I figure now that I've had real Internet access for nearly a month, some video uploads are long overdue. I didn't shoot much video during my Peace Corps experience, mostly because I was busy taking still photos. But I managed a few. Please note that all of these can be seen larger at my YouTube page here.

I hope you're well. Videos below.

The Savai'i House at Maluafou College in Apia rehearsing their siva for Culture Day 2009.

Akanese singing on the day I met her.

Me and Akanese playing Popo Mano.

Akanese and me playing a children's version of Go Fish.

Me and Akanese playing a Chick-ee-Bom (sp?).

Bored with Jenga, a couple of us built a tunnel that Scout inadvertently destroys. Hilarity ensues.

The 10.4 class (my English class) sings Herman's Hermits' "Henry VIII".

The 10.4 class (my English class) sings The Beatles' "Hey Jude".

Jack: Lemon, that’s the smartest thing you’ve ever said.

Lemon: Really? What about 3 years ago when I said there should be more TV shows about cake?

This was the conversation I just watched on On-Demand “30 Rock”. I started clapping. Hey America, why are there so many shows about cake now? I admit they are hypnotically fascinating, but still, it's absurd how many hours of American television are devoted to baking and assembling elaborate cakes. In the three weeks since I’ve been back, I’ve learned that straws inserted into lower cake tiers are used for weight displacement whereas dowels are used to hold cakes in place. A Comcast guide search reveals the following shows: Ace of Cakes, Amazing Wedding Cakes, Cake Boss, Cake Boss: Next Great Baker, (many many episodes of) Food Network Challenge, and Ultimate Cake Off. I’m overwhelmed.

It’s a weird overwhelmed though. I don’t feel hit over the head; I don’t feel the weight of cake shows crashing down on me. It’s a more subconscious phenomenon where, for example, yesterday I watched hours of cake shows for no other reason other than my brain seems extra susceptible to bizarre meaningless American television programming. My brain has spent the last 2 years taking it slow, and now even a lukewarmly stimulating TV show is enough to captivate my brain for hours.

But it’s not just TV. Christmas shopping was insanely difficult this year. Browsing the shelves at Borders one night last week, I walked around the store for an hour and a half. It was a strange feeling though, because even though it physically felt like boredom-fueled aimless wandering, I wasn’t bored at all; in fact, I was enthralled. It was as though something caught my eye, and then I was distracted by a shiny object, and then another shiny object would catch my eye, and then another and another. After shopping for a while, I ran into some friends of mine. I told them quite earnestly, “This store is so big!” They found this hysterical.

People keep asking me about how I’ve been dealing with the cold. But the truth is the cold isn’t all that big of a factor—it’s been freezing, but it’s such an easy thing to remedy, I haven’t minded it too much. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs comes into play, and the things at the bottom of the pyramid, while most pertinent, have been the easiest to resolve. It’s the more ethereal, more subconscious stuff near the top that’s been most difficult to address. I can get myself a sweatshirt or a blanket to deal with the cold, but it’s difficult to even realize how overstimulated I’ve been, let alone try to alleviate the issue.

So I’ve mostly been taking life slow, trying not to overwhelm my brain with unnecessary thought processes. I’ve been enormously unproductive since I got home. Blogging has been out of the question. Sorry about that, but it was a low priority anyway, and assembling 500 words of coherent thought was out of the question.

But now things are settling down a little, and maybe life is getting back on track. I could elaborate, but there’s a cake show on TLC right now, and my attention’s divided.

I hope you’re well. Pictures soon.

There was a moment in the long car ride home last night when conversation with my parents got around to tragic things that happened to people we know so peripherally that it wasn’t important enough to share internationally but now that I’m home I may as well know. “This person’s aunt died” and “The mom of the boy you might remember from little league is in the early stages of dementia” and “That little girl from church who’s at least 8 years younger than you is taller than you.” Most of the ride was cool, but this conversation made me a little tense.

To draw an embarrassing literary parallel, it reminded me a little of the scene from Dan Brown’s latest, “The Lost Symbol”, in which Robert Langdon is drowned in a vat of amniotic fluid. Brown claims it’s a form of torture in the sense that when you come out of your natal relapse, reality is nearly too much to bear.

The Peace Corps provides geographic isolation, and with that comes a certain amount of emotional detachment. There’s also a relief in returning home after the Peace Corps where it feels like something difficult has finished and I felt a small sense of invincibility. And then reality punched me in the face.

It wasn’t just that conversation, of course. Living in the developing world, one occasionally idealizes America, and returning home can definitely bring one back to Earth. America is cold and dry and busy and expensive and not quite the haven of efficiency and convenience I remember.

When Phil and I sat down in the waiting area at the shipping agent yesterday as the lady behind the desk took care of Scout’s paperwork, Phil and I reveled in the fact that we’d just been assured that this seemingly bureaucratic process that might take forever in Samoa would be taken care of in 10 minutes.

The process took 2.5 hours. Taumafai atili pea, America.

The other analog that comes to mind is one Jim used to lay on us after youth ministry retreats in high school: After the Transfiguration, Jesus looks at Peter, James, and John and essentially says, “You can’t tell anyone about this because no one’s really gonna understand.” It’s kinda like Jesus’ version of the “What happens in Vegas...” tagline.

But the Peace Corps experience is all about that. Even with the blog, even with modern technology and text messaging and Skype and somewhat frequent access to Facebook, no one besides the people who were there know what really happened. We can tell you stories and we can paint a damn good picture, we can show hundreds of photos and perhaps some of you actually came to visit. But even then, you can’t really know what it was like.

I was chatting with a friend from CNET on GChat this morning, and I asked her what I missed during the last two years. She gave me a 20-word response, which was surely informative, but I can’t really say I know what happened. Only the people directly involved can really know.

And that’s a lonely feeling for a returned volunteer: I’m surrounded by people who don’t know. And now it’s the people who do know who I’m texting and Skyping and looking for on Facebook.

Sorry if this is on big downer. Honestly coming home has been very exciting and joyful, and even the 4 hours that it took to get the cat through Customs wasn’t all that bad. My parents setup my bedroom, the cat has adjusted surprisingly fast (save for getting along with the dogs), and the Facebook message board has been all warm and friendly. I swear I’m not complaining. I’m just trying to paint a picture of the experience.

I’m also sorry I’ve been away for the last couple days. I’ll catch you up on the stuff you missed tomorrow.

Finally, if I gave you a business card with my phone number on it, be advised that number doesn’t work. My cellular carrier, who assured me 26 months ago that they’d keep my account on hold until my return, instead decided to cancel my account without informing me (by their admission). I don’t want to say who it is, but I will say that the name rhymes with “Kay Tee and Tee”.

I hope you’re well. Pictures will be posted tomorrow.

We're getting ready to head over to Italiano Pizza for Phil's and my last meal in country. I've run into all sorts of obstacles all day. Maybe I'll tell you all about them someday. In the Resource Room right now is Jenny S. 82, Kaelin, Supy, and Joey. Phil is in the Peace Corps office's shower. I figured I'd use my remaining Internet time to post.

There is a big debate over whether our flight will leave at 11:59 p.m. or 12:59 a.m. tomorrow. Either way, the shipping agent wants the cat at the airport at 8:00 p.m.; the likelihood of us making it there by that time is dubious. And anyway, I don't want the cat stuck in a box for so long.

The training group was in town today. Danny helped me unload the car this morning. I got to say goodbye to Nancy and Jenny and Rob.

There's still a lot that's not packed at my house. And honestly, I don't think the rest of it will get packed. This list includes:Bed sheets and pillowcases;

Dish soap and dish drainer;

Mop;

Etc.We are going to Y-Not for pre-pizza drinks now. Next post from America.

I hope you're well.

Moving out is exhausting. When did I acquire so much stuff?

Less than 24 hours left in Samoa.

I could blog, but I can barely keep my eyes open. Going to sleep now.

I’m late constantly. Senior year of high school I was late to second-period English nearly every day. At eCivis, where management operated like time Nazis, I was often admonished for showing up to work 4 or 5 minutes after the 7:30 a.m. call time. In the training village, every morning was a contest between me, Supy, and Sara to see who would show up last. I have no moral problem with lateness, but I still felt pangs of guilt as I was running late for today’s PTA Luncheon.

I was supposed to be at school at noon, but this morning was busy and by 12:20 I arrived at my house by cross-town taxi, and scrambled to feed the cat and make myself presentable for lunch. And as I nearly rushed out the door, I looked around at my messy house which has only become more chaotic as my days have grown increasingly busy and things have fallen more into a state of neglect.

So I dropped everything and washed the dishes.

It’s difficult to think of the last time life was so busy and stressful. It’s a pitiful moment when you have to test the bounds of acceptable tardiness because there are menial-but-essential household chores to be done. If it’s not a sign that life is out of control, I don’t know what is.

And, as far as I can tell, life will only continue at this frenetic pace until I board the plane Monday night. There are lots of administrative things I still have to do: close my bank account, close my landline, close my dial-up Internet account, write up my official Description of Service, take the cat for her final vet appointment, take me to my final doctor appointment, get all the necessary cat paperwork to the shipping agent.

Then there are the social obligations, which are arguably less essential, but still obligatory, and definitely more time consuming. Rotaract is celebrating my going-away tonight, Staff Dinner tomorrow night, Host Family Friday night.

And normal responsibilities still carry on. The unflushable blog is breathing down my neck, tomorrow morning I’ll be helping Kaelin edit the co-teaching video, I need to make a CD with all of the files—grade calculating spreadsheet, vector-based logo, letterhead, etc.—I’ve developed for school over the past 2 years.

And between all of this, there’s all the normal trappings of moving out: purging (most) of my possessions, packing up the things I’m keeping, picking up souvenirs for the family back home, etc.

At this point, it’s all a blur.

So maybe doing the dishes this afternoon wasn’t menial or pitiful. Maybe it was just a nice way of taking a break from the warp-speed pace of leaving. Washing dishes made things feel normal, if only for a moment.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

I treated my Year 13s to McDonald's breakfast this morning before we headed to the Internet cafe.

At the Internet cafe.

My pule dancing at today's PTA Luncheon. I forgot to mention above that the PTA Luncheon didn't actually get started until around 1:15. I had no problem showing up 45 minutes late.

Amanda, me, Tafale.

Standing room only in the Great Hall.

Me with a couple of year 12s.

Suasami and Bernie are also leaving after this year.

Me with a bunch of 11.1s.

A couple of year 11s stopped me outside the hall and requested I take their picture.

Colleen wins best in computers for year 11.

A bunch of the 11.2s.

Staff meeting after clean-up.

Though Prizegiving is tomorrow, I was expecting today to be high on the ceremonial side. There are a bunch of teachers leaving, and the year is drawing to a close, and it only seemed appropriate for there to be some intimate acknowledgments of the bonds we’ve formed as a staff and as a school and while tomorrow is a large celebration with pomp and circumstance and family and friends, I imagined today might be a day for some calm before the storm.

But today was all business. The moment I arrived at school the secretary handed me the agenda for tomorrow’s program and asked that I turn it into a booklet handout. I had last year’s design saved, and I substituted some of the graphics with a bunch of vector-based graphics I built for the Peace Corps t-shirt, and by the time morning assembly was over—mark the time, 10:00 a.m.—I had a draft ready for my pule’s approval. I handed him the design as he walked out of the Great Hall. He nodded emphatically, said, “This is very nice!”, and then walked away without waiting for feedback.

I went over it again with the school secretary, who had some changes of her own. She wanted to put the starting time for tomorrow’s event at the top of the agenda, “8:30 – Taimi Amata”. I smiled and nodded and ignored her suggestion.

We’ve been having a talent competition of sorts at my school over the past few weeks, and though the entire agenda was written in Samoan, the talent events were written in English: Soloist Finals, Duet Finals, and “Agapela Champs 2010”. That last one seemed a little ridiculous to me, so I changed the invented Agapela to the traditional Italian-borrowed “A Cappella”. This caused a brief controversy among staff, as many thought I had no idea what I was talking about.

Once we finally started making copies of the program, my Vice Pule asked, “Did you fix fa’aisuaso?” Apparently the word should have been Fa’aiuaso, translation unclear at press time, but no one had told me this until the copy machine had started. I quickly hit cancel and fixed the mistake.

As the day wore on, I made 360 double-sided copies for tomorrow’s program, and after the secretary got sidetracked, I ended up folding about 250 copies of the program in half. The entire project took about 4 hours, and I was all too happy to get out of school this afternoon.

Once I was got out of school I went to the Peace Corps office, picked up the brand new Peace Corps t-shirts, headed to Italianos for dinner, and then went to the airport to see Dan and Jordan off.

I got back to my house around 1:15 a.m., only to be greeted by my pule who emerged from the campus’s shadows. “Can you come early tomorrow morning? The programs are wrong. We need to re-print them,” he told me.

Even though I’d received his cursory approval, the thumbs-up from the school secretary, and my vice pule’s (late) blessing, my principal wants me at school at 5:30 a.m. to redo the program. How fun.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

In order to make a big show of the Dux award (in America we'd call this the Valedictorian), my school gives the winning student 4 different trophies, all of which must be returned next year so they can be awarded again. In order to document the 4 trophies, the Prizegiving Committee asked me to take a photo of them today. I suggested Ms. Peteru be in the photo. She happily agreed.

My folded programs in the foreground. All of which must be discarded.

Blakey and me out for Dan and Jordan's going away this evening.

Wednesday marked the third year in a row I missed my family’s annual Martha Stewart viewing. The night before Thanksgiving every year, we invite friends over to watch the same Martha Stewart Thanksgiving Special, circa 1987. For most major holidays our family would go to someone else’s house to celebrate, but we always hosted Thanksgiving, so it’s always strange to spend the holiday without home-field advantage. But I must admit, part of the benefit of staying in Samoa for my school’s Prizegiving was it meant I’d get to spend one last Thanksgiving with the Peace Corps.

As I’ve said a thousand times before on the blog, we go all out for American holidays here—Thanksgiving, Halloween, and the Fourth of July tend to be big, jolly affairs. And yesterday was no exception.

Our monthly stipend provides more than enough for food, and certainly none of us is hungry, but it’s still a rare occasion to have a large American-style meal served. Sitting with a bunch of trainees from group 83 who are still used to either American-sized portions or the luxury of training itself, many of them filled their plates with small, sparse piles of mashed potatoes and turkey. You eat like a bird, group 83.

At the other end of the spectrum were those of us who’ve been out in the cold for 2+ years. Looking around at the other picnic tables, I saw a bunch of group 81s gorging themselves on plates of food piled to the point of absurdity.

After last year’s failed garlic mashed potatoes, I went in on a bowl of Poor Man’s Macaroni and Cheese—i.e. macaroni shells with parmesan cheese—with garlic-infused olive oil. It was not the most appetizing side dish on the table, but it at least it was served this year.

