The Unofficial Holiday

Manu

Was it a holiday?  A Sunday where more people were at church than normal?  If you were to look at Apia, it appeared to be a ghost town.  No busses were running, no taxis were on the road, for that matter no cars were on the road.  You could zig zag up and down the middle of the road without any problem because there were literally no cars.  Businesses were all closed, and if they couldn’t close for some reason, everyone either was in the back watching tv or listening to the radio. 

Where was the country?

Tuned in to the television of course!

Go Manu! 

Who knew rugby would play such a big part of my Peace Corps experience?

Watching Samoa’s opening match against Namibia, I don’t think you can help being impressed by the athleticism Manu put forth.  Within one minute of the game starting the whole establishment where I was cheering because Samoa had scored their first try.  No one stopped screaming until the end. 

Sixty minutes into the game, I jinxed the team, thinking it was going to be a shutout, and said out loud how amazing it would be to see a shutout in the World Cup….and then Namibia scored. You could tell Manu was tired by the end of the match, but they still finished strong.  The final score was 49-12.

As soon as the final points were up, I ran to do an errand, it was amazing to see the ghost town of Apia come to life.  It was so quiet when I left with not a single car on the road.  Then all of a sudden there were so many cars honking and waving Samoan flags.  It was simply incredible.  The noise did not stop for hours!

Saturday Samoa plays their next match, and I have a bit of a conflict with this….The race ends at the same time as the start of the rugby game.  We all need to make sure we run extremely fast to not miss a second of it!