Futile in hindsight

As an adult I can now look back and appreciate the scope of life's challenges my parents and other working class citizens in Samoa faced. When I graduated from University and realized the type of money my parents earned during their working years I was horrified. I understand now why my father was so tight with money. But ironically, ours is a story of creditable adequacy. There were many others who were worse off than us. My dad ran a tight ship but we were never at any point without anything we needed.

My own family life is vastly different to that of my childhood. Currently in my parent's house we have the same living room furniture, dining room table, beds and linen, pots and pans from my childhood. My father would fall off his chair if he realized that in 8 short years in my house we have changed our living room and dining furniture three times, we have three TV's (not counting the one I gave away because it was crowding the house), three cars, my children change clothes almost every year, four computers, five iPods, Nintendo Wii, XBox 360, and the dagger in his heart would be that we eat out two-three times a week. I never recalled as a child my family going out for meal. That would be just too much for my dad to stomach. Conversely, my own family's consumerism is through the roof and I am guilty as hell. Yet my children think we never buy anything!

There's something to be admired about my parent's generation. They were frugal and knew how to save for rainy days. They knew hard times. They grew up in modest households, lived through the war in the Pacific, and top of it all raised their families. There were many like them and they were all admirable. A quality lost in today's "instant gratification" Generation X.

In my short stint as a Public Servant in Samoa I realized how grossly underpaid most admirable professions were. I thought back to my former teachers and realized why none of them had fancy cars, or why they took the bus to and from school. I learned a lot from school. I've had some great, and not so great, teachers. But for the most part I had a good run.

Sometimes I've wondered what has happened to some of them. Some I know are right where we left them twenty or so years ago. Then there's somewhat of a haunting memory I have of an experience I had involving an elderly teacher. Once I was standing in line in a popular supermarket, I recognized a teacher who taught in my primary school getting ready to pay for her items. She was not my teacher but I recognized her from my old school. She was two places in front of me. The cashier tallied up her items and told her a total not within her expectations. She stood quietly for a minute in the midst of the shopping chaos and then politely asked if she could return some of the items. The cashier obliged, she paid for what she could then walked out the door. The whole time I stood there like the gutless fool that I am and did nothing. I could have easily stepped in and paid for it. Its the least I could do. I was a young professional, unmarried, and well paid by Samoan standards. Maybe it was because I didn't want to draw attention to myself or maybe I didn't want to offend anybody, or maybe it was because I was a fucking idiot. Sometimes its the small things in life you want to take back. Hindsight is a mixed bag. Sometimes you look at it and laugh. Sometimes you look at it and cry.

The Red Radio

The luxury of owning a television in Samoa in the early 80's was only reserved for those families with money. Not particularly wealthy families but those who could muster up a few luxuries in life. We had a TV but both my parents were public servants so our family was never at any point characterized by wealth.

Radio was a big part of Samoan life. Our only radio station 2AP, served the entertainment needs of much of the country. There was a wide variety of programming from children's classroom lessons, stories, music dedications (a favorite of the teenage youth), weather, funeral announcements and government notices. Everything a public radio should be. I always remembered during cyclones how everyone would cling to the radio hoping for good news while the incessant winds tore up our surroundings. Also thinking back, and I was too young to realize it, whether there was any government propaganda? Not sure if Samoan politics then was as insidious as it is today.

Ofo's family owned a radio. It was a red box-shaped radio with one round speaker on the right, tuner and volume dials on the left, analog frequency display on the top-front, and a red handle. It was about the size of a child's shoe box. The red radio was the only item of luxury in the entire fale. It constituted a major purchase in their family's economic situation. Often Ofo's mother and younger siblings would huddle around the radio and take in the moment's programming and chuckle at the antics of Samoa's most prominent radio personality, Pat Mamaia.

Strangely the state of the red radio often revealed the state of Ofo's family dynamics. There were days when it was loud and proud and the mood was jubilant. There were days when it was turned off completely because batteries could not be afforded. Then as time wore on the red radio was partly decimated and pieced together in a sloppy manner with pieces of string and rubberbands. Those were the bad times. Ofo's father had a proneness to throwing the radio out in front of the fale onto the stoned yard during his fits of anger. It was almost as if it was a lesson in humanity. In stressful times, the father who is the head of the family, will take away or deny the family of a certain thing, and the mother will quietly and methodically patch it up and add reassurance that everything will be okay.

However, after a few trips to the front yard of the fale the red radio ended up burning with all of the other insignificant rubbish one evening. Nothing replaced the red radio. Ofo's family had no electricity so I often wondered what they did in the evenings. He showed up every Tuesday night at my house to watch the A-Team. Not long after the red radio disappeared Ofo's family were evicted and disappeared to.