Ahhh Thailand

Well we made it to bangkok against all odds. Apparently if you are flying from Samoa to Thailand via Sydney you still have to get an Australian visa. On the flight from Sydney to Bangkok the crew over served some jack ass in first class and then when he was harrassing the first classers they decided to move him back to economy class and guess where the only free seats were? So after spending the last 2 hours of our 8 hour flight being called a bitch and having this drunk jerk-off reach around his seats to our seats and knock our food off our trays and sexually harrass us and shout racial slurs as the egyptian family behind us AND throw pillows and magazines and the flight attendants we finally landed. (Side note- the crew did bring out hang cuffs at one point but didnt want to put them on the dude because then he would atomatically have to go to jail upon landing for 2 months and since he was a first class flyer that would just be bad for buisness). Anywho, we stumbled into bangkok and somehow manged to find our hostel and internet (had to let mom know i was alive). Walking back from the internet cafe that night we saw an elephant walking in the traffic with a blinking light on its tail. Ahh Thailand (reference to the movie "Volunteers" circa 1980s tom hanks/john candy making fun of peace corps in thailand...must see it if you haven't).
Saturday we awoke unsure what day it was or where the hell we were, but knowing that there was shopping to be done! Oh and it was my birthday. So we spent the day shopping at the weekend market and then had a couple drinks that night to celebrate the quarter century.
We are trying as hard as we can to pretend that jag lag doesnt happen to people like us, but im not gonna lie today was a bit of a struggle. We went back to the weekend market of a few hours because really, its just that awesome. I mean seriously this place is HUGE! And they have everything you could ever want! The down side is that Asians are tiny and after a year of eating taro and coconut cream i am not. There fore none of the clothes fit but between sefa and myself i think we have bought about 45 bags...whatever they cost like 3usd a piece...and they make us feel pretty.
After more market shopping we came back to our side of town and treated our selves to thai massages. amazing. Now we are heading back to the airport to fly to chaing mai in the north of thailand to meet up with my good friend doug young (from wisconsin) his girlfriend and a couple of peace corps volunteers from thailand (Go peace corps GO!) for new years. Life is a highway. Happy new years!

christmas in Samoa

Twas the night before christmas
and all through my hut
all the creatures were stirring
even the dino-rats and cockroaches...
Ok apparently i suck at rhyming. So, christmas eve was actually pretty cool this year, mostly because i was substantially less homesick than i was last year. I spent christmas eve day running around apia trying to get everything i needed for thailand since i am leaving the morning of the 27th and christmas and boxing day are holidays here. For this reason christmas eve in apia was more obnoxious than shopping in new york during christmas season...ok probably not but it felt like it. Large crowds scare me these days (good thing i am going to bangkok tomorrow) so apia was a bit overwhelming. The highlight of my day came when trying to cross the road and a cooler bounced out of the back of a bus. Wouldnt have been to big of a problem if the cooler wasnt full of fish. Gross. Of course no one on the bus noticed so the fish stayed where there were for who knows how long.
At any rate, got a ride back to Tafatafa that afternoon and had a few glasses of wine while watching the christmas episode of grey anatomy (season 2) and making a cake for the next day. why cake on christmas, well i will tell you. Sina, a girl who lives across the street from me, turned 25 of christmas and as i was also turning 25 a few days later i decided that we should celebrate our birthdays together on christmas. So i made a cake that was actually a layer of brownies covered in chocolate icing with a layer of chocolate fudge cake and an other layer of chocolate icing. Apparently i like chocolate.
So after i was done with all this i laid down to go to sleep only to be awoken at 1230 by music or something....after listening for a few minutes i realized it was singing so i got up to investigate. When i looked out my window i saw the methodists dressed in their sunday best (i.e. all white) singing samoan christmas songs in the road! It was just a full moon a few nights ago so it was bright enough to see them. I went and sat on the steps of the womens committee fale next to my house and listened to them walk up and down the road carolling for a little while and then went back inside to fall asleep hearing them singing. Even though being far from home on christmas it is nice to be away from the commercial christmas and remember what christmas is all about...
More to come on christmas, but for now i have to run to the boxing day festivities. Hope everyone had a merry christmas!

aaaand was happen?

