By Angela Hemmeter
Silver Solas Award-winner in the Doing Good or Kindness of Strangers category
Giant leaves and leaning palms framed our view of the field, bright with the morning sun. On the far side, a long driveway cut along the field’s edge where a line of trees cast sharp shadows in the tall grass. “Here they come,” Ron called.
I looked to the bend in the driveway. Hunched figures emerged, swinging machetes with quick, downward thrusts, and then back up, sending hacked vegetation flying with glinting blades. They crept along the road, too far off to make out the faces, but we could tell who were the teachers by the way they stood straight and idle like guards of a chain gang.It would be a while before they reached us.
Our cinderblock house with corrugated metal roof that I shared with two other Peace Corps volunteers backed up to a forest. Tangled brush blanketed a slope before it leaving only one way to get to our place—a set of car tracks through a thicket of banana plants and papaya trees. It was from this leafy tunnel where the boys eventually poured out and surrounded us. The thwack and chink of metal striking stalks of thigh-high grass entered on all sides of the house through louvered windows. Ron rushed to mix a pouch of powdered Gatorade with a jug of cold water, then brought it out to the front steps with a stack of mismatched, plastic cups.
I hovered in the shadows and watched the boys. With their knees slightly bent, torsos leaned forward, they reached up high with those two-foot knives before slicing them down through the weeds, inches from their flip-flopped toes. By now, they had been working in the sun for close to two hours. Most wore a stained t-shirt and an ’ie, a colorful cloth wrapped as a skirt around their waist. Some took off their shirts and wrapped them around their heads like sloppy turbans. Their sweat-coated, brown skin shone in the harsh sun. I studied their dirt-streaked faces, searching their eyes, their expressions for clues of what they might be like as students.
In a couple of days, classes would start and I would teach for the first time. I had no teaching certificate and no teaching education beyond the last month of Peace Corps training. I worried that this wouldn’t be enough to prepare me for managing a classroom in the United States, never mind here in Samoa where I still was learning the culture.
~
I first visited Avele College on a tour of schools that needed teachers. While banging down its pot-holed driveway, squeezed into a minibus with other volunteers, I peered out at a tree-lined, sunny field on one side and dense vegetation on the other. We drove up a hill to the school buildings where Aiga, the principal, greeted us with slices of coconut and papaya. “Welcome to the Jungle,” as she called Avele, an affectionate jab on its overgrown campus. The other schools had tidy grounds, most of their trees and brush bulldozed over to keep the vegetation at bay. After seeing those school’s buildings baking under the equatorial sun, the soothing shadows and messy wilds of Avele were an oasis for my eyes.Aiga needed a chemistry teacher and I liked the idea of a female boss. The school seemed like a perfect fit. I wrote in Avele at the top of my school preferences.
When Jackie, one of the trainers, assigned me to Avele, she said, “It’s an all-boys school, but with your stand-back personality, you’ll probably be okay.”
She said this in a cheery tone, as if Avele and I were a favorable pairing, but her words were a jolt to my self-awareness. What did she mean by “stand-back personality?” Had I been unfriendly? I felt a twinge of conscience. After two months of living with host families and feeling constantly on stage, I had to admit that I wanted to withdraw from everyone. All the volunteers did. But Jackie wasn’t talking about the other volunteers and I couldn’t say that her words didn’t trigger a hint of recognition.
Though I liked hanging with friends and going to parties, I knew of my tendency to be reserved and avoid eye contact with new people. Still, I hadn’t realized that I came across so guarded. Contrary to what Jackie might have thought, I didn’t see a stand-back personality as an asset, especially here where language and cultural differences would be challenge enough for me at fitting in. At the same time, my mind hooked on to the concern behind Jackie’s comment. I wondered what she knew about the all-boys school.
What did she mean that I’d “probably be okay?”
~
In my third year of college, when I listened to a family friend, Dave, describe his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia, I knew that was what I wanted to do. He and his wife helped crafters with the business of selling their wares abroad. What I remembered most from Dave’s stories were not the details of their actual assignment, but of their training.
Dave and his wife joined the new Peace Corps in the 1960s. Back then it had a sink-or-swim perspective on training, which entailed dropping Dave, his wife, and a few other volunteers off alone on an island in the Caribbean and telling them to find someone to take care of them. I imagined them walking from the shores where they landed, to the lights of a village, and down its dirt road where figures moved in the light of simple houses. Dave’s wife, who spoke Spanish, broke the ice between the villagers and volunteers. More than her language skills, though, she had a knack for making people feel comfortable around her. All through training, she was the one the locals wanted to be with.
