Donna Marie Barr - My View from the House by the Sea: A Life Transformed by Samoa and the Peace Corps

MY VIEW FROM THE

HOUSE BY THE SEA

A Life Transformed by Samoa and the Peace Corps

A memoir byDONNA MARIE BARR

Dedicated to

Harold Robert Bailey,

raconteur extraordinaire,

Peace Corps trainer, beloved uncle

and to

Tuifeamalo Annandale Tuatagaloa and

Lesaisaea Niualuga Evaimalo,

whose friendship mattered

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage.

Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey

The coconut tree doesnt bend by itself; it bends because of the wind.

Things dont just happen.

Samoan proverb

Table of Contents

After Id raised three sons and enjoyed an intense and gratifying professional life, I finally realized my lifelong dream to join the Peace Corps. I found myself exploring my own internal pathways while navigating an ancient and unfamiliar way of life in Samoa. Dropped off at the door of strangers, barely able to speak the language, I embarked on a cultural immersion filled with ups and downs, through which I ultimately gained deep insights into myself and the country I come from.

Despite those many challenges some heart-warming and some hair-raisingalong the way I fell in love with Samoa.

Two years after I returned home in 2010, I began to transcribe my almost-daily journal entries to merge with notes Id kept on my laptop. A few years later after intermittent editing, I had a manuscript that approached what I wanted to share, but I knew I still needed to go further with deeper honesty and emotion. So I called on my friend and writing mentor, Tom Peek, to help pull the truth and depth out of me. He encouraged me to keep going, and I couldnt have written this memoir without his support, guidance, and wisdom.

As an avid journaler, I always knew that I would write about my Peace Corps service. But I couldnt have envisioned how significant that experience would be, or that writing about it would be equally as enlightening.

What follows is a true story. Some events, however, may not have happened exactly as I recount them, because I didnt always translate the Samoan language correctly and I may not have remembered every detail accurately. More importantly, I saw things from my own perspective, and some of my early opinions changed over time. In places Ive written about sensitive cultural matters, and I apologize if any offense is takenespecially by those who so kindly welcomed me to their country, their villages, and their homes.

Ive included additional acknowledgments and thanks elsewhere, but at the outset I want to mention my mom, Hope Helen Wild. At eighty years old, she kept up regularly by email, and sent me frequent care packages of candy, nuts, dried fruit, and many unexpected treats. Other family and friends were also wonderfully supportive, but Mom was my most faithful correspondent. In the spring of 2006 when I told her I was applying to Peace Corps, she embraced me and said Go for it! This is the time in your life to do it. Thanks Mom!

And with grateful aloha, I also want to thank my Uncle Bob for inspiring me to become a writer, as well as for sharing your joy for life, and your love of Hawaii. I am who I am because of you.

Both have passed away, although I feel their presence in my life every day.

Donna Marie Barr, December 2021

Ua faalaau tu i vanu

Like a tree standing near a precipice

The future is unknown.

From the house by the sea, I watched sunset after sunset, never able to capture in words the true beauty of the waning sunlight playing on the clouds and the ocean, marveling at each evenings transformation. As the colors glowed, morphed, and faded into dusk, Id write in my journal until the lights in my Samoan village came on one by one:

Im watching another breathtaking sunset. The view keeps changing. For the first time here in Poutasi, I feel like Im home.

My fiercely red, wire-bound journal was my constant companion throughout my Peace Corps adventure that began in 2007. I chronicled the beauty and kindness of the Samoan people, the challenges of daily life in a foreign country, and my struggles to learn the language and carry out village projects. But beyond the facts, I wrote of the life-changing explorations and discoveries, the tribulations that seemed so overwhelming, and the successes large and small, and hopefully lasting how it felt to be there. I now see my Peace Corps self from a new point of view, as I struggled, learned, and loved while daily life in my small village surrounded me and the house by the sea.

The fale i tai (fah-lay t)the house by the seawas my place of refuge, solitude, relaxation, meditation, entertainment. My office, meeting place, writing space, and village observation post. I cant imagine my life in the village of Poutasi without the fale i tai at the heart of it.

Forty years earlier, like many young Americans in the 1960s, Id thought about joining the Peace Corps one day. And like most young Americans in the 1960s, I didnt. Luckily, I had a second chance.

In 1961, when President John F. Kennedy said to America,... ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country, I was a tall, geeky, ponytailed seventh grader. My childhood in the rolling green hills of eastern Nebraska was a classic farm life. We had a red collie dog, barn cats, geese, chickens, milk cows, and sheep. I loved my horse Cocoa, so named because his reddish-brown coat was exactly the color of Hersheys cocoa powder. I rode for hours, daydreaming on his strong back in fragrant alfalfa and knee-high corn fields.

Through eighth grade, I walked with my younger brother to a white clapboard, two-room schoolhouse with one teacher for lower grades and one for upper. After school, Id often curl up to read on the porch swing, shaded by giant elms. My favorites were stories of adventure in faraway placesWhite Fang, The Swiss Family Robinson, Island of the Blue Dolphins. I was an introspective and energetic girl who got straight As and played piano for choir at the small country church where my grandfather was pastor. In the summers, I planted and weeded in the family garden, worked on 4-H projects for the county fair, and went to Riverview Bible Camp, where I got my first kiss in the glow of the bonfire by the wide Platte River.

In high school I was in the Future Homemakers of America club, played flute in the marching band, and planned to become an English teacher. Attending the small Lutheran university in a neighboring town, I drove my baby-blue 1962 Renault Dauphine to my waitressing job after classes, wrote articles and a column as feature editor for the college paper, and thought Id marry the handsome sports editor who Id been dating for two years. Life was proceeding expectedly.

But I was also restless and curious. Maybe I was born that way or wanted to see for myself what was in those books that I loved, or perhaps I needed to satisfy my inquisitive itch to experience the world beyond my provincial upbringing. For all those reasons (and more), in 1970 I joined the United States Air Force instead of the Peace Corps, and had a vastly different, though equally challenging and formative, experience.

The Air Force sent me to Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas, to work in NORS Not Operationally Ready, Supply. Our responsibility was to track down replacement parts for F-111 fighter jets in Vietnam. We called bases all over the world to find the required component and ship it to the deployed location (and if necessary, we could cannibalize aircraft not in the theater of operations). I had to drive an assortment of small trucks and a forklift, so I needed a U.S. Government Drivers License. At the base driving school, I met my future husband, the tall, thin, dark-haired non-commissioned officer in charge. It was love at first sonnet. James was also an English major, resuming studies after his return from Vietnam. We began taking literature classes together at Texas Christian University and we married six months later. He was funny, had an inquiring mind and a nearly photographic memory, and was a Texan through and through, born in El Campo, fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico. The Instamatic camera photos of me romping in the waves on nearby Galveston Beach, my first glimpse of the vastness of an ocean, revealed sheer delight on my beaming face.