My first two months in American Samoa went off without a hitch. I teach high school Language Arts in a small, tightly knit village called Leone. It’s a deeply religious community with an incredibly strong work ethic. Six days a week, everyone works tirelessly. They attend work or school, come home and clean the house and do their other chores and prepare for the next day. On Sundays, the entire village shuts down and everyone attends church, which is followed by a big feast called an umu. Everyone here knows your name and waves at you when you walk by. I have more than 150 students who come through my classroom every single day and countless others who I see walking the streets and sitting out on their front porches. I really feel like this community has adopted me as one of their own.
Just as soon as I thought I had things here figured out, it all changed in a heartbeat. On Sept. 29, I woke up and hopped out of bed at exactly 6:47 in the morning. As soon as I stood up and put on my glasses, I began to hear a loud noise and feel the ground shake. It’s the type of feeling that you might get when there’s an extremely powerful windstorm that rattles your house. But it kept getting worse. I had never been in an earthquake before, but it wasn’t difficult to tell that this was one. To be honest, I really had no clue what to do when I realized that I was in the middle of an earthquake. Neither did Kelly. First we sat in the living room and ducked down, covering our heads. But then we got worried that the house would collapse, so we decided to go outside. As soon as we got out, we heard someone yelling something in Samoan at us, and because we couldn’t understand, we assumed that they were telling us to go back inside. So we did. We spent the rest of the earthquake standing in doorways and hoping that nothing would fall on us. About two minutes after it started, the earthquake was over. We looked around the house and surveyed the damage: a large mirror was broken in the bedroom, but other than that, everything was fine.
We went outside to survey the damage, and we were greeted by small children running frantically past our house. There was terror in their eyes, and some of them were yelling, “Tsunami!” We were told by a neighbor that a giant tidal wave had just hit about half a mile from our house. We bolted for higher ground, along with thousands of others, many of whom were still soaked in blood and ocean water from a wave that had just hit minutes earlier.
After a few hours, the remaining tsunami warnings were called off and we were allowed to go back home. Thankfully, our place was fine, but others weren’t so lucky. In the afternoon, I decided to go into the center of my village, which was a short walk towards the beach. I’ll never forget the scene that I saw there. It was a total disaster area. There were completely empty spaces where houses used to be. Heaps of concrete, brick and tin were piled all over the area. Trophies and family photos and children’s toys were strewn all about. I saw some of my students, many of whom were bloodied and bruised and crying.
The tsunami left hundreds of people here homeless or badly injured. Most tragically, 11 people in my small village lost their lives. Although all of the students at my school somehow survived, the elementary school where Kelly teaches lost two students (a first grader and a second grader) as well as one of her fellow teachers. And among the dead were the parents, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters of my students.
The next few days were a whirlwind. I woke up the following morning to find that some pictures of the damage I had taken and sent to Reuters were featured prominently on The New York Times Web site, Google News and on the front pages of all kinds of newspapers around the world. We were inundated with all kinds of relief workers from AmeriCorps, FEMA, the Red Cross and the military. I got warm messages from people I hadn’t talked to in years who just wanted to make sure I was safe.
The strange thing about all this is that I came to American Samoa precisely because I wanted to isolate myself from the news. During my time at Amherst, I found myself becoming addicted to checking the headlines at least 10 times a day. I needed a break from it, so I wanted to go to a place where people had never heard of Bernie Madoff or Eliot Spitzer or Sarah Palin, a place so seemingly insignificant that most folks in the U.S. can’t find it on a world map even if they knew exactly where to look. And then, in a tragic twist of irony, for several days my small village found itself at the heart of the biggest news story in the world.