Three Samoa Moments

There are some moments that we have on a daily basis here in American Samoa that pass without much notice. Things that would be very out of place on the mainland and may be against the law, violate various moral codes and otherwise not happen. A few recent examples from last weekend.

I went over to a friend's house for a barbecue on Saturday. I did something unusual for the island, I showed up at the scheduled time. In the palagi community, no one shows up until and hour to an hour-and-a-half after the scheduled time. However on this Saturday, I was lounging around our house without much to do, so I opted to be punctual.

Being on time left me greeted with a few of my friends butchering the meal in their front yard. They were hacking apart a yellow fin tuna, a mahi mahi and a wahoo in the bed of pickup truck. The fish were still frozen solid, straight from the hold of a purse-seiner. So "hacking" literally means bludgeoning a knife/machete/cleaver through solidly frozen fish with a hammer or using a serrated saw to part the head or the tail from the body. Imagine someone trying to saw or hammer their way through a 30 pound ice block while trying to leave the ice block in a few specific sized chunks.

It was gross and bloody work, especially after the out layers of the fish started to thaw. The flies were everywhere, eating up all the stray chunk of flesh that were scattered all over the ground and the pickup bed.

After about an hour, they were left with a giant cooler overflowing fillets, steaks and other cuts of the fish and a massive mess.

This also served as a welcome back to one of our friends who left 8 months ago. He had arrived back on the Thursday flight and moved in with the good Doc. He was moving from his grad student life in San Diego to the lifestyle where you could be asked to gut a fish at in afternoon for your evening meal.

Another thing he got when came back was a beater, island pickup. It was previously owned by one of the attorneys on island. It had sat around for three or four months before its new owner got back to claim it. Let this be a testament to how hard the climate and air is on everything. The roof of the truck had rotted out in the months it was sitting here.

It rotted enough that there were large holes located where the windshield and the roof meet. With as much rain as we receive on Tutuila this is a problem. Once our intrepid grad student got on island, he set about fixing the leaky rook. First, this took the form of keeping the rain off the roof and the interior long enough to get it to dry off in the Southern Hemisphere wet season. No easy task.

This solution took the form of an umbrella stuck directly into the holes in the car canopy. A site I'd never seen before. The truck's new owner was starting to sand off the rusted sections of the truck roof in anticipation of bond-o/sealing the holes.

It's a testament to the corrosive powers of heat, salt and water how quickly metals break down in t his climate. I've had paperclips rust apart in my backpack in only a few weeks. A few months will lead to some extreme results here.

 The last of the uniquely Samoan phenomena that needed cataloging was the toad we encountered in the pool on Sunday.

Sara had already gotten in the pool at our housing complex when I noticed something swimming around the deep end. Turns out a cane toad had fallen into the water and couldn't make its way out. I had a bit of a moral dilemma about this situation. On one hand, the cane toads are an invasive predator that has gone a long way towards displacing a number of native reptiles, amphibians and birds in the environment. They are poisonous and have overrun the ecosystem around where we live. On the other side, a dead toad floating around the pool would probably decommission one of our few reprieves from the wet season heat. It's one of the few perks of living where Sara and I are. We regularly host a wide swath of our friends on hot weekends for cocktails and pool times.

With a little debate with Sara we opted to keep alive our escape from the heat and humidity. I fished the toad out of the water. He'll live to eat and reproduce. Sigh. Only in American Samoa do you need to fight these little battles on a daily basis.

Only in Samoa...

Sara and I took a quick coffee run to the McDonald's Drive-Thru (ironically one of the only places you can get a decent cup of joe on the island) this morning. In the line for ordering saw one of the odder moments that has happened tin front of us here. Someone was ordering their meal from the back of an ATV. This had us both laughing out loud.

Transportation on the island is pretty laissez-faire. It's frequent to see 5 or 6 people riding in the back of a pickup truck and aiga buses are colorful and loud substitutes for public transportation that often fill up to the point that new riders need to sit on the laps of people with seats. That said the sight of a four-wheeled dirt-bike grabbing a bite at McDonald's was new on us. Just another reminder that even though we've been here for 7 months this island will still find ways to surprise you.

Last Weekend of the Bachelor Life

It's my last few days before Sara arrives (yay!). Thus there was an endless number of things I needed to get organized and in order for her introduction to The Rock. The first of these issues I tackled was on Friday. Seeing an email go around that one of the palangi living nearby was selling his truck, I made an appointment to see it and take it for a test drive after work. Unfortunately that afternoon I wasn't able to make it to the bank to get the necessary cash. Coming from the mainland, I was stunned to see that the banks close here at 3pm. So, this was going to be a look only test drive.

Giving directions on the island is a bit different than the mainland. There are no street names here. This is fine for the Samoans. They grew up here, they know every street, alley and back road on the island from since they were children. As a person who's been here all of three weeks, I'm at a severe disadvantage compared to them. Directions here need to be in narrative form, starting with well know land marks and guiding you from there. A paragraph that reads like "Turn right at the white wall with blue accents that after the curve to the left" is what you have to follow to reach someone's house. Following directions takes on a whole new element of complexity when they read more like a list of local features instead of a connecting set of street names. Following the half a page of instructions I wrote down, I got to the seller's house and got to see the truck.

On the test drive, took advantage of the seller and made him be my captive guide. This way I got to see the truck and a few back roads along the way. I discovered the village of Ottoville and found the beverage distributor for island is located there and is willing to sell to the public. I might need to follow up on that next time I throw a party. I also got to see how the truck handles in the water, since Lake Ottoville formed in the middle of a low-lying section of road from the runoff from the rainstorms earlier in the day.

