Thinking of Samoa

I've been thinking of Samoa all the time for the last few days. I lived in Samoa and American Samoa for 18 months when at twenty, quite presumptuously and wrongly I hoped to convert Samoans on their lands and in their villages to my birth family's idea of God. Though I ultimately disavowed the faith I was sent to promote, the people of Samoa touched and changed my life forever. My deepest hope is that they will survive this terrible natural disaster with greater strength and peacefulness than ever before. Let no one imagine that this event had anything to do with the intentional will of a god. The following is extracted from the daily journal I kept at the time:

The village invited me to be the assistant trainer for the boxing team when I went running alone for miles on the paved road at 4 a.m. in the morning, then did it again the next day. By the third morning there was a crowd of us young men running up and down the road, all of us harboring the idea of being better boxers. I longed to box with them in the muddy pen formerly owned by pigs, but mission rules prohibited me. While training, a blow to an unprotected nose would drop the boxer’s opponent like a rag doll, and ten hands would slap and cajole until the young man was able to move out of the ring to make room for two new teammates to pummel each other in the head. Sometimes they fought until they were so exhausted that I thought in a last effort of animal strength to preserve his own life, a boxer could rise up and make that one killing blow just to end the fight.

Every night every soul in the village would sing church hymns at the top of our lungs. I’ve never heard anything as beautiful as various families singing, as if in a round, all at the same time in praise and effortless unrefined harmonies, and every night I wrote in my journal by candle or storm lantern. One night my intention to get down my impressions of the day was distracted by a little dark-brown-skinned girl with curly blonde hair who scratched restlessly at the floor of the hut with her fingers, waiting half-patiently for my attention. That night Uigi (pronounced Wingie) sat at the edge of the hut I shared with my companion while hundreds of moths gathered to the single source of light, a kerosene lantern that hung from the rafters above my head. I had counted more than twenty strikes with a stick that she endured before she stretched her tough bruised legs to the edge of the hut where I slept.

I put down my pen and went to sling my legs over the rough-hewn boards of the floor. Uigi stood back in a posture of defense as she looked at me with luminous eyes. She stepped back again, bowing in submission to my will, but I gently followed her to the openness of the compound.

She stared into the sky and said, “The moon is bright.”
“Yes.”
“God lives there, on the moon, when it is bright.”
“I like to think God isn’t so far. The moon is far away.”

She fled from me, ashamed of her impertinence. I was ashamed of my insensitive reaction to her expression of faith. I hollered out to her across the compound, repentantly, “The moon is bright! God lights our steps tonight! Come back!”

And I became a Samoan at heart when I chose Uigi’s language over mine. From that day forward, wherever I went on the compound she was holding my right hand while my left held an axe for chopping firewood for the umu. With the simplicity of her sincerity, a sense of doom came hard over my whole body and sapped my strength. I had to let a part of me tingle away like a sleeping limb before I could make room in my heart for a new way to perceive a wholly other place. I would try to comprehend Uigi’s God instead of indoctrinating her with mine.

In my travels between villages I found an old cassette tape and player in a drawer in the church building. I slept that night on the church grounds, opting to sleep alone in a small food preparation hut behind the church. As darkness came I strung up my mosquito net from the rafters. I settled onto my portable bed, a thin woven mat intended to soften the irregularity of the two-inch lava rocks between my shoulder blades and against my spine, and I lit an incense coil. The blue smoke spun before me like the burning of a cigarette with a lonely aroma like tobacco, and I let the depression in to do its thing; to wear itself down by my lack of resistance. Despite the incense, the mosquitoes filed in through holes in my net faster than I could squish them. I turned on the cassette player and Anne Murray sang to me personally, “I want to sing you a love song. Want to rock you in my arms all night long…” I was in love on my mission, with a land and a people who sometimes hated me, often misunderstood me, and who gave me every opportunity to see if I could be human. The only sound when the music was over was a subtle hissing from the burning incense. I understood very slowly again that my god resides in silence, not words, and that it was a different god than the one I acknowledged in my promise to serve the Lord. I fell asleep with my sheet pulled up over my chin. Tiny animals took my blood to share with my hosts, and the blood of my hosts mixed with mine. I woke to hundreds of mosquito bites on my swollen red knuckles and fattened fingers.

The following day I submitted to what my hosts wanted from me, against what I was trained to turn them into. When I listened to their desire, hoping to accept more graciously their food, I became the teacher they wanted me to be, and love was reciprocated back.

I sat in a very humble rock-floored fale. Woven mats were laid out in layers over the lava rocks and though rare, this family had a low table positioned in the center of the floor. We sat with legs crossed. It is the greatest offense to straighten a leg toward any other while sitting, and thus we sat for a long time, hours past when the legs go numb from keeping them still and tight. As bats flew by one side of the fale I stared at the baby that lay on the center of the rough-hewn table. Flies gathered to dozens of open sores on the tiny male’s skin, and the flies dug at the crusty food that congealed in the corners of his eyes and between his legs. The infant’s hands lazily grazed at the skin of his face, like a cat’s washing its face with a paw.

The parents sat wearing a constant smile, that I would honor them by eating their specially prepared boiled turkey tails. After a meal it would be appropriate for me to show my thanks with an admonition from the scriptures. Instead, putting my scriptures deliberately behind me, I held my hand up with my fingers spread. I tilted my hand horizontally, and I slowly rotated it clockwise:

“Tonight, My Lord and Her Highness, look up into the night sky, and I promise you that there you will see the mirror of the place we share in the universe.” I slowly waved my hand to the children and eldest son who now clamored to have a view of my hands. “The universe is like the shape of my hand; it is dense in the center and spreads into tendrils like the octopus.

“We are here, on the edge of this finger, and when we look out from our place in Creation, we can see across infinity to the next tendril that hides the next arm behind it, and so on, and so on for eternity. In time, after millions of years, we experience the whole universe as we rotate around, until we arrive back where we started, looking out into infinity. Wherever we are, we are part of infinity. This is how I think of God.”

“Our Teacher, we are humbled that you would honor us with the secrets of God. Tell us please also about the trip to the moon.”

And I did, for hours and hours, day after day to groups that grew after each meal in a great variety of homes, homes predominantly without electricity or running water. They called these the “Beautiful Stories” and the stories grew to include plate tectonics, hydropower dams, and I bluffed my way through explaining how jumbo jets can possibly fly. I’d explain some of these while farmers taught me how to hunt for and how best to eat grub worms, and the proper depth to replant the cropped head of a taro plant. It taught me the sacredness of food, and sharing it. “Eat me; drink me” was the god’s silent commandment. The constant sacraments left precious little time to discuss the superior points of one religious dogma over another.