There was college football on TV, but few volunteers sat inside to watch. After dessert was served a bunch of us threw on our trunks or two-pieces and took a dip in the pool. A rather intense game of Three Flies Up ensued—the kind that ends in tears and broken fingers. It was a good time though. At one point I decided I was done and began to climb out of the pool, only to have my third fly land directly in my arms. It was cool.

Though the party was set to end around 7:00, the 83s were scuttled away at 5:30, which was sad.

The rest of us sat around chewing the fat until it was time to go.

Yeah. Third Thanksgiving is in the books. Bring on the Christmas music.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Admin Officer Denise dines with Supy, Paul, Otis (her husband), and Phil.

Lindsey, Jenny 83, and me.

Kyle and me. Kyle went to Notre Dame. Congratulations, Kyle.

Me and Jenny S. 82.

Joey and Mika dive for one of my Three Flies passes.

The night of my college graduation, Sara and Jen came to my RA suite to help me pack up my possessions. Even though my room was furnished and I had no kitchen, I had somehow acquired a lot of stuff, and it was a headache packing and loading everything in the car. Moving apartments after college was even more of a headache since by then I had kitchen stuff and a futon and furniture and the like. But moving out of my house in Samoa is a whole different animal since I can only keep a suitcase or two.

My goal is one suitcase. Air New Zealand charges a whopping WST$140 for a second suitcase, and since I’m already paying to register the cat as cargo, I’d just assume keep the baggage cost minimal. One suitcase after two years is certainly a challenge, but I think it may also prove to be a good way of separating the wheat from the chaff.

I still tell people that ideally my house will burn down the day before I leave, and I won’t have to lug any of my junk home. There are things here that I like, but very little that I honestly need to take with me.

I plan to take as few articles of clothing as possible. According to RPCV Cale, the nicest clothes he had in the Peace Corps didn’t hold a candle to his clothes in The States. The Peace Corps lifestyle is rugged and unforgiving to clothing. I brought my OA uniform from college and my lucky USC football t-shirt, and last night I started mulling over whether or not I should bring those back to America for sentimental reasons. Right now I’m leaning toward no.

Books are a little perplexing. On the one hand, they are some of the easiest stuff to unload since the Peace Corps has a healthy library and volunteers tend to have nothing better to do with their time. But then I have a couple books on my shelf that I actually want to read, and it seems silly to get rid of them only to return to America and go through the trouble of buying/borrowing the same book again.

Besides moving out, the one other major problem facing my exit is I have a lot of gift-giving to do: teachers, students, the host family in the training village, the Indian missionaries, etc. My hope is these two problems will cancel themselves out. If I give everything away, I won’t have to worry about getting it to fit in the suitcase.

I think this will work without too much difficulty if I keep an eye on things. I’ve invited people to come “shopping” at my house.

PCV Kyle asked how much I wanted for my cinderblock bookshelf. I told him if he was willing to pay to move it, then it was his for free.

Just get it out of her.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Bag of clothes by the door ready to go to the Peace Corps free box.

There's so much crap in the kitchen. Hey Samoan readers, anybody want anything?

Last year I remember talking to Cale and Sara around the time they had 2 weeks left, and I told them they should think of it as essentially a 2-week tropical vacation before they returned to America. Presumptuous fool. This last week has been just as busy as the rest of my time here, and the rowers show no sign of slowing. I will be busy all the way down to the wire. Here are some other odds and ends from the week:

The phrase “interpersonal politics” from Sunday, November 14’s blog post caught on for a hot minute among group 81. I think Dan used it 19 times the day after the post went live.

Blakey, in addition to housesitting, is watching a kitten. Everyone swears this kitten is more well-behaved than Scout, but I beg to disagree. Scout’s manageable.

Oh by the way, I’ve been using my old camera that I broke during training. The viewfinder is still broken, so the photographer doesn’t have an exact idea of the photo (s)he is taking, but it still takes photos. Yes, mostly I am the photographer, but I figure at events like Prizegiving and such where I’m asking people to take pictures of me, this will be more of an issue.

The other fun part of this is that this is the first camera I used when I arrived in Samoa, and now it will (hopefully) be the last. Full circle. Book ends.

Finishing the Peace Corps is really expensive.

Finishing the Peace Corps involves a lot of paperwork.

I finally finished “Six Feet Under” today. I can understand why fans and critics enjoyed the series finale so much, although I must say in the time leading up to then I really hated just about every character except for Keith, Maggie, and Federico. And Nathanthiel, who I think was the best character for the entire 5 seasons.

I briefly mentioned the Avanoa Tutusa Health Fair in Sunday’s post. I want to briefly mention it again and say that it was amazingly successful. Props go out to Joey and the rest of the Avanoa Tutusa crew.

Samoa is obsessed with Brad Paisley/Alison Krause’s “Whiskey Lullaby”. Many of my students know how to play it on guitar. No one seems to know and/or care it’s about severe alcoholism. Oh well.

Tomorrow night is the Peace Corps Book Club’s second meeting. I ditched the first on account of not being interested in the book. This one I’m going to have to miss because I never acquired the book. I’m still going to have to pay for the book. I’ll read it once I get back to The States.

Apong was dying to buy my laptop off me, and in the end I’ve held out to sell to Suasami and her Ecumenical Women’s church group. Unclear on whether or not the latter will actually come through with payment. Worse comes to worst, I’ll have to bring my laptop back to the United States.

I only voted for one student award during Tuesday’s meeting: Best All-Rounder. It came down to Fou and Lanuola, and while I don’t know either that well, Lanuola just seems like a nice person. So I voted. She lost.

One thing I didn’t realize was we delineated between “Most Reliable Student” and “Most Honest Student”. I think Most Honest might be syntax error. Just a thought.

The furniture at Blakey’s housesitting house is right out of “The Golden Girls”. Check out the photos below for proof.My school is getting a JICA volunteer to replace me in March! I'm so excited!That’s all I got for this week. I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Blakey's Golden Girls furniture.

The boys dressed up as girls dancing for the school.

Christina and Umuafu from my 9.2 class sing a duet for the school.

Losi and Akari sing their duet.

The year 13s put on a show.

Blakey's obnoxious kitten Good Times.

In addition to our principal, there are 4 staff members leaving at the end of this school year. The head of the Commerce department prematurely resigned his position when he received a verbal job offer from the Ministry of Education that didn’t pan out, one of the Samoan teachers received a scholarship to attend a Masters program at the National University of Samoa, I am returning to The States, and Suasami—the English teacher I sit next to at Interval most days—is retiring. The Commerce HOD has stopped showing up to school, and the Samoan teacher isn’t really leaving per se, so Suasami and I are in a club of our own. And today we bought tea.

As I’ve said many times before on the blog, most schools don’t have tea. If teachers want to drink tea at Interval, they have to buy it. And most schools certainly don’t offer a small pastry with daily tea. But my school, with all of its functional money management, is able to offer staff members a cup of tea and a panepopo or a scone or a muffin for just about every day of school. But now that we’ve essentially reached the end of the school year, and the tea committee has set off for India, daily tea has become less of a guarantee. So Suasami and I stepped up to the plate—errr—the saucer.

Celebrating your own special occasion by buying stuff for others is how things are done in Samoa. When Apong’s son was born he bought lunch for the staff. When the secretary got married she bought lunch for the staff. For my friend Dev’s birthday a few weeks back he bought rounds of drinks at the bar. And it was somewhat obligatory that Suasami and I would buy tea in observance of our own leaving.

Had I been going it alone, I would have bought Pinati’s for the staff. Pinati’s is sort of like Samoan Taqueria food; i.e. voluminous and cheap. But it still works out to between $3 and $4 per person, and Suasami thought that too expensive. She suggested we get cinnamon bread from some bakery she likes in Mata’utu, panekeke from the same place (deep-fried balls of dough somewhat similar to doughnut holes), and Sky Flakes crackers.

As the non-Samoan half of the duo, I decided to stay out of the decision-making process. Whatever she thought best was cool with me.

We went to the bakery this morning. “We have to wait until nine o’clock,” she told me when I arrived on campus. As it turns out, the bakery needed a couple hours to come up with 80 balls of panekeke. In fact, they needed until ten o’clock.

But we rolled in an hour early, so we killed time browsing the shop next door. Have you ever been really bored so your mind fixates on things to read even though they’re not particularly interesting? I read the warning label on the packaging for a bath mat, and I think Suasami was ready to buy it for me. I had to talk her down.

In the end, the bakery worked out just fine, and we got back to school with lots of time to spare. Once tea was served, art teacher Kolenio did the traditional Samoan announcement that is said when someone provides a meal. Ears perked up when my name was called out, and many staff members came to thank me and shake my hand once the meal was over.

Ehhh. I do what I can.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Business Studies teacher Tone, Art teacher Konelio, Tafale, and Lofale.

Today was a cleaning day on campus.

Dance practice was held after school as everyone gets ready for next Tuesday's Prizegiving.

This billboard went up near my house a couple weeks ago. Tonight I realized Miss Samoa's sash is written in Monotype Corsiva.

I assumed too much. Students Filifili and Marie from last year’s graduating class wanted school magazines, and I proposed meeting up for lunch, and we’d all agreed to meet at noon today at the fish market. Yes, the school day typically ends at 1:30 p.m., and even by Peace Corps policy I shouldn’t be off school grounds until that point. But given the lackadaisical nature of the last two weeks on which no day have students and staff dispersed after 11:30, I figured making a lunch date for noon would be no problem.

Murphy’s law. I sat down at 11:00 a.m., well after other teachers had gathered in the Staff Room for Interval—I’d been printing colour photos on the vice pule’s machine because hers is the only colour printer in the school that still has ink. We sat and ate buttered masipopo and drank tea for a while before my pule started the meeting.

This has happened before. I’ve gone through the blog archives, and I can’t find any other mention of it, but it’s certainly happened enough times, as soon as the meeting started, in my gut I feared the worst.

There’s no warning. In my text to Phil, I used the word “ambush”. Most staff meetings last 20 minutes, if that. But every once in a while—often on the rare occasion when I have somewhere else to be—a staff meeting will go on for 2+ hours.

At 11:57 a.m., I asked the teacher sitting next to me if she thought the meeting would go on much longer. She laughed in response and said, “Maybe two more minutes.”

Yeah. Right.

It’s true, I should have seen it coming. Prizegiving is next Tuesday, and since there’s probably not going to be school on Friday, there’s a lot of logistics to work out between now and then. In addition to forming committees and working out what teachers will wear and who is in charge of what, there’s also the rather obvious issue of what students should be awarded which prize.

It was sophomore year of high school when I first heard the quotation, “The worst part of democracy is that everyone gets a voice.” We sat there as a staff this morning, collectively mulling over which students should receive awards like “Best Sportswoman,” “Most Reliable”, and “Best All-Rounder”.

Note: When I made the label for the Best All-Rounder trophy, I typed out Best All Around. Both the Samoans and the Indian Missionaries thought this was hilarious. What a fool I was. Clearly the award should be titled Best All-Rounder. Whatever that is.

There were long discussions with debates that went on and on. For Most Reliable, there was a tie in the voting, so arguments had to continue.

During all of this, I’m receiving text messages from Marie and Filifili wondering where I am. At one point I feigned receiving a phone call as an excuse to leave the room to go pack up my laptop so I could get the hell off campus once the meeting finally ended.

I finally ended up leaving at 12:45 p.m., nearly 2 hours after the meeting started, and 45 minutes after I was supposed to meet up with my lunch party.

But at least we’ve all had input on who should be awarded Best All-Rounder.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

My pule mid-meeting.

Filifili, Marie, and Marie's friend (he told me his name, but it escapes me now).

Me, Marie, and Filifili.

Marie, in true Matt's Samoa Blog style, couldn't resist a blurry self-portrait.

Every Monday night—at least through January 2011—there are three flights that leave Faleolo International Airport (APW): one to Los Angeles, one to Fiji, and one to Auckland. There are a bunch of other flights to Fiji and Auckland, but Monday still ends up being central in terms of departure dates. For group 81, this means weekly departures scheduled between 15 November and 20 December. This week we have a bye, but I’m staying in Goodbye Mode anyway because the Indian Missionaries leave for the connection in Fiji tonight. Their departure provided a strange preview of what my own goodbye will look like.

As soon as I arrived on campus this morning, there was a rush to finish the list of awardees for next week’s Prizegiving. Somehow the fact that I and the Indian Missionaries are not Samoan gives us an air of impartiality in deciding which students should be awarded prizes. I don’t necessarily agree with this perception, but I agreed to take on the responsibility if only because it meant I got to make flashy Excel spreadsheets.

Once the list was checked and re-checked, and everyone was satisfied with the list, it was time for Interval. It’s funny how 2 years ago I may have missed the subtle hints that seating at luncheons like today’s was special. I knew the Indian Missionaries were leaving today, and I figured there would be some sort of program at our staff meeting, but I maintain there were still subtle, subconscious cues that helped the event run smoothly.

Thanpuii made a speech in which she thanked the staff on behalf of her, Apong, and Maengi, and she apologized for any shortcomings or faults. After 9 years of living here, Thapuii and Maengi know the drill.

Then our staff sang a goodbye song. Tolo, the other computer teacher, accompanied on guitar, and staff around the room swayed to and fro. A few times it sounded like the song had ended, and then a teacher—twice Peteru, once Tuuau—called out the beginning of the next verse, and the room broke out into song once more.

I admit I had to hold back tears, which doesn’t bode well for my own goodbye. I’m going to be a mess.

I wanted to give gifts, though I hadn’t purchased anything. But as it turns out, I have a house full of stuff I’m looking to give away in the next 2 weeks, so I went shopping in my kitchen and bedroom.

For Maengi, my small wok and my tea kettle (she’d asked for these). For Thanpuii, my mini MagLite I never opened in my 2 years here. For Apong, my electric guitar tuner. And for everyone—I admit this was a little bizarre—an Australian keychain! I bought a bunch in Sydney in January, and they’ve been collecting dust in my bedroom ever since. Oh well. Better late than never.

Dan and Jordan leave next Monday night. And then a week after that, me and Phil. We’re down to the wire.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below!

My shelf has become pretty bare with books and DVDs going to the Peace Corps office and papers going to recycling.

Maengi and I took pictures tonight before we said goodbye.

The last week has been busy. Time has sped up to a fever pitch, and keeping up with everything seems impossible. Several times this week I’ve felt like I briefly stopped paying attention to the calendar, and without my knowing, two days had past. Now that exams are over, school has become far more casual, and the rest of the day is spent either preparing to go back to The States, or finding new ways to remain in denial about going back to The States. Either way, the blog has been put on the backburner, and I apologize. The following is a brief re-cap of the week:Monday, 15 November

Teachers start turning in their marks to me to be compiled by my fancy Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It’s becoming an increasing problem that I have not taught anyone to use said spreadsheet. At 5:30 p.m. I meet up with a bunch of the 81s who’ve gathered to see Erin and Chris to the airport. We (i.e. Me, Koa, Dan, AJ, Blakey, K8, Erin, Chris) take a taxi van to pick up Chris’s cat, and then we all head to the airport. It takes Chris about an hour to sort out registering her cat as cargo. It provides a nice preview for checking Scout. Blakey and Dan sleepover at my house.

