Haves and Have Nots

The view I had from my shower every morning.  Balanced out the shock of the cold water.

When I applied to the Peace Corps I was obsessed with finding out about food and living conditions.  Just in case any one else is similarly obsessed and Googling, here’s what we have/don’t have in PC Samoa:

What We Have in Apia:

Apia is the capital of Samoa and has pretty much everything you need.  At the hotel we have electricity, hot water, beds and WIFI.  The WIFI is $19 per hour or $50 tala for five hours.  That’s a major chunk of change for a PC trainee.

There’s a kitchen we can use in the hotel, although it has a limited supply of pans/dishes, etc.  Handy way to save some money, though.  I typically cook for myself a few nights a week and eat in for most lunches.

There’s a MacDonald’s in Apia (and, according to rumors, another one is going to be built on Savaii) along with a variety of other restaurants.  I had pizza last night.  Because it was our first night back and my first Palagi food in six weeks, I blew $24 on pizza and beer.  Worth every seine.

I’ve heard there’s a good Indian restaurant and I’m hoping to try that this week.  I’ve tried two different Chinese restaurants.  One was so-so, the other was pretty good.  Prices are a bit steep, but the portions at the good place were huge.

HOLY CRAP!  I’M WRITING THIS ON THE BALCONY OF THE HOTEL, ENJOYING THE COOL BREEZE AND VIEW OF THE HARBOR.  WAS SHOCKED TO HEAR A PLANE FLYING OVERHEAD.  ONLY THE SECOND PLANE I’VE HEARD IN TWO MONTHS.

Ok, the newsflash is over…back to what we have and don’t have.

There is no Mexican food in Samoa.  Or, apparently, American Samoa.  And yes, I would have taken the 11 hour ferry trip for a good plate of Mexican food.  There are also no Mexican ingredients to speak of in the grocery store.  Chi Chi’s salsa that is both expensive and past its expiration date does not constitute a viable ingredient.

Fresh meats and vegetables in the stores are expensive and vegetables can be hard to fine.  Generally, in Apia, you can find bok choy and carrots in the larger markets, reasonably priced.

The best bet for fresh veggies is the open air market.  It’s big, sells everything that’s in season at the best prices you’ll find and also has prepared food, if you’re in the need for a fast food fix, and have a strong stomach.  Tasty and cheap but can be dangerous for the tummy.

Basically anything you need (note that is need, not want) can be found in Apia.  You do have to be prepared to pay for it.  Toilet paper, for example, is exorbitant.  I now understand why some people in the villages use used Bingo sheets.  Really, $1 USD a roll for a small roll of single ply?  If anybody has the Charmin guys phone number, let me know.  Given the Palagi Plumbing Problems (think Montezuma’s Revenge) I might be spending all my tala on TP. 

What I Had In the Village

Any place where people live that isn’t in Apia is called a village.  Actually even Apia is broken up into “villages”, although by walking through town (and the town is smaller enough to walk across) you’d never know it.   Even in the rural parts of the island, frequently  the villages are sort of like suburbs.  Very close together so you can’t tell when you leave one and enter another.  The villages are all similar in a variety of ways.

ANOTHER NEWS FLASH.  YET ANOTHER PLANE JUST FLEW OVER.  TWO PLANES IN AN HOUR?  NEWSWORTHY!

Back to the blog.  In my village we had electricity, a couple of street lights, running water and some indoor plumbing.  That depended on the house.  My house, for example, had an indoor, tiled shower.  It also had an indoor flush toilet, but due to a plumbing problem had to be flushed with a bucket of water.  It also wouldn’t accept TP, so that went into a basket in the bathroom.  The not being able to flush TP situation is common. 

I’d venture to say that the majority of homes, including the fale where we had our training, had outdoor facilities. Usually, two rooms in a tiny building.  One door was to the toilet, the other to the shower.  After using the toilet at the fale, we stepped into the shower room to wash our hands under the shower head, which was a pipe coming out of the ceiling.

By the way, the toilet there flushed but didn’t accept TP.  It was my favorite place, because it had two windows (holes in the wall, no screen), a view of the ocean and a very nice breeze, most days.  Onofia probably thought I have serious health issues, given the amount of time I spent there.

