First of all, I just wanted to give a huge shout-out to everyone who’s been reading my blog for the past two and a half months. Thank you for taking the time to be interested in what I’m doing and learning out here in the Pacific. I miss all of you and can't wait to see you in December!
We’re coming to the end of our classroom learning and our independent research projects will be starting soon. I’m a little nervous about it to be honest. I had great plans about how organized and on top of things I was going to be at the beginning of the semester and none of that has happened. It will be interesting to see who stay around campus and who goes off into the villages. I really want to spend at least a few days with some of the different families I’ve met in the past two months. Unfortunately the office phone isn’t working right now so I can’t call any of them.
We’ve spent a lot of time traveling this past month and had so many opportunities to observe and learn. Especially with the trip to Fiji I feel like I suddenly have a lot to process and try to understand. Going to Suva and seeing a modern city that contrasted so sharply with the small village of Abaca we’d just left was such an eye-opener. It brought so clearly to my mind the issues of development and modernization, not just in Fiji but in Samoa as well. Coming back I noticed many things about Samoa that had escaped my attention before Fiji. I noticed that we American students were among the few young girls who consistently wore lavalavas on campus. I noticed that all around me young people were using their cell phones to send and receive text messages. There is a subtle revolution among the youth that I feel like the older generation almost wishes to ignore in the hopes that it will just disappear. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that they are completely throwing off their cultural heritage. They still have the overwhelming hospitality and pride in being Samoan, but I can’t help but wonder if in focusing on what the older generation has defined as being Samoan we are ignoring what the younger generation is now defining as being Samoan. Are they the same? In many regards undoubtedly yes. I think however that there is a danger in ignoring the differences that do exist because they could easily open up into the conflicts and problems that we saw in American Samoa. If the older generation ignores the younger generation then the chances of conflict and misunderstanding will only increase.
I hope I wasn’t speaking in too many riddles. When we first arrived in Suva many of the girls were in a state of mini-culture shock and felt like they were back in America. To the SIT Fiji girls though there was no doubt that they were in Fiji. They could see the aspects that made it similar to America but they could also see the aspects that remained distinctly Fijian. It made me realize that in my attempt to understand Samoa and Apia and the urban areas as Samoan I had ignored the effects and influences of Westernization. I was seeing only how it had not developed and not how it had.
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