Tuesday, 16 November

More compiling marks at school. Blakey and Dan are still at my house when I’m finished, so the three of us walk to Pinati’s for lunch. I spend the afternoon napping. Dan comes over for dinner, which consists of uncooked toast (i.e. bread) and over-medium eggs. Dan falls asleep in the middle of “Rain Man” while I finish marking my science exams. I finish marking around 11:30 p.m. and proceed to watch 5 hour-long episodes of “Six Feet Under”. An important character disappeared, and it took 5 hours to resolve this. I couldn’t turn it off.

Wednesday, 17 November

I show up at school briefly to hand out print-outs of compiled marks, and collect a few more mark sheets from teachers. I sneak out to attend the Avanoa Tutusa Health Fair at the National University of Samoa’s gymnasium. Jordan and I end up leading aerobics classes for two hours. I’m all about the cardio-kickboxing. Later in the evening, a bunch of us go out to dinner and drinks with Kaelin’s friends who are visiting from America. My camera disappears. Sad.

Thursday, 18 November

Teachers become increasingly annoyed with me as I am the keeper of the marks and I show up late. I can’t help but cop to being ka’a. I rent a car for a day so I can move some stuff out of my house. Most of my books and DVDs go to the Peace Corps office, and I have $35.60 worth of glass bottles to return to Apia Bottling Company. After running errands I take the rental car to the south side of the island and hang out with my host family in the training village. No photos since my camera disappeared Wednesday.

Friday, 19 November

I told my school the day before that I would be late on Friday. It takes a while to get from one side of the island to the other, and I roll in around 11:30 a.m. School has essentially finished for the day at this point, but my vice pule wants print-outs of all the compiled marks. This takes an obnoxiously long time because besides me and the vice pule, the secretary and the librarian get involved, and there are way too many cooks in the kitchen. I return the rental car and head to the Peace Corps office where the 83s are in a state of shock over visiting their permanent sites. After they head back to their host villages, a bunch of us head back to Blakey’s for dinner.

Saturday, 20 November

Saturday morning involved a heated exchange between me and the Samoan Port Authority. I probably shouldn’t get into details in this forum, but I will say that all ended happily, and there was an incredibly fancy lunch once the situation was resolved. I spent the rest of the day napping and accidentally watching a bunch of “Six Feet Under” episodes out of order.

Sunday, 21 November

Blakey is housesitting this weekend, so I have come up the mountain to watch TV and mooch hi-speed Internet off the hotel next door. Although can it really be considered mooching if I had to pay for my log-in? My conscience is clean.It’s true. If I had budgeted my time better, I probably could have posted this week. But time management is not one of my strong suits right now—not with time going by at warp speed.

I’m not clear on how the camera situation will resolve itself, but I hope to start uploading photos later this week. Maybe not til next Saturday. I hope you’re well.

New posts start tomorrow!

Yes. I took a week off. But starting tomorrow, I'm guaranteeing one post per day for my remaining 16 days in Samoa...

And I'm going to go ahead and match that with 16 additional days from America.

So I'm going to promise 32 days in a row of the Matt Experience (the one caveat being the day I arrive in The States during which Internet access may be difficult.).

Starts Sunday, 23 November at 8:00 p.m. See you then. I hope you're well.

Just after midnight tomorrow, Chris and Erin will board an airplane headed back to America, and that will mark the official beginning of the end. Group 81, who arrived in Samoa 8 October 2008, will begin leaving Samoa 15 November 2010. In order to celebrate (drink away?) this transition, the group—sans Joey on account of him being sick—headed to the Sa’Moana Resort on the south side of Upolu to spend one last night together.

Though we all ended up eating dinner together, there was no toast. No one made speeches. No tears were shed. Had there not been a myriad of conversations about what’s next in life and the schedule of layovers and the headaches of moving out, it would have been difficult to tell that this night was different from all other nights.

There was some tension due to interpersonal politics, and at times the night felt like a group divided. But like any big, dysfunctional family, differences were swept under the rug, and our final night together passed without incident.

This morning was a haze of continental breakfast and coffee. There was a little bit of snorkeling and bocci ball, and then it was time for the first wave to return to Apia.

Before boarding the van, we all got together for a group photo with members perched in the branches of one of the trees along the beach. And with the flash of a camera, it was over.

Chris and Erin said their final goodbyes to Supy and Phil, who had to head back to Savai’i. Everyone else is expected to be in town tomorrow for the lead-up to the airport.

Until then, we’ll all be in denial a little longer.

I hope you’re well. More pictures from the weekend below.

Supy and Phil.

Erin, Dan, Rob, Paul, Rebecca.

Dan and AJ.

Dan and me.

A bunch of 81 surveys the pool upon arrival at Sa'Moana Resort.

The view eastward from Sa'Moana's pool.

Australian Volunteer Rebecca and Group 81's Paul.

Me and Blakey.

There was one day when Ms. Yarbrough went berserk. Back in 7th grade English and Social Science, it was the last period of the day, and we were reading some textbook aloud as a class, and out of nowhere, she snorted. She laughed and flailed her arms and talked to imaginary people on either side of her. She leaned back in her chair and let out bursts of blithe incomprehensible gibberish. When she came to, she told us it was all an attempt to show us what our behavior looked like from her perspective. And now, 15 years after the fact, I finally understand.

I’ve heard a bunch of reports on NPR about how the human brain isn’t fully formed through most of the teenage years and how this can at least partially account for why teens act as though they aren’t in control of their bodies. And watching them day in and day out, I can believe it.

Trying to keep 9.3 under control yesterday, I warned them that the next person I saw talking would have his or her test taken away and that person would receive a zero. This worked for about 30 seconds, and then one boy across the room from where I stood turned and yelled something at the kid behind and to his right. As soon as the words had left his lips, he got this stunned expression on his face and snapped his head toward me. The look was less contrite and more bewildered, as if to say, “What was that?!”

The talking to imaginary people is a real thing as well. My 8th grade teacher Ms. Barton used to make fun of us. She observed that at certain moments, everyone in the class was talking to each other at the same time, and absolutely no one was listening. She looked out and saw not 15 different conversations, but rather a cacophony of 30 separate impromptu soliloquies being performed for 30 different imaginary audiences. Everyone is talking, no one is listening. “No one is listening to you!” Ms. Barton would mock. “You’re talking to the world, but no one can hear you because they’re busy talking to you.” I’ve seen it over and over this year, particularly with my year 9s (who would be 8th graders in America). It would be funnier if it wasn’t so obnoxious.

And it’s amazing how the kids grow out of it. Collecting the exams once the testing period was over yesterday was chaotic. I told the kids to quietly raise their hands if they were finished, and I would come around and collect everyone’s paper. The result: 46 kids babbling to no clear listener.

But when the same system is used with the year 11s, who take exams as one collective group of ~150 students in the assembly hall, they’re impressively patient and orderly about the whole thing. Certainly the acoustic reverb in the classroom makes things worse, but there’s still much to be said for how much more self-control the year 11s have in comparison to the year 9s.

Grow up.

I hope you’re well. Picture below.

My school's secretary, Fa'alau, asked me to take this picture of her next to the bulletin board.

This week has been bizarrely productive. Tuesday’s post was a bit of a lie in that I actually found marking papers a good distraction from the inevitability I talked about in Wednesday’s post. I think this is why I’m way ahead of schedule. In fact, the only reason I haven’t finished marking my year 9 science exams is because the kids don’t take the test until tomorrow morning. Oh well. Here are some other odds and ends from the week:

Speaking of yesterday’s post, sorry it’s such a downer. My writing style can veer toward dramatic from time to time, and I sometimes have a tendency to lay it on thick. Take everything I say with a grain of salt.

I brought my laptop to school, and I’m typing this as I proctor the 9.3 Business Studies exam. I never see the 9.3 kids, and as I look out on them to scan for cheating on occasion, there are always at least 3 pairs of eyes staring right back at me. I will never stop being a spectacle.

I bought a pound of popcorn last night. And a fluorescent light bulb. And that new tube of toothpaste last week. And I just ran out of dish soap. So many ridiculous things to be buying this late in the game.

I admit I’m proud of that picture of Shakira I drew despite the fact that Jenny 82 and Kaelin thought her chest was too saggy in the original, and Luisa thinks the published version looks like Helen Hunt.

The rainy season is in full effect. It rains for an hour and then gets sunny and then rains for another hour and then gets sunny. You’d almost think you were in the Bay Area, except even during the rain it’s way too hot.

Speaking of heat, me and the Taraval guys are going to Chicago in January. We’re gonna burn.

Yesterday I was compiling the computer studies grades for terms 1 and 3 to see who would win the prize for top mark at Prizegiving. I had a bunch of files open, and I inadvertently erased all the marks from 10.4 for term 1. Idiot.

Jenny 83 is training in a village near our host village and she is doing model school with Akanese’s Year 2 class. When the trainees were in town last Friday, I asked Jenny about her school and she said, “My favorite student is this girl Agnes.” Akanese goes by the palagi “Agnes” at school. I think I may have screamed.

In 9.3 just now, the sign-in sheet I passed around came back with 49 names. This is a problem because there are only 46 students sitting in the room. So I just toured the room checking off name after name. As it turns out, 3 students—Lanuto’o, Vaiaata, and Konelio—signed in twice for some reason. Something very similar happened in 9.2 yesterday.

Does 11 November make anyone else think of Graeme Base’s “The Eleventh Hour”? I loved that book. The solution was so simple, and yet it took a really REALLY long time for me to figure it out.

I have a rash on my chest. It’s insanely itchy. It’s all I can do to not touch it. Sorry. You’ll hear the highest highs and the lowest lows.

Everyone here seems mildly disappointed my hair has grown back so fast. My vice pule looked genuinely glum. “It’s already back?” She asked with a sigh.That’s all I got for this week. I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

This 9.3 student fell asleep during this afternoon's Business Studies exam.

There must be the people that grin and bear it, the ones who never make it to the comfort zone, the ones who spend their entire time miserable and then gleefully countdown the days. The Peace Corps isn’t for everybody certainly, but there’s got to be a few who don’t fit and against all odds make it through anyway. They’re the people who can compartmentalize for two-years-plus and head back to America with the joy and relief of a fish who’s been flopping around on land feels as it finally heads back into the water. But for me, and for many others I assume, I feel myself contorting into crash position waiting to collide back with America.

They warn us about this from the beginning; it almost seems like a recruiting slogan: adjusting to life in the developing world isn’t nearly as difficult as re-adjusting to life in The States once you’re done. It makes sense too. It’s easier to slow down than it is to speed up. When I try and imagine what life will be like when I get back, I picture myself sitting on the sofa quietly, trying to get a grip on all the action going on around me.

I find myself growing increasingly anxious about going back to The States for any number of reasons. For example, I’m worried about being lonely. It’s funny because coming into the Peace Corps, I was worried about being alone. And now that I’m going back, I apparently have the same fear. I’m comfortable in my life here. Despite geographic distance, Peace Corps Volunteers are a tightly knit group, and the relationships tend to be emotionally intimate. Going back to The States, where I’ve had a distant, intermittent relationship with most people for the last 2 years, that closeness won't be there--at least not at first. Sure there are people excited to see me, but none who have gone through a common experience. And that just feels lonely.

At the same time I’m worried about finding a (temporary) job, getting into school, buying Christmas presents, keeping a budget, will my iPhone still work?, where is the cat going to live?, when in the hell am I going to move all my crap out of my house here?, etc.

But I presume, as with many other emotions, the anxiety before the storm is worse than the storm itself. Just as the weeks leading up to my Peace Corps departure were full of apprehension and nerves, these last few weeks before my return home are the same.

And adding to that symmetry is facing the crucible by myself.

On move-in day, we were dumped off at our sites, and the next month was spent learning to be alone. And the hardest part of learning to be alone is you have to do it by yourself.

Now things are going in the other direction. Now there's the apprehension of being around people again. And the hardest part about bracing for all of this is, once again, it's a DIY project.

But I guess it’s like I told the 83s: You gotta close your eyes and hold your nose and jump. Soon enough you’ll hit the water. Swim.

I hope you’re well.

It’s that time of year again. This week is wall-to-wall common exams for the entire school. The year 12s and 13s are in their second week of the Samoan School Certificate Exam and the Pacific Secondary School Certificate exams respectively, and the lower levels have common exams as administered by the Congregational Church School System. It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times.

Teaching is so much work, and it’s a beautiful thing to wake up in the morning and not have to go through the day’s schedule to make sure everything is in order. Proctoring is such a nice break. It’s guilt-free, and I get to bring a book.

It reminds me a little of when I used to work the reception desk at the local community center during high school. I’d spend an hour un-stacking chairs and tables, and then I’d sit around for 6 or 7 hours reading and passing the time. It was awesome. This is similar, except I have to occasionally admonish kids when I see their eyes start to wander.

But then there’s the downside. Proctoring is boring. Most tests are 2.5 hours long, and it’s my job to sit there, ticking off the time on the chalkboard every 30 minutes. Books are fun and all, but at 8 a.m., my body gets confused as to why it’s awake if I’m not doing anything.

For the English exam I proctored Monday morning, the 10.1 classroom had exactly enough chairs for all of the students to have a seat, and me to have none. So I paced and wandered the classroom for 150 minutes, occasionally reading my book, occasionally stretching, occasionally wandering out to the balcony to suck in the fresh air.

But far and away the worst part of exams is the exams themselves. I walked out of school yesterday afternoon with 65 year 11 computer studies exams and 47 English exams. Granted this load is far lighter than last year—and really I’m only doing the two classes of year 11 exams as a courtesy to the other teacher; they’re not my kids—but I still absolutely abhor grading exams.

My conscious mind hates the tedium. Page after page after page after page. My subconscious mind gets incredibly bored. Yesterday I turned on Arrested Development to try and offer the bored parts of my brain a little entertainment. But halfway through the year 11 multiple choice—i.e. the easiest part of the correcting process—my subconscious seduced me into a 2-hour nap. Anything to avoid grading exams.

I try and find ways to reward myself—energy bars, fieldtrips to the store across the street, half-hour guilt-free minesweeper sessions—but mostly I find my brain repulsed. It’s sad when dishwashing sounds way more fun than the current activity at hand.

But I finished all the computer exams last night. And I’m halfway through the English. And with my rewarded free time, I wrote a blog. Back to work. Ugh.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

There's been much discussion about what small logo should go on the front of the t-shirts I talked about on the blog earlier this weekend. The result has been a parlor game of increasingly inane tidbits that encapsulate Peace Corps life in Samoa. The un-controversial favorite seems to be this one above of the pili waving with the caption "Malo, Friend." The phrase doubles as a greeting and a popular pick-up line.