“They loved her,” Dave said.
As I filled out the Peace Corps application, I feared being dropped in a foreign land and left to fend for myself. The idea of asking a stranger to take me in and feed me, never mind someone from a different culture, who spoke another language, filled me with terror. I hoped that my training would not be like Dave and his wife’s. At the same time, I admired them for their bravery and openness to connect with others from other countries. I wanted to be like them. I especially wanted to be like Dave’s wife: someone who puts people at ease, someone with whom people wanted to be around.
~
On the first day of school, I could hear the boys singing, even before I left the house. As I walked through the leafy tunnel, past the student dorms, past the other teachers’ houses, and up the hill, I heard their voices, sometimes deep, sometimes high, sometimes laughing. They sang mostly traditional Samoan songs that reminded me of the songs we sang in the village at lotu, just before dinner, after the sun had set.
As I passed the open hall, I saw the boys, now clean and dressed in their uniform—white, button-up shirt, green lavalava (a wrap-like skirt) with three yellow stripes, and a puataunofo, the yellow flower of Avele, tucked behind the left ear. They sat cross-legged on the floor, squeezed up next to each other, their flip-flops on their lap. With mouths opened in song, their eyes followed the prefect on stage, a senior student who conducted the tempo using his whole body in a dance of sorts. Jutting movements set the beat of clapping while subtle spasms signaled louder claps. He made his final spasm extreme and silly to make the boys laugh, which they did, together letting out a gleeful roar, but not until the song had finished.
Every school day the boys’ singing and laughter followed me from home to the school. I’d make my way to the classrooms that were in long buildings with open, louvered windows on both sides to let breezes flow through. The scent of hibiscus and the papery rattle of fluttering leaves mixed with my lessons making me feel always connected with the outdoors. When I taught in room 10, I could peek out one window and see a wedge of ocean through the trees, its deep blue water under a hazy boundary with the brighter sky.
In the general science grades ten through twelve, most of the boys were still young enough to be shorter than me. In the year 13 chemistry class, I was the smallest. Some of the boys, who retook year 13 for another try at standardized tests for better scores, were only a few years younger than me. None of them were boys, really, but young men.
When I stood before the blackboard writing chemical equations with a gritty piece of chalk, beads of sweat formed at my temples as I struggled to conceal my fear of public speaking. Did the boys notice? If they did, they chose not to take advantage of it. More than that, they seemed to make a show of being polite and respectful.
Once, when I had trouble lighting an ancient Bunsen burner for a lab demonstration, several boys raced to be the first to pull out matches while a couple others adjusted the gas intake. Together they got the burner lit in about 30 seconds. I found it amusing that at a school where kids brought matches and machetes, discipline would be the least of my worries.
My biggest stress came from meeting the requirements of the Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate, an international standardized test, in which scores determined opportunities for higher education. To qualify for the chemistry PSSC, my students had to participate in and write up five labs. This sounded easy enough, that is, if we had the chemicals for the labs. Avele had no chemicals—well, virtually no chemicals. There were plenty of dusty bottles on the shelves among the decomposing geckos, but many were empty. Those that had anything of substance looked older than me. Scrounging for supplies would be my greatest challenge that first year.
The PSSC covered everything I had learned in college as a minor in chemistry and then some. Covering this range of material in one year required meticulously created lesson plans for every available class. If classes were canceled, I had to push out and trim down lessons.
Because Avele was known for its rugby players and dancers, classes could be cancelled with little notice for practice of a big event. On one particular cancellation, I sat, silently fuming, on the hill overlooking the rugby field where the boys, shirtless, wearing only their green lavalavas, milled around barefoot on the grass. They had been asked to dance for a visiting foreign dignitary and all the school were invited to watch the rehearsal. The other teachers collected in groups on the ground as if at a festival. Miffed at losing precious instructional time for dancing again, I sat alone.
A sudden, threatening cry pierced the field and the boys instantly pulled into two factions facing each other in an aggressive pose: knees bent, elbows out, ready to fight. With slow, controlled movements, affecting a barely suppressed rage, they stomped the ground and struck their chests, bellowing a challenge in time with their measured approach toward each other. I had never seen a dance like this. My irritability gave way to curiosity.
As the groups converged, a whip-quick pivot snapped the hundred or so warriors to face us. Fists clenched, brows pinched, they advanced, each leaded tromp shaking the ground all the way up the hill and reverberating in my core, stirring up my own inner rumblings.