I don’t know of anyone who had air conditioning in the village, although my house had ceiling fans.  We rarely used them due to the cost of electricity as well as the assumption on the part of Samoans that using any type of electric fan will actually make you hotter because of the hot electricity coming from the wall heating the air. 

I slept in a Palagi house, which means it looked like a house you’d see in the States – walls, roof, windows, etc.  It had screen on the windows which was stellar and kept the mosquitoes out.  Most houses I saw did not have mosquito screens.  All the windows I’ve seen in Palagi houses have jalousie windows, like we used to use in Florida.

I slept in a bed in a private room.  My mattress was a Samoan mattress, stuffed with some type of fiber from a tree/plant.  I have no idea what kind but I loved the mattress.  Think of a really, really firm futon mattress and you get the drift.  The bed was basically a plywood platform with a headboard and the mattress on top.

I was the only one to sleep on a bed.  Fa and any family visiting slept on the tile floor in the living room.  Most slept just on woven mats.  Fa slept on woven mats topped with a mattress.  I was invited to sleep in the communal room, since it was larger and had cross-ventilation so was cooler, but I respectfully declined.  They’d been warned that Palagi’s are weird about sleeping alone so it didn’t seem to cause an issue.

A few houses in the village had stoves/ovens, washing machines and refrigerators.  We had a two burner propane stove that Fa used to crank out some tasty food.  We had a refrigerator that Fa used occasionally.  Mostly we used it as a room temperature cabinet to store the eggs, mayonnaise and bottles of water. Yes, I ate the warm eggs and mayo.  No, I never got sick. I have eaten street food in India.  I am impervious to intestinal distress, knock on wood.

Like most Samoans we didn’t have a washer and did laundry in a bucket outside.  Let me rephrase that.  “We” did laundry a couple of times and then Fa couldn’t stand it and started sneaking into my room to steal my clothes while I was at language training.  She’d wash, dry and fold them for me and sneak them back into my room.  I love her for that.

ANOTHER PLANE!  OK, I WAS STARTING TO THINK WE WERE BEING INVADED THEN REALIZED I’VE BEEN HEARING THE SAME PLANE.  I HAVE NO IDEA WHY HE’S CIRCLING THE TOWN, BUT I’M SURE IT WILL BE A TOPIC OF DISCUSSION, AS IS ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS THAT’S OUT OF THE ORDINARY.

Fa also has a traditional Samoan outdoor kitchen.  It’s open air, has a sink with running water, place to have a fire and counters.  That’s what most homes seem to use.  A Palagi house with an indoor kitchen and bathroom are high-end homes.

Most Samoans live off their land.  They eat what they can raise or grow.  They eat mostly root vegetables like taro and breadfruit.  They also raise pigs and chickens, primarily.  Some raise cattle, but I understand they are used primarily for fa’alavelaves, a topic I’ll tell you about in another entry.  The chickens and pigs are free range, as are the many dogs.  It was not unusual for training to be interrupted by a massive dog fight involving up to ten dogs.  I was never sure what set them off.

Being a city girl, I occasionally interrupted training by squealing about some animal or other.  I was thrilled when Onofia stopped training one day to point out one of the family who lived in the fale we used coming toward us, holding a piglet.  It was the runt of the litter and he was concerned it would be crushed.  He should have worried about the fallout of two senior trainees fighting over the right to cuddle the pig for the day.  It worked out.  Sia and I took turns.  Unfortunately, it was my turn when the little bugger had to pee.  Small, but holds amazing amounts of liquid. 

Speaking of liquid, our village had plenty of water.  So much, in fact, that it was not unusual to see a tap left running, sometimes for hours.  Having been raised in the desert in Arizona, I had trouble seeing that.  It was nice to have free water coming from every tap.  That isn’t the case for all villages.  Some volunteers and many Samoans depend on cisterns which collect rain water.  And some can’t afford cisterns and depend on nearby rivers or neighbors.

Things I Don’t Have

There was nothing that I needed in the village that I didn’t have.  There were things I wanted that I didn’t have, but got used to the lack of familiar creature comforts very quickly.

Cold showers.  I washed my face Saturday with hot water for the first time in six weeks.  I took a hot shower this morning but decided it wasn’t as refreshing and turned off the hot water mid-shower.