Well, its been a bit hectic 'round these parts the last few weeks. School ended this last week and we had prize giving last Thursday. In samoa they do prize giving as a sort of graduation in all the schools. The top 3 kids in each grad get prizes that usually consist of pots and pans for their families...that is unless the kid is in one of my reading groups. Thanks to mom and grandma, the top kids in my classes got candy, stickers, and books. Which I was extremely excited about, forgetting that in Samoa no one person owns anything, but the family owns everything. Therefore, when you give a child a present they turn around and give it to their parents who do whatever they see fit with it...It is a beautiful custom in many ways because I always see the kids sharing everything they have, but when you make presents specifically for certain children...anyway...it was great
After prize giving all the teachers went back to the office and divided up the mea alofa (gifts) from the parents i.e. money and tinned fish. Then we all thanked eachother for a wonderful year and i apologized for being a stupid palagi (white person) and we laughed and cried and hugged and then went home and passed out...
Well i was going to write you all a list of all the books i have read over the past year in samoa but then i realized i was hungry and there is a fish burger down the street calling my name. so more to come..

Well la-di-freakin-da!

Just some pics for viewing enjoyment. Just finished giving my final reading exams so school is pretty much over for me even though i have to keep going for the next 4 weeks. Sigh.

I caught a mahi-mahi!! It weighed 9.5 kilos and tasted delicious!!

This was my "house" for last weekend. There was a big fishing tournament in my village so I just stayed on the beach all weekend, couldn't be bothered with the 3 minute bike road to my house up the road.

The girls of group 77 at the Halloween "gathering"

This was for the fiafia for the new group 79. From left to right is me, meghan, stephanie (who I am going to Thailand with!!), Jordan, and Ema. Steph is all decked out in traditional garb for the ava ceremony (because she was the one mixing the ava) where as I am wearing nothing that is traditional samoa at all.

My Samoan washing machine...

...And the Samoan dryer

Things that make me uncomfortable...I mean really!

Things that make me uncomfortable… I mean really!

