Matagofie

In fa’aSamoa (the Samoan language) my new favorite word is matagofie. It means that something is beautiful, and it keeps running through my head like a broken record. I know it has only been four days that we have been here but it feels like so much longer, and there are so many things that keep taking my breath away on a regular basis. The town of Apia is set in on a harbor and wraps around the coast, extending inland and trickling up into the hills that are covered in lush tropical foliage. There is an elevated path along the water so that you can walk the line between the ocean on one side and the town and mountain on the other. There is so much beauty here in everything. I haven’t been able to leave my hotel without carrying my camera because I’ve noticed that I impulsively feel the need to document a visual memory so that I never forget what I’m witnessing, what I’m part of. Yesterday afternoon my fellow trainee Andrew and I wandered up into the mountain that bisects the town. You are walking along winding roads up through lush vegetation with beautiful flowering and fruiting trees, and then all of a sudden you turn around and look back down and there is Apia, the whole harbor and the Pacific ocean, laid out beneath you. Maybe it’s just the rose-colored glasses I seem to be sporting twenty four hours a day here but everything just feels so amazing and beautiful and perfect and it’s such an awesome feeling to get the privilege of viewing and being a part of it all. It’s hard to explain the feeling that being here gives me- kind of like everything is right, everything is just as it should be. That pretty much sums up my emotional state at the moment, and you probably think I’m a cheeseball for it. So with that I will end the sappy reflection and try to give a bit of an idea what I’ve been doing besides mooning over my newfound love with this island. We spend most of the day during the week in training, sessions all morning and afternoon on topics like safety and security, cross-cultural exchange, medical training, life and work, and of course language. So far we have mainly been doing “introduction to ___”, and talking about our expectations for what we can learn from training and on how to work ourselves into the Samoan way of life. On Friday afternoon we started our first language lessons and I am so excited! I love learning language in general and the Samoan language is very beautiful and it’s also just so great to be finally getting into the real work of acquiring the skills I have only speculated about for the past year in anticipation of this moment. I’m so excited because I feel like there is nothing more thrilling than spending the next two months learning to understand and communicate in the language here, and lucky me that’s exactly what we will be doing! We also get time during the day at lunch and in the evenings to wander around and explore Apia and all it has to offer. Last night the current volunteers held a huge fiafia (party) for the trainees as a welcome ceremony where they performed traditional Samoan dances, sang songs in Samoan, and there was even a traditional Samoan fire knife dancer (fire knife dancing is, indeed, what it sounds like it would be, and is quite impressive). Then we had a huge feast with tables and tables full of traditional Samoan food cooked for us by the current volunteers and staff that was really good- I even tried octopus. Although I gotta say the whole tentacle-y thing is not really my style. There is the best fresh tuna sashimi here that I have ever had and all kinds of other fish as well as some really amazing food where lots of coconut cream is used in preparation. The evening was really fun and it was great getting to talk to all of the volunteers who have been here and in this for some time ranging from a couple of months to two years. I’m so excited to be a part of it all and just so overwhelmed by everything but in a really good way. Today is Sunday which means no classes so we went on a “cultural exploration” to the beach. It was tons of fun, everybody’s sunburnt and apparently the little fish here are aggressive and territorial because we all got bitten by them when we were in the water. But it was wonderful snorkeling, and especially getting to be there when some of the trainees experienced coral and marine wildlife for the first time in their lives! I have uploaded photos of our time at the beach, the fiafia, and just hanging and wandering around Apia and into the hills. That’s all for the moment- I hope that I don’t sound too much like some starry-eyed sap and have actually given a bit of an idea what the past few days were like.