One last roar punctuated with a thrust of arms, and before I could register what I witnessed, the war dance ended. Bodies straightened. Arms relaxed at sides. The factions fell into disarray as the warriors turned back into teenagers.
I looked around at the other teachers. Maybe a few applauded. They too dispersed, satisfied smiles on their faces as they headed back to work. To them, the performance was just a treat. They had seen it before. I kept silent and walked back to the lab processing the boys’ performance. Just that morning, I had seen them sitting in the hall singing sweetly with flowers behind their ears. One day they are hacking through the campus with long knives; the next they are politely listening in class. In many ways, they showed maturity beyond their age. In other ways, their lack of cynicism and trusting nature gave them an air of innocence. This was most evident when having their photo taken.
As the photographer for the yearbook, I often had my camera with me. When the boys saw it, they would stop, put an arm around a buddy and pose with a peace sign or some other innocuous hand gesture. At first, I found it endearing. I personally hated to get my picture taken. My self-consciousness showed in the resulting photos: a crooked smile, a sideways glance. The boys, on the other hand, loved it, and I loved that they trusted me, a foreigner, to snap the picture. Together we’d laugh and they would hold up an index finger, pleading, “One more! One more!”
After a while, I tired of the posed photo with hand gestures. I tried sneaking up on them while they worked or readied for a performance, but someone would always notice before I had a chance to focus and shoot. The photo revealed a chest pushed out, a bicep flexed, and the emergence of a smile. Eventually, I told them I would take no more photos unless they acted natural. This prompted GQ-model poses while pretending to read a book or shimmying up a coconut tree and waving from two stories up, “Look! I’m acting natural!”
Those photos never captured that private, authentic moment that I wanted. Instead, I got a different truth: a snapshot of gleeful, uninhibited youth—a freeze frame in their transition to adulthood.
Since I lived on campus, I ran into the boys often. While biking home down the school driveway, often with plastic bags tied to my handle bars filled with groceries or jars of chemicals pilfered from other schools, I’d hear a boy call out, “Hemmeta!” They always dropped the r at the end of my name just like they did in Massachusetts where I grew up.
At night, working on lessons at the dining table, sometimes I heard the swish and crunch of footsteps in the grass just outside my house. Awash in light, I could not see a thing out in the black night. I’d call out a questioning hello. A high-pitched friendly greeting echoed back as disembodied flip flops smacked the concrete of my porch while cutting through to Aiga’s house.
During end of year exams, students came to my house for tutoring, kicking off their flip flops at the door and walking barefoot on our unswept floor. At the table, we’d spread notebooks, pencils, and old exams; I’d lean in, scratch out symbols and numbers, and explain equations that stumped them.
One evening, a notorious skipper, who couldn’t have been to even half my classes, showed up at my table, sitting innocently next to his friend, another chemistry student who rarely missed a class. I thought about the months of classes he missed and the material I taught that built upon itself, that he couldn’t possibly understand. Exasperated, I said, “I can’t insert the whole course into your head a few days before the exam.”
Then I proceeded to tongue lash him for missing so many classes. All the while, he and the other student looked at me without a hint of insolence, silently taking it all in. He gave no excuse, like a long illness, a death in the family, or simply that he got so far behind that he didn’t know how to ask for help. Not a word. For an hour he sat quiet and respectful as I helped his classmate.
~
One day I woke up in the hospital not knowing how I got there. White sheets and white curtains added to the fog as I faded in and out of consciousness, remembering someone, I don’t know who, telling me a taxi hit me while riding my bike into town. It happened after school, just outside the gate as students and teachers walked home or caught a bus into town. Ron would later tell me that some boys had chased after the taxi, throwing rocks at it as it sped away.
Groggy, I wondered if I had been in the hospital for days or hours. Beverly, the nurse, coyly informed me that, while I slept, a group of Avele boys had paid a visit. Immediately, I felt alarmed at the thought of my students seeing me sleeping in bed with disheveled hair, wearing a hospital gown, and possibly drooling. I was not yet aware of my swollen lip, bruised face, and the stitches in my forehead. Beverly described how the boys circled around me and prayed as I breathed deeply. I warmed to hear of their concern, touched that they made the trip to the hospital.
“At the end of the prayer, right after one boy asked God to give you a full recovery,” she said giggling, “You snorted loudly.”
~
In my second year at Avele, girls were admitted for the first time in the more than 70 years of the school’s existence. I had heard that some of the old boys, graduates of Avele, were not happy about this break in tradition. I wondered if some of the teachers and students felt the same way and worried for the incoming girls. Certainly, Aiga would make sure they were welcomed and treated as equals. Still, I was alert to any resentment from staff or students.
