Stories: O le faifeau papa'e -- Foley
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| O le faifeau pa’epa’e
No, not me! Ae se’i fai si a’u tala pu’upu’u about the “white missionary” my soa and I came in contact with one day when we were assigned to live on Manono-itai:
The island of Manono, between Upolu and Savaii, is such a small place that it only took about 45 minutes, at most, to casually walk all the way around. To make the tala’iga more challenging, there weren’t many people living there, and quite often during the daytime many of them would go i uta — to Upolu — to work on their plantations, or wherever. Of course, we could not leave our area without permission. For variety, Elder Seamalepua and I would walk clockwise around the island one day, and counter-clockwise the next.
One day everybody was excited because an important faifeau La-Mo-Sa was coming. In those days the London Missionary Society was still affiliated with the predominant Protestant church in Samoa, but what made this event unusual is that the visitor was a faifeau palagi originally from England. Of course, the local LMS congregations thought this was a big deal and treated the special visitor like a king. When our daily circuit happened to cross the path of his visit, we were doubly surprised to see the man was totally dressed in startlingly white clothes, from hat to shoes, that just outshined us all. I remember thinking, wow, until he broke the spell by attempting to speak Samoan. It was way off. Still, most of the LMS people seemed to think he was an angel — one I can still see in my mind.
One of the things that made proselyting on Manono special was Alofipo Toso, a matai from Savaii, and his wife who were also assigned to the small Sunday School there. Several of their daughters were serving in the mission at the same time. Alofipo was a short man, well along in years at that point; but I’ll also never forget how witty and clever he was in failauga faaSamoa. All of the matai on Manono treated him with respect and deference.
One of those was an old matai who always welcomed us and shared what little food he had (because there was a big oge after the 1966 hurricane). He loved to tell us how he had visited his aiga in Laie, Hawaii, where I’ve been living for the past 40 years, and though he wasn’t a member, actually spent some time helping build the Laie Temple, which was completed in 1919.
Another thing I remember about Manono is that practically every day (except Sundays) the men would go fishing in their paopao. They would locate and circle a school of atule, and then te’i!, wherever you were on the island, you would hear a boom — fana i’a — when one of them would dynamite the fish. Usually that afternoon somebody would drop off a small coconut basket of tasty atule for the Alofipo’s and us. Sometimes it was a man who was horribly scarred from face-to-feet: It turns out that years before when he was out fishing in this manner, he threw the dynamite in the water, and then jumped in before it went off. Aue! |
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