Tide Pools in Vatia

Last Saturday I went snorkeling in the tide pools in Vatia. Vatia is located on the north side of the island and to get there you have drive up a giant hill and then back down the other side (this is the same village you have to go to to hike up Mt. Alava). It's unclear whether buses actually go there or not. However, during orientation when we all went on a bus tour of the island, our bus broke down when we were almost to the top of the hill. We had to donate our water so that the bus driver could use it to cool off whatever was smoking under the hood. So anyway we were glad that our friend Dave, who works for the Coast Guard and has a truck, was coming with us and could drive.

Getting ready to climb down the rocks!

To get to the tide pools you have to stop before the village of Vatia at a great look-out spot where there is a sign for the National Park. It's a short hike down to the tide pools from there. It's pretty steep and basically at the end you're just climbing down the rocks. It's a little bit tricky to actually get into the tide pools because periodically big waves crash over the place where you have climb down the slippery rocks into the pools. If we had known how deep it was we probably could have just jumped in instead of climbing down the rocks. We all made it into the tide pools eventually. We waited for a big wave to come and then tried to make it down before another one came. A couple came while while we were still on the rocks so we just had to hang on and close our eyes.

 Once we got into the tide pools, the snorkeling was pretty cool. I took a lot of underwater photos, but only some of them turned out well. (The two photos of me are courtesy of Lauren). I saw an awesome blue fish and got a couple ok pictures but I couldn't get as close as I wanted to.

The cool blue fish

We also saw this cool bivalve mollusc but we weren't sure exactly what it was. It would open and shut if you waved your hand in front of it. I took a video of Lauren's hand making it open and close, but for some reason I couldn't upload it onto my blog :(

Malota

The beach at Malota

It’s been a while since I’ve updated, but a lot of stuff has been happening. On the 15^th was Amber’s birthday, but since it was a Sunday we couldn’t really do much to celebrate. Luckily we had the 16^th off from school for MLK day. Some students were easily convinced that we didn’t have school on Monday so that we could celebrate Amber’s birthday. Another student, when asked “Who’s Martin Luther King Jr.?,” shouted out, “He’s the guy who freed the slaves!”

So anyway on Monday we went to Malota (emphasis on the last syllable) to celebrate. Malota is a village way on the west side of the island—so far west that it’s actually on the north side. The buses don’t go that far and a lot of the road along the way is still damaged from the tsunami. I think the road actually ends a little ways after Malota. Basically almost all of Malota is owned by one family who are friends of our landlords so we got to have a barbeque and go swimming on a private beach with our landlord’s family, the family who owns the beach and a bunch of World Teachers who came along to celebrate. All of us teachers packed into the back of our landlord’s truck for the ride. We were probably quite a sight—a truck full of 8 palagis. I would say the 3 of us Leone teachers have almost attained celebrity status on the west side of the island. Everywhere we go we are followed by a chorus of students yelling, “Hi Ms. Quinn, Hi Ms. Abby, Hi Ms. Amber!” and enthusiastic waving.

Our landlord and his granddaughter

All the kids tried to fit in one kayak

The weather was not the best with the off and on rain, but it was still a fun day. All the little kids enjoyed swimming and playing in the sand immensely, in a way that you just don’t anymore after you reach a certain age. It’s fun to try to see the world through the eyes of an 8-year-old sometimes. We had tons of food including pineapple, rice, potato salad, bbq chicken, turkey, gravy, pork, sausage (no Samoan meal is complete without at least 3 different kinds of meat), pumpkin bread, cookies, and Quinn and I brought a cake. It was quite a feast.

Of course at school the next day I had several students bombard me with comments and questions: “I saw you on Saturday!” “What were you doing?” “Where were you going?” “That’s my village!” “Did you see me? I waved.” People don’t usually go any farther west than Leone unless they live in one of the villages because it’s mostly just houses and beaches. So a lot of students saw us who don’t normally see us on weekends and they were excited that we got to see them and their villages. 

