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Apia
The clock tower, with the two tallest buildings behind After doing our best headless chicken impersonations and trying to madly catch up with everyone and get organised over the last couple of weeks, Ed and I finally scraped through check-in without having to pay for our ridiculously overweight bags, and collapsed in a heap on the plane. Five hours later we stumbled off at the other end, bleary-eyed at 1am the morning before we had actually left (although it’s not that far away, you cross the dateline to get to Samoa). We were greeted by a smiling Karin, the in-country manager of our volunteer programme, and her Samoan husband Bill, and started to perk up a bit when we were handed a beer for the one-hour drive into town. 23% of the population of Samoa lives on this road so we peered out into the dark as we drove, trying to get a feel for the place. We caught teasing glimpses of houses, churches and many fales - a fale is a traditional Samoan building with no walls - instead there are several columns holding up a thatched roof, with families living underneath.
So far, our overriding sense is that we’ve landed in Bizarro World - a sort of
Apia
The government building seen across the harbour, complete with peanut - yep, that's the CBD parallel universe to Fiji, which on the surface looks quite similar in a lot of ways, but scratch it and you discover it’s completely different. Our first day was a walking and driving tour of Apia, which is country-town sized with wide streets and sits next to a harbour - in some ways a smaller version of Suva. There are only really two high-rise buildings, one of which is the government building - apparently it was decided to be the ugliest building possible once it was built, so they added a large brown dome on top to give some character - affectionately dubbed ‘the peanut.’ The central landmark is a clock tower, although it doesn’t work too well - we discovered this walking past at a quarter to seven one night, when it started chiming five o’clock. Apparently it needs a special kind of clock engineer, one of whom doesn’t currently exist in Samoa.
Talk of the town at the moment is the fast approaching South Pacific Games, to be held in August and September. Sporting venues and hotels are going up everywhere, and there is so much re-laying of roads going on that they are almost level with the
Beach trip
Back at home in the Pacific! footpaths. Everything happens at a Pacific pace naturally, but most people are generally confident that a couple of weeks of last minute frenzy should get things up to scratch. Karin expressed concern though at what will happen to all the new hotels after the games finish - it only goes for two weeks, and the hotels that currently exist already only run at about 60% occupancy the rest of year. Also, last year all government departments suffered a 30% budget cut to increase games funding.
Pacific time is definitely in operation - we went to buy a newspaper and were asked if we would like today’s or yesterday’s - a very relaxed approach! On closer inspection it doesn’t seem to matter too much; the paper tends to be littered with a few current articles and then padded out with fillers - re-runs of old articles if necessary. Yesterday there was an opinion piece on ‘who will be the next Samoan Head of State?’, even though the new guy has been in the job for at least a couple of weeks already.
The first few days were handy to get our bearings, but really we couldn’t feel settled until
Beach trip
Fales at the beach - these ones I think are generally for hanging out in by villagers during the day we moved into our house, which finally happened on Saturday. It’s a great place, an old German colonial house has been split into four units and we have one of the top two. The old surrounding verandah has been walled in in parts, and just mozzie-screened in in parts, and has been transformed into a kitchen, living and dining area, with our bedroom in the centre. There’s also a spare bedroom, so no excuses for not coming to visit!
On our second day, Karin and Bill took us on a trip to the beach. The hour-long drive was incredible - up a wide valley with sweeping views back down to the coast, then through a pass and finally out to the other side of the island, ending up in the southeast corner. We were enthralled by the many wall-less fales we passed - I felt a bit cheeky peering so easily into someone’s home complete with beds, other furniture and people generally going about daily life, open to the world. The beach itself was stunning, and lined with more fales for tourists - starting at one end with the basic cheap ones where you can pull a tarpaulin around
the poles if it starts bucketing, up to fancier ones at the other end with walls and a small balcony. This is where most of the volunteers come for their weekends away, so I imagine we’ll get to know this place quite well.
Today we each had our first proper day at work, after a brief meet and greet yesterday. I’ll withhold judgement until I’ve spent a bit more time there, but so far it bodes well. My counterpart, Kemi, is great and the work sounds like it’s going to be interesting and challenging. There’s lots of it and it seems quite daunting at the moment, but hopefully things will seem a bit more manageable when I settle in more and have got through the mountain of background reading with which I’ve been presented. Ed is still trying to actually track down his boss, who hasn’t appeared yet, but otherwise has got himself a computer and a desk to start with and is also withholding judgment so far.
We’ve met most of the other Aussie volunteers who seem like a decent bunch - not assisted though by a mildly awful haircut I had the day before we left Sydney
Beach trip
Ed excited about his first snorkel in a while - great for the self confidence when meeting a group of new potential friends! This Saturday night there’s a superhero party - god knows where we’re going to find outfits, but at least everyone else is pretty guaranteed to look like an idiot too.
It will take a while longer to settle in properly, but so far things seem reasonably on track and we’ve both got a pretty good feeling about it all. Now I’ve got the intro out of the way, I’ll try and keep future updates a bit shorter! Hopefully I haven’t lost too many of you yet…
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Afio mai o le Samoa
Glad to hear you're settling in just fine. Already I'm green with envy. Apia Park was under construction whilst I was there so I didn't get a chance to see the Manu Samoa play there (although they did play a NZ provincial team elsewhere in town). Also, a word of advice: if you're worried about your hair, don't go to "Looks 2000" which is on the ground floor of the Immigration building (next to the cinema). It's a shocker! Lalomanu is a beautiful beach but do make the effort to get over to Savaii. Manase (on the northern edge of the island) is quite beautiful too.