Samoa

Samoa………Samoa was difficult. I was again part of the ADVON team, so I flew ahead of the ship. However, there are no direct flights from Palau to Samoa. Instead, I flew from Palau to Guam to Tokyo, JP to Auckland, NZ, to Samoa over the course of about 36 hours. Once I arrived in Samoa we drove an hour to our hotel. Over the next 3 weeks we confirmed events to the best of our ability, and planned engagements for all our mission body. However, there is a strong social bureaucracy in Samoa. Nobody will commit to an event before confirming with his or her boss, which in turn confirms with their boss and so forth until you reach the upper levels of government. Even when it was the Ministry of Health who sent us to a location to set up an engagement, nothing would be committed until that game of social telephone had been completed, which took forever. Even the day before the ship arrived, we had not confirmed everything that we wanted to confirm. The US Embassy in Samoa was also highly involved in what we were doing. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as they were sometimes able to open doors for us that we could not open by ourselves, but it added just one more step in the social telephone game. Other times we requested to make contact with a certain organization and the Embassy simply said no.

The waters around Samoa were also far from calm. The ship was anchored on the windward side of the island, and white-capped waves were a normal occurrence. We intended to have a barge tied alongside the ship to facilitate people getting on and off the ship easily, but due to the constant rough seas 2 attempts were made at placing the barge, and both were met with failure and snapped mooring lines. Instead, our personnel got on and off the ship via a rope ladder over the side to a waiting water taxi boat below. We had 2 water taxi vessels, and there were multiple times they had to pause operations, sometimes for hours at a time, until the seas calmed enough for them to continue operating. Even then one of the vessels had a rope anchor/cleat ripped completely out of its deck due to the rough conditions. I should also mention that during this mission stop the US government couldn’t agree on a budget and had shut down, severely limiting the funding for our mission and greatly reducing the number of personnel we could house on land instead of braving the bucking sea conditions every day.

Despite these headaches, I was able to coordinate with the Disaster Management line of effort to conduct a full-scale Marine Rescue Operation exercise involving Samoan Maritime Police, Red Cross, Apia Fire Department, Ambulance Service, and National Emergency Operations Center. I also took part in their 3-day Disaster Management symposium and After-Action discussion. In the few days I was not working with the Disaster Management team I drove a diesel stick-shift van around the island delivering personnel, bottled water, and MREs to various locations. I was tasked with this due to being one of the few on the mission that actually knows how to drive a stick-shift and the ability to do it backwards. Instead of driving on the right side of the road, in the left vehicle seat, and shifting with one’s right hand, everything was reversed. I drove on the left side of the road, in the right vehicle seat, and shifted gears with my left hand. It was less awkward than I originally thought it might be, but a skill set that many on our mission did not possess.