My first two tasks in Samoa – finished!

The program team told me when I arrived here in Samoa, I had two jobs to complete before I could begin my assignment properly: one, find accommodation and two, find a car. I’ve completed both in just the past few days.

First off, I have a house that I like to live in for the duration of my time here. I signed the lease on Tuesday and moved in on Wednesday. The house is in Tiapapata, up on the mountain behind Apia off the Cross Island Road. It’s set away from the main road and there are only a few houses on the road so it’s really quiet. All the houses are large, with gardens and gates. And I’ve been told that in the wet season I’ll be able to hear the waterfall that is a few hundred metres from my house. Below is the view and the sunrise on my first morning living here.

The house itself is four bedrooms and way too big for just me. But for the price, it worked, and my hope is that other Australian volunteers who start their assignments in the next few weeks and months will want to share with me. Or that I will have lots of visitors who will want to come and stay.

It was advertised as fully furnished. Samoan expectations of fully furnished and Australian expectations of fully furnished are two different ideas. It’s come with beds, a living room sofa and two chairs, a dining table and chairs, a washing machine, refrigerator, a rice cooker, a microwave and an oven with a stovetop. Plates, cups, glasses and cutlery have been provided, but I didn’t have any pans to cook in and shortly after arriving, I realised the stove didn’t work. So I ran to the store and bought an electric frypan and a kettle. There’s also a trestle table and some plastic chairs out on the deck.

My landlord lives next door and so far, has been very amenable. He and I sat and had a chat for an hour or so in the Samoan way before I moved in. He’s a senior public servant and it will be interesting to know him and hear his opinions on things as Samoa will undergo a national election late in August. His immediate family live in New Zealand and he mentioned that it gets a bit too quiet for him these days. There are seven or eight houses in my street and he also mentioned that extended family live in all of them other than mine and the one on the other side of me.

He tried to fix my stove the first night without success and needed to get a technician in to fix it. Even after the technician came, only two of the hotplates work. He announced that would be fine for me since there’s only one of me. He did bring me two pots to use too. I may just end up using my electric frying pan more often. 

I was thrilled to have a washing machine and put it to use as soon as I moved in. I washed the sheets I bought and hung them out to dry. I then went down the mountain to buy a few supplies thinking the sheets would be dry by the time I got home. Instead, a huge rain cloud came over and my sheets were more wet than after they had been washed. So I left them outside figuring they would dry on Thursday. Nope, the same thing happened. It was sunny all day and they were probably just about dry, but just before I got home for the day a rain shower ruined everything. It took three days but I finally had clean sheets on Friday (still slightly damp when they were put on the bed) and it was bliss. Clean sheets are really underrated in this world.

Unfortunately, after two loads of laundry, the washing machine decided it didn’t want to drain. My landlord and I spent considerable time on Saturday trying all the troubleshooting ideas in the manual before he has decided to get another technician in to fix it. The technician came and found two coins in the drain pipe. I am not at fault since I never put coins in my pockets. 😊

Living here on this mountain also means that I only have internet connection and phone service if I’m out on the deck and that is intermittent. This isn’t exactly ideal so I’ve looked into a few options. Starlink is here in Samoa and is functional, but it is exorbitantly expensive on a volunteer’s budget. Not to mention that I hate giving money directly to Elon Musk. I mentioned the issue to my landlord to see what he uses. He has a fibre optic Vodafone service to his house and says he’s willing to get them to extend it to my house. Then I’ll have my own internet account and be able to watch TV. He’s contacted Vodafone and set up the account but it’s anyone’s guess when they will come out to run the cables. I have fingers crossed for sooner rather than later, but I am always mindful of Samoa time when things get promised here.

It’s not all doom and gloom. I really like living here. What is fantastic about this house is the view of the ocean, the flowers and plants that surround it, my bed is super comfy, there are mosquito screens on all the windows and ceiling fans in all the rooms, so I don’t need to sleep under a mosquito net. And the sunrises I can see from my bed are incredible. I also have a trestle table and some chairs on the deck. This is fortunate and allows me to have a place to write and paint surrounded by nature. The deck is covered so even if it rains, I can use it. And this past weekend I went to the local secondhand store and found a hammock which I’ve strung up for viewing the ocean and the world go by. I love hearing the birdsong, especially in the morning. It’s such a beautiful way to wake up. And being this high up on the mountain, it’s cooler than down in Apia. Already I notice that when it’s 30 degrees in Apia, it’s only 24 or 25 degrees here. I’m glad I have a couple of sweatshirts and long pants.

I feel blessed to live here for the next 11 months.

Moving to this house brought the problem of a car to a head though. I really needed one since I can’t take a bus to work. So once the house was secured, that was my next big job. I set out on Friday determined to buy a car by the end of the day – and I did. It took hours and a lot of test drives but in the end, I decided on a Mazda Demio (also known as a Mazda 2). I found one with very low kms on it. It’s a manual drive (which I like) and the owner Amin bought it for him and his sons to drive. The problem is that his sons never learned how to drive a manual. So Amin decided to sell it. Which is good for me.