This picture, stolen from the Vailima label, is probably inappropriate for Peace Corps to be sporting in Samoa, but the idea is kinda funny, especially with the caption, "Fia inu?", want a drink?

Given the mindblowing popularity of Shakira's "Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)" in Samoa (and apparently nowhere else in the world?), this one seemed like a natural candidate.

My favorite is this one of taro on the half-shell bathed in pe'epe'e with the simple caption, "Fia ai?", hungry? But people mistook the taro for mutton flaps. Oh well.

I had nothing to do today. It was hot when I woke up this morning, and so I figured I’d spend a couple hours in the Peace Corps office, hanging out with whomever was around, soaking in the air conditioning. Dan wanted me to bring my Skype headset, so I loaded up my backpack and headed over. Though I needed phone credit, I walked past K.K. Mart on the corner and headed directly for the office door. I hadn’t sat down for more than 5 minutes when Jenny 82 approached.

“Hey Matt,” she said. “Want to work on the Peace Corps t-shirt?” I knew what she was talking about immediately.

A while back some Peace Corps Volunteers in Samoa created a non-profit organization to make it easier for volunteers to perform collective community service projects and such and apply for grant money that might not be available to the Peace Corps itself. This group, Avanoa Tutusa, is typically headed by a volunteer (currently Joey 81).

Avanoa Tutusa’s latest fundraising project is making Peace Corps t-shirts and selling them to current volunteers. Jenny 82 drew the initial design a month or two ago, and since then the project has been in development hell. There were issues with finding a good place to get t-shirts made, and Jenny’s design went through several iterations.

So when Jenny asked this morning if I could help with the t-shirt design, I think she mostly wanted me to scan the image and move around a couple of the implements on the page.

But I, in my vector-based mindset, decided it would be best to re-draw the entire design on the computer. Chris (who had been working on getting a t-shirt vendor in The States) had toyed with the idea of creating a vector-based image of the logo, and that got me excited, and so when Jenny 82 casually asked this morning, I made a beeline for the computer.

I started work at approximately 9:30 this morning. I worked diligently for roughly 5 hours to re-create Jenny’s design. Jenny, who attended art school at one point, had big ideas for the t-shirt design that she had forfeited months back for whatever reason. But with my newfound zeal, my recreation of the design provided an opportunity to include a lot more stuff that had been cut.

This morning, the design included a bus with a breadfruit leaf, a banana tree, taro leaves, and a hibiscus flower. By late afternoon there was a fish, a fan, a lizard, and a pig. Then a computer (preferably drawn in dramatic perspective) and a stack of books were added in the early evening.

There was a lot of discussion about the angle of the bus and whether it looked like it was actually coming toward the viewer. It was worked and re-worked several times over.

In the end, I left the Peace Corps office at 8:30 p.m., 11 hours after I’d started. But it looks good, I think.

And I didn’t mind. I had nothing to do today.

I hope you're well. Leftover bald pictures from last week below.

Me after the initial haircut.

Dan helped with applying the shaving cream.

Me with the Bic.

Dan helped with the Bic.

The final product.

Since the Year 12s and 13s are all in SchoolC and PSSC exams this week and the 9s, 10s, and 11s are off until Monday, this week has been pretty slow. I’ve been rolling into school around 9:30 every morning, and those morning hours have been spent preparing for Prizegiving, even though it’s 4 weeks away. The Indian missionaries are leaving for India on 22 November, and they want to have everything in its place before they go. So I’ve been compiling grades for the upper levels and printing trophy labels. Keeping busy. Here are some other odds and ends from the week:

I took the cat up to the vet yesterday to start preparations for her to fly back to America next month. I paid $10 for a taxi ride up the mountain only to find out they’re out of whatever vaccine that cat’s going to need. It may arrive tomorrow. I paid another $10 to get home.

Not to beat a dead horse... but how about those San Francisco Giants?

In the World Series / Halloween craziness of last weekend, I forgot to mention I spent Friday night in the host village. Everything there is good. It’s my host mother’s 70th birthday next month, and there are lots of celebration plans in the works.

The SchoolC exam for computers was this afternoon. Here are some of the more inane questions:The printer that actually throws ink onto paper to produce the intended characters is known as a/an...

What can Simon and Uili have on their computer that wll help them speed up communication with local and overseas customers and suppliers?

Underline the printer that would cost you more.

laser printer inkjet printerI’m not really interested in any World Series stuff. I just want a Buster Posey jersey. That kid’s brilliant. And he looks like a batboy.

I’ve started watching Six Feet Under. Black humor is great.

How about Chris and AJ’s Avatar couple’s costume? It was elaborate. Did you see the ears?

I got called up to the girls’ college up the hill from me to fix the computer in their front office. Windows wasn’t recognizing the modem. After a half hour of tinkering, I plugged the modem into a different expansion slot on the motherboard. Windows found the modem, the college staff thinks I’m a genius. I fooled them.

My host sister Asolima rode the bus with me into town Saturday morning, where I helped her shop for Sunday to’ona’i. At Frankie Molesi I picked up some Colgate Herbal Whitening toothpaste for $2, which I proceeded to leave in the shopping bag that Asolima took back to Fausaga. At Lucky Foodtown tonight, I picked up an identical box of Colgate Herbal Whitening toothpaste... for $4.30. Oh well.

The fluorescent light bulb over my dining room table burned out. I’m living in this house for 4.5 more weeks. Do I throw down the money to replace it?

I’m ready to not be bald anymore.

I sewed my monk’s hood myself out of a brown ’ie. This was impressive because I’ve never sewn a hood before, and risky because I didn’t start sewing until after I shaved my head. But it all worked out.

The best part of the Saint Francis costume came on Sunday morning when Kaelin 82 texted me with, "Make me a channel of your peace." It was worth shaving my head, if only for that.That’s all I got for this week. I hope you’re well.

Birds flying in the staffroom. It's Birds! It walked on my pillow!

School secretary Faalau and me sharing an impromptu lunch after it was discovered we'd ordered too much for the exam proctors.

Scout trying to get in on the Jim Beam.

For my host mom's 70th birthday, the guys tore down the garage to build a new large faleo'o.

The closest I ever came to wearing a uniform to school in The States was sophomore year of high school when our water polo coach required us to wear ties to school on the day of one of our post-season regional championship games. And that doesn’t really count. I still wore jeans. Our starting defensive hole set Will wore a clip-on tie on the collar of his T-shirt. So I make no claims to knowing the joys and pitfalls of wearing a uniform to school, but I can assume that free-dress days are an exciting treat.

I vaguely remember friends of mine who went to private school talking about free-dress days as rewards in some sort of scholastic or behavioral incentive scheme. Here in Samoa free-dress days come at a different price: literally a price. On occasion schools will use free-dress days as a fundraiser. From what I hear, the fee tends to be nominal—the one my school had last week was $10—though some students’ families have a harder time paying for this than others, of course.

The free-dress fundraiser is referred to as a Mufti. Since this is definitely not a Samoan word (two consecutive consonants is a linguistic impossibility in Samoan), I can only assume the term comes from Kiwi influence. Oh good. As it turns out, Wikipedia has an insightful article about the Mufti’s etymology. Apparently the term is Arabic.

In any case, I have to say from what I hear from other volunteers, my school deals with financing really well. School staff runs a small profit off the student canteen, and that tends to cover nearly all extracurricular expenses. This is a rare arrangement in this country, and it explains why in all the time I’ve been here, last week’s Mufti (to subsidize school magazine printing costs) was my first. In fact, when Koa texted me about a Mufti at his school back in February of this year, I had no idea what the term meant. Blakey had to explain it to me.

Free-dress comes with all the excitement one would expect. Girls wear earrings and make-up. Boys find their own ways to accessorize—hats, sunglasses, and for some, make-up.

The event seemed like a bigger deal for the lower levels. The 9s and 10s were all about it. The older kids, particularly the student prefects, seemed rattled with adolescent indifference and shrugged off the day as though it simply meant they didn’t have to worry about ironing that morning. By nature of their position, student prefects are on campus outside the normal school day pretty often, and much of that time is spent out of uniform.

And now that I think about it, my year 12 computer class was a bit of a fashion show. One girl Taeone, the pebble in my teaching sandals, was dressed to the nines with vinyl gold sandals and designer sunglasses. Legalo wore her hair down. Vincent, who tries his best to channel Michael Jackson, was in top form. It was a crack up.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Fautamara and Taeone.

Fanua and Eddie (who wore Vincent's sunglasses for this picture).

Boys from my year 10 English class. Vailima (in the middle) wore eye-liner. It was so punk rock.

Girls in my year 9 science class.

Akari from year 10. I have no idea what the 74 means.

I’ve done it once before. Between college and Samoa I cut my own hair, and on one occasion in early 2007 the guard on the clippers came off while I was trimming the hair on the back of my head, and I had no other choice. But yesterday’s session was a conscious decision from start to finish. I recruited Dan to help me in the matter, set out the objectives beforehand, and then stood on the steps behind myself while Dan went to work.

People have since asked when and how I came up with the idea, and to be honest, I don’t have a straight answer. Halloween snuck up on me, as it always does, and I’d been talking to a bunch of volunteers about costume ideas, and when someone suggested monk Friday afternoon, I immediately rejected it. But somehow it crept back into my deliberations yesterday morning.

On second thought, the idea had merit. The clothing wouldn’t be difficult; though I don’t have a brown robe, a brown ’ie faitaga would work perfectly. Additionally, what with the Giants doing so well in the World Series, being a Franciscan monk would fall right in line with San Francisco. In fact, Saint Francis would be a great tribute costume on a number of different levels.

But the part that really pushed the idea over the edge—the thing that would bring the costume from mediocre to memorable, the way the costume could really outdo years past—required a certain amount of sacrifice.

For whatever reason, in my experience Peace Corps Volunteers take Halloween far more seriously than most people I knew in The States. Perhaps the qualities that make for a good PCV fall in line with those that make for a good Halloween costume maker/wearer. Or maybe life overseas means we have a lot of pent-up Americanism and Halloween simply provides an outlet. Whatever the reason, past years have set the bar high.

And, if I do say so myself, I’ve had a pretty good track record. In 2008, my mosquito costume was certainly a failure, but it was a memorable failure. Though it became unwieldy almost immediately and it was unrecognizable to most people that night, people still talk about how awesomely bad it was. Last year my Halloween homage to Country Director Dale was a big hit. At Group 83’s Welcome Fiafia earlier this month, Dale even introduced himself as Matt. So I like to think I’ve built a bit of a reputation for coming up with a costume that generates some sort of buzz, which is all to say that expectations for this year were high.

So I shaved my head. It was the added quirk that brought the entire costume to a new level. When I told Dan my idea, we discussed whether it should just be clipped short or whether a safety razor and shaving cream would be necessary. We decided on the latter. Dan used a longer setting on the clippers first to get the general shape and then went over it again once we were both satisfied. I did much of the work with the safety razor, although Dan helped with the back.

The monk’s hood provided a good method of reveal that let people soak in the costume initially, and with its removal, the tada! moment. Many people at the party thought I was wearing some sort of bald cap, and I was asked several times during the night where I found such a thing in Apia. Everyone’s next question of course was, “What are you going to do tomorrow?”

My answer: shave the rest.

And so as I type this now, my head is completely bald. It will be difficult to explain this to school staff tomorrow, but I figure once people get over the initial shock, things will be business as usual. Students won’t be around this week on account of testing, and there should be a fair amount of stubble by the time they get back next Monday.

In any case, I feel like I rose to the Peace Corps Halloween standard. Don’t expect this next year.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Erin showed up as a Native American. Me as Monk.

Koa and Summer as John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

The costumes. 4 volunteers showed up dressed as other volunteers. Left to Right: Kyle as Jenny S. 82, Jim as Trent, Blakey as me, Elisa as Tifa.

The real people. Left to Right: Jenny S. 82, Trent, Me, Tifa.

Phil and Supy, in a sequel to 2008's Big Spoon / Little Spoon, came as Masima and Masima Saina (Salt and Chinese Salt... even though Supy is Thai.). Joey 81 was a baseball player.

Emily showed up in full Dia de los Muertos garb.

K8 showed up as Miss Mortein, a superhero of her own creation.

Group 81 showed up in its entirety as we do on occasion. No other group has ever achieved this outside of training in all my time here. Yes, we love patting ourselves on the back.

Me tonight. Bald.

It’s been quite a day. An hour after assigning my English class a rather lengthy report to have ready for class tomorrow, I was informed tomorrow will be a cleaning day and there will be no classes. Essentially, today was my last day of teaching in Samoa. There was little time to process this though, because I taxied across town as soon as school got out to watch the Giants deliver a wallop to a stunned Texas Rangers. 9-0?! I mean, c’mon! Did that really happen? And then 8 hours later I finally watched the last episode of Lost. It’s a lot to take in. Here are some other odds and ends from the week:

Okay, okay. For the sake of everyone else, let’s continue to refrain from leaving comments about Lost, but if you want to at this point, you can email me if you want to talk about it. I think I may be the only person in Samoa who has seen the whole thing—certainly no other Peace Corps Volunteers have seen it, probably some of the trainees—so goodness knows I could use someone to talk to.

It has been insanely rainy these past couple days. The wet season is here.

Blakey and I have been puzzled by all the baseball players on both teams wearing kitschy necklaces color-coordinated to their uniforms. RPCV Dylan says the neckwear is supposedly magnetic or power-channeling or some other sort of snake oil. Cool.

The magazine is really finished because the final product has been delivered. At Interval on Tuesday copies were distributed to all the form teachers so students could see an advance copy. Everyone seems pretty happy. I have not received a copy yet, but I’m thrilled there will be no more revisions.

You know Suasami? The teacher I sit next to every day at Interval? I somehow left her name off the list of people in her form class’s picture. Every single other teacher is listed with their class and has his/her name underlined. Oops.

Liam turned me on to this band The Morning Benders. They’re great.

I’m so happy Year 13 Camp is over. It’s fun at first, and then it just feels like the school day never ends. Even the hormonal students seemed relieved to not be here anymore.

Have you heard about this new casino they’re building in downtown Apia? I heard a rumor today that only foreign-passport-holders will be allowed to gamble. How are they going to enforce that?

Man. Lost isn’t The Wire or Arrested Development, but it’s damn good.

I desperately need to submit law school applications. I think this may happen Sunday.

I need a Halloween costume!That’s all I got for today—sorry it’s a little short. I hope you’re well.

Daaaang. Texas Rangers got beat down tonight. At one point, one of the announcers on the American Forces Network, before praising Edgar Renteria, tried to affirm his objectivity by saying he didn’t favor either side, and that all he was rooting for was a 7-game series in which each game was decided by 1 run. After which I said to Blakey, “I’m rooting for a 4-game series in which each game is a blowout.” The series has yet to be decided, but at least the latter part of my wish came true in game 2. Ouch! But really, the thrill of the last 2 days has simply been watching baseball.