Alright it’s official. I have now been in Samoa for a whole year. It is a very odd feeing to have people from the new peace corps group (which came last Wednesday) say to me, “I can’t wait to get to the point you are at now where you are so relaxed and know what’s going on.” Well, I have to say that was news to me that I was in the know. Apparently I am good at look cool, calm, and collected…who knew? At any rate, I was pondering my new status of “senior volunteer” in Samoa the other day on the bus, as there is nothing else to do on the bus but ponder meaningless things, and I began to think about how, even though I supposedly look under control to new peace corps volunteers there are still quite a few things in this country that make me a bit...well…uncomfortable. Now don’t get me wrong I am sure I do many things that make the people of Samoa feel a bit squimish…I can’t think of what but I am sure there is something. At any rate, this blog is not meant to be culturally insensitive by any means because I really do love this place (it’s a freaking tropical island what’s not to love?!), but there are just a few things, cultural differences if you will, that make me feel a bit uneasy and I thought maybe some of my devoted readers (thanks mom!) would find some humor in some of the predicaments I have found myself in over the past year due to these certain differences. So here goes…
1) Creepy crawlies- I’m talking specifically about centipedes, cockroaches, and rats all of which have tried at length to snuggle with me at some point and I just don’t find anything romantic about this. Actually just this week I felt something tickling my hip in the early hours of the morning just as the sun was coming up. I was barely conscious, but I pulled down my sheets and hoisted up my boxer shorts to take a closer look and out leaps (I kid you not, it jumped) a gecko. I mean really! Although the geckos might be better looking than the rats, centipedes, and cockroaches I still don’t really want them playing around my…well…you know, in the early hours of the morning. The centipedes in particular are probably the most vial creature I have ever encountered. Now I hate snakes, luckily there are none here, but centipedes make up for it. Imagine a creature about the size of a small snake or about 6-8 inches, but it has hundreds of legs enabling it to move faster than let’s say a human with only two legs. Oh and there poisonous. And ugly. Gross.
2) Lice- Ok the lice themselves don’t bother me (I actually have not yet housed the little guys but some girls have donated their heads to these little suckers to hang out in 6 or 7 times), it is the matter in which many Samoans dispose of these little mites. I had heard rumors of this process, but did not believe it until I was witness to the de-licing of a child just recently. So a woman sits behind a child and slowly and meticulously inspects each and every strand of the child’s hair. When they find a little white mite they don’t simply dispose of it but they eat it. That’s right. They mush it against their teeth to crack the heads off and then they swallow. Now that is one way to do it and I am sure there is nothing wrong with it if you have been doing it all your life, but personally it makes my stomach groan in protest.
3) Fish food- I love the fact that living next to the ocean I eat fish at least once a day. And it is good fish. I also love the fact that when I eat lunch at school we don’t use silverware. Especially since the fish is usually cooked whole and you have to get all the bones out yourself. What I can’t seem to get use to the parts of the fish the teachers at my school seem to view as a delicacy. I know they must think I am mentally unstable for only picking out the white meaty part and then discarding the rest of the fish as trash, but that’s what we do in America, make waste. And I do applaud the fact that nothing is wasted from their fish including the liver, heart, gills, eyes, brains, and even the scales, although I have to admit I still have to avert my eyes when this is taking place because my stomach thinks this is not at all funny. The part that makes me most uncomfortable about these little lunch time culinary adventures is the sucking out of the fish eyeballs and then sucking the brains of the fish through the eye sockets. I just can’t seem to get used to that. To my credit though, I did try mahi-mahi eggs this weekend. Not bad. I had to turn down the heart though which everyone thought made me weak. Its all yours guys.
4) Baby food- So you don’t really see much Gerber’s baby food around these parts, but Samoans clearly make do as they are some of the strongest people I have ever encountered. One method, which I have witnessed in Tafatafa, of feeding children who lack teeth (some children’s baby teeth have rotted out due to a very sugary diet) is very similar to a mama bird feeding her babies. A Samoan mother will take a cookie or cracker and chew it up and then bring her child’s mouth up to her mouth and transfer the now chewed cookie or cracker. Oddly enough this doesn’t really make me uncomfortable any more I think because it makes sense. Its not like there are blenders around here, might as well do it yourself.
5) “Hey Baby”- So many, many, many soles (a sole is a Samoan man between the ages of 15-50) think that the most persuasive and attractive pick up line to white girls is “Hey Baby!” I really wonder what these guys think I am going to do. I mean I am in the middle of running around town (this would never happen in my village because I know everybody and the boys in Tafatafa are very respectful and treat me like a sister) with a million things to do and then some scetchy looking dude yells “Hey Baby!” Oh yes! Let me just drop everything I am doing so we can run to the closest church, get married, and then I can start having your children. I mean really!

more pics

Meghan and I with the days catch. We are both holding on the the biggest yellow fin tuna i have seen yet. That is a marlin to my right that is of equally ridiculous size.

Bringing in the boat after a day of fishing. Ive started to go down to Dave's beach in my village Sun afternoons because they usually come in have a couple drinks, cut up a tuna that they just caught, and eat sashimi. Tough life

During the awards ceremonies we were all goofing around and dancing. I think our district should have gotten the most spirited award

The U-10 boys got third place overall. The people in the yellow shirts and rainbow i'es our the teachers from our district. As usual I was told about this "uniform" the day we left for the soccer games so I didn't match...oh well we had a good time anyway

This was after the U-12 boys district team one the final in Apia. From the left is Manaia, Mariota, and James from my school and the fourth boy is from a village about 10 min from ours. I just love this pic for some reason.

This is ben and the barracuda we (and by we I mean the boys that were fishing on the boat as I was leaning over the sides trying to get ride of my internal organs) caught. Pretty nast looking sucker...

Sina is one of the teacher's 3 year-old daughters. Maybe the cutest thing on this planet. Her family will ask her who her mom is and she will yell "Lola!" Should that freak me out?

Its my life!

I caught a fish..and then i puked...4 times. But it was deep sea fishing and awesome!

In true samoan fashion, they children holding up a i'e to give shade for the teachers...Respect thy elders!

Our under 12 boys lined up with the team from Sefa's district for the final game. We won by the way...

This is Malaki and I during one of his sign language lessons. We were taking a break to wave hello. If you look really closely you may notice the hearing aide in his right ear...yeah! He was recently accepted to a program that meets in Apia every friday. It is taught by Australian volunteers and caters to children from the village with hearing disablities. Very cool.

I made fish!