I’ll be heading back to my village in a couple of hours,
after two weeks away. I have mixed
feelings about it.
I’ll be leaving restaurants, taxi’s, hot showers, air
conditioning, Americans and many others who speak English, a real bed,
relatively few mosquitoes, no cockroaches or centipedes, no packs of dogs, grocery
stores that are stocked with almost all the foods I enjoy and relative
anonymity.
I’ll also be leaving a place where money seems to be sucked
out of my wallet by a giant invisible vacuum; “Apia feet”, which is what I call
the disgusting filthy state of my feet after walking in town; strangers; cars
with pumped up amplifiers blasting music; few children; rude people who
aggressively shove me out of their way; a waterfront that is more brown than
blue and a place where traffic is the predominant sound.
I’ll be going to my house, filled with bugs of the flying
and crawling variety, a bed that is a thin foam mattress on wooden slats, a
house where bugs and blowing sad require that I sweep twice a day in a futile
attempt to have a clean floor, cold showers and doing laundry in a bucket, grocery
stores that don’t have such luxuries as cheese, canned tomatoes or vegetables,
no restaurants, sweat and polyester puletasis, early wake up calls from
roosters, pigs and church bells and crowded buses.
I’ll also be going home to my beautiful grinning baby
Julius, hordes of children who scream my name with delight when they see me,
friends who will hug me when I arrive, the sound of the ocean in the background
everywhere I go, the voices of the church choirs singing in harmony with the
ocean at least twice a day, people who will crowd together so that I can have
the best seat on the bus, loud laughter and the yelling of adults and children
as they work and play, and a lagoon that is featured in travel magazines.
I’ll be going home.
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