Did You Say Exercise or Extra Fries?

Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Promoting health and vitality.

University of Alabama researchers Josh Lockhart and Grant Pethel administering pile sort activity at National University of Samoa.

Josh Lockhart, Grant Pethel, and I went down to the shipping terminal to buy ferry tickets for American Samoa. We were planning to travel to Tutuila to collect data. Tutuila is American Samoa's main island, the Manu'a Islands the other.

I had planned to go to Ta'u in the Manu'a Islands of American Samoa as well, but it was impossible. Flights among the islands are touch and go. The second airport in Samoa just reopened in July, so more flights had become available. However, the bottleneck of people traveling back and forth to see family was such that they were booked up for several weeks. The only way to travel to American Samoa during the six weeks of the field season without having known ahead of time was to travel by ferry.

This would be rather difficult because our return flights to the US were out of Samoa. Had I planned better, we'd have flown into Samoa and out of American Samoa and saved ourselves considerable stress.

We had gone directly to the ferry the day before after getting back from Savai'i, but Josh did not have his passport with him so we were not able to make the purchase. We planned to come right back with the passport but were tired and by the time we got back and didn't want to drive back downtown. We would have bought the wrong tickets if we'd done that because of the time zone issues.

We would have to buy a ticket that would leave on Friday from Apia at around 8pm and arrive in American Samoa on Friday around 2am. The return ferry would leave American Samoa around noon, and that would get up back in Apia on Saturday around 2am. It's very confusing to me.

We'd chatted with our host, Lai, and he'd told us which tickets we needed to buy. So we did that and then went to the CSS offices to conduct some pile sorts of participants we had recruited.

For lunch we went to Burger Bill's. We thought it was funny and kept accidentally ending up in their parking lot for some reason and had a hankering for a burger or something and went there. Bad idea. I have not been a fan of much restaurant fare in Samoa, but this was gross. I got a mushroom swiss burger for some reason. I should have known better because my first job was at Hardee's, and Hardee's had a mushroom swiss burger that I found gross then when I liked fast food (working at Hardee's soured me on that place forever). Burger Bill's burger was similar, so I left it unfinished. Grant and Josh had underwhelming experiences as well.

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Wednesday, July 19

Left tray: pulasami, oka, fish is coconut milk; right tray: chicken, pork, yams, seaweed, cucumber-tuna, and bread?

​The best food we have eaten in Samoa has been what people have served us at their homes, for the most part. I'm not a fan of the curries I've had there. They are simply flour based sauces, I think.

Fortunately, we were eating at Leota's for dinner, which would include the #2 pig. He also promised to make a couple versions of Oka (fish in coconut milk and lime juice), which is one of my favorite Samoan dishes.

In the meantime, we ran errands and tried to meet up with Su'a Alaiva'a Sulu'ape. We'd been popping in, and Ata finally gave me his cell number and told me to call him. I did but just got voicemail. I also texted. We had arrangements to meet that day but could not nail the time down. Su'a will often roll in a few hours after the arranged time, but he is Su'a, so no one says a word. However, we were on a schedule, so we could wait an hour or so but then would have to jet.

We sat watching Junior, and he introduced us to the family he was working on. It was the son/nephew of the Nu'uuli fautasi team in American Samoa. I told Josh and Grant how important these guys are, and they were very friendly and receptive. They live in Pago Pago, so we made arrangements to meet up with them the following week for data collection when they'd be back home and we'd be over there.

We went over to Leota's around dinnertime and met his family. This included his wife, young daughter, and baby son. His wife is a teacher a Samoa College. They also live with Leota's brother and three cousins, who go to university and help with the kids.

Basically, all land is family land, and they are from Savai'i. So when they are in Savai'i, they obviously have places to stay as any kid would going home. But when they are in Apia, this is an extension of their village, giving them a family to stay with in Apia too. Leota tells me that from now on, I will stay with them and in the village when I am in Savai'i.

Leota's mother bought the property they have in Apia, and she is buried there. This was a big deal for Leota and a decision he is unsure was the best political move for him. He aspires to be High Chief some day, and he certainly has the character and aptitude for it in all the best ways.

His mother was an important chief, and she should have been buried on the traditional family land, rather than a new piece of property on another island. However, Leota was so close to his mother that he could not bear to be separated from her, so he pleaded with the High Chief to be allowed to bury here in Apia.

In previous years, I've puzzled about the Samoan custom of burying family in the front yard. This year we got a thorough education about it from Leota. According to Leota, fa'alavelave are more important than the Christian holidays, even though Samoans are very Christian. Fa'alavelave are gift-giving celebrations that accompany important village events, such as weddings and funerals.

Funerals are as lavish as weddings for Samoans, with family flying in from all over the world. The celebration of the deceased lasts several days and includes lots of event planning. We witnessed one next door from our Air'B'n'B that lasted several days. They had multiple Taula party tents set up and were outside cooking in the traditional style near the edge of property near us. There were ceremonies we caught glimpses of in the distance, and there were crowds of people.

