Driving in Style Through the Streets of Apia

This post was originally published on Full, Bright Reflections (https://fulbrightclinton2015.wordpress.com/),
a shared blog for the 2014-2015 Fulbright-Clinton Fellows.  

As I finish off my third full week in Samoa, I wanted to focus this post on providing you with a few images of life in Apia – at least as I’ve experienced it thus far.
  
Let’s start with how people get around. The means of transport are essentially the same – cars, buses, taxis. The style, however, is a whole other matter. Here, people deck out their vehicles to an extent that would make “Pimp My Ride” look snooze worthy. Fuzzy animal print on the dashboard and the name of your car emblazoned in rainbow lettering across the windshield are both among the standard decorations for cars and buses in Samoa. If you want to increase the retail value of your car, all you need is extra swag. A couple of Australian volunteers attached a minimum of six Mustang horses to their dash, rear view mirrors, and car top, and they have now been repeatedly stopped by people who were hoping that their car was for sale.

And taking the bus here is just as fun and colorful an experience as you might expect from a bus with a fuzzy zebra striped dash. Bus schedules are subject to the whims of the bus driver, and bus stops are any spot on the driver’s route where a rider needs to hop on or off. In the mornings, I  walk about five minutes to the main university road and wait at the intersection for one of the colorful buses to come rolling down the hill. I then wave the bus down (which you do by holding out your hand and shaking it with the palm face down), step on, and settle into one of the wooden, bench-style seats inside.

A trip to the bus depot in downtown Apia is guaranteed to be full of bright colors and creative bus names
(Source: http://www.alaimoana.ws/ - I keep forgetting to get a shot of my own!)

In fifth grade, our bus driver had tricked out his school bus with speakers and would blast a variety of R&B and rap during his route. He would have fit in perfectly in Samoa. Every bus here has a sound system, and they without fail will blast their favorite tunes as they drive about the city. Yesterday, I cruised to work to a remix of Gagnam Style, and today’s ride was to a series of reggae-style remixes of Christmas hits. I have also heard that people will sit on strangers’ laps when there aren’t enough seats, but I haven’t been in a bus yet that was crowded enough for that to happen. While it was a bit daunting to catch a bus for the first time, I am so happy that I now get to regularly enjoy this very distinctly Samoan experience!

Day-to-day life in Apia is also marked by a very different soundtrack from what would mark my days in Nashville, Dayton, or Paris. The morning starts at 5 am with the gong of bells from the church next door. My first alarm at 7:30am is then usually accompanied by the cheeps of baby chicks who are wandering through our backyard. And less charmingly, a rooster will also chime in on some mornings. It seems rather ironic now that before coming to Samoa, I would use the rooster call sound on my phone when I needed a particularly loud and annoying wake up call.
  
Evening follows with its own unique set of sounds. To start, our landlady has a couple of dogs that stay on the property to guard it. Dogs here are very different from the yip-yaps that little biddies parade around the streets of Paris. They are often left to their own devices and serve more as guards than as companions. Our landlady’s dogs like us well enough, but they definitely have never been trained, so evenings are often punctuated by lots and lots…and lots of barking. And as I drift off to sleep at night, it is often to the strange, indescribable chirping of geckos.
  
To give you an idea of what this is like:


  
So all and all, it has been an exciting, full first three weeks with lots of new discoveries, and I’m looking forward to discovering more of day-to-day life in Samoa over the next ten months!

And to finish off, here is what will be your first Samoan word or phrase of the week:
Hello: talofa, or hi: malo
(This is all I really know for the moment, but I’ve just started Samoan lessons, so I’ll definitely have more to add in the coming months!)

Aloha!: Passing through Honolulu and Crossing the Day Line

Having successfully made it through my first week and a half in Samoa, I thought it was time to write another post with some highlights from my experiences so far. This week, I’ll focus on my day layover in Hawaii and my flight over to Samoa.

  

After a solid sixteen hours of flights and layovers, I was so happy that I decided to have a day layover in Hawaii before heading to Samoa! And on top of that, I had a friend that I was able to visit who could show me around. Part of my day in Hawaii was a hike into the hills outside of Honolulu that lead to a truly breathtaking overlook of the island. The picture above doesn't fully do the view justice, but at least you can get the general idea.

   

I really enjoyed seeing the different trees, terrain, and wildlife, and I also couldn’t help but chuckle at the none-too-subtle disclaimer signs that floated around the trail. To start our hiking experience, we read a lovely sign that kindly warned us that we could be crushed and killed by falling rocks on this trail. After a fairly intense hour and a half of up hill hiking, we reached another sign, letting us know that the trail ended RIGHT before the amazing panorama that I had just hiked up a mountain to see. And in case you proceeded past the “end point” for the trail, there was another sign on the lookout point, letting you know that you could fall and die. Despite these doomsday warnings, I survived to tell the tale!