Through Facebook and talking to friends from back home, I know a fair amount of people who attended one or both games, and it’s weird because I don’t feel jealous at all. After living in Samoa for 2 years, I am disconnected from America enough that the thought of attending a World Series game seems surreal. It would be sensory overload; more stressful than fun. Like getting in a car and jumping from 10 mph to 100. It honestly doesn’t sound appealing.

But I miss baseball. I wrote about this nearly a year and a half ago after watching Field of Dreams, and as much as I’ve spent the time since then adjusting to a life without it, I still quietly miss it a lot. So part of the thrill in having the Giants go to the World Series is having an excuse to seek out a TV in Apia showing a baseball game.

Shortly after I posted Sunday, I emailed the Charges d’Affaires to ask about possibly watching a few World Series games at the American embassy, and she was cool with that. So I wore my Tim Lincecum T-shirt to sixth period yesterday, and as soon as the bell rang I made a beeline for the embassy.

I felt a little ridiculous emailing the Charges to ask if I could come watch TV, and I was completely prepared to sit in a corner at the embassy to quietly watch by myself. But it was the Charges who suggested the event might be more fun if I brought some other people. So Blakey came along yesterday and had a good enough time she came back for Game 2 this afternoon.

There was a brief moment of panic when I first arrived yesterday and we couldn’t find any channel showing the game on the handful of stations that come in through the embassy’s satellite dish. But then some embassy TV expert came in and changed the input, and the American Forces Network came through like a champ. This means that we get military commercials between half-innings and during pitcher changes. Although I’m still apt to recite, “And when it’s time for a change, think Speedy Oil Change...”

So just for a second, I’m going to use my soap box here to talk some trash...

Is walking in a run not one of the most embarrassing things one can do in professional sports? I’d say it’s worse than shooting an airball from the free-throw line or getting tackled in your own endzone. It’s the kind of thing where the opposing team winces in embarrassment for you. The kind of thing where even the scoreboard shakes its head, shrugs, and then chalks one up for the other team. The kind of thing Germans invented the word “Schaudenfraude” to articulate. In English, I’d just have to call it pitiful.

Bring it on in Arlington.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Note: Odds and Ends Thursday will run tomorrow.

Me in my Lincecum T-shirt and my gray 'ie faitaga.

Blakey and I have been watching in the embassy's staff dining room.

Me and Blakey.

Last Tuesday my year 13s begged me to open the computer lab during the open-study period from 9:30 p.m. until bed time at 11:00. While I was more opening the lab to the masses at the beginning of camp, I’ve lately been a little over camp, and sitting in the corner with a classroom full of year 13s looking at pictures on their flash drives and listening to the latest from J Boog isn’t my idea of a restful weekday evening. But I agreed to open the lab anyway. And none of them showed.

That’s right: I was stood up by my students. A few of the year 12 boys who live on campus came into the room around 10:40, and I let them use the computers for the final 20 minutes. As you can expect, I was cranky about the situation.

But then Amanda apologized the next morning, “Sorry about last night, Mista,” she said. “But they wouldn’t let us out of the classroom.” The idea that some overzealous teacher put the kibosh on the computer lab made more sense. Amanda went on, “I was so angry they wouldn’t let us out of study hall, I just didn’t study. They wouldn’t let me out. So I just sat there.” And then I was completely won over.

It’s totally something I would do. I’m all about irrational, pseudo-subversive responses to arbitrary rules. Would it have benefited Amanda to have spent that time studying rather than trying to make some pointless statement about the tyranny of the supervising teacher? Sure. But it’s much better to sacrifice studying in the name of a principle; it’s always a thrill to be the martyr.

Fast forward to tonight. The supervision rotation found all the players in the same spot for the first time since last week’s episode. And the year 13s were at it again begging me to open the lab.

“We’ll come this time, but you have to pick us up,” they told me. “[That teacher] is mean.” Speaking the name of the teacher in question, of course. Until this afternoon I hadn’t realize which teacher had been holding them in. The news was slightly surprising because I was under the impression it had been someone else, and yet not surprising at all because the story made much more sense now.

See, the students in question are all trustworthy. Most of them are student prefects. They don’t fit the profile of the cigarette-smoking rebels looking to sneak out and raise hell. To deny them passage to the computer lab seems a little extreme. But then again, what is the entire Hall Pass system, but a way of asserting one’s power? A hall pass is completely function-less except that it reminds students about the Rule of Law.

The entire situation became more ridiculous when I actually went to pick up my kids from The Big Bad Wolf tonight. The teacher coarsely acknowledged me as I approached, and then I said in a quiet tone, “Can I have the computer studies students?” The teacher, looking to hang on to the asserted power, barked at the students a bit before allowing them to go. But I didn’t stick around to listen.

I figure getting between Amanda the Martyr and The Great Authoritarian is no way to spend a Monday night.

I hope you’re well. Picture below.

Did I already post this picture? If I did, it's worth posting again. It's from a few months back when a student borrowed my camera for an event. I think one of the the girl on the right is her little sister. They're darling.

They left a week late. The training schedule usually dictates the incoming group stays in Apia for approximate- ly 10 days, and then on their second Saturday in country, the newbies leave for the training village. In the past the Welcome Fiafia has been held the night before, so the trainees get one last hurrah before heading out into the cold. But for whatever reason this year, the trainees stayed in town an extra week. And then yesterday afternoon, they headed out.

There’s one other difference with group 83: they have 4 different training villages. While group 81 took the village of Fausaga by storm back in October 2008 with all 13 of us living with host families in the village, and group 82 doing the same last year with the village of Manunu, the 83s have been split into 4 sub-groups. I’m pretty sure the 4 villages are somewhat close to one another—I heard it’s approximately 5 miles from one end to the other—but the 4 villages don’t necessarily border each other.

When the volunteers heard about this strategy, there were mixed feelings. On the one hand, we liked our experience of the group unity that is forged in having a common village experience. After two and a half weeks in a Apia, group 83 knows one another pretty well, and it’s lousy to have to split up. On the other hand group unity is more difficult to achieve with 20 trainees, so it might be less overwhelming for the volunteers and the people in the village to split the large group into more manageable pieces.

Given my residence in Apia and group 83’s outgoing nature, I’ve been able to interact with them quite a bit since they arrived, and I’ve been in limited contact with a few via text message since yesterday. It’s been entertaining reading about their reactions.

I recall in the day or two leading up to my groups first trip to the host village, the Training Director warned us, “Just remember: you signed up for the Peace Corps.” Those first 10 days were spent at an air-conditioned hotel in downtown Apia. Going from there to the training village is a mix of The-Honeymoon’s-over and you’re-getting-pushed-into-the-deep-end. It can be overwhelming at first.

Here are some text messages I’ve received:

Lots of freakin roosters around me

Survived my first day. Lots of awkward moments but its expected.

I can’t remember anyones names! :-(

All the teen girls boss me around

How long does it take to get used to cold showers...cause that was pretty awful

[All the 83s] i have talked to are fine...still uncomfortable but fine...and actually looking forward to class tomorrow

Reading these feels like listening to one of my cousins talk about high school: I’m not jealous of their situation at all, but it’s mildly entertaining to watch someone else have to go through the same growing pains, and I can’t help but feel a little nostalgic. Being stuck in the training village was lousy. And I miss it a little.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Samantha and Olivia from group 83.

The tall palagi guy who manages Farmer Joe shopping at K.K. Mart.

This was posted on the chalkboard when I walked into my 9.2 class one day last week. Apparently in reviewing for the upcoming Visual Arts exam, the art teacher gave the sample question, "What is Art?" And the correct answer, "Art is life." I found this hilarious.

The next question: "What is the key of art?" So, by extension, what is the key to life?

The answer: "Drawing."

Fascinating.

My dad texted me at 8:46 p.m. PDT with, “Giants win 3-2”. And just like that, my boys are going to the World Series for the first time in 8 years. This is glorious news, except for the fact I’m completely isolated from baseball. I’ve been wearing my Giants t-shirt to class and my Giants baseball cap around town, but the thrill of baseball isn’t about the jersey or the hometown pride; it’s about watching the game. And though it’s going to be decidedly difficult to do that, I’m going to try my damnedest.

Looking at the game schedule, games 1 and 2 are this Wednesday and Thursday at approximately 2 p.m. Samoa Time. Then games 3 through 5 are Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and then, should games 6 and/or 7 be necessary, next Wednesday and Thursday.

Here is a list of viewing possibilities I’ve come up with:

Sports Bar. There are 2 prominent sports bars in Apia: Henny’s and Wildfire. Each of these has ESPN Australia. Fox has domestic TV rights, but I suppose there’s a chance ESPN is telecasting the games internationally (or at least to Australia). Assuming that, and that they are open at 2 p.m., these places become viable options.

Charges d’Affaires. The Charges gets the American Forces Network at her house, and I would definitely assume it will be showing there. Going to her house is probably not an option during the middle of the week, but it’s possible she’d allow a TV-less PCV to come watch the World Series next Saturday or Sunday.

The American Embassy. They have cable that can be shown in the lobby. It’s unclear whether they get any channels that will be showing the World Series, but it’s certainly possible. They tend to be tight on security there, but I don’t think watching a game there would be out of the question. It’s definitely worth a try.

GameDay Webcast. If worse comes to worst, I should be able to (ideally) watch or (more realistically) listen to the games over the Internet. When I lived in Pasadena I subscribed to MLB.com so I could listen to Giants games, and their web capabilities have only improved since. Watching a 3-hour game on LavaSpot would be expensive, and it’s unclear the LavaSpot would have the bandwidth to handle streaming video. These factors make this option a last resort.I wonder if I know anyone else who has good cable. Jordan and Blakey housesat for a couple up the hill who have pretty good international cable. Jordan invited me over earlier this season to watch baseball. The second-to-last resort:

Do you live in the Apia area? Do you have a satellite dish or otherwise International TV capabilities? Can I come to your house to watch a baseball game at one of the following times?27 October, 1:57 p.m.

28 October, 1:57 p.m.

30 October, 12:57 p.m.

31 October, 3:20 p.m.

1 November, 2:57 p.m.

3 November, 2:57 p.m.

4 November, 2:57 p.m.I would be willing to bring chips and soda and explain the finer points of Major League Baseball to anyone interested. Please email me here.

I hope you’re well. Picture below.

While watching Lost yesterday, I noticed Hurley put a Teuila blossom on Libby's grave. The Teuila is, of course, the national flower of Samoa.

Note: Please refrain from leaving comments about Lost. Thank you.

In the office where my mom used to work, there was a sign posted next to the large office calendar that read, “Dates in the calendar may be closer than they appear.” Most members of group 81 are fully aware of how many days they have left in Samoa off the top of their heads. I had a media-related issue last night that I called Koa about, and his solution was, “We’ll be back in America in 53 days...” Koa’s leaving a week after me, so my countdown is even farther along. But I find the countdown only creates stress, so I try and avoid thinking about it.

On the other hand, I am acutely aware of how many weekends I have left (seven including this one), and since weekends are the only time of week when I can really do much in-country travel, I’m trying to mete out weekend time a little more wisely. Since everything shuts down Sundays, I mostly treat weekends as a Friday-Saturday affair.

First the constraints. We’ll be celebrating Halloween next Saturday and Thanksgiving on my penultimate Saturday in Samoa. This leaves 5 remaining Saturdays (including tomorrow) before I leave. Money is also more of a factor than I’d thought it would be. Whereas prior to May of this year, I was putting a little away every month, I’ve since been squandering my cash on who-knows-what. I don’t think this should be too much of a factor, but it’s still good to keep in mind when considering the next part of the finite weekend equation: the list of things I want to do.

Creating a list of stuff to do before we leave was part of the Close of Service Conference. I wrote out a long list that I have since misplaced. Oh well. Here is a list I’ve brainstormed off the top of my head:

Go to Namu’a Island;

Go to Manono;

Do the River Fales Hike (again) in Falese’ela;

Rent a car to:Return my large beer and soda bottles to Apia Bottling Co. for $0.40 per bottle; and

Take one last joy ride along Upolu’s south coast;Visit the training village at least 2 more times; and

Visit Savai’i at least 1 more time.This list actually seems a little modest. It seems like there should be more, although nothing else comes to mind at this point. One thing that can be safely said is that if I’m going to do all of these things—or even most of these things—my weekend schedule is going to be crowded for the rest of my stay in Samoa.

There’s the consolatory idea that I whatever I don’t do in the next 6 weeks can be done on some subsequent return to Samoa. And while I’m not at all opposed to coming back to visit, even returning for 2 weeks doesn’t seem like enough time to accomplish much at all. RPCV Max has been visiting these past 2 weeks, but he’s spent most of the time catching up with his host family and living the typical PCV lifestyle; that is, saving all the fun stuff until it’s too late.

I hope you’re well. Happy Birthday Dustin! Picture below.

Girls after year 13 camp last night. Left to right: Amanda's sister (sorry, I don't know her name), Tafale, Amanda.

I was up until 3 a.m. Monday night/ Tuesday morning grading exams. I managed to finish all my year 13s and then fought off sleep grading my year 12s’ multiple choice. It was the kind of deal where I was falling asleep in the middle of moving my pen back and forth across the page. But by 4th period Tuesday they were ready to be handed back, and just like that, the second to last big hump of my Peace Corps experience was over. Here are some other odds and ends from the week:

Okay, maybe it’s a little too hopeful to think that there’s only one big ungodly effort left before December, but I think I’m just happy to be done with the slideshow and the exam-marking and the school magazine (knock on wood).

Happy birthday, Jen!

Why the knocking on wood? Well after the printing company delivered the proofs last Friday, my pule decided he had a slew of content changes he wanted to make. Proofs are only for checking color and margin size! The magazine was finished already! Let sleeping dogs lie!

I made his changes. We re-submitted the magazine Wednesday. We should have new proofs early next week.

It’s getting to be that time of year again where I lament the fact I didn’t start planning my Halloween costume a week or two earlier. Oh well. I found this one on the Mental Floss website. I really like it, but I’m not sure I could find orange tights or a cottontail in Samoa.

I’ve started listening to The Beatles’ Let It Be re-release, “Let It Be... Naked” a lot recently. I never found the original very approachable, but this new version has grown on me. Kinda funny because I got the “Naked” album as a Secret Santa gift for Christmas 2003, and it’s taken these 7 years for me to really get into it.

Most annoying development in months: somehow the device driver software for my touchpad disappeared. My computer won’t acknowledge the factory touchpad. Now, if the touchpad simply stopped working I could get an external mouse, and the problem would be solved. But instead the touchpad does work, but now I can’t disable one-touch clicking. So now I keep inadvertently bumping it while I’m typing, and I end up clicking somewhere else on the screen. And since the software is gone, there’s nothing I can do to disable that. It’s effing obnoxious.

The sāsā we performed at the 83 Welcome Fiafia was the worst sāsā I’ve been a part of in my 2 years. This is sad because it’s most likely the last time I will sāsā. Oh well.

