Bad Blogging

Things are finally picking up here in Samauga. I’ll start out by saying that I am a horrible “blogger”. I understand that the point of a blog is to frequently provide interesting information. I’ve failed the frequently part and it is the readers job to judge whether or not it is interesting. The good thing is I should be getting dial-up internet in my house in the next few months. After that I’ll have no excuse.

Today I held my first meeting with my Peace Corps committee. Ths committee was supposed to be created before I arrived in Samauga. But, like most things here things don’t always go according to plan. But, nevertheless, I finally have a committee. The purpose of having the committee is to support me and my work. I divided my committee into for groups. Members were selected by myself and the “mayor” from different village committees. The first is the School group. In the group is Siliga, my host brother, who is very helpful and a very hard worker. Another member is Lina, who lived in Australia for a long time. She speaks great English and will be a huge help to me. The second group in my committee consists of women from the village women’s committee. They are as follows; Mafu, Malaepepa, and Pulemao. I spend a great deal of my free time at the women’s committee so I’ve gotten to know them very well. The third group is the youth who are out of school. Right now there are only two members, Saua, and Eli. The final and probably most important group for the villages sake are the older men. They are in charge of the decision making in the village as well as any major kind of project. Currently there is noone in this group. I left the selecting of this group to the “mayor”. He told me not to worry. He’s on it. He’ll let me know He’s taking his time. The meeting went great. Everybody who was supposed to show up showed up 30 minutes late. 30 minutes late is very early in Samoan time. I was very proud. I am a very lucky peace corps volunteer in that I have a projector and screen to show presentations with my laptop. So I put together a PowerPoint show explaining to the committee how best to utilize the volunteer that they requested. In the last several months I’ve come to realize that a large majority of people in Samauga didn’t understand why I was here. As I moved beyond small talk with the language I could tell that most people thought I was just here to get them stuff for free. During my meeting I strongly emphasized that this was not the way it was going to work. My job as a development worker is to help people help themselves. And to do that we have to work together. So to make a longer story shorter, I feel pretty confident that my point was understood.