I also had some really amazing food. For any sashimi (i.e. slices of raw fish) fans out there, I had the Hawaiian equivalent: poke! They marinate the fish to give it the most incredible flavor. I was excited to learn that they also have poke in Samoa! I haven’t tried it yet, but I did try oka, which is fish soaked in coconut milk. Very fresh and tasty!

   

Going back to my day in Hawaii, we had dinner at a really great Japanese restaurant that specialized in yakimono (i.e. a variety of grilled meats and veggies on skewers). You order items à la carte, and I wish I had written down everything we ate, because it was all so delicious! After dinner, we finished off at an ice cream shop that specialized in mochi (dough balls with an ice cream filling). It was fun to be able to eat ice cream with your hands without it melting everywhere, but at the end of the day, I think I still prefer a good ole fashioned bowl of ice cream.

   

After a day filled with hiking and culinary adventures, I headed back to the airport to tackle the last leg of my trip: a 4:20am flight to Samoa. As a traveller who has lived through a spectrum of missed and cancelled flights, I always head to the airport early to prepare for the unpredictable. In this case, that was definitely a mistake.

   

The check in area at the Hawaii Airport is completely open with very little seating, no bathrooms or cafés, nothing. I ended up sitting on the ledge of a row of plants and bushes as I waited for the check-in desk to open. About halfway through waiting, the sprinklers went on. Of course. Luckily, they switched back off rather quickly, and I was able to sit back down.

   

As we were all uncomfortably waiting outside, I noticed that people were placing their luggage in a line and then sitting down somewhere to wait. I only fully figured out that they were holding their places in the check-in line after a lot of people had already left their luggage, but at least I wasn’t at the very back.

   

Once we finally did check-in, we had to walk the length of the airport to find the one open security check point, wait a while longer before we could go into a pre-boarding waiting room, and then wait in line to board. All of this after 2am. Now I know where the writer of Warm Bodies got his inspiration for the scenes of the zombies wandering around the airport.

   

Needless to say, I was very happy when the flight was over, and I had safely arrived in Samoa. As this post is already on the long side, I will finish here and devote next week’s post to life in Samoa – stay tuned!

Now What Exactly Are You Doing In Samoa?

Source: http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/samoa.htm

With over ten hours of flying and airplane layovers ahead of me before I arrive in Hawaii, I certainly have ample time to write my first blog post! Let’s start with the basics: what I’ll be doing as a Fulbright-Clinton Fellow in Samoa and what I’ll be writing about in this blog.

The Fulbright-Clinton Fellowship is a specialized program under the umbrella of the general Fulbright program. Originally titled the Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship when it was inaugurated in 2012, it offers Fellows the opportunity to have a professional placement within a government ministry of a partnering country. (There are currently about a dozen participating countries that range from the African Union to Kazakhstan to Samoa!) This placement is determined based on a Fellow’s background, interests, and areas of expertise.

I will spend roughly 4/5 days working with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, with that time being divided between the Legal Division and the Global Environmental Facility Division. My exact duties will be decided after I arrive and meet with my supervisors, but generally speaking, I will be helping with work on new climate change legislation and incoming climate change-related grants.

The remaining day is reserved for an independent research project. There is a lot of flexibility with the exact nature and topic for this project, so that is also something that I will pin down more concretely once I arrive, see what exactly I’ll be working on, etc. For the moment, I’m hoping to research the monitoring and evaluation of Samoa’s climate change goals.

I have been interested in monitoring and evaluation ever since I took a course on randomized evaluations of development programs as part of my graduate studies and was introduced to the research of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Their book Poor Economics provides a really good overview of their research and main findings – which are often not what you would predict! Their central premise is that “...it is possible to make very significant progress against the biggest problem [poverty] through the accumulation of a set of small steps, each well thought out, carefully tested, and judiciously implemented” (p. 15 of Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo).

I chose the title “Accumulating Small Steps” for this blog as a nod to this line in Poor Economics. I’m hoping that through this blog, I can share with you my “small steps” or experiences as I seek to help make progress against some core challenges for international development today.

So over the next ten months, I’ll be keeping you updated about my work, research, and day-to-day life in Samoa. Please keep in touch as well and let me know what you’re up to by leaving a comment at the end of this post or by shooting me an e-mail. My internet access is going to be limited, so I may be a bit slower in getting back, but I will be very happy to get your news!

And if you want to follow my posts without having to remember to check back, you can enter your e-mail address at the bottom of this page, and you’ll get a notification every time I post something new.

Next post, I’ll tell you more about the rest of my trip (including my day layover in Hawaii!) and my first days settling into life in Apia, Samoa.