husbands...

I feel like I am losing all these vital members of my family…Thursday one of the few people who can give New Jersey a good name went home. Peka (Becki) is so amazing and brought a smile to us every day and it was so sad to see her leave in a taxi to go. Peka always wore the best skirts and was just so much fun. I know it is not good bye forever because she is way too amazing to let go out of our lives. Last night we will lost another person in our family, Amanda. Amanda is planning on coming back soon. She just really needs to get everything under control.
On a brighter note I almost got myself a husband! I was walking down the street near the sea wall in Apia to go to the Digicel store…and this is the first time I was brave and decided to go out by myself! Normally when we walk down the street I am the social butterfly saying Malo to everyone we pass…but since I was by myself…I decided the safer route was to just get my New York walk on and just be on the zone without talking. However this police officer stopped me to say Talofa…so I responded with “Talofa lava”..then he said something really fast that I could not understand. He saw my confused look and asked where I was going, where I was from, what I was doing in Samoa..I responded of course to be nice. Then he told me how he would really love to get to know me better. That put up a big flag so I told him I am sorry but I had to go meet up with someone. After doing my business at the store I ran into one of the volunteers, Koa. He agreed to walk back with me to the hotel….and if we ran into the police officer again he was going to pretend that he was my husband. Thankfully we didn’t see him on our walk back!
We learned about what to expect for our village trip. We are leaving today and won’t be back to civilization and electricity for 4 weeks. It should be a lot of fun. We learned a lot of ways to offend our new Samoan family and hopefully I don’t do any of these things or find new ways to offend them!
About an hour after classes we had a fia fia (party!!!). The current volunteers put on an amazing show for us and cooked for us. The women did traditional dances that looked beautiful. I really can’t wait to be up there in a year entertaining the new trainees! The men also did a traditional dance where there were all oiled up and wearing leaves around their legs and around their necks. They had a drummer keeping them in line and it was awesome! My favorite part was when they yelled out tiger they made a tiger face and did something similar when they yelled out buffalo. There was a skit made by our trainers and a few people in our group sang a song. We then travelled outside for….
FIREDANCERS! They were amazing. It was so awesome as they twirled their fire sticks with the greatest of ease! Once one of them accidently lit his hair on fire..it got out easily at least.
After the fire dancers we went upstairs to eat. All of the current volunteers made a gigantic feast of food. I think the funniest food someone brought was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I talked to the guy who made it later and he said in the future I will consider it gourmet cooking.
We had some drinks and went to the bar across the street, Bamboo. It was a great time hanging out with everyone there. I stayed until 12:45…so I am really surprised I went out running at 6 am this morning!! I actually think I did the best I’ve done in awhile… running my mile without getting tired at all. I know it will be different in the village because we won’t have the sea wall to give us a path..but we will find a way!
I’ll write again in four more weeks!