6 Months Post-Grad

Today, it is exactly 6 months since I graduated from Boston College. It has been 6 months since I left BC and Boston. 6 months since I last saw (most of) my best friends for the last time. 6 months since MA’s, Lower dirt, Higgins, the Chocolate Bar, JTree’s sourpatch fish bowls, Hillside frips and espresso shots, Eag’s Tuscan veggie subs. 6 months since I got out of bed at 2pm. 6 months since I went to class (as a student). 6 months since I lived 5 minutes away from 95% of the people who made up my entire life. 6 months since that surreal night when we all said goodbye, when Rob played Wonderwall while we all sat around with fake candles (where did those even come from?), when we did cartwheels in the rain (I still have those videos), when I ate a meatball sub in the Rubi kitchen, when we all spent the morning angry as hell because we hadn’t showered, hadn’t slept, hadn’t had coffee, and graduation started in an hour. 6 months since that surreal afternoon when none of us knew what to do with our hoods, when I slept through most of the Commencement speech except the part about swings (why swings?), when it was so, so hot, and there were so, so many people in the College of Arts and Sciences. 6 months since we all burst into tears at the same time in the Gate common room, since we said a very real goodbye to the Not-a-Real-Table, since I said goodbye to my best friend on the corner of a street near Coolidge Corner. 6 months since I left the place that had been home for the past 4 years. 6 months since I left the people who had been my family.

And where am I now? My life is so, so unbelievably different. Monday was a horribly, horribly long day. The kids misbehaved, I was distracted, and that night all the palagi teachers were shocked that the next day was only Tuesday (apparently it had been a long day for everyone). Oh, and I had sugar cookies (and ONLY sugar cookies- Jackie knows) for dinner at 9pm. It was what it was. But Tuesday, walking around the village after school, I remembered to look around, to really see where I was. Samoa has a lot of problems, some that I am only starting to see now. It’s also one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. That night, after a dinner of fresh Manu’a roll sushi (thanks to our brilliant co-workers and friends- I guess you can’t actually live off Ramen for 3 years…), I walked home and stopped on the beach to look at the stars. There are so many more of them here than anywhere else I’ve ever been, and there’s something about looking out at a night sky filled with stars over a vast ocean while standing on a tiny rock in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly, in this little and sometimes claustrophobic place, the world seemed huge.

It’s weird looking at your life and realizing it’s so different from anything you could ever have imagined. It’s even weirder, I think, to look at your life and realize it has somehow become exactly what you imagined. This is what I wanted when I decided to travel to the South Pacific for a year, this exactly: billions of stars over an endless ocean, puppies, island children who come to play, students who, every once in a while, show how much your presence means to them, a job that I really believe matters, weekend adventures, new friends; a whole new world.

I came here to prove to myself that I could do this, and if I could do this then I could probably do anything. I wanted to show myself that I could leave everything (and everyone) I knew and loved and set out on an unknown adventure on my own, and that I could make it work, that I could be happy. It’s pretty cool to be proven right. It’s also pretty cool to know, though, that even though I came here on my own, I’m not alone at all. I’m surrounded by wonderful people on this island, and I’m surrounded by wonderful people outside of the island, too. 4 months into my time in Samoa (and 6 months out from graduation), I know that the people who mattered to me before are still a part of my life and always will be, and that if I need them they’re always there. So thank you for that.

I could say a thousand more things, and I did mean to blog about the adventures of last Saturday, which, between our fearless leader Saunoa and the mythical Saua were pretty much legendary. But I figure this is getting long enough, other people have done it better than me already (google it, yo), and, anyway, all anyone really cares about is pictures.

So. Here’s what I did on a casual Saturday in November. Yes, you should definitely be jealous. 

(OH. And I finally saw a whale this weekend!!! Thank God! I still want to see one in a zoo and/or beached (probably because of my childhood whale-induced trauma) but this is a step in the right direction!)

Pololo Season!

“Are you going out tonight?” one of the other teachers asked me as we were leaving school on Friday a few weeks ago

. A pretty typical question to start of the weekend… except when you’re in Samoa, and it’s one week past the full moon, and “going out” actually means standing out in the middle of the ocean at 2am catching sea worm sperm with a giant net. Of course I was “going out”!

Pololo is a Samoan delicacy beloved by all. It’s also basically sea worm reproductive organs. Yummy! The pololo “rise” once a year, one week after the full moon in either October or November (there’s lots of ways that people believe you can time it exactly, but not that much is actually known about pololo rising and people usually end up checking the ocean for a few nights before actually hitting the jackpot). On the night the pololo rise, entire villages plunge into the ocean in the dead of night (they usually come between midnight and 3am or so) with buckets, nets, and, in some cases, bed sheets, to catch the worms as they rise out of the reef. They’re attracted to light, so they swarm towards underwater flashlights… or, as we discovered, headlamps!

After successfully staying up all the way to midnight (this included the use of lots of caffeine and lots of dumb TV), we (the palagis of Faleasao) went out to the beach where some Samoans were already sitting, having snacks and talking and joking as they watched the ocean. We hung out for a bit as more and more people gathered, nets and buckets in hand. Wes guessed that the pololo wouldn’t come until 3 or 4am, based on when the moon would rise, but we actually got lucky and the rising started around 1am! We went into the ocean about waist high and all took turns holding nets or buckets and catching the wiggly little worms as they flocked to our flashlights. We stayed out until about 3am, by which time our buckets were half full, the pololo were slowing down, and all of us were slowly approaching hypothermia (in the South Pacific! That might be a first).

This was probably hands down the strangest Friday night in my life. But hey, when in Samoa...

From left to right, Leafa, Jackie, me and Cat, all looking ravishing at 3am after spending 2 hours in the ocean swarmed by worms.