Just on a side note since I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but there is a lot of village pride in AmSam. When introducing themselves the first thing people will say is “My name is ________ and I’m from the beautiful village of _______.” And, yes, they almost always use the word beautiful. Village loyalty is the cause of most of the fights that take place at school. Even if you are not personally involved in the disagreement, you have to go defend the person from your village. Students from different villages have staked out certain “turf” at school. Different areas around the campus belong to certain villages and that’s where those kids will hang out during lunch or before school. The area around my classroom is the Vailoa turf, home of the 2Ala boys. Quinn’s area belongs to Aloao (aka Alaska) or the Snow Boyz, and Amber’s classroom is in the Taputimu turf, home to the Tap Town Riders, who are also a rap group and have personalized t-shirts. It’s also pretty common to get the name of your village tattooed somewhere. It’s mostly the boys who are part of these “gangs” but the girls hang out in their designated turf as well. I use the word “gangs” loosely because they aren’t like what we would think of as gangs in the U.S. They seem a bit tamer. Yes, there are a lot of fights, but to my knowledge there are never weapons involved and people are never killed or even very seriously injured. That being said, it’s still a problem, and, in my opinion, an unnecessary cause of violence.

In other news, all the World Teachers took the Praxis test on Saturday the 14^th because it is a requirement for the WorldTeach program. For those who don’t know, the Praxis is a standardized that teachers need to take in order to get certified. There are also Praxis II tests which focus on certain subjects, kind of like the SAT and the SAT II. Since WorldTeach paid for us to take the test, it was a good deal for the people in our program who want to continue teaching after this year. But since I have other plans for the future, I saw it as just kind of a waste of my Saturday morning. It also doesn’t really make sense to have us take the test in the middle of our teaching year, but I think next year WordTeach is changing their policy and requiring volunteers to have taken and passed the Praxis before arriving in AmSam to teach.

I’m also continuing to play soccer with the Leone village team, but right now it’s the futsal league instead of regular soccer. The soccer season ended mid-December. Our team lost in the semi-finals and then lost during the consolation game so we ended up getting 4^th place over all. As I’ve mentioned before, futsal is basically just indoor soccer on a basketball size court with only 5 players on each team. The season doesn’t start until February but we started practicing at the beginning of January. I’ve made some friends on the team and it’s a nice break from doing school stuff. We practice at the school that’s about a 5 minute walk up the street from my house. Occasionally there are little kids who ride their bikes around or chase the balls for us. One of the little girls who is in 3^rd or 4^th grade decided to befriend me and likes to talk about random things. The other day she caught up with me on the way to practice and this is how our conversation went:

Me: “Hi!”

Her: “Are you a tomboy”

Me: Laughter….”Why? Do I seem like a tomboy?”

Her: “You walk like a boy.”

Me: “How do boys walk?”

She proceeded to demonstrate the “boy” walk and the “girl” walk while I watched.

Her: “Kids at school call me a tomboy.”

Me: “Well it’s ok to be a tomboy. Ok I’m going to go practice now.”

At school things have been a little crazy since the 2^nd semester started. For one thing, I keep getting kids added to my classes. A few are kids who just needed to rearrange their schedules but some are kids who have been moved up from the lower level. But this doesn’t really make sense with science since the upper and lower levels for the same grade don’t necessarily correspond. For example, lower level freshman take General Science, while upper level freshman take Physical Science (the class that I teach). So I’ve gotten more kids in my Physical Science and Biology classes because of that. And there are only 2 Biology class (I teach both) so they were already big and I’m getting ALL the new kids. Right now my 6^th period has 31 kids. I have 22 desks so kids just have to sit on the floor. I put in a request for more desks but realistically I don’t have much hope (my fan has been getting fixed for 2 months now). I only have one class in which kids don’t have to sit on the floor. I got a handful of new kids in my chemistry class just because I’m such a popular teacher J This is flattering, but is still stressful. It was already difficult to do lab activities and now it’s even worse. Last week I had my chemistry and biology classes extract their own DNA from their cheek cells and then look at it using microscopes. It took me a while to get all the materials and dig out test tubes from the abyss that is our chemistry closet, and it was stressful for me to be the only one monitoring 25-30 kids doing this activity, but I think it turned out ok. There were a few kids who got lost in the shuffle, but I think the majority of student really enjoyed the activity and thought it was really cool.

