Village Visit

Well, last week I had my second inspection of a village water supply scheme. Things were quite similar to the first trip – everything was running late and we had to go through the same welcoming procedures before we could start our inspection. This time we enjoyed koko Samoa– the Samoan cocoa drink instead of tea. It is really good, almost as good as eating chocolate!

We had to wait for the rain to stop before we could head out. We had been warned that we might have a long walk ahead of us, but fortunately we had a decent 4WD with us and managed to get a long way up a rather rough track before we decided that the risk of getting stuck was too great – real Barry Crump stuff!!

The rest of the inspection was straight forward and we finished up back at the meeting house for the speeches etc. This time there was a fair bit of laughter and I heard the word palagi used a few times. Apparently they were conveying their appreciation for me coming out to visit their village – and their hopes that I would hurry up and complete my design and fix their water supply!

This time after the speeches we weren’t invited to partake in a feast – instead we were presented with 2 whole pigs that had been roasted in the umu while we were doing our inspection. This was accompanied by a basket of roasted taro and palusami. Apparently they were worried that we had got wet during our inspection and did want to hold us up any longer so sent us on our way along with our feast. So we loaded the food on the back of the ute and headed back to the office. There we divvied to food and tucked in. It was a bit messy, but delicious. We certainly never get anything that back in NZ!!