In “Kua?” But Blakey- you’re thinking – I have been keeping close track and know that your training village is called Fausaga and the capital city is Apia and you now live at the school compound at Avele College, so where is Kua? Well now, sit tight my well-informed friend, “kua” is a Samoan word for “rural” or “small village outside of Apia.” The country is divided into 2 sections – Apia and everywhere else. Everywhere else is called “Kua.”

Saturdays involved lots of napping and prep for the big meal on Sunday, the “To’ona’i.” In fact, the word for Saturday in Samoan means “to prepare for Sunday’s mean. It is Aso To’ona’i (Aso = day and To’ona’i = the big meal on Sunday). In order to prepare for To’ona’i, my brothers and or dad would go to our plantation to get taro (taro is to Samoa like Potatos were to Ireland), ripe coconuts, and big leaves of palm trees, breadfruit trees and banana trees. Girls don’t go to the plantation. I was told this is because there are to many bugs. I actually did go one day with my mom, but we did no work – ask me about that one later.

Once the boys are back from the plantation and I am done napping, we might kill a pig. Most families have lots of pigs, but they are only eaten on special occasions. While I was in Fausaga there were a lot of special occasions so we got to eat a lot of pigs. Well, I got to eat a lot and so did my parents and grandma, but the kids rarely got to eat any. They were only allowed to if there was extra when the rest of us were done. This is pretty typical Samoan eating etiquette.

***warning – some graphic pig slaughtering details to come***

The first time I saw a pig killed it was suffocated in a bag by my 16 year old brother. I guess it was taking too long in the bag though, so he took the half dead pig out of the bag and forced it under water in a bucket in our outdoor shower. I think it is a sign that I have been here a while that I thought the weirdest thing about that was that it happened in the shower (not that a 16 year old boy was suffocating a pig). The words for “kill a pig” in Samoan are “kape le pua’a.” “Kape” is the same verb used for “turn off,” as in “turn off the lights” or “to go out” like “the power is out.” FYI – there is a different word for the killing of a human but the same word for turning off the computer.

By the time I had seen about 5 pigs killed, my gag reflex had subsided. I asked my brother how many pigs he had killed or seen killed in his lifetime. He said “lots,” which is the Samoan answer to any question that involves statistics. I estimate that if our family kills 2 pigs a month (probably an underestimate) and he is 16 years old, that is 384 pig deaths in his lifetime. He probably started killing them when he was 13, so that is about 75 slaughterings. One day after Peto killed a pig, on a whim of mine, after NO thought, I told my family I wanted to kill a pig. I am still not sure what possessed me to do this. They were SO PROUD that their Samoan daughter wanted to be a real Samoan girl that they promised I could kill the next one.

Hmm…How was I going to get out of this one? Or, more importantly, did I want to get out of it? What sort of person had I turned into that I wanted to kill a pig? After much thought, I realized that killing a pig here is very different than killing a pig in North America. The circumstances in which one would kill a pig in the states are so limited and regulated that the only chance I would get would be if I snuck in to a farm with a shotgun. That will never happen. Here, we kill them all the time and then eat them. They are one of the main sources of protein for a people that have been eating them since they were introduced to the islands. Ok, I decided, I can do this.

The next Friday was “Culture Day” for all the PC trainees, where we prepared the traditional To’onaa’i for the Matais (chiefs) of the village (luckily our brothers and sisters came to help us since we would have been lost without them). My opportunity to Kape le Pua’a had finally come! Turns out my roommate and two other boys also wanted to kape pua’as. Worked out will because there were two pigs! I didn’t think I could suffocate a pig (especially because I had tried to suffocate a chicken that morning and failed, which was awkward for me and horrible for the chicken). There are no circumstances in which I will ever shoot a gun, so that was also not an option either (although guns are only used for big pigs and this one was just a size 2). In the end, the girl I roomed with in Apia, Chris, and I stood on either end of a large stick with the pigs neck underneath in order to suffocate it. Between the two of us it was over 300 pounds of girlpower pressure on the neck of the pig. It took about 5 minutes until it stopped squirming and stopped breathing. That was 5 whole minutes of me killing a pig. While standing on the lethal teeter-totter that Chris and I were riding on, I had time to take a few good pictures. I won’t post them here unless the populous demands it. Later in the day I ate some great tasting pua’a and was very satisfied. I do not see a career for me in this and I have no urge to kape any more pua’a, but I am glad I did it once.

***end of graphic details***

So back to the typical weekend that I was describing earlier, Saturdays are for preparing for Sunday. Sundays involve lots of church – once in the morning and once in the afternoon. If we go to the church next to my house it starts at 7:30 AM. When that is done we chnge out of church clothes and in to our “umu” clothes. “Umu” is the word for the Samoan outdoor kitchen. Since we just burn coconut husks the fires are very smokey and everything is dirty, so umu clothes are the same ones every week and I never wear tham for anything else.

Once we’re all in the umu, there is a lot of work to be done. Everyone knows their place too – the 12 year old brother gets all the coconuts ready, the 14/16 year olds scrape the inside of the cocnuts to make coconut cream later, they scrape the skin of the taro (no such thing as a vegetable peeler here) and make the oven. The oven is a really cool thing. They light a fire from the used coconut husks and put lots of stones around it to heat them up. Then, when the fire is gone and it’s just coals, they wrap all the food in leaves and put them on the hot stones. Any extra hot stones are place (by hand!) on top of the food to cook it on the top too. That is what all the big leaves gathered at the plantation are for. Also, just in case you were worried about salmonella, once the pig is cut open and gutted, they place hot stones inside it so the inside cooks too.

Now is chill time while we wait for everything to cook. It takes about an hour. When everything is done, the boys take the hot stones off the fire (by hand!) and then remove all the food from the umu (again, by hand!). There is apparently no such thing as a hot pad – more accurately, I should say that there is such a thing, and that they are the hands of boys). One of the things I love about to’ona’i is that we eat outside in a hut as a whole family and that we use no plates, forks, knives nor cups. There are placemats woven from palm leaves, fresh leaves used as plates, coconuts to drink and we eat with our hands.

My favorite thing to eat at to’ona’i is palusami. Palusami is salted coconut cream wrapped in taro leaves and cooked in the umu. It is eaten like a sauce on taro. The first time my family gave it to me I didn’t know what it was, so I ate it with a fork (they gave me a fork because they didn’t think I would want to eat with my hands). They all looked at me in a funny way and I knew I had done something wrong but I wasn’t sure what it was. Finally my mom asked me if I wanted some bread with my palusami, which clued me in to the fact that your’re not supposed to eat it straight. It was as if I had gone to an American dinner party and started eating brie cheese with a fork. I was embarrassed, but I just started eating it with taro. Now palusami and taro is my favorite Samoan food!