The school schedule has also been messed up to make room for Samoan Day practice which is scheduled for February 10^th, although inside sources tell us it will mostly like be pushed back a couple times because kids aren’t ready. During a usual schedule we have 6 periods every day, but now the schedule is we have 5 periods Monday through Thursday and 4 periods on Friday to allow for extra practice time. As far as I know during Samoan day each of the classes will perform traditional dancing and singing. I think it will turn out to be pretty cool once it all comes together. A lot of the kids hate going to practice, though. Amber and I got into trouble for harboring fugitives in our rooms while they were supposed to be practicing. These are kids who have said they aren’t going to come to school on Samoan Day anyway. I feel bad for some of the students I have who have lived in Hawaii or California for most of their lives and don’t speak Samoan. It would be difficult to learn the songs and dances while it comes pretty naturally to all the other students. But anyway I’m excited to watch all the kids perform when the actual day rolls along.

ChristmOZ

For our 2 week Christmas break Quinn and I decided a few months ago to go to Sydney, Australia. We left for Apia, Samoa on Tuesday the 20^th right after our last session of mid-service. The only places you can fly to from American Samoa are Samoa and Hawaii, so in order to go to Australia we had to fly to Apia first. Our flight to Sydney left early on Wednesday morning so we stayed overnight with some peace corps volunteers who live about 5 minutes from the airport in Apia. The taxi driver who dropped us off at their house offered to come pick us up in the morning to take us to the other airport about 45 minutes outside of Apia, where they have more international flights.

Between going out to dinner with the peace corps people and waking up early for our flight, we didn’t get much sleep that night. It didn’t help that the taxi driver came at 3 am when we had told him to come at 4 am. We had told him that we wanted to get to the airport at 5 am (since our flight was at 7 am) but he had misunderstood and thought our flight was at 5 am.  We made it to the airport with plenty of time to spare since even though it is the “bigger” airport in Apia it still only has two terminals. The 5 and half hour flight was pretty uneventful except we were annoyed that they didn’t give us any food or drink the entire flight. That’s what you get when you buy the cheapest flight I guess.

We were very excited when we landed, but we had to wait for a while to get through customs. And then we found the train we were supposed to take to get into the city. As soon as we got off the train, WOW talk about reverse culture shock! There were tons of people everywhere and they were all walking really fast! There were fast cars driving on the wrong side of the road! Lots of tall buildings and stores and traffic lights and lots of city noises. It was cold and rainy and there we were bumbling around with our huge backpacks, tired, hungry, getting in the way of all the fast, purposeful walkers, not knowing what to do first. Get a taxi (how? They all went so fast!) or find something to eat? We walked around for a while not really sure what to do. We somehow ended up in a mall type place, by which time we had gotten so overwhelmed we just decided to get in a taxi to go to Quinn’s friend, Amie’s, apartment. A kind man explained to us the light system of the taxis so we were able to flag one down.

When we got to Amie’s apartment we dropped off our backpacks and, since no one was home, we decided to walk around to find something to eat.  We found a little café to get sandwiches and then explored both of the nearby grocery stores in awe. So many choices! Usually there’s just the tuna/weird meat in a can aisle, the packaged cookie/chips aisle, and the pasta/large jars of mayonnaise aisle. After the grocery store foray we headed back to the apartment to shower and take a nap. I took the first hot shower I’ve taken in 5 months and it was AMAZING. I was difficult to make myself turn off the water and get out after 20 minutes. I then had the best nap of my life curled up under a thick comforter in a super comfortable bed.  So those were the highlights of the first day: the pleasantly cool temperature, grocery stores, and hot water. We continued to enjoy these and more simple pleasures throughout the trip.

Bondi Beach

The first few days in Sydney we explored the city. We saw the bridge and the opera house. We walked around the old part of town called The Rocks where they had a pretty cool market. We also explored the fabulous beaches, including the well-known Bondi (pronounced Bond-eye, not Bond-ee, we learned) and went on a coastal walk from Bondi to Coogee beach, visiting all the beaches in between. Oddly enough we didn’t actually want to spend too much time just sitting on the beach like many other tourists. We’ve been in the sun so much all year round that we wanted an escape, and, although the water was supposedly warm by Australian standards, it felt freezing to us! We explored the cool little beach neighborhoods, and indulged in large servings of frozen yogurt which does not exist in AmSam. Dairy products are hard to come by (we drink ultra-pasteurized milk that doesn’t half to be refridgerated until it’s opened and tastes a little funny), as well as anything frozen, so the combination is truly rare. We tended to get most of our food at the grocery store instead of eating out since Sydney is a pretty expensive city and we were definitely on a budget. One of our favorite food items was passion fruit yogurt which I had never had before but is excellent. We enjoyed it with muesli every morning.