Ice.  Mostly in the village I drank water.  Fa made me tea and hot Koko Samoa (like cocoa, but made with water) every morning and some evenings.  No alcohol.  Drinks are seldom chilled and I didn’t see ice for six weeks.  It would have been nice, but I didn’t really miss it.  Actually, I don’t see ice often in Apia, either, but refrigerated drinks are common.

Vegetables.  I’m not sure why, but it’s really hard to find fresh vegetables in the villages.  There are some roadside stands, but they’re not in every village.  The faleoloas sell some fresh vegetables, but it’s a rarity.  As in they might have a bag of cucumbers or some pumpkin (a type of squash similar to acorn squash in flavor, but much larger) once every week or two.  As I said before, families eat what they grow.  That means a diet primarily composed of taro, breadfruit, green bananas and occasionally chicken or fish.

Chocolate.  Yes, chocolate as in Snickers, M&M’s, etc., are available in Apia.  They are outrageously expensive.  You can find the occasional candy bar in the larger villages, where they are also worth more than gold.  My friends Gail and Bob demonstrated that chocolate ships remarkably well.  A bag of Ghirardelli squares arrived intact and delicious.  It would have been nice of me to share.  I’m not that nice.  I did share M&Ms,  which made me very popular until they ran out.

Mail.  Yes, I get mail.  Letters seem to take about 3 weeks to arrive.  Some packages arrived within a month.  I’ve heard from others that they’ve sent packages, some six weeks ago.  Since I’ve heard that because all the planes are packed with Samoans coming home for the holiday, the mail slows considerably.  I’ll look forward to opening Christmas presents, mailed on Halloween, on Valentine’s Day.

In one of the many documents that the PC sent us to prepare, it said that we’d quickly get used to cold showers (or, in the case of some of our group, bucket showers) and limited varieties of food.  They were right.  I’ve come to accept and appreciate a way of life that is simpler, not that I won’t spend hours in the Albertson’s produce department when I go home.

They were also correct in saying that what is much harder to deal with is the isolation that comes from language and cultural differences.  It was fine for me because I had my fellow trainees to talk and vent with.  I also had my new friends, the Samoan PC staff, some of whom were in the villages with us frequently.  They won’t be there in Savaii.  It will be challenging at first, but I’m confident I’ll meet people with strong English.  And, my Samoan will improve with time. 

It seems there’s a lot of talk in the Peace Corps about who’s “real” PC and who’s in the Posh Corps or Beach Corps.  I think it’s more about we’re giving, rather than focusing on what we’re not being given.  We’re here to teach English.  Will that change the country or the future of world peace.  No.  Might I change one life?  Or the opinions that a few have about Americans?  Perhaps. 

Whether I have electricity or not doesn’t make a difference.  And for those who think I’m having a two year vacation on the US taxpayers dime, come on over.  After you ride two hours on a bus, sitting on a cramped wooden bench with someone sitting on your lap, so you can attend training to make you a more effective teacher, we can talk about how easy we have it here on the two hour bus ride home to our dinner of boiled bananas.  I love it here and am committed to stay.  But it isn’t a vacation, by a longshot.

I’ve been writing about we had and didn’t have related to “stuff”.  In another entry, I’ll write about what we had/didn’t have in terms of the more important things.  The amount of humor we shared.  The Samoans love to laugh.  The number of stars I saw while waiting for the bus at 5 a.m.  The number of hugs and kisses I got.  I’ll also write about how I didn’t miss the having cars go by with music so loud the bass shook my windows. 

I hope you enjoy the photos. Please let me know if you have any specific questions about village life.

One of my favorites.  Fish cooked in coconut cream.

Dinner - taro in coconut cream, rice in coconut cream and at the top, a small bowl of raw sea urchin.

A typical plantation on Savaii, where each family grows their own food.  That's taro in the foreground.

The beach fale in front of my new house in Savaii.

View from my new front door.

View from the second floor of the school where I'll be teaching.  Walk to the street, turn right, walk five minutes and you'll be at my house.

We trained on the front porch of this fale.  The bathroom is the building in the back. Thought it was funny when one of the chickens decided to stroll in.

The Army marches.  The Peace Corps strolls.  In this case up the main road on the island.  To reach the main part of our village, we turned left at the intersection.