Never Forget February 2010

"Are you serious?" I asked. Mitzi replied, "Of course I'm serious!! Would I be calling you if I weren't? You need to get everyone out of there right now. Bishop is driving to meet you at Lion's park." And then the line went dead. Being 1:30 am, I wasn't the picture of rapid response but the urgency of her voice got my adrenaline pumping and I was up. I woke up Ben, the other adult, to let him know and then started waking up the scouts. They needed to grab what they could, get some shoes on, and get going to meet up with bishop. And they needed to do it fast in order to make the 30 minute walk from the end of the runway back to the cars as short as possible.

Just an hour or so earlier, I had been asking one of the boys what he would do if a tsunami came during our camp. "Oh man, I would jump the fence and fly down the runway to the airport." He even knew where the gap in the barbed wire was so that he could make the vault easily. That discussion coupled with my thoughts over the past few weeks of what I would do in case a tsunami did come during our campout made the warning difficult to believe. Thus my incredulous question on the phone. I could easily picture a lavish prank being pulled. But she was totally serious and we were obedient and got out quickly and safely.

It was only after my shower at home that I became very worried about all my "stuff". I called Ben up and asked if he wanted to go back and get the tents and fishing poles and such (we had planned to complete the fishing merit badge Saturday morning). Like me, he couldn't stop thinking about all our gear and didn't want to leave it out there for other fishermen to pilfer or the tsunami to wash away. By then we had discovered the tsunami wasn't due until 8:51 am and we had time to hike back and pack up camp. So at 3:30 I was back on the trail with Ben and his boys. It took us an hour and a half to get there, pack up the tents, food, and bags, and return. After another shower, I spent a good 40 minutes letting the adrenaline subside and finally fell asleep at 6am.

For those who know me well, I like a lot of sleep and don't do well with little. So you can imagine how I was feeling at 9 when a pow wow broke out in the driveway outside my window. You see, our house is in a "tsunami safe" zone and friends of neighbors had showed up to wait out the tsunami. I can appreciate that and generally encourage it, but they may have well jumped into bed with me and snuggled up. No use fighting it though. I got up and spent the morning cleaning up the camp stuff, wishing to go back to sleep. Around 1:00pm, the tsunami warning was canceled. 2-3 foot waves had shown up right on time in Pago Pago every 20 minutes for the first little while, dropping to about half a foot an hour or so later. So Melinda asked what I wanted to do. The obvious activity was to fall asleep while watching a movie. She wanted to go swimming because it was beastly hot. We ended up at sliding rock swimming in the tsunami waves. It was clear they were still coming when the water would surge in higher than it should have and then out lower than it should have, about every ten minutes. I was still in a bad mood, and my wife noticed.

Later I went surfing with Ben's boys at Sliding Rock. It wasn't the best, but the sunset definitely was. Super golden light reflecting off the water. Getting brighter after it had completely set. That made my day.

Though I probably got 10 hours of sleep last night, waking up this morning at 9:30 was still too early. I was grumpy all day and still am as I write this. I hope you like the story. I'm going to bed.

ps. the tide gauge is still registering tsunami waves 37 hours after the first arrivals.

W-CAP Sewing Days

I mentioned our women's group called W-CAP. They've been coming to my house for sewing classes to eventually be used for microenterprise home businesses. We've got some converts to sewing!

Our first two days we made bags: totes and mini coin bags w/ drawstrings. Barbara Gaddy was our expert instructor. We used a pattern for one-hour totes. The finished products:




Today we made culottes or "comfies" as our instructor Joan Holland called them. Culottes are loose, calf-length pants. Like a skirt with legs. They turned out really big, but it was a good learning experience.
This little one is Owen's friend who was born about two weeks before him. (Here's a photo of them together pre-birth.)

Little Reader

After finishing Hop on Pop Ella said, "That book was SO long! I'm never reading it again!"
She did a great job, though. We're happy for our little reader. Kindergarten is paying off!

3yrs x 3boys

Isaac's lucky to have best friends live on either side of us. These boys keep (us) busy with good times, time outs, waterbreaks, waterfights, fights...

It's been really hot lately, so we've been trying to beat the heat.

Ooh, Isaac gets dunked. And just as he's recovering...
Sploosh. Oh the joys of little boyhood.

And this guy's 11 months now. He's into everything, stands for a split second, has new head injuries daily, scoffs at gravity.

Oh boy, oh boy.