Part of the coastal walk from Bondi to Coogee

 

Vineyards we visited in Hunter Valley

We took a couple day trip to Newcastle where we stayed in a hostel. It’s a smaller city, but still on the coast with nice beaches and a nice coastal walk as well. One of the days we were there we went on a wine tour in Hunter Valley which is famous for Semillon and shiraz wines. Our tour guide, Tex, was a large Australian with a thick accent and good sense of humor so that made it even more fun. We visited a total of 4 wineries, two large ones and two smaller ones, and a cheese shop where we got to sample many delicious cheeses. We learned a lot about the local wines and vineyards and drank a lot of wine throughout the day!

 

Back in Sydney we explored more of the city including the botanical gardens and Chinatown which was filled with tons of cheap stuff so it was definitely the place for us. Christmas and New Years to me felt more like the 4^th of July or Memorial day at home than anything else. I’ve never had a Christmas or New Years in a place that wasn’t cold and snowy. But in Australia it’s summer during that time so everyone parties and has barbeques and goes to the beach all day. On New Year’s there were fireworks from the bridge at midnight which were pretty awesome. We watched from the little beach near Amie’s apartment since going into the city would have been madness. We had been there earlier in the day visiting the gardens and there were already huge lines of people waiting to get into certain places, no doubt prime firework viewing spots, at 10 in the morning! Even getting out of the city at around 6 pm was tough because certain streets had been closed off and the buses were rerouted and packed with people. I think we got out just in time!

We were also able to take day trips to the Blue Mountains and to a wild life reserve a couple hours west of Sydney. It was nice to have public transportation that had a schedule and came on time and didn’t stop running at 6pm! At the wild life park we were able to pet kangaroos and koalas and saw a lot of other cool animals like birds, wombats, wallabies, bearded dragons, and penguins. The Blue Mountains were one of my favorite things that we did. The temperature was a lot cooler there and it was perfect for hiking. We saw a lot of beautiful mountain scenery and waterfalls. It reminded me of hiking in Pennsylvania in the fall.

Waterfall in the Blue Mountains

We left Sydney to fly back to Apia on the night of the 1^st. It was a long trip that is kind of a blur in my mind because of sleep deprivation. I pretty much had half a seat on the way to Apia because of a large Samoan sitting next to me. We also arrived in Apia just a few days after they had switched time zones, so we got there on the morning of the 2^nd which was a Monday. We had a while until our next flight and also had to travel 45 minutes back to the other airport (we had to go back to the other airport because we had originally bought our tickets for the wrong day, not taking into account the time change) so we decided to stop by the market. However, there wasn’t really anyone at the market and everything seemed sort of dead. We even spied a few people who looked like they were going to church, so maybe they still kind of thought it was Sunday the 1^st instead of Monday the 2^nd. Then we thought we should just head to the airport and we might be able to get on an earlier flight since we had done that a couple times before. The airport seemed kind of like it was closed too. There was one other person waiting there who said he was supposed to be on the 8:30 am flight. We had also heard from someone else that there were supposed to have been flights even before that. Ours wasn’t scheduled until 10:30 so we still held out hope that a plane would come. Confused and exhausted, there was nothing else to do besides take a nap on the bench. After waiting for what seemed like forever, more passengers started showing up and when we saw a pilot walk by we knew we were truly in business! I think our plane probably left around 11 am. I’m not sure what happened to the earlier flights but that’s just how it is in Samoa.

After our 30 minute flight from Apia to Pago Pago it was like we had traveled back in time because it was then the morning of the 1st again. We slept the rest of the day, woke up for a few hours to eat, and then slept the rest of the night. It was good that we got a couple of days to recover before school started again on Wednesday.

All in all it was a fun trip, but I wish I’d had more time and more money to explore some other areas of Australia. I also think the experience was different for me coming from AmSam than it would have been coming from the US. While things like petting koalas are cool no matter where you are coming from, we also immensely enjoyed things like not sweating for an entire day and wandering up and down the aisles of the grocery stores. It’s good to be back but that also means I have to go back to eating tuna and pasta and sweating 24/7.