So how about my San Francisco Giants? Sure, they lost tonight, but who’d have thought they’d get this far in the post-season? I’m just sad I can’t watch. If they make it to the World Series, so help me God, I’ll find a way. It will be difficult, but not impossible, I think.

Here are the best answers from my Year 12 and 13 final exams:What does ASCII stand for?

American Standard Code for Interchuch Information

What does WYSIWYG stand for?

Word Software Input War (sounds menacing, ay?)

Why is it good to use a spreadsheet program rather than pencil and paper?

You dont have to waste your time by doing on paper and it good because the computer knows everything

Question unknown.

Microsoft Bublisher.That’s all I got for this week. I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

This afternoon I was on a panel to discuss teaching in Samoa as part of group 83's training. This picture, along with the next 2, is group 83 from my vantage point. Left to right: APCD Kellye, Interim Peace Corps Trainer Jamie, Sarah, Samantha, Olivia, Jenny, Lindsay.

Left to right: Katie, Rivka, OtherMike, Danny, Pat, Natalie, Chris.

Left to right: Chelsea, Rob, Mike, Devon, Rachael, Dave, Karen. Nancy was sitting right next to Chelsea out of the camera's frame. Sorry, Nancy.

This was the sky off the balcony of the Pasefika Inn this afternoon. Samoan skies are breathtaking. 2 years later, I can't help taking pictures of blue sky and clouds. I think the rusty corrugated roofs also caught my eye.

Yes, I admit these last Cultural Explorations were sporadically posted over a much longer time period than usual. For a moment on Sunday, I actually planned to write and publish 5 blog posts. But then I literally fell over on the couch and fell asleep. Much like last year, last week’s lead-up to the Welcome Fiafia was a mostly sleepless affair. With everyone in town last weekend, there was little time to catch up, and the re-introduction of Year 13 Camp this week has left me surviving on caffeine and mid-afternoon catnaps. So sorry if things have been uneven; it’s an accurate portrayal of life.

The slideshow turned out pretty good. Since the Fiafia came up way faster than I was expecting, I didn’t have much time to throw the slideshow together, so I mostly relied on the same clever tricks I concocted last year. Thus the crowd was less awed than last year, but still satisfied, I think.

I included factoids about each volunteer, and since I have twice the familiarity with group 81 this year, I was able to sprinkle the show with in-jokes and euphemisms. In fact, use of the word “factoid” itself is a quiet shout-out to the 81s.

There were the typical hang-ups. One volunteer felt all of her pictures were lousy, another shouted out during the slideshow presentation that the village I’d listed as her home was incorrect. Whatever. As a pre-emptive buffer to such criticism, I made sure to a make a show of being self-deprecating during the part about me. So there.

Supy put up a big stink because the Fiafia was held on his birthday, trying to get all of us to attend his alternative party. To lull him into coming, I included a special Happy Birthday Supy segment, which included, among other things, a sing-along-with-the-bouncing-ball portion; not an easy feat in PowerPoint.

I was worried people wouldn’t get it or would be weirded out, but much to my relief, the crowd actually sang along to the bouncing ball! Too bad Supy didn’t show up. That’s right. He didn’t come. Not that I’m bitter.

Until 4 hours before the Fiafia was scheduled to begin, I still had no introduction. I was chatting online listening to my iTunes on random play when Ira Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” came on. I thought of the beginning of the movie “Manhattan”. And thus the introduction was born. I found as many dramatic pictures of Apia buildings as I could find, changed them to black and white, and edited my Gershwin mp3 down to a manageable length.

The result is ridiculous. Woody Allen filmed iconic images like the Empire State Building at dawn, cars crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, and crowds moving through Time Square. I used shots of a breakfast banner over McDonald’s, a Birthday sale at Chan Mow, and two ladies walking in front of K.K. Mart. Iconic to Peace Corps Volunteers? Certainly. Majestic? Not so much. Entertaining to (movie nerds) me and Koa and no one else? Most definitely.

Oh well. I liked it.

I hope you're well. The finished product was 215 MB, so I’m not going to post it here. But there are some screenshots below to help you visualize.

Dramatic photos of Apia from the slideshow intro.

More dramatic photos of Apia from the slideshow intro.

Okay. So the basic gimmick I kinda invented last year and then shamelessy used again this year works like this: Dan's pictures fly in. The disappear one after another to reveal different information about Dan—his village, project assignment, and factoids. Different pictures replace the old ones. Then Dan's name and all of the pictures except one fly. In this case, the large picture on the left stays.

That large picture on the left then pans within its frame to reveal a different member of group 81. In this case, A.J. (Red arrows added for demonstration purposes.).

Once the pan finishes, pictures of A.J. fly in to fill the slide. The process repeats itself. A.J. links to Phil, Phil to K8, K8 to Blakey, etc. We're all connected.

I admit when I left for the Peace Corps, my goal was to essentially sneak out of the country under cover of darkness. When my roommates and my family asked about throwing me going-away parties I asked they be small in order to minimize the number of goodbyes. When you leave for the Peace Corps, there’s a tendency for people to treat you like you’re dying, and I wanted to avoid that. So I didn’t tell most of my friends I was leaving for Samoa until I was at LAX getting ready to board my flight. I have a feeling leaving Samoa won’t be so easy.

Fa’amavae, or going-away parties, are a big deal in Samoa. My group’s first Samoan fa’amavae came near the end of training when we left the training village. We spent a good 5 or 6 weeks preparing for the event, including rehearsing a song, a play, and several Samoan dances. The party took on a fiafia structure, starting with a big dinner and eventually evolving into an exchange of talents and musical numbers. Most volunteers went home after the public event for private celebrations with their host families, which probably included an exchange of gifts and even more food.

Now that group 81 is getting ready to leave our permanent sites where we’ve lived for considerably longer, the stakes are a lot higher, and some of us are starting to get nervous. Much of Samoan culture is considerably more formal than American culture, and I personally feel like I’m constantly walking on eggshells, hoping not to say the wrong thing or inadvertently slight anyone—and that’s just normal life. Just like in America, special events in Samoa—weddings, funerals, Christmas, going away parties—bring on heightened stress.

Most Samoan speeches begin with an apology. “I’m deeply sorry if any of my past actions have in any way offended you...” Et cetera. I guess I can handle that. Maybe throw in some biblical allusions for good measure. Round it off with a long list of thank yous. I guess I can do that.

Maybe I’m more worried about the exchange of gifts. It’s somewhat common for a school to give a departing Peace Corps Volunteer money, which is nice, but it definitely puts the pressure on the volunteer to reciprocate, and it’s difficult to know what’s appropriate. Giving money back? Not appropriate.

For host families, several Peace Corps staff have suggested framed pictures, or some sort of photo album. I feel like the magazine I created for my school might be enough of a gift, but I don’t know how fresh that will be 2 months down the line.

In any case, volunteers often throw our own fa’amavaes where we get together for one last hurrah. Group 81’s shouldn’t disappoint. And then, of course, there’s the typical congregating at Aggie Grey’s—from where the airport shuttle departs—for hugs and a final Vailima. I’m dreading / looking forward to that.

Back to regular blog programming tomorrow.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Me dancing at our host village fa'amavae.

The Battle of the Minds finals I scrutineered on Saturday morning.

The Battle of the Minds studio audience during a brief break when Digicel did a promotion.

There’s something post-apocalyptic about it. It reminds me of “Mad Max” or “Waterworld” or even “Wall-E” in which people (or robots) trying to survive after the world has ended re-commission everyday items for new purposes—think of Kevin Costner filtering his waste with a modified Mr. Coffee or Wall-E with his cache of treasures he’s found in the dump. The practice in Samoa isn’t quite so dramatic, but it’s still a little off-putting the first time you think about it.

This trend is noticeable on the trip into town from the airport: even from the road it’s easy to see the Samoan thatched fales securing the roof with old tires. Some houses use the left-over scraps of the rubber sheets used to cut out the soles of Jandals. The foot-shaped holes form a sort of rubber net that holds a small sheet of corrugated aluminum that keeps the fale waterproof.

Culture Day in the village provided some more examples. Rather than using a vegetable peeler or a knife to peel taro and breadfruit, it’s common in Samoa to cut a tin can about an inch from one of the bases and to use the jagged edges as a peeler. In addition to using banana leaves and breadfruit leaves to cover the umu, the above ground fire used to cook whole pigs among other things, I’ve seen people use old refrigerator boxes.

Re-usable food containers are all over the place. Tip-Top Ice Cream—perhaps the most popular in Samoa—comes in a plastic blue box. My family used these tubs as jewelry boxes, containers for storing important papers, and as cheap substitute for Tuperware. Other popular reusable food cartons include SkyFlakes cracker tins and large plastic Best Food mayonnaise jars.

Sometime about halfway through training I tried not to notice as different members of my host family took large swigs from a plastic bottle of well vodka. It was only when they gave some to the baby I realized they were using the vodka bottle to store water.

I’ve actually adopted this technique, although it’s not something I picked up from my host family. It was Cale and Sara who pointed out water tastes better from a glass bottle than that from a plastic bottle. So pretty early on I acquired a finished bottle of Absolut, and I’ve used that as a water jug for nearly as long as I’ve lived in my house.

My own re-commissioning of everyday items doesn’t end there. When I couldn’t find a cooling platform for my laptop, I bought a cheap plastic basket at Big Bear. I lowered my shower curtain using the wooden pegs the biology kids used on their field trip to Mt. Vaea. Scout eats from old Skippy’s peanut butter lids.

And sometimes when I’m watching her eat, I feel a little like Mad Max.

Tomorrow's Cultural Exploration (the last Cultural Exploration): Fa'amavae

I hope you're well. Pictures below.

I noticed this while watching Lost last night. See that oxygen tank hanging in the background? That's a makeshift bell. Those are used everywhere in Samoa. I think it's safe to assume every village has at least one of those. I can hear them ringing outside my house from time to time. Hats off to Lost for its eye for detail.

Note: Kindly refrain from leaving comments about Lost. Thank you.

Phil and me, mustachioed, peeling taro with tin cans.

Scout and her food dishes. The dark blue (i.e. the chunky) is for food. The light blue (i.e. creamy) is for water.

There’s a scene in “Annie Hall” where Albie goes to visit his friend Max, who produces a sitcom in Los Angeles. In the scene, Max is supervising an audio technician who is adding a laugh track to the sitcom. “Now, Charlie,” he says. “Give me a big laugh here... And a medium-size chuckle here.” The scene demonstrates America’s nuanced spectrum of socially acceptable laughing. If something is a little funny, there’s a quiet laugh. If something is hilarious, laughter is more uproarious. In my experience in Samoa though, laughter is rarely quiet or nuanced.

It doesn’t take much to get a classroom full of kids to laugh—a witty remark, a wardrobe malfunction, a clumsy misstep—and when my kids laugh, they laugh hard. When some of my fellow volunteers get together, we often trade stories of good and bad moments we’ve had at school, and many of these stories involve students laughing for one reason or another. When recounting these stories, volunteers sometimes use a laugh similar to that of the miserly Muppets characters Statler and Waldorf; that is, a huge belly laugh with a “BWAAA!” sound and an accompanying rolling back of the head. It captures the zero-to-sixty nature of students’ laughter.

During a free period in the middle of the day, I’ll sometimes come back to my house, and I can often hear the sounds of classrooms full of students bellowing with unbridled laughter. The sound is loud and it carries.

The Big Laugh certainly isn’t limited to students. While there might be less screaming and whooping, the laughing that goes on during staff meetings is often just as big and hearty. The laughing doesn’t seem limited by geography; we noticed the big laugh during training on the south side of Upolu, and volunteers from around the country have attested to The Big Lausgh at their sites. I remember sitting outside Tanu Beach Fales on Savai’i waiting for a bus and overhearing the family church services going on in the open fale nearby. About once a minute there was a great big, “BAHAHAHA!”

It’s conceivable that things here are simply funnier; the slapstick more over-the-top, the irony more brutal, the comedic timing more crisp. Perhaps. But in my experience, the same tired “O fea lou teine?” jokes never fail to garner The Big Laugh.

As far as I can tell, The Big Laugh seems like a great thing: most medical research on laughing seems to point to the bigger and more frequent the laugh, the better. So more power to you, Samoa. My only qualm is this: with The Big Laugh, I feel like I have a stacked audience. I crack one small joke in my science class, and immediately my kids are in stitches. It makes me think I’m funnier than I am. But I guess I can live with that.

Tomorrow’s Cultural Exploration: TBD

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Mike 83 and other trainees en route to the beach last Saturday.

Danny 83 and Samoan boy blowing bubbles in the ocean.

Jenny 83, Chris 81, Rachael 83, and OtherMike 83

Dan 81 opening a can with a large knife in the Peace Corps office. Nothing new for AJ.

Once, when I was very young, I called my grandpa an idiot. Confined to a car seat in the backseat of the car, I was unable to see out the front windshield. As we approached the intersection at Hesperian and Win ton, my mom saw my grandpa in his car across the intersection, so she honked and waved. When I heard the honk, even at my young age, my Pavlovian response was to shout, “Idiot!” This kneejerk aversion to honking has stayed with me, which has made life in Samoa difficult.

Spend ten minutes riding in a car around Apia, and you’ll hear no less than 8 honks; probably more. Taking a taxi across town is a veritable symphony of car horns. Backing out, pulling in, passing, being passed, assuming right of way, acknowledging right of way, saying hi to your cousin walking down the street. I think even if you drive in a straight line at a constant speed in Samoa, it’s customary to honk every two minutes, just for good measure.

In addition to honking frequency, there’s also high value placed on a having an elaborate customized honk. Lately I’ve noticed a lot of drivers around town have installed a new horn that honks once and then echoes that honk over and over and over, slowly fading to silence. There’s also the ever-popular synthesized catcall. I’ve also taken cabs where I didn't realize the weird sound I was hearing was the taxi’s horn until we were nearly at our destination.

And as I’ve mentioned previously in Cultural Exploration, RPCV Cale once had a million-tala idea that involved inventing a car horn that simply sounded like a long kissing noise.

The one time I drove a car on the island, I had a difficult time perfecting the staccato Samoan honking technique. On occasion we do a similar thing in America in which we punch the horn with the side of a fist, but the American style is a little too short. On the other hand, the normal, open-handed American honk is way too long of a tone. I get the impression it’s an acquired skill.

The worst part of Samoan honking, for me, is getting honked at while I’m on my bike. I’ve been told drivers honk at cyclists as a means of making the cyclist aware of the car’s presence. And because the practice is essentially obligatory, riding a bike down the street inevitably means honk after honk after honk after honk from a line of drivers passing.

The sound never fails to grate on my ears, and I sometimes feel an un-diplomatic urge—one which I’ve never acted on, one which might be described as Pavlovian—to yell back at passing cars, “Idiot!”

Tomorrow’s Cultural Exploration: Laughing

I hope you’re well. Pictures will be posted later tonight or tomorrow morning.

