DK Orchard

This will be my last post before coming home.  I leave next Monday morning at 1:30 am.  I will miss this place and the loving people but I am excited to return and see my family.  Yesterday we were invited by a family to join them at their home for a day of fishing and food.  The invitation was too great to pass up.  1st, we stopped by the church in their village of Safaatoa where they were having a young men/young women cultural activity.  The were having an umu (native cooking) followed by singing and Samoan cultural dance.  They killed and cooked chickens, a pig, and cooked taro, samoan noodles, cocoa Samoa.  They gave us a soup/drink appetizer made from bananas and tapioca served in a coconut shell.  Drinking it was like kissing a woman with a mustache.

We then went to the families home then to the sea.  The ocean was too rough beyond the reef so we just had a ride in the outrigger canoe and Tasi did the fishing, free diving with a spear gun.

He got a mess of colorful fish.  Then we went back to his plantation.  He and his brother cooked the fish and some taro in coconut cream.  The best taro I had eaten in Samoa.  I even took seconds.  The cooking was done in a separate kitchen fale over an open fire.  Water is taken from a tap in the middle of the yard.  There is no indoor plumbing.  They do have a shower but no hot water.  It's like camping out all the time.  Tasi hunts wild pigs and fishes to supply the family with meat.  They also raise pigs and chickens, and everything else is supplied by their plantation, ie, papaya, bananas, mangos, taro, pineapple, and breadfruit.  They have no mortgage because the property is handed down to families for generations, so they sell their produce at market to provide money for electricity, water, gasoline, clothing, and automobiles.  Very simple life but they are happy.