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Research teach with Leota's family in Apia.

​Like weddings, professional photographers capture it all on film, and Leota showed us the video of him wailing atop his mother's coffin.

Fa'alavelave are important and expensive, but Samoans don't think of money as something that needs to be squirreled away for personal use. They are a communal-oriented culture, especially compared with my own midwestern US background. In Samoa, everything is owned by the family and village, not individuals, so money flows through the family and village and is not kept by individuals. For the most part.

Banks accommodate this; fa'alavelave loans are easy to get, have no/low interest, and you can get multiple fa'alavelave loans even if you haven't paid off previous ones, because of the value these events have in the culture.

Burying family in the front yard is very important in Samoa. By doing that, family remain close. They are buried in the front out of respect, and the size and design of their monument often indicates their status in life. Untitled people may have unmarked graves in the yard but are still with family. In Savai'i, Leota pointed out several graves around the monuments that we had thought were simply landscape decor.

The cemeteries I've photographed in previous posts are often graves of displaced, foreigners, or those whose family land is gone. There is one such near NUS.

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​Leota regaled us with these stories, and he and his family served us dinner and entertained us with some ukulele playing and singing. I will have to ask him to teach me a Samoan song next time, as I usually travel with a small stringed instrument to pluck on (uke or stick dulcimer). He family is lovely and daughter is charming, and the food was fantastic. Leota's oka is spot on, and even though there was too much food, I ate two servings of oka.

Leota explained to us that their tradition of hospitality requires that they serve guests and make sure they are satisfied and retired because they eat. He told us this in Savai'i, which is why he was always sitting before us as we ate and never eating himself. So again, he sat before us and talked with us while his wife and cousins brought us food.

By this point, Leota felt comfortable giving us friendly cultural advice on how to behave, which we appreciated. He had told us going to Savai'i that humility is the thing. Josh and I would like be seen as flashy because of our hair. Josh has long hair, and I put product in mine and have a somewhat extravagant mustache. Grant had his head shaved, which is seen as simple.

So he reinforced that I should be sitting in the middle as the important person. They would bring us a tray of food and extra of everything as soon as we tried to finish a dish. It was a Sisyphean effort to finish a meal because they would refill everything so fast. Fortunately, we had learned from Dionne the trick of at least having a bite of everything and not feeling guilty beyond that. Like money, food flows through the village. It is not wasted if it is not all eaten. It will go to the untitled people serving us later, and what they don't want goes to the pigs or the dogs, and it will replenish itself.

Grant, Leota, me, and Josh outside the RSA, Western Samoa.

​We managed to not be completely distended by the end of the meal because Leota wanted to take us out for some beers before we left for American Samoa. So after the obligatory photo of everyone, we went down to the famous RSA.

I say famous because apparently it is known as one of the best nightclubs in the South Pacific. I thought this was odd, as there are a lot of clubs popping up around Samoa and American Samoa it seems. However, it turns out this was one of the first, and it is one of the few places a touring band might play if they went to the South Pacific (which I think is probably rare, expect among islanders musicians themselves).

Grant is very good at putting himself out there to get the party started. He jumped out on the dance floor and had local women dancing with him. We had a great time with Leota and learned a couple other lessons. He thought it was weird that each of us paid for ourselves going in, and I covered him so didn't notice; but the custom in Samoa is that the first person in a group walking in pays for everyone. And when someone gets a beer, they get one for everyone. I actually had been covering Josh and Grant for most things on our National Science Foundation Grant, but they don't cover nightclubs and drinking, so I'd toggled to the American style of covering ourselves.

Having friends there willing to tell us these things has been great. I'm very torn about staying with Leota's family in the future, not because I'm not thrilled by the offer and opportunity. I have an excellent relationship with our hosts Lai and Renon, and I learn a lot from them too. Lai and Leota are both talking chiefs, so they are very knowledgeable about Samoan culture and history.

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Grant gets parties started and keeps them going.

​Leota showed us the genealogy of his family he has memorized and written out. As a talking chief, it is his responsibility to know the family history and names. The titles are passed around to indicate status and lineage in the hierarchy. For instance, the title Leota is an important one in Gataivai and widely used. Several of the chiefs we interviewed were also called by their chief name Leota.

I promised not to publish it, but Leota let me take a photo of the genealogy. Leota says he has memorized 72 generations but has not completed his memorizing. He knows ancestors that predate the colonial encounter, however, making me wonder about the validity of the concept of prehistory/history with regard to Samoa.

​Leota says that Samoans know more about their culture than has ever been written down because it is palagi who write things. Samoans live them. But he is worried that his children will lose access to the truth of their culture through learning to read if the truth isn't written by Samoans for the children to read. Matai are responsible for preserving their culture, so he considers this his mission as a scholar. He says the chiefs don't really value the university education, but they appreciate that it must be done to protect them, and they support Leota in this role.

The woman who had been dancing with all of us but especially Grant was a US Customs Officer and was trying to get Grant to continue the party with her friends, but he politely declined and we dropped Leota off and went "home."

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