. I took my piece of cake and cup of tea back to my desk and proof-read the recipe one more time before sending it off.

I’ll stop being melodramatic; I have achieved a couple of useful things recently. In fact I’ve just completed one of the main goals of my assignment, which was to conduct gender sensitisation training for all staff in my office. This is so that when they plan their work, in whatever area they specialise (be it governance, crisis prevention or environment for example) they will consider the gender aspects (and there are gender aspects to all those things). I think it went quite well - I conducted five sessions on consecutive Friday mornings, and made sure they were very interactive. We played games, acted out role plays, and had discussions - all activities quite new to some of the staff who are used to training generally being presented as a lecture. I think I learnt just as much out of the process; about gender roles in Samoa, how they are learned and how they define people. There are one or two staff members who will probably continue thinking I’m a naïve palagi bringing in my foreign ideas about what gender equality means, but I think the sessions also made an impact on several staff, and if I have at least planted a tiny seed in people’s heads that makes them think to consider gender when planning a project, then I’ve been successful.

Julia

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