Tsunami Puppet Show

After the tsunami, our friend Ali started the Womens Community Action Program (W-CAP) to educate, involve, and improve lives of women on our island. And reaching the women will affect the men and children, of course. The group consists of women from many backgrounds and nationalities. The main facilitators are amazing women from villages affected by the tsunami. They are wonderful. I've enjoyed being in the group because I've learned so much.

One of our first projects has been creating a puppet show that addresses fears of the tsunami. The group wrote the script, made the puppets, recorded the script, wrote a song in both languages, learned to work the puppets, and arranged for us to give our show at schools around the island. I went along on Thursday to the school in Tula, one of the villages severely hit by the tsunami. Fortunately no lives were lost, but the students still are traumatized by the memory of it all and its lasting effects.

I felt so happy to be with them and give them some joy with our little show.

These are our six characters dancing before the show. I'll have to get some better pictures of them all. There's a frog, turtle, octopus, clam, shark, and starfish.

This is a cute girl named Marisa (on the right) with her friends.
We performed the show 4 times in different classrooms. The teachers were so sweet to let us come.

Here's Ella with our friends Amber, Dianne, and Maeva.

In this picture you can see temporary classrooms set up by a local construction company. Tula School has two, one is being used for the cafeteria and the other is the preschool, since those portions of the school haven't been repaired yet. You can see that the school is right on the beach!

Here we were with the older students (grades 6-8). I thought they'd be bored with the show, but they loved it!
Here are our performing puppeteers in action! (I'll get a better photo of them soon.)

The girls were fighting over the "palagi baby".
We drove up the the NOAA station afterwards and saw people settling up in the hills. That is a FEMA tent set up next to their make shift shelter. (How would you like to face a cyclone in that?)

Hurricane is Past

Well, the hurricane is past us and moved south to Tonga (poor guys). So we're okay now. We had a fun few days at home, including the holiday today. By tomorrow we'll lose our cabin fever and get back to normal life! Thanks for your prayers and thoughts.

So...remind me again why we live on a little Pacific island?
Never mind. There are so many reasons.

Tropical Cyclone 15F - Rene

Here is some feedback from our island residents.

“Really windy and heavy rains,” said Lavata’i, “everyone’s house is boarded up...we’re okay.” - Ta'u Island

“I feel like Pago is having such bad luck...first the tsunami...it’s super super windy out there,” said one motorist from Faga’alu who drove through Pago in the morning. “The kids are getting antsy...they’re getting scared...when this thing is going to hit us...we’re just sitting and waiting.”

“The kids are okay, they’re young so they really don’t understand...everybody seems calm, the windows are boarded up. I guess it’s the same like every other hurricane,” an Utulei mother said around 1 p.m. “The wind comes and it’s really cold and it goes and there’s heavy winds and then the next thing there’s no wind at all.”

“We got our batteries for our lights...a gas stove so we don’t have to worry about a power outage if we have to cook...I did all my laundry...everything that might blow away has been tied down,” the mother added. ”Other than that, we’re just waiting.”

“It’s calm over here...a little bit windy, the usual bad weather...we have the boys boarding up the houses and we are glad they are at home preparing,” a Lauli’i resident told Samoa News at around 12:30 p.m. “The older folks are yelling at the kids, telling them to stay inside and everyone is just sitting around, waiting for another report, listening to the radio, watching TV and waiting for when the power goes off.”

Here is a picture of our neighbor's house. He works for a construction company, so his guys came out this morning to board up their windows. We haven't boarded up ours. We're just hoping the winds don't get out of hand.


The red crosshairs shows the center of the storm and our island is in the red circle. We thought Rene was going to pass further to the east, but the track keeps shifting further west of the earlier forecasts and it looks like we're going to get this passing directly over our islands tonight. So far we're doing ok, just waiting for when the power goes out.

Tropical Depression 15F

You'd think we would get the hint and have some food and water stored in anticipation of getting hit head on by one of these. You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Not that we don't have any at all, we just probably couldn't survive for more than a week or two if the stores were emptied. The fact of the matter is that a direct hit from a cyclone in American Samoa comes every 5 years, on average. Another fact of the matter is that the last big one, Olaf, formed on February 10, 2005. Exact..ly... 5 ... years ... ago. Whoah!

Anyway, 10F will become Rene (not Renee) if he keeps intensifying (Pat just formed near us yesterday, so the next name is male) and is forecasted to track right over us. Sheesh! Don't worry, though, we'll be alright. Hurricanes aren't usually massively deadly here. If Rene does form, we'll grab our 72 hour kits and important documents and head for a shelter. Our power may go out and phones won't be working. But we'll be fine. On the other hand, maybe we'll just stay here. I mean, this house has already lived through 5 cyclones and is still standing, right? And then we'll tell ourselves the same thing as last week when Nisha passed close by: let's get some food storage going before the next one comes.