The truck seemed good. It was an older Toyota pickup. The truck reminded me of the old GMC my father owned for 20 years. It was simple, like I like; no electronics amenities, a non-functional stereo, and an unworking AC (though it may just need a freon charge). It's a manual transmission, which might not be the best for island driving. The max speed limit on the island is 25 mph and the road usually is clogged with slow cars and drivers. The constant stop and start nature of the driving here would be a test while using a stick. But as a veteran manual drive, I like to think I'd be up to the challenge. There was a little rust on the body, but on this island everything steel gets that way soon. If the car's still available on Tuesday Sara and I may be heading over to pick it up (or at least get her opinion of it).

Another thing to come out of the test drive was an invitation for that evening. When I showed up at the car owner's house they were busy preparing a pad thai dinner for a roommate's birthday. As I'd hosted the truck owner's household the previous weekend at my barbecue, I was invited to come back and join in the celebration. Not having any plans for the evening, I happily accepted. The pad thai was good, the drinks were great and I was able to meet a number of new people who attended the party. After things winded down there most of us headed to the airport bar and had some fun with karaoke.

It was a good mix of Samoans and our group of palangi. The locals took their songs seriously and we were treated to some great vocal performances. One Samoan lady pulled an archeologist, from our group, up on stage and serenaded him and stole a kiss at the end of the song. I had a great time there and I have a date with the birthday girl to go back to the airport bar tomorrow, since both of our spouses are flying in on the same flight. Apparently the airport bar is the central social hub of the island on flight night.

Saturday was a get-stuff-done day for me. Most retailers on the island have limited hours on Saturday, so headed into town early and started running the errands that needed to happen before Sara's arrival. I stopped and snapped some photos of the dramatic scenery around Pago harbor along the way. This is a shot looking east across the harbor to the Starkist tuna cannery.

The harbor is one of the biggest resources Tutuila has. It's one of the few places that larger ships can land in this part of the Pacific. It's what makes Tutuila one of the more populous areas in this region. Supposedly the harbor is the remains of an old volcano cone. One side eventually eroded into the ocean and left a nice natural harbor in it's wake.

It was nice to play tourist for once. I've been seeing these sights everyday on my commute into the office, but I was happy to spend a rainy morning stopping to snap some pictures of the coastline and waves. I'll need to take some better pictures when the light is better and I've got a better camera than my old cellphone. The scenery around here is definitely worth sharing.

After playing tourist is was back to shopping around for the things I need to get the house up and running. Another attorney with the AG's office, who arrived on island a week ago, joined me for a run to the Ace hardware, the fabric store and a sewing shop.

The Ace hardware here is closer to a Home Depot back home. It's a large warehouse that sells most all the tools and hardware used on island. It was bustling when we were there. I even ran into one of my opposing counsels (who was wearing leather Ugg slippers, when it's 88 degrees and 100% humidity) shopping with one of his clients I have a case against, I'd also met this client on the hike to Fagatele Bay my first weekend here. The criminal AG I came with also saw one of the people that she charged with a misdemeanor on Thursday. I'm still adjusting to how small the community is here.

After Ace we went to ask a sewing shop about having curtains made. It was almost a sweatshop, with 10 little Chinese ladies huddled over their sewing machines. We got a price quoted and were told to go purchase the fabric and they'd have our custom window coverings in a few days. The fabric store was great. It had a huge wall with nothing but Hawaiian print fabric. It was tough to decide which bright color combination of flowers and leaves was going to grace my house for the next two years. Selections made, we took our materials back to the sewing shop. Should have our curtains ready on Tuesday.

We got invited to another gathering Saturday night by a neighbor of ours. It was at the house of an Australian couple out on Coconut Point. CP is one of the few communities close to Pago harbor to keep a more traditional Samoan feel rather than the suburbs-lite feel that seems to have crept into most other local villages. The houses are all clustered along one dirt road that run the length of the peninsula that divides ocean from lagoon. Most homes have traditional open-sided fales in their front yards, with a modern cinder block house behind it. People gather and hang out in the fales and keep their possessions in the modern buildings. The home we were visiting was down near the end, looking out over the ocean.

The gathering was mellow. We hung out on a covered front porch, drinking Stienlagers and talking. For most of the evening there were more Aussies than Americans at the table, even picked up a Kiwi later in the evening. I didn't know the rivalry between the New Zealanders and Australians ran as deep as it does. A little back and forth ribbing ensued, but everyone was a good sport and it was some great hang outs overall.

Once we got back to Freddie's Beach and dropped off the first member of the carpool at her house we had a bit of a mishap. Our (sober) driver accidently drove the front wheel of our work truck into an open hole left over from the ASPA repairs to a water pipe from a few weeks ago. After some late night efforts to free the car failed to yield any results, we decided this was a task best left until morning.

It took some pushing and shoving, but we were eventually able to pile enough rocks under the wheel to drive the car out. We were glad not to have to call for a tow of our work car. Somehow that would surely get back to our boss.

We even had some help digging out from the puppy Lulu.

Samoa in the News and Car Issues

After weeks of looking for new and researching the Samoas, I've come to the conclusion that there is relatively little available online about the Samoan Island chain. That said, it's nice to see a little news about the part of the world I'll be moving to in less than a week: Samoa Proposes Moving the International Date Line

Looks like "Independent" Samoa is looking to move forward a day, or potentially be a day off from the island Sara and I are moving. Should make for easy time travel once we're there.

Also, Sacramento got a parting shot at me over the weekend. I've been trying to sell my Jeep for the past few weeks. Unfortunately someone took a fancy to less than the whole of my Cherokee on Saturday and smashed the window and left with the stereo. All of a sudden my effort to get a decent price for my car just got much harder. I'm ready to put that aspect of mainland life behind me.