The Trifecta (Written 11/26/05)

Today we had our last TDA (Trainee Directed Activity) and this time we had to come up with our own activity. Everyone chose different activities such as talking about Samoan legends, explaining how a traditional healer in the village works, how Christianity came to Samoa, etc. Well since I love kids, I wanted mine to be kid related so I used a nursery rhyme song that my brothers told me the first day I arrived in Falevao. It's called "Faititili" and it's a preschool song that every child in the village knows. It's sung to the tune of the first part of Itsy Bitsy Spider ("The Itsy Bitsy Spider" part) and here it is in Samoan:

            Pa le faititili (x2)

            Aua loa le pia (x2)

            Tetele mai timuga (x2)

            Auoi ta maalili (x2)

And here it is in English:

            Burst the Thunder (x2)

            Don't be noisy (x2)

            Heavy from the rain (x2)

            Oops we are cold (x2)

And once we got done with our TDA, we had our last formal language class (next week is review week) and all of a sudden I felt like I had forgotten everything I knew. Maybe it was the heat mixed with the humidity but all of a sudden nothing was sticking. So I've come to the conclusion that I have hit the wall in terms of language retention. At this point I am just so filled to the brim with Samoan vocabulary that my mind has kinda said "Nope, we're not open for translation right now." And it could also be due to the fact that we've been doing language classes for 7 weeks straight now and its kinda hard to get excited about it anymore. So after our class and lunch we went to Lalomanu – yet another beautiful beach along the same coast we've been along this entire week. It's funny because we've been on this south eastern part of the island 3 times this week (Palolo hunting, Thanksgiving and today) and have seen Nuutele island from 3 different distances. But even though we've beached out 3 times, it still hasn't lost its natural beauty. Lalomanu is the more tourist oriented of the 3 beaches we've been to but it was till quite beautiful. While we were there we got to say hi/goodbye to two people from Group 71 (the group we're replacing) and that was fun because we got to hang out with folks who we might not see again for at least 2 years. We also played water Frisbee with two of our trainers, Fale and Setu, which was also fun because we don't get to many chances to just play and hang out with our trainers. They are away from their families for 10 weeks because of us, so the least we can do is have fun with them so its not rough from them. After the beach we went to the village of Amaile which was the training village for Group 74. We went there because they have freshwater spring that sits right next to the ocean – its quite beautiful and refreshing.

The Freshwater Spring.

 

From this freshwater spring pool you could see the mountains of American Samoan (80 something miles away) and at night you can see the lights of American Samoa very clearly.

View from the spring.

 

So this was definitely a great experience – to bad we got a village surrounded by mountains instead of this village by the sea (even the trainers wanted to come back here). Ah well, if we were on the beach all the time then we wouldn't appreciate days when we could leave the village – like today (plus, we think the trainers feel bad that there's not safe water for us to cool off in unlike previous training groups). And thus ends week 7 of our training – affectionately known as "PC/Samoa Spring Break Week!" L8r.