Growing up outside Berkeley, attending college in downtown Los Angeles, and living in San Francisco for a few years after, I’ve experienced a fair amount of panhandling. It’s an awkward, narrow line to walk balancing budget and compassion, and so inevitably we make up arbitrary rules about who we give to along the street. There was a guy who hung out near the Embarcadero BART station who used to repeat over and over, “A nickel and a smile will last a long while.” I would usually toss him some spare change. And there was a piano player who would play with a keyboard and amplifier downtown during the day and huddle in our neighborhood laundromat at night. I’d toss him a dollar whenever I’d see him around. But for whatever reason, “Ska kupe” doesn’t bring out my giving side.

As several visitors have pointed out in the Guest Contributor series, Samoa has relatively few conspicuous homeless. The streets of Apia are mostly empty at night, and those that are out tend to keep to themselves. Panhandling is, for the most part, limited to young children around town during daylight hours singing the unapologetically direct, “Ska kupe.”

“Ska kupe” is a slang contraction of the phrase “Aumai se tā tupe,” which technically translates to “Give me our money”—How beautifully collectivist is that? “You know that money in your wallet that is both yours and mine? Give it to me”—but in the modern lexicon essentially means, “Give me some money.”

The first time I was ska kuped was shortly after I moved in walking back to town from Ming and Hana’s Supermarket. Two children walking toward me, a girl no older than 7 and her younger brother. On seeing me, the girl stopped, pulled the boy back, and whispered in his ear. When she let go, he trudged right up to me, and with as much assurance as I’ve ever seen, he stuck out an open-faced palm and commanded, “Ska kupe!”

No.

Ska is used with other objects, of course. It’s not uncommon to hear teachers to call out to students during Interval, “Ska tea!” When I was in the front office today, I used “Ska flash drive” talking to the librarian.

Still, the brash entitled demand of Ska kupe is not lost on Samoans. Consider the following situation. In Samoa, rather than accepting gifts and money and drinks from your friends on your birthday, it’s more traditional to buy drinks and food for others. So earlier this year, after computer class, one of my year 13s revealed it was Luana’s birthday. So without missing a beat, I turned to Luana and said, “Ska kupe.” The class seemed wholly entertained.

Tomorrow’s Cultural Exploration: Honking.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

These are the kids from PCV Leah's school on the south side of the island. None of them gave me a ska kupe.

Leah's kids.

The view from behind the camcorder.

Sometime back in 2006, I recall I heard some jazz artist on the radio talking about his new album in which he converted the intonations in peoples’ speech to musical tones, and from there he would compose music around that melody. His favorite, if I remember correctly, was a melody string he’d taken from a Hong Kong reporter reading a long string of stock reports. It was a fascinating collision of music and linguistics, and since then I’ve tried to keep an ear out for distinctive lingual melody strings. One that every American seems to notice upon visiting Samoa is the question melody.

When RPCV Dylan returned earlier this year, he told a story about having a phone conversation with RPCVs Cale and Sara when they were fresh off the plane in Los Angeles last December. According to him, Sara couldn’t shake the question melody, and understandably so: the question melody permeates a volunteer’s English very early in the Peace Corps experience, and I can only assume it will be a difficult habit to break once I leave.

I’ve written out the question melody above in its most simplistic form. This 4-note string captures short questions like “Where are you going?” or the Samoan “Te alu i fea?” Each word is assigned to one note; syllables don’t matter. “What are you reading?” “O ai lou igoa?” “How is the morning?” All of these follow the most basic pattern.

Things get trickier as the question gets longer. The jump from the G down to the C seems to be present in every question, but the number of syllables attributed to any one of the tones in the pattern changes depending on the question. For example, in the question “What are we doing for dinner?”, the first two words “What are” are intonated on the F, the “we doing” on the F#, the “for” on the G, and the “dinner?” on the C (“we” could also be said on the F leaving only the “doing” for the F#).

There are also exceptions, of course. When asking “What time is it?”, “What” starts on the G, and then “time is it?” would all be intonated on the C. The Samoan version of the same question, “Ta se fia?” would also skip the F. The “Ta” would start on the F#, “se” on the G, “fia?” on the C.

It’s unclear where the question melody comes from. I hear it’s the result of New Zealand influence, but while I recognize British, Australian, and New Zealand English speakers all have distinct question lilts, none seems to be the direct predecessor to Samoa’s.

The question melody is so far off from the American English question melody—we intone up at the end of our questions rather than down—volunteers can often be heard making declaratory statements in the question tone. Around the Peace Corps office, this practice works out fine, but on occasion I’ve made statements to my classes using the question melody. This usually results in students looking at me quizzically, confused about whether I’ve actually asked a question.

Tomorrow’s Cultural Exploration: Ska Kupe.

I hope you’re well. Pictures will be posted later this afternoon.

At my middle school and high school, students were allowed to take one period off in their schedule to be a Teacher’s Aide. While TAs in college were usually graduate students who would assist in teaching lab classes and take on other teaching duties, TAs in middle school and high school would do menial tasks like marking multiple choice tests based on an answer key or walk around collecting attendance sheets. While this isn’t the same sort small-time job as would be asked of a student doing a Samoan fe’au, the diminutive nature of the task is as close a parallel as I can find.

The literal translation of fe’au is an “errand” or “something to be done”. Within the context of school, this usually means an errand a student is running for a teacher. At my school it’s not unusual for a teacher to pull aside a trusted student, hand that student $5, and have the student walk across the street to buy Digicel phone credit or a cup of Ramen noodles. Often when asking a student to fulfill such a task, a teacher will ball up the $5-bill and toss it in the student’s direction, and the student will pick it off the floor.

Though fe’aus don’t always involve retail transactions, most involve moving a object from one place to another. Having a student do some heavy lifting or sending a message to another teacher via carrier student are both acceptable uses of fe’au; I’ve heard other volunteers talk about sending a student to retrieve items from the volunteer’s house.

Rules also differ from place to place. I heard from another volunteer that at his school, if a student is sent on a fe’au to buy phone credit, and the fale’oloa down the street is out , that student needs to keep walking until he finds phone credit. He’s essentially not allowed to return to school until the fe’au is completed. This mentality of not resting until the job is done is okay though because running a fe’au is a completely acceptable excuse for not showing up to class on time.

I am fascinated by the fe’au phenomenon for 2 reasons. First, most tasks seem either too menial or too risky to warrant a student’s participation. I don’t feel justified in asking a student to carry a stack of books thirty meters when I could just as easily do it myself, and I’m always a little terrified some kid is going to get hit by a car crossing the street to buy me phone credit.

My second fascination is choosing the student to run the fe’au. When I have a task in mind, I will think of a specific student and then seek out him or her. Whereas other teachers seem willing to trust any random kid to run an errand.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I never could have implemented the fe’au system in Oakland Unified. I would have been fired for child endangerment, and I would have been out $5.

Tomorrow’s Cultural Exploration: The Question Melody

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

This kid approached Dan and me to sell us pens. We chatted with him.

Jackfruit growing at Blakey's pule's house.

Sorry Sorry Sorry...

Things are really busy. Lots of people are in town because it's White Sunday tomorrow, and there's a lot going on during the day, and then even more going on at night.

I know I owe you an Odds and Ends for Thursday, a The Story So Far and FAQs for Friday, and Cultural Exploration 50 for today. These things have been marinating in my head, but I haven't had time to type them up. Apologies.

At latest, they'll be posted tomorrow night. But I might get to them before that. Cross your fingers.

Anyway, I hope you're well.

Go Giants!

This morning marked exactly 2 years since we landed here in Samoa. It’s weird how in some ways it feels like we just got here, and the last 2 years has gone by in the blink of an eye—and on the other hand, it feels like we’ve been here forever. The time remaining seems incredibly finite. No longer does a free weekend mean sitting around the house reading a book. A free weekend needs to be spent doing something tourist-y that I haven’t done yet, going to the training village, or preparing to leave. But before I go on too much about the future…

The Story So Far (as continued from July 8, 2010)

The week back after 4th of July was the unofficial School Magazine kick-off, a project which would span the entire 3 months, and be a shocking onerous undertaking. Back in July I started taking class photos. My pule and I also went around to get photos and logos from sponsors.

Around that time, Erica 80 registered Peace Corps Samoa in a 9-week soccer tournament. Though it was difficult to field an entire team at times, and though other teams had an ungentlemanly style of play at times, it proved to be my favorite part of the week while it lasted.

Jen and Tommy came to visit near the end of July. Their stay was cut short because of an airplane mechanical failure that left them stuck at home for an extra day. We made the most of their stay, heading out to Manase for a couple days.

A few days after their departure, I attended my first Peace Corps wedding. A volunteer married a native Samoan in judge’s chambers. It was lovely.

In the midst of all this, the Volunteer Resource Room moved down the hall at the Peace Corps office. At the time, this was extremely controversial, but 2 months later volunteers have made peace with the move.

In school sports, athletics (err… Track and Field for American readers) reached its climax with the national Champ of Champs meet in early August. Though my school performed well at the regional “zone” meet, their performance at nationals was admittedly lackluster.

Champ of Champs was held on the Friday before the long Father’s Day weekend, which meant plenty of volunteers were around to celebrate. Phil and I had lunch with the Indian missionaries up at Apong’s house on Saturday, and a larger contingent of volunteers headed down to Tafatafa on Sunday.

With the help of student aide Maryhellen, I took a great majority of the class photos and staff photos in mid-August. Also, Jordan and I studied for the GMAT.

A visiting Tahitian Rugby Team came to stay at my school in late August, so we canceled the last week of classes for term 2. This did not necessarily mean a longer break since teachers had to come in and cook and serve food on a 3-day rotation. I was mainly tasked with cooking rice.

The Peace Corps came in first in the 2nd annual Perimeter Relay Race.

September was a month of blog lies. I got a tattoo on September 1, but wrote about PCV Paul getting his. Later in the month I posted an apocryphal story about Scout’s birthday party and posted a heavily photoshopped picture.

In reality, I helped Kaelin shoot for the Peace Corps’s new Co-Teaching Video. The project has since run into some roadblocks.

During school break, Group 81 had its COS conference at Le Uaina Resort in Faleapuna. It was the usual tomfoolery.

After the break, the last term started with a fairly easy teaching day, and a mad dash to get the magazine finished. By the first day of school I had a working draft of the layout, though getting all of the students, teachers, and administrators involved to submit articles was a little like herding cats. There was also an unexpected content approval process (which gave me an excuse to make an obscure Elvis Costello reference).

In addition to the magazine, life has been crowded lately by the year 13 camp and their subsequent tests, adjusting to Samoa’s first foray into Daylight Savings, and preparing for the (now arrivéd) Group 83.

And that’s the story so far.

FAQs

When do you get back?

I think I’ll be flying into Los Angeles December 7, but that won’t be for sure until I’ve purchased the plane ticket.

Are you excited?

Yes and no. There’s been a lot of people, places, and things from back home I’ve missed. But there are also a lot of Samoan people, places, and things I’ll miss once I leave. Moving out and moving in and drastically changing one’s lifestyle are never very much fun. And I’m sure the joys of reverse culture shock will be a riot. But yes, I’m excited about coming home.

What about the cat?

The plan is still for Scout to come home with me. True, I haven’t really done much about this, but it’s on my radar.

And you’re going to go to law school?

Maybe. If I am accepted. I think I’m going to start submitting applications Monday.

What schools are you applying to?

Two in California and three on the East Coast.

Tomorrow starts a new round of cultural exploration. Tomorrow’s topic will be Feau. I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

83s Rachael and Olivia. Hey Amanda, doesn't Olivia look like Lara?

Time is speeding up. In the true binge-and-purge spirit of the Peace Corps, the dog days where time seemed to stand still for hours on end have switched gears and we’re mow moving at warp speed. As you may have noticed updating the blog has become less frequent. But if I’ve missed a few days here and there, it’s only because the day went by so quickly, I didn’t realize it had passed. Here are some other odds and ends from the week:

Now that it’s Spring, there’s been a huge uptick in what Dan calls “death bugs”, which is a rather dramatic name for an insect that’s mostly harmless. Death bugs are extremely tiny flying insects that swarm in clouds about 5 feet off the ground at dawn and dusk. These clouds are only visible from about 5 feet away, so it’s difficult to know you’re about to walk into a cloud of bugs until you are standing in the middle of the cloud of bugs. This is particularly nasty when jogging. I’ve run through death bug clouds and come away with dead bugs all over my shirt, arms, and face; as though I’m a human windshield. The worst is inhaling them. So gross.

Last night was ridiculously hot. I fell asleep clothed with no covers, and I woke up sweaty at 3:00 a.m.

My year 12s took the computer studies common exam for Congregationalist schools this morning. It was uneventful.

Oh, I nearly forgot! The magazine is officially finished. I finally received a report for the Director of Education—a digital copy of the half-page report, so exciting!—and the layout is complete. I’m having some trouble converting to PDF. I’m using PrimoPDF to convert, which has a tendency to inexplicably make random objects disappear. A page full of pictures will show up in the PDF with a white rectangle in the middle where one photo somehow didn’t make it.

We received official word from Washington allowing us to give our bikes to Host Country Nationals! This was exciting.

Giants looked good against the Braves today! This is excellent.

Tomahawk Chop: most annoying cheer in all of sports. Thoughts?

I am still fan-less.

Group 83 is great. Since most of 81 is leaving in a couple months, I think we had all written them off a little, but we’ve just been so impressed with them. They remind us of us, and we’re nothing if not jolly narcissists.

Saddest moment yet: Tauinaola, who’s been featured on the blog several times over the last 2 years, was hanging around the computer lab because she wanted me to import a bunch of mp3s into iTunes so she could play them on her Nano. While she was standing around, I asked why she didn’t take computers this year. She shrugged and asked, “Can I take computers in year 13 next year?” So I had to remind her I wouldn’t be here next year. She was surprised by this, and I don’t think she’d ever known I was leaving. And then things just felt sad.

I met the Prime Minister today. Randomly.

My pule is very skeptical about bringing a digital copy of the school magazine to the printer. He wants me to print it out and submit a paper copy. I will print out a hard copy to appease him, but I sure hope the printer uses the digital version (provided the PDF converter starts working).

My friend who asked me to take photos at the National Memorial Ceremony, and whose family owns the dog I talked about Sunday, read Sunday’s post about the dog and confronted me. “My mom is a high chief with seven matai titles and you’re trying to tell her lies and feed her bread to the dogs?!” She laughed.That’s all I got for this week. I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

My Vice Pule was finally ready for her close-up.

Prime Minister.

Koa, Summer, and I watched "Rain Man" tonight. Me in full Giants regalia.

Kaelin and Jenny S. 82 at the pool this afternoon.