We agreed on a price, and he agreed to pay for the registration for me. I went off to the bank to try to withdraw cash. That’s when I hit a roadblock. It turns out that I have a limit of $2000AUD that I can withdraw from an ATM a day. I only learned this after running around town, trying 5 different ATMs and spending an hour in a queue at the bank. There was a limit on what I could withdraw per day and Amin didn’t have a way for me to transfer him the money electronically.

I went back to Amin and told him what the problem was. He was amazing. He let me pay part of the money (not even half) and let me take the car. He hadn’t registered it because when he got to the car registration office the queue was huge. Friday afternoons here are not the time you want to register a car. So I drove off on Friday afternoon in my new car, having paid not even half of the money. What I did pay was in cash (!) which freaked me out. He was trusting me to go back with the rest of the money. And I was trusting him to register the car over to me the following week.

Since it wasn’t registered, it didn’t have license plates. Amin warned me that I could be stopped over the weekend but to just show the police the invoice for the car and tell them I bought it after 4pm on a Friday when the registration office was closed. Luckily he warned me as I was stopped on Saturday morning. The policeman who stopped me reminded me of the inspector on Death in Paradise which made me laugh. But I stifled my laugh and concentrated on not being overly verbose (see my last post about my problem talking too much to police). He was super nice and just kept nodding his head like the whole thing made sense. Then he asked me what I was doing here in Samoa and when he found out, he shook my hand and said thank you for coming to Samoa to help the people here. It was a lovely encounter.

Cash is truly king here. I have found myself carrying large amounts of cash to pay my house bond and first month’s rent, and now to pay for the car. On Monday I delivered the second instalment to Amin and we sat out under an open meeting house on plastic chairs, next to some pool tables, counting out $9000WST in $100WST notes. Yep, that’s a lot of notes. It blew me away. But it seems to be the way things are done here.

Amin and I had a lovely chat. He’s originally from Pakistan but has lived in Japan (and speaks Japanese fluently), the US (in West Palm Beach, Florida and in California), the Solomon Islands, Istanbul and a few other places. We’re about the same age (he knows how old I am because he needed a copy of my drivers license to register the car and he showed me his license). We talked about moving countries and our families. After giving the car to me on Friday, he went home and told his wife about me and she has now invited me to dinner at their home. They have five children with the eldest about the same age as mine. He’s not a typical used car guy, let me tell you. As I drove away on Friday, he clasped my hand and looked me in the eye and said, “I’m trusting that you will come back on Monday and pay me the money.” I replied, “I’m trusting you that you aren’t selling me a lemon.” I think my trust was a bigger leap of faith since the island is small and there’s not many places I could have escaped to with the car.

I do love my little car. I’ve started calling her Sammy (we have a habit of naming the cars in our family) and I love that she’s a zippy little manual drive – even if I hardly ever get her into 4^th gear because of that 35mph/56kph speed limit I wrote about last time. All of the controls and the communications/navigation screen were in Japanese so Friday night I spent a bit of time on Google translate and voila! I’ve changed all the settings in the car to English! Except for the bit that shows how many kms to empty. That’s still in Japanese and I can’t figure out how to change it. I might just leave it as a little tribute to Sammy’s heritage.

Today I finally paid the last of the cash to Amin (I’m hoping that’s the last of my big cash purchases) and we went to register the car together. It was inspected and then we went to the office to pay the fees and get my number plates. While we waited we had a great chat about how he, born in Pakistan in the late 1960s and me, born in the US in the late 1960s could have had such parallel yet oh so different lives. We both left our home countries around the same time (1993-1994) and haven’t ever really moved back. We talked about religion, politics, families and realise although we have much that is different, we also have so much in common. The more I travel and meet people, I have to believe that most people are good and are just trying to have a good life for themselves and those they love. The conversation I had with Amin confirmed what I already believe.

Amin told me that about a month ago, a guy had come to him and had offered him almost asking price but he didn’t feel right selling the car to this man. When his kids asked him why he didn’t sell, he said that he could see in his heart that the car wasn’t destined for this man. He could see it going to someone he trusted and who he would know is a good person. He told me today that person was me. I felt grateful. As I wrote before, I hate buying a car, but this process with Amin, although unconventional in every sense of an Australian purchase, has felt right. I can’t explain it more than that. My intuition told me that he is a good man. He told me today that he works every day to be a good Muslim. I told him that I work every day on being a good human. Both he and his son, Hazim agreed with me that that’s what life is all about.

As we were waiting at the registration office, he asked if there was any special number I wanted as he knew the girl on the counter and she will give him any number as long as it is close to the one on the top of the pile. (You are meant to take the one you are given that is on the top of the pile). When we got to the front of the queue, the next license was 55048. I asked if I could have 55155 and I got it! I love it since the number has a special significance for me! Once again, the Universe has provided.

It’s been an amazing experience buying a used car, I’ve met a new friend and his family here in Samoa and I got one of my favourite numbers!

With house and car now sorted, I can actually get on with the job at hand – my assignment that I’m here to undertake for the next 11 months! I can’t wait!