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Published: August 9th 2018
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Again we sleep in, and spend the morning lounging on the beach and by the pool. I think that I could get very used to this.
We chat to our lunch waiter who is a man in his early twenties named Teetee. He tells us that he has only been working at the hotel for a month, and quit his previous job as an auditor so that he could be closer to home and spend more time with his grandparents. He tells us that his parents divorced when he was an infant, and he was the youngest and only one of several siblings who “escaped” with his father from his mother’s family after the split. He says that his father soon remarried, and he was then raised by his grandparents on his father’s side. He says that he owes everything to his grandparents, who are now both in their eighties. He says that he still lives with them in a village close to the resort, and gives them everything that he earns. He tells us that his mother is a wealthy doctor who works at the hospital in Apia, and his siblings who stayed with his mother are all wealthy
too and all have nice homes and fancy cars. He says that he didn’t meet his mother again after the divorce until he was seven. He says that he doesn’t envy his mother and wealthy siblings in any way, and that he would much rather be poor and living with and looking after his grandparents. He tells us that it is an honour for him to be able to serve us. Issy looks like she’s about to cry. She tells him that she wants to take him home with her. It seems that family bonds are very strong in Samoan culture, even in the wake of divorce.
We wander again along the main road through the villages along the coast to the west of the resort. The village dogs look friendly enough, but the pigs and cats all seem keen to give us a wide berth. Issy says that all pigs have a sixth sense about how much people like bacon. The village children smile and shout “bye” to us as we walk past. I wonder why they don’t say “hello”. They look too cute and innocent to be telling us to go away. We then pass a few older children who smile and greet us with “bye, please give me money”. That takes the gloss off a bit, but only slightly; they’re still very cute. We need to turn around so that we can get back to the hotel before dark, as we’ve been warned not to walk through a village during the evening prayer curfew which runs for ten to twenty minutes around sunset.
I prowl travelblog.org to see what fellow bloggers have had to say about Savai’i. It seems that we are well off the beaten track. The site has more than half a million blogs, but only two from Savai’i, the last of which was way back in 2008. The 2008 blogger was in awe of the Savai’i lifestyle, and marvelled at how everyone lived in open sided fales, without any walls, and apparently without a care in the world about their privacy, or the safety and security of their worldly goods. She said that crime was rare, and generally dealt with by extended family and the village chiefs (matai), with a focus on confession and forgiveness rather than fines and jail sentences. From what we’ve seen so far, not too much seems to have changed since 2008. Savai’i still seems to be relatively untouched and unspoilt, and we can only hope that it remains that way for as long as possible.
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