A Barbie Doll in Army Trousers

A Short Story

This is a true story I wrote in 1980 when I spent a year as a volunteer teacher in Western Samoa. It is a story of two remarkable women I met and of something of the culture of Faa Samoa – the Samoan way.

By Denise McKenna

Naomi reminds me of an animated Barbi- doll, albeit in army pants or football shorts. Her life must be a struggle to throw off the impression her good looks create. She’s a natural for toothpaste ads with gleaming white teeth that flash into a smile often enough to know that life treats her well. Or eyeshadow – though her sparkling, round eyes don’t really need any accentuation. Make-up would be obsolete if there were too many Naomi’s around. It would take others painful hours at a salon to have hair like hers –platinum blonde, shoulder length, glossy – she throws a comb through it and could pose for Vogue. All this tops a tiny, sun-bronzed frame of something under five feet and only the hairy legs and dirty fingernails indicate that looks are deceptive.

She might look like a Shirley Temple doll who wants to be cosseted and cuddled but that vision is only in the eye of the beholder. She might look so fragile that if you dropped her she’d break but once again, your impression would be wrong. This diminutive picture of prettiness is happiest slogging away in the mud and dirt and weeds of a vegetable patch.

With two years of a university degree behind her, she packed her gumboots, mosquito nets and army trousers and paid her own way to work on the missions in Western Samoa as unpaid weeder and message girl. Now she’s up at the crack of dawn weeding the taro patch or cursing the price of bananas or figuring out ways to smuggle tamarillo trees into the country.

She got in with Mother Lawrence, a legend of a nun for her efforts in rescuing Vietnamese children after the fall of South Vietnam. She was a POW and after much diplomatic wrangling was released and returned to New Zealand. To the disbelief of the diplomats and others, she went straight back to Vietnam to rescue some Vietnamese nuns she knew would not be able to escape without her.

After that little adventure, she came to Western Samoa and pestered the government for some land to start an agricultural school. Eventually she was given 200 acres of virgin mountain forest in the backblocks of Savaii. Now Savaii is a beautiful island but not many would want to live there as it is. The Samoans themselves leave it in droves to seek the relative civilization of Upolu. A bus trip along the ‘main’ roads of Savaii is a bone-shaking experience and getting to Savaii from the main island seems to always involve hours of waiting for the boat in rain or shine and more waiting for connections.

To do it once, is an experience. To have to do it regularly, is an ordeal. Then for those of us used to electricity, running water, fresh meats and vegetables, a telephone and such basics, having arrived there is another eye-opener. Basics become luxuries and you must adjust your lifestyle.

Mother Lawrence did just that. She built her own road up to her plantation, she built her house and put in the tanks and the toilet and the garage. She found a batch of ‘pupils’ who would come to live in the mountains with her and be paid to work on the land and learn to make the most of the fertile soil and productive climate. Her vision is to help the Samoans to help themselves. Her task is to impart the skills to her students to utilize the assets they have. She shows the way – a tiny figure always on the move. She rises early and works hard. She expects the same from her troops.

Naomi loves it. Living in the mountains with two nuns for company and thirty Samoan students whose English is hardly better than her Samoan. The fresh air and damp earth are like a drug to her and the cycle of planting and nursing and weeding is a tonic for the body and soul. After living there, virtually alone, she says she could cope anywhere. She’s used to sitting by the roadside before sunrise waiting for the WSTEC truck piled with workers off to the plantations for the day, to hitch a lift. She comes to Upolu on the boat, the only pelagi on board, and endures the incessant stares and shouting of Pelagi! Pelagi! Which Europeans find one of the most irritating of Samoan children’s habits. She stayed once with the family of one of the girls from the plantation but swears she would never do it again. She was treated as a freak and was stared at all night like the Crown Jewels on display. When she did finally get to sleep, her host raided her knapsack and she woke up to see her ear-rings from the bottom of her pack, on strange ears. Living in the backblocks involves some demanding adjustments to your lifestyle so she let it go. Her experience in a Samoan fale, also lead to an infected leg which was badly swollen for a week but she limped around to her chores each day as usual. Like I said, appearances are deceptive.

Naomi’s in demand to visit the families of the girls she works with but she regretfully declines all invitations now. “I’m a pelagi and a kiwi-born and bred.’ For many Samoans, pelagis are still a novelty and they have only to meet you and they will ask you to visit and come and stay. If you accept, you will be treated like royalty for the duration. The Samoan rules of etiquette are strong on respect for guests and their hospitality is a national asset.

However it can be disconcerting. I never could work out if having a pelagi to stay wasn’t like adopting some sort of pet to fuss over and show off to the neighbours. They seem to have no concept of privacy and if you do stay, you are very much on display.

Of course, their traditional Samoan houses, called fales, are not built for privacy. A family will live in the one open-air, no-walled building with a family consisting of any number of relatives who fancy the particular household. Chores will be allotted according to age and rank right down to the youngest who are glorified communal servants.

A visitor is exempt from all but eating and sleeping and talking. You will eat first, either on your own or with the head of the household and if it is a progressive household, the wife may share the meal with you. The teenage girls will serve the meal – a selection of dishes with of course taro ( the national dish), and cooked green bananas, breadfruit, fish and some meat, maybe chicken or mutton flaps. Some of the less appetizing foods will be a misnamed chop suey which seems to be noodles boiled to death and cooked in a brown sauce, cold spaghetti straight from the tin and pea-soupo – tinned corned beef, a delicacy to Samoans but inedible to many Europeans. It is apparently so-named because the first tinned food to be brought here was pea soup and the label has been transferred to other tinned products!

Once the food is served, the young girls will stand or sit silently fanning the flies from it with banana leaves. The traditional Samoan way of eating is sitting cross-legged on the floor, with the food served on mats of banana leaves and eaten with the fingers. Many families now have a table and in deference to their guests, will use it and produce knives and forks. Not always.

Savaii has not even a semblance of a town and it is a stronghold of Faa Samoa or the Samoan way. Apart from the missionaries and the Peace Corps volunteers who man the schools, a few doctors and technical experts, there are very few Europeans living there. Naomi is one of them and it is no wonder her presence creates so much interest. Why does she do it? A young, educated woman from a conservative background, sixth in a family of twelve children. Her mother came over for a week to investigate the Samoan lifestyle of her daughter and was not impressed. She thought Naomi was wasting her time. She saw the hours waiting for buses and boats and the obstruction of the Customs officials when she tried to bring in some gifts of seeds and cuttings for Mother Lawrence’s projects, as signs of Samoan inefficiency. Her attitude was ‘let them be’. Still Naomi stayed on.

Mother Lawrence had hesitated and thought seriously about employing her. Unlike many mission orders here, she does not seek volunteers. Her vision is to help the Samoans to help themselves with minimum European influence. Too many young Samoans leave their families and the plantations as they aspire to a more Westernized way of life with more possessions and more freedom and bright lights. Every volunteer here, no matter what they do, is an example of Western life and contributes to this influence. Still Naomi was accepted.

She finds it strange living as she does. She is a European in a Samoan stronghold. The children stare and shout at her, the young men proposition her and the young girls ape her. She misses Bob Dylan music, living without a tape-recorder or fancy stereo; she misses fruit juice and carrots and apples on an island where taro and bananas are a monotonous diet to Europeans; and she misses the company of people to share her experiences with, living as she does isolated from friends and acquaintances.

For all her doubts and fears, her work is her life and her fulfillment. She’ll move on in time to other fields but here for a while, in this unlikely place, she has found a niche. She is very much doing her own thing until she meets her farmer and can settle down to life on a few acres at home. She’ll have a few stories to tell her grandchildren!