NZ part Last

(This post has been a draft while life got busy again: sick kids, tropical storms, housing stress, etc. Sorry for the discontinuity, but here's the post.)

Okay, this is the last one, then we'll move on with life like normal healthy people.

For those following the logistics, we flew from Queenstown back up to Auckland, spent the night there, and the next morning flew to Samoa and then on to American Samoa. Since Ephraim's arrangements were made through work, we flew on separate airlines. He took the luggage, I took the kids.

Given that traveling is always stressful, we did fairly well. I have vague memories of losing Isaac in the Auckland airport (don't worry, I found him again), spending my last NZ dollars on a canvas tote and a snowglobe, making puppets with airsickness bags in the plane, and breaking the snowglobe in Apia.

I wrote about the mucky condition of our house and our dead car here.

When I come back to reality after a nice trip, I always feel like I'm putting on a familiar heavy pack. Then I have to get up and move on--hopefully with new motivation and resolve.

We are happy to be back home, but if anyone needs a travel buddy for a NZ excursion, I'm there!

A few lingering thoughts in New Zealand:

> I went with a goal to understand the Maori people better (Native New Zealanders), specifically how the climate played into their Polynesian culture. I'd been picturing Samoans living in old Ireland, and it just didn't work in my mind. I reread Potiki by Patricia Grace (BYUH folks, remember that one?) to help me picture village life in rough seas, rocky beaches, and pine forests. It also demonstrated the racial conflicts that exist/ed, and it gave me a glimpse of the language, which is quite different from Samoan. Then when we went to Te Papa Museum and saw photos of chiefs and village life, I understood that the Maori bore a strong similarity to Native Americans with bare skin under thick capes (made of feathers), homes with walls (not like Samoan fales), and carvings of ancestors (like totem poles). To survive in the harsh climate they used kumara or sweet potato instead of tropical crops like taro or breadfruit. Ephraim commented how their clothes were like Native Hawaiians living up in the cold Big Island mountains. But ultimately, the Maori are unique, and I loved learning about them.

> The Toilets. When flushing you get to specify your flush. #1 or #2. It's like a gameshow. And you always win! Flushing's fun again.

> Price Rounding. New Zealand has gotten rid of their pennies. Their lowest coin is 5 cents. At the store prices are still $1.99, but they adjust your total at the register so you don't get a penny back. They round up or down as needed. Genius. I mean, pennies, who needs 'em?

> Happy Parents & Kids. Of the many hours spent observing family interactions in public places, I was amazed that generally parents appeared genuinely happy to be with their kids! I never saw threat, a spank, or a raised voice. Just kids and parents talking and getting along. Even this one strong-willed little girl's mom just wisked her away from the situation when she was getting worked up. I felt coarse calling my kids "Buddy" and "Kiddo" like I do when around me I heard "Darling" and "Gorgeous". So now I try to throw in a "Yes, Dahling" now and then.

> The accent. Sometimes I couldn't understand people. But I got used to their flattened vowels and odd expressions like "Oh Shivahs!" Ephraim harbors resentment toward Kiwi BYUH guys because all the girls were drawn to their accents. What can I say, it's intriguing. I loved not looking like a tourist, but I sure sounded like one! Except when we met European travelers, they couldn't distinguish NZ vs US accents.

> Murray from Flight of the Conchords kept popping up on billboards and on TV. It's easy to be a local hero in a country the size of Colorado.

> Green-land. Way eco-conscious. I was happy to be charged for plastic bags at the grocery store. Recycling bins everywhere. Less plastic, more reusable materials. Very refreshing to be around people who care in a place that's big enough for good ideas to work. Our friend Anne in Wellington orders organic food online that gets delivered to her door. She pays a flat rate and they drop off whatever produce is fresh. And at this website for the Antarctic Centre in Christchurch the background is black to reduce electricity used to light your screen. I'd never thought of that. (Btw, Mac users I accidentally discovered that ctrl, alt, apple, then 8 makes the screen negative and maybe saves energy. Try it and let me know.)

I already mentioned the sales tax, the short shorts, the thrilling playground equipment, driving on the left, and other quirks. I hope I haven't given away too much about the country that you feel you don't have to go there. Hopefully you can make it there someday. I'll leave you to discover all the other wonderful things about New Zealand. Promise you'll tell me all about it.