Hurricanes, Heat, and Samoans trying to run fast

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Trip Start Jul 19, 2009 Previous
Entry Trip End Ongoing

  Pago Pago, American Samoa
Tuesday, April 6, 2010

It's been a busy couple of months since I last updated the blog.

Right after I last wrote I began coaching track and field, which was a very interesting experience.  At first, I was the only coach, and had a very motley crew of athletes.  On the first day of practice we ran a mile fast to see what kind of shape the kids were in.  The fastest boy ran six thirty, while the fastest girl ran a painfully slow thirteen minutes flat.  At first, I thought they just weren’t trying, but after a little while I realized that they were just at a completely new level of unfit. 

At our first girls meet, none of the girls completed a race longer than two hundred meters without walking.  Even in the four hundred meters, both of our girls in the race had to walk it in the last hundred meters.  Not everyone on the team had shoes, and some of the shoes that the kids wore were not running shoes.  Airwalks and converse were considered pretty good running shoes, and would be traded among the kids between races.  To top everything off, our girl in the second leg of the four by four hundred relay passed out two hundred meters in and had to be carried off the track.  We had a lot of work to do in the beginning.  Some of the Samoans began helping out and assisting, which was great in the beginning.  After a week or so it began to cause more problems than it solved though.  I feel like my relationship with the other head coach is fairly typical of some of the relationships white people have with samoans.  This other coach has never run before, and knows much less about running than me.  Instead of using me to help the team though, I guess I feel like he felt threatened, and began to try to take over the team and work against anything I tried to do.  I won’t go into too much detail, but we got into some pretty intense arguments, which culminated in a shouting match in front of the stands at the championship meet.  We don’t talk anymore.

The season was only a month long, and we really did make some amazing improvements.  We had 5 girls run under ten minutes in the mile, which might not sound like much, but keep in mind that they were running fifteen minutes miles a month ago.  One of my boys ran a 59 second four hundred, and two boys ran two thirty two and two thirty three in the 800.  We ended up getting second for both boys and girls out of all ten schools on the island.  Since the season was so short, I began a running club in an effort to keep the kids running and keep them in shape.  This has been met with moderate success.  We’ve had probably fifteen kids show up on and off throughout the last month that it has been running.  Only two or three are very serious though.  It’s just tough to keep them motivated with nothing to work towards.  Luckily there are some road races coming up in the next month that I can use as motivation now.   I actually just ran a race last Saturday morning.  The race was supposed to get Samoans motivated to stay fit, and lot of people showed up.  First place got two hundred dollars.  I felt kind of guilty taking the money from the Samoans, but I’m a volunteer, and I could use the cash.  I didn’t feel that great, and only ran about 6 fifteen pace.  I still won by over two minutes though.

I’ve been tutoring our math competition team all year here, and that has finally come to an end as well.  We worked the kids pretty hard.  They had tutoring before and after school as well as on Saturdays.  It paid off though.  We ended up placing second overall on the island, which is the highest Tafuna High School has ever placed.  We lost to a private school whose students are probably 90 percent Korean immigrants that have had most of their education in Korea, so we didn’t feel bad losing to them. 

We had Spring Break two weeks ago.  Officially, it was cancelled because we missed four days of school for the tsunami.  Myself and 9 other Worldteach volunteers decided we were going to ignore the cancelation and go anyway.  This caused some problems with the administration.  For the first two months of this semester, a lot of teachers across the island were not getting paid.  The Department of Education claimed they had simply run out of money.  This is extremely shady, and everyone suspected that someone at the top had been stealing it, but nothing was proven.  Because of this, teachers stopped coming to work (and who can blame them).  Unfortunately, this meant that I subbed for someone almost every day for the first two months of the semester.  This is also why the administration didn’t want anyone else to leave for spring break. 

Like I said, we went anyway though.  It was really fun.  We rented a car one day and drove to some sites around the island.  We went swimming in some caves, and then climbed down a ladder about one hundred feet into this pit, where the ocean came in and filled up the bottom though a cave in the side.  You could dive down into the cave and swim through for about twenty feet to reach the ocean on the other side.  I went scuba diving with one of the other volunteers, and saw a sea turtle, some eagle rays, and my first shark.  It was a white tip that was only about four feet long, so it wasn’t too scary.  We ended up buying a shark to eat the next day.  We did it to be hardcore, but it actually ended up tasting really good, like really soft fish.

Other than that, the weather has been pretty horrible.  We’ve had two hurricanes come toward the island.  The first didn’t cause much trouble, but it rained hard enough to cancel school.  The second was  a category three and was headed right for the island.  School was canceled for a day, and we boarded up all our windows, bought water and food, and buckled down to ride out the storm.  It ended up taking a last minute turn to the south though, and we it just rained for a few days.  Fairly anticlimactic.  Since then it has been HOT.  It usually gets up to about ninety two or ninety three degrees, which is bad by itself.  The humidity is almost always 70 percent or higher.  I did some heat index calculations, and a lot of the days with higher humidity (around 80 percent) feel like it is about 125 degrees out.  If I do anything I sweat.  I sweat doing the dishes, and even brushing my teeth.  I wouldn’t mind the heat much at all though if I didn’t have to run in it.  I can make it about 5 miles during the heat of the day, and then my body just runs out of water.  I’ve been trying to really stay consistent and run at night when I can, but it’s been tough.  We should be entering the "winter" months down here now though, so with any luck the heat will begin to dissipate soon. 

Well, that’s about all I can think of for now.  I’ll try to write at least once more before I leave.  Hope all is well with everyone back home, and hope to talk to you all soon.

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