83 is here! Blakey and I were picked up by Peace Corps staff at 6:00 a.m., and we trekked down to the airport to welcome the new trainees, give them ulas, and smile at them to theoretically smooth over their culture shock. We stood around with the training staff and a basket of moso’oi and groggily stood around sipping coffee and waiting for the tell-tale sound of jet engines. And about a half hour after the plane landed, they started trickling out of the customs checkpoint.

This was a slightly new situation for me. The only other time I’ve experienced it was the brief period between when I arrived at the Crown Plaza hotel in Los Angeles for staging and the time our first scheduled session began in the hotel’s conference room: intuitively guessing which random faces in the crowd are Peace Corps trainees. Back in LA, I remember waiting for an elevator next to a short blonde girl, attempting to discern her volunteer-ness through a myriad of indefinable visual cues (Incidentally, the girl at the elevator went to Tonga.).

Picking through travelers at the airport this morning was both easier and more difficult. At least half the passengers on the Air New Zealand flight from Los Angeles were Samoans, and since Peace Corps tends to not send volunteers to countries where they have family, they could be ruled out. But I feel like within the remaining group it was difficult to delineate the Peace Corps Trainees from the German tourists from the American travelers from the Kiwi travelers laying over , etc.

Does she look like she could grow to enjoy cold showers and bug spray? What would his legs look like covered in mosquito bites? Can I see this person “scraggly”? Could this person wear the same t-shirt for an entire week? It’s seemingly impossible to define criteria to answer these questions, but some people seem to look more the part than others.

Some were easier than others. The kid with the curly hair, the girl with the aviator prescription glasses, a couple girls I recognized from their blogs—these were obvious. But a few faces slipped into the crowd and had to be ushered back toward the herd.

The first person out was Nancy, who has emailed Blakey and me several times. Blakey and I recognized her immediately. Interim Training Director Jamie turned to me and asked, “Who’s that?” I think not expecting to hear it was a Trainee.

“That’s Nancy,” I said.

“Nancy who?” She asked.

I rattled off her last name. Jamie was surprised.

“How do you know that?!”

I shrugged. “The Internet.”

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Group 83 on the bus to Apia.

Danny and Chris 83. Apparently Danny's mom frequents the blog. Hello, Danny's Mom!

Blakey and AJ await the morning's 'Ava Ceremony. Blakey was taupo this morning, and in this photo she is already in costume.

Me, Blakey, and AJ at the 'Ava Ceremony.

Jenny 83 drinking the 'ava flanked by Rachael and Chelsea 83. Jenny's mom also reads the blog. Hello, Jenny's Mom!

A bunch of group 83, as well as a bunch of group 81 and Ally 82, stuck around after the ceremony to finish the 'ava.

It’s Finish

The magazine is done except for 4 things:

I have received no report nor do I have a good photo of my Vice Pule;

I have received no report nor do I have a good photo of the Director of Education;

I have no photo of the Magazine Committee; and

I have no advertisement for Samoa Stationery Supplies.If I don’t get the first 2 tomorrow, I figure we can just turn their page into a Table of Contents. It will be more worrisome if they both submit and they write too much to share a page (which is pretty likely). I couldn’t write in the names of the Magazine Committee because I don’t really know who is actually on it. I feel a little like I am the entire Magazine Committee (people have been asking, “How’s your magazine coming along?”), but I’m trying to be inclusive. I made my own ad for another Apian vendor, but I can’t find any contact information for Samoa Stationery on the Internet, so I’m at a loss for what to do there. These are all relatively tiny details though. The major hope is that I don’t have to spend another couple hours scavenging and cropping photos. Although if I end up making that table of contents, that’s exactly what will happen.

The Dog from Yesterday

One of my friends in town asked if I could take photos at the National Memorial Service yesterday because for whatever reason she would be late if she could make it at all. She arranged a ride for me: I rode over to Taifagata Cemetery with her mom and her mom’s friend. On the way home, we stopped off at a fale’oloa to pick up a few loaves of bread for Sunday’s typically light dinner. And then we went back to my friend’s mom’s house to drops some things off.

When we get there, Mom sets the loaves of bread on the patio furniture outside, finds her keys, and opens the door. I follow her into the kitchen carrying the small take-away meals we received after the service. “Can you get the bread before the dog gets to it?” She asks me. Sure. I walk back outside to find the dog wolfing down a loaf of bread.

I’ve mentioned before Samoans can be nasty toward domestic animals, and though I was annoyed at the dog for complicating my life, I didn’t know what would happen if someone found out. So I quietly scolded him, tore a small chunk off where he’d been chewing, and took the bread inside. A couple minutes later I went back outside to wait by the car, only to find the dog eating a second loaf of bread I had missed the first time. This time it was a loaf of pane, which is sort of like Hawaiian sweet bread. It comes in individual “buns” that can be torn away from the loaf one at a time. So the fact that the dog has taken a chunk out of one of the buns makes it conspicuous this time.

Still wanting to cover for the dog, I ripped off the remaining corresponding bun (loaves are baked in rows of two), and in attempt to get the dog away from the scene of the crime and to destroy the evidence, I threw the bun across the yard. The dog goes tearing off, and I turn the loaf of bread the opposite way in the bag to hide the now-non-heeled end.

I go back into the kitchen, leave the bread on the counter, and then walk back outside. The dog, who has eaten way more bread than he’s used to at this point, is taking his sweet time swallowing the pane.

Just then, Mom walks out. I’m getting ready to wash my hands of the entire thing, should she notice what the dog is eating. I figure I’ll just blame the dog and that will be that.

But then her son follows her out of the house, and he’s holding the doomed loaf of remaining pane.

“Here!” says Mom, taking the loaf from her son and handing it to me. “We bought too much. You take this.”

So at least no one had to discover that the end of the loaf was missing. But now I kinda regret giving the extra chunk to the dog. Pane’s good. Oh well.

I hope you’re well. Picture below.

We talked about the seasons in my 9.2 science class today. Notice my crappy rendering of Australia and New Zealand on each globe.

Originally, the plan was to actually write and publish 4 posts tonight. I was going to start with Thursday’s Odds and Ends and power right on through to writing a treatise about today’s National Memorial Service for the one-year anniversary of the tsunami. But it’s 10 o’clock now, and I have too much non-blog stuff to do to justify spending the next 4 hours writing and cropping photos. My pule wants the magazine to be finished tomorrow, and I want my law school personal statement to be finished tomorrow. So I going to give you a synopsis of the last 4 days, so you’ll be all caught up. That cool with you?

Thursday

We ended school early on Thursday because a group of Samoan Kiwis came to hang out with the year 13s during what would usually be camp. After school let out, I went down to the Peace Corps office to work on some things. I came home to change before heading out to Aerobic Dance Fitness at JP’s Fitness Center. After showering I had dinner at Peace Corps Admin Director Denise’s house, after which I helped her husband Otis with some algebra class he’s taking over the Internet. I got back to school in time to watch the kids clean. People seemed pretty annoyed I wasn’t there for the Kiwi visitors. Oh well. I can’t be everywhere.

Friday

I wanted to go to Savai’i this weekend, but a wrench was thrown into that plan when Phil texted to say he was sick and would be both contagious and not fun to hang out with. So I invited myself to Dan and Paul’s. They were cool with it. Getting away from my campus was difficult. Upon hearing I was heading to Savai’i, my pule decided that moment was exactly the right time for me to install the printer on my vice pule’s machine. She didn’t have enough outlets in her office to plug the printer in. I left. I’d never been to Dan or Paul’s house before. So I can check that off the list. Now the only 81 houses I haven’t been to are AJ and Erin. I’ll get to both if time permits.

Saturday

Paul got up early to go get email addresses for his students at the Internet cafe. I slept in, and then Dan and I caught a bus into Salelologa. The bus was an hour late, but we were in no hurry. Le Waterfront was closed, which was mildly heartbreaking, so Dan and I got fish-n-chips at a lesser restaurant. Then we headed down the street to Lusia’s Lagoon Fales where we whittled away the evening with a bunch of other volunteers.

Sunday

I caught the bus into town so I could make the 10 o’clock boat. The boat ride was uneventful. For no particular reason, I treated myself to a meal at McDonald’s. By the time I got home, I had enough time to briefly charge my camera and change my shirt before running out the door to get to the National Memorial Service at the Taifagata Cemetery. It’s a long story that I won’t get into here, but I was a photojournalist for the day. There was an incident that involved a dog—maybe I’ll tell you that story tomorrow. I came home, trucked over to the hi-speed Internet to submit my photos, and now I’m here.

I’ve got the magazine to finish next, and though my personal statement is passable at this point, everyone keeps saying it needs to have more of a tangible story. But I’m having trouble relating teaching 6th grade middle school in Oakland to anything having to do with the law. There are some major issues that need to be dealt with. It’s going to be a late night.

I hope you’re well. Apologies for the missed days. Pictures below.

Dan on his campus

The ocean in front of Dan and Paul's school.

Grrr.... Blogger has changed the way users upload photos. The new way is lousy. It's not letting me upload anymore right now. And it's taken a half hour to get these 3 up. So I'm going to stop now. More photos tomorrow.

I’ve been time-traveling in my dreams. Reality and fantasy often converge during sleep, but lately I’ve been taking the next step, justifying the inexplicable by accepting time-travel as an acceptable narrative device. Watching “Lost” while living on an island, it hasn’t taken much for my subconscious to make these leaps. Several times over the last week, I’ve awoken with the rare (and in this case phony) intellectual satisfaction of being able to explain my own dreams: time travel. So it was especially creepy this morning when, on the anniversary of last year’s devastating earthquake, I was rudely awakened by another earthquake.

This morning I reported the quake “occurred exactly 1 year and 2 hours after The Big One,” but that’s only because I forgot to account for Daylight Savings. Technically it was only 1 year and 1 hour. The sun was in nearly the same place, the kids at school let out nearly the same scream, and I was in nearly the same position on my couch—with one crucial difference: I was laying the other way. Last year, my head lay at the eastern end of the couch. This morning my head was at the western end. If not for this immediately obvious detail, I might have actually believed The Island wanted me to join the Dharma Initiative.

But that wasn’t the case. This morning’s jolt, though slightly strong, lasted less than 10 seconds. I recall I yelled, “Get out!” in an Elaine Bennis sort of way, and then, upon checking the time on my cell phone, realized I was 5 minutes late for second period.

This experience encapsulates the national mood as I experienced it today. On one hand, I knew many people who expected today to be a national holiday, and after it was decided not to be, still searched for ways to commemorate the occasion. On the other hand, today was business as usual.

A few Peace Corps Volunteers had specially calibrated lesson plans because they assumed there would be no school today. Emails from the Rotaract community invited people to come commemorate the occasion with a moment of silence in front of the government building, while others encouraged people to wear black and white.

I hear there was some sort of ceremony in Lalomanu this morning, but mostly today functioned like any other Wednesday, which was both strange and a relief at the same time.

I attended the launch of (occasional blog commenter) Lani Wendt Young’s book, Pacific Tsunami – Galu Afi on Monday night, which gives a peoples’ history of last year’s earthquake and tsunami. There were speeches and musical tributes and opportunities for emotional release. It proved both cathartic and inspiring.

Looking back, the tsunami was literally and figuratively the centerpiece of my Peace Corps experience. Something changed that day at Samoa’s emotional core, and its effects seem to be everywhere: the cracks in the floor of my computer lab, the jumpiness of my students, the readership of the blog—hell, there’s good evidence Scout was abandoned by her mother as a result of the quake, and thus she came to stay with me.

But as easy as it is to see the change, it’s difficult to see life much differently. After all, this morning when I awoke, the sun was in nearly the same place, the kids at school let out nearly the same scream, and I was in nearly the same position on my couch. Sometimes when things change, they kind of stay the same. It’s almost like time travel.

I hope you’re well. More pictures from last year below.

Me standing next to Tui as Mira uses my phone to call her parents after the school was evacuated.

Crowds from multiple schools hike to higher elevation.

Cars and people evacuating under banners informing drivers of the switch from driving on the right to driving on the left. The switch happened 22 days before the earthquake.

Books in my living room that fell off my shelf during the quake.

Apia was evacuated again later that evening after sizable aftershocks. This family packed their bags to stay the night up the mountain.

Exactly 1 year and 2 hours after The Big One, we just had another earthquake. This one we just had minutes ago was considerably smaller and shorter; there was no evacuation. But it made it clear that earthquakes are weighing on the national psyche. It was also pretty damn creepy.

More earthquake anniversary coverage tonight.

Leah still wanted me to bring doughnuts at 7:57 this morning. Since we were scheduled to truck down to her village first thing this morning, she wanted us to bring two dozen doughnuts from Gregg’s Bakery in town to share with her staff, and I figured Peace Corps staff would be cool with making a pit stop before we left town. But then 19 minutes later before Peace Corps staff ever arrived, Leah called me. “I think we have a problem,” she said. Ho, boy, Leah. You don’t even know.

As I’ve mentioned on the blog before, I’ve been charged with videotaping and editing a video on The Art of Co-Teaching for the Peace Corps office here. Theoretically this video would be shown to both incoming groups and to schools where a Peace Corps Volunteer will soon work. Kaelin 82 is spearheading this production; I’m just DP. We went out a couple weeks back during my school break to get footage of a bunch of the 82s leading songs and activities with their kids, and interviewing Principals and students alike.

I have a little experience with digitally editing video, but not too much, so I was a little nervous from the beginning. It hasn’t helped that I can’t get my laptop to acknowledge the camcorder. This morning I finally figured out how to turn on the camcorder’s “USB Flow”, but even then, my laptop crossed its arms and turned a cold shoulder. Vista can be a snooty jerk.

But even that wasn’t the half of it.

I rewound to our old footage from last time to see how much tape we had left for today and set the tape at the right spot. But in the viewfinder’s playback, the screen is barred with a bunch of thick grey lines. Also, the camera’s speaker, which was already had an obnoxious crackle, was mostly silent. This wasn’t how playback looked and sounded two weeks ago.

In my frustration over the USB issue, I downloaded the camcorder’s 300-page manual over hi-speed internet a week or two ago, so I went looking for these grey stripes in the troubleshooting section. The manual diagnoses a dirty video head, and prescribes using the cleaner cassette for a minute or two to clear up the problem. But the Peace Corps doesn’t have a cleaner cassette.

And if the camera can’t play the footage we already shot, I’m severely dubious of its ability to accurately shoot new footage. But none of that mattered this morning because the staff member with whom Leah was going to co-teach was out sick. And he was the back up. The original is out on maternity leave.

AND THEN this afternoon I went to the office to figure this out with the Peace Corps’s Technical Officer, and I was standing at his desk when the acting Training Manager came in to tell me that it’s irrelevant whether Leah’s co-teacher will be back in school tomorrow because no one from the Peace Corps staff is available to drive me down there anyway.

So between missing on-screen talent (and her understudy), a camera with which to shoot said talent, and the transportation to carry the nada-camera to the nada-talent, the project seems a little doomed. I think we have a problem.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

Pelenatete giving a presentation on Thailand.

Fautamara giving a presentation on the Philippines.