On the first day of school, in my chemistry class, in the back, off to the side, sat a lone girl. While the boys leaned back in their seats and joked comfortably with one another, she spoke to no one. She fidgeted, repeatedly adjusting her arms and legs, which she kept close to her body. In the way she looked sideways and avoided eye contact, I could see her desire to disappear, to escape from feeling like an outsider. The next class, she wasn’t there, nor did she show up at any other class after that.
At a school event during those first days, I saw a few girls offering trays of fruit to the boys. The boys didn’t seem to have a chore. I complained to one of the teachers, Lina, about the girls being positioned as servants to the boys. Wasn’t it bad enough that the girls were outnumbered—only a handful had been admitted that first year. Lina, unconcerned, only smiled and said, “We have an expression in Samoa: The girls respect the boys and the boys respect the girls.”
This did not put me at ease. I hadn’t seen the boys do any similar shows of respect for the girls. But I said nothing. What did I know? I was a foreigner. How could I say that I better understood the situation?
Though I remained the sole female in my chemistry class, my lower grade science classes had a healthy mix of boys and girls. The girls hung with the girls and the boys hung with the boys, but a uniform buzz gave evidence of a cross click interaction. It was just like every mixed gender class I’d ever experienced.
One of the girls volunteered a project to compete in the countrywide science fair. I offered to mentor her.
After school, when the campus emptied of all but those who lived there, I saw her coming down the leafy tunnel alone, her project display board under one arm. A boy in a coconut tree that neither one of us had noticed called out to her. I watched the girl closely. She looked up, gave the boy a cheerful wave, and said something—something I couldn’t make out. It sounded like a greeting to a friend. She did not pause in her stride. Her posture did not change. She walked with back straight at a confident clip to my front door. She walked like she belonged here. I relaxed. Maybe I had been overly concerned for the girls. Maybe everything would be alright.
The year progressed without any apparent tension. I never heard of any issues from Aiga or the other teachers. It appeared as if the transition from an all-boys school to admitting both boys and girls would go just as smoothly as the previous year. Would the students have agreed? I don’t know.
I thought of Lina’s saying: The girls respect the boys and the boys respect the girls. Initially, unimpressed, I thought it simple and obvious. Well, of course they should both be respecting each other. The problem is when they don’t. Now, I realized the importance of stating the obvious, of having a clear, solid understanding that everyone could stand on and return to if a problem arose. And it was a simple phrase—simple and balanced—the first half of the phrase a mirror of the second half. It’s meaning and its syntax perfectly level on any scale. No word and no one tipped above the other.
I thought of how I fit into Lina’s saying. In my concern that the boys might not be respectful to the girls, I had forgotten how respectful they had been to me. I thought of their polite behavior in class, how they called out to me when I zipped by on my bike, and how they loved it when I took their picture. You would think that the differences of culture and gender would have created stumbling blocks in the distance between us. Yet, the boys skipped over these barriers like they weren’t there, greeting me with trust and acceptance, seeing me without judgment or fear.
I thought about my stand-back personality and how it differed from the boys. Had I come across as cold and unfriendly? I had wanted to be more open. Clearly, it was that quality of the boys that made me feel welcomed.
One of my favorite Avele photos is of me with two of my students. Sisamata, another teacher, had invited the whole school to a celebration of his wedding. On the church steps, the bride and groom in white beamed with joy while teachers and students mingled on the paths and laughed in the garden. Upon seeing two of my students sitting in folding chairs, I gave my camera to someone to take our picture. In the photo, the two boys, year 13 chemistry students, wear the green lavalava and white shirt of their Avele uniforms. They make no hand gestures nor strike a pose. Their smiles are subtle and polite. I wear my favorite pulatasi, a traditional, Samoan, formal dress that drapes down to my ankles, my flip-flopped feet poking out from under the hem. My smile is bright, and my hands rest on the boys’ shoulders.
When I first saw the photo, I noticed how small and pale I appeared compared to them. More than that, though, was my relaxed posture and easy smile, so rare in photos of me at that time. It was as if in that single frame, the camera captured a moment when I felt completely at ease, a moment when I felt right at home.
~
Angela Hemmeter has worked as a high school chemistry teacher, a science textbook editor, and a stay-at-home mom. She has an MFA in creative writing from Texas State University and lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, two teenagers, and two noisy guinea pigs.