Eighteen Days in American Samoa

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Eighteen Days in American Samoa

Hey everyone, I think it’s about time to write an update about the beginning of my Samoan adventure in case anyone is curious. I know it’s long—I’d recommend taking it at a few sittings. I arrived in American Samoa two and a half weeks ago on the night of Sunday, July 19, after fourteen hours of traveling. Tafuna International Airport is a little one runway airport, and we deplaned down a set of steps out on the tarmac. The first impression was pretty stunning—a blast of warm (not as hot as Texas), sticky (but way more humid) air, and a clear view of the mountains, lit up by the moon. After waiting half an hour for our luggage to come around the carousel, we went out through customs and were greeted by a welcoming party of Department of Education staff dishing out shell necklaces and young students holding up a “Welcome World Teachers” banner. Then it was on to Nuu’uli Polytech High School, where we had some fresh-baked cookies, dispersed into classrooms (girls’ rooms, boys’ rooms, and one for married couples), and crashed on the floor on our foam pads.

Monday morning I got up bright and early to take a freezing cold shower in the makeshift shower room, and then we were off to a little Samoan natural history museum where they hold a sort of cultural summer school for kids. We participated with groups of 7 and 13-year old in classes on traditional dancing, grass weaving, carving, and painting. I got my first lava lava (essentially their word for a sarong, but tied a little differently) in the dance class. In the afternoon, we toured the island in a school bus, but we didn’t get to drive up to my little town, Vatia, because in order to get there you have to take a side road up over the mountains that dead ends in Vatia after about 30 minutes.

The next few days were filled with six to eight hours a day of classes led by the Department of Education and PICED, an organization devoted to improving education in the Pacific islands. We learned all about curriculum—in every possible subject, whether that’s what we were slated to teach or not—some tips about lesson planning and classroom management, and a bit about Samoan culture and language. One highlight—or rather lowlight—was a woman who came to talk to us about teaching Correctional English, or English for students who don’t quite get it through normal instruction. She seemed to think that in order to tell us how to teach this program she had to actually teach us as if we were in the program, so we spent an hour and a half repeating vowels, consonants, syllables, and words on queue as she snapped her fingers at us and shouted “Eee-yah!” (she never explained what the hell that meant) and “Next word!”. Overall, the program probably prepared us to teach as much any two week program could, although some more instruction in Samoan language would have been good.

At the end of the two weeks, we started to cut loose a bit. The last Thursday, we all grabbed the bed sheets off of our mats and had a toga party in the large kitchen of the high school (not entirely sure why it had a kitchen…perhaps for cooking classes since it was a technical high school, or for cooking the students’ lunches). After waking up painfully early Friday morning to be introduced at a conference of all of the principals on the island, we went to $2 Beach for the afternoon. Fortunately PICED covered the $2 entry fee for us. I went out to a little rocky island right off the beach and attempted to scale it with another volunteer, Raj. We gave up about ten feet from the top after Raj tried to pull himself up by a little palm frond and instead just pulled the thing up by the roots. All in all, a very good time. Friday night we went to a local bowling alley/batting cages that’s also a bar at night and did some dancing with the locals. The next day everyone split up to go to their towns and take up their assignments.

Vatia is a small bayside village on the north side of the island. The first time I went out to visit it was the second Thursday we were here. I went with my roommate, Steve, and we had to wait two hours for the bus because it had apparently just left when we got to the bus depot. The bus fleet in AS does not run on timetables or anything. It is a collection of pickup trucks converted into small buses run by independent drivers. Only one bus runs to Vatia, so there are only a few trips each way throughout the day. The driver is a cool guy named Craig who gave us his phone number to check with him about bus times. He may have “the best sound system on the island” (2,000 watts running through the bus—very impressive), but his sense of time is a bit off and his predictions about arrival times are not quite accurate, to say the least.

On our first trip, a big Samoan in his late teens sat down across from us an asked if we were teachers. When we responded that we were, he asked if we were Alex and Steve. A bit taken aback, we told him that yes, we were, and asked how he knew that. He said that there had been an article in the newspaper, the Samoa News, that listed the names and assignments of all of the WorldTeach volunteers. He introduced himself as Marx, a recent graduate of Samoana High School, where he had some contact with last year’s WorldTeach volunteers. When we got to town, he showed us where our house was and introduced us to the secretary of the school. It was pretty awesome having a local guide showing us around and explaining who we were to people in Samoan. He has since taken to stopping by the house every night and we tell each other about our respective cultures.

Steve put it well when he observed that our living situation was a bit like staying in a beach house for a year. We are about 30 yards from the water in a little bungalow without air-conditioning or hot water. Everything is pretty much always wet, so our first purchase was a couple of fans to dry out clothes and keep the heat down. Once we did a fair amount of shopping (cooking utensils, pillows, a month’s worth of food), we were able to really make it home. It’s been wonderful to be able to finish up with training at our school, walk five minutes down the street back to our house, throw on our board shorts, and go out snorkeling. The bay doesn’t have the clearest water, but there’s some good coral and a few kinds of beautiful tropical fish.

A quick word about dogs on the island. They’re everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. I had one try to walk into my classroom while I was getting things together at school today. Many of them are pretty mangy and bark wildly at you as you go by them. They also bark at each other at all hours of the night, which can make sleeping difficult, especially when you have to sleep with the windows open and they bark right outside your bedroom. If they act threatening and come near you when you’re walking, the locals recommend yelling “Ahlo!” at them, and if that doesn’t work, throwing rocks. I didn’t have to resort to the latter until last night when Steve and I walked down to the end of town to look at a trail that runs out to the point at the edge of the bay. We walked by a pack of dogs on our way out and had to yell a few times and fake like we were going to throw at them to keep them away. We got by them successfully on our way back, but then I heard a couple of them coming up the road behind us. I whirled around and got off a quick throw that popped one on the shoulder. He let out a yelp and they both fell back. I’d be hard pressed to find a better way to get your adrenaline pumping than fending off wild dogs.

As far as the actual teaching goes, I’ll post some pictures of the school on shutterfly. It’s a tiny six building school with a basketball court in the middle. I’ll be the sixth grade teacher, and then all of the 5th-8th grade students will rotate between teachers and I’ll teach all of them Social Studies. The classes are all incredibly small-no grade has more than ten kids. I feel alright about the beginning of school next Monday, but the prospect of writing out lesson plans for so many classes is rather daunting.

I hope things are going well with all of you!

PS: if you want to check out pictures, go to http://alexinsamoa.shutterfly.com/