Tsunami Relief Supplies

Many of you have offered to collect donations or put together relief supplies to send to the people of American Samoa. I was at a shelter yesterday and from the conversations I had, there is a need for the following:

- Hand santizer

-Facemasks

- Towels & wash cloths

- Games - cards, coloring books, crayons, basketballs, footballs, marbles

- Baby-safe stuffed animals

- Baby food and formula

- Diapers, baby oil and lotion

- Reading glasses

- pillows

- Baby blankets

- Shampoo, conditioner, deordorant, lotion

- Milk & juice

- Laundry soap

- Toilet paper

- Basic med - Tylenol, Advil, etc.

You can send these to me at:

Steve Atwell

WorldTeach

P.O. Box 5411

Pago Pago, American Samoa 96799

- - American Samoa has a small population and one that is built around people pulling together to support one another. In addition to the earthquake and tsunamis here, this week has seen some truly devastating natural disasters tear through the Pacific. If you want to help, please consider making a donation to either the American or International Red Cross http://american.redcross.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ntld_main&s_subsrc=RCO_RedTab&s_src=DRF

In addition to communicating the needs of the people here, I’ve put together an account of my experience in the days since the tsunami:

The last few days have been a blur of exhaustion and personal fulfillment. The day after the Tsunami, I returned to my village to begin cleaning our house, mopping the floor and taking things outside to dry. The damage to our house was minimal - my sixth grade science text book was one of the few things damaged. Taking a break on our front porch, a number of our students came over to check on us. When they found out we hadn’t eaten - with the power out, we had no way to cook a hot meal – they brought us a huge plate of barbequed chicken, hot dogs and rice. Alex and I sat on the front porch gorging ourselves on meat and drinking the last of the quickly spoiling orange juice.

As the sun began to set, it dawned on us that we were unprepared for the impending blackout that nightfall would bring. We fetched our blue lagoon scented candle from the coffee table, brought it outside and listened to music on my battery powered speakers. One of the students from a local high school made a fire in our front yard using a piece of driftwood and a bountiful supply of coconut shells. We spent the evening listening to Indie rock, rap and Bob Dylan as the moon came up and bathed the darkened village in a silvery light.

When we woke up Thursday morning, we still were without power or potable drinking water and decided to pack our things for a long weekend in town. We hitched a ride and were finally were able to pick a cell signal as we crested the mountain and began our decent into Pago Pago.

We called our friend in town and found out that the Red Cross staging area had been set up within walking distance from their house. Alex and I convinced the driver of the truck to let us stop at a hardware store to pick up hammers, gloves and facemasks. We dropped our things at the house and quickly made our way to the Red Cross.

When we got there, it was late in the day and we were soon frustrated by the lack of action and limited direction we received. Instead, we caught a ride to Leone, one of the towns on the West side severely hit by the tsunami. We met up with some other volunteers and walked the rest of the way into the village. When we got there we checked on an elementary school teacher whose house had been destroyed. As we approached, she appeared on a second story balcony, but reassured us that she was fine and didn’t need help.

We entered her living room through the doorway where double doors had once hung, found the refrigerator on its side and the kitchen stove lying in the backyard. Not needing our help seemed questionable, but she told us that she had to wait for FEMA to evaluate the damage before the clean-up effort could begin. On the morning of the tsunami, she was running late for work and at home when it hit. She ran to the back bedroom to check on her mother as the water tore through the door, shattered the windows and began to gush toward the bedrooms. We talked to her for a while and promised to offer her what limited support we could provide. Despite our best effort to help, we weren’t able to truly make ourselves feel useful. Finally, we decided to call it quits and give it another shot at the Red Cross the next day.

Friday, feeling confident, we caught a ride with one of the teachers back to the Red Cross. We got there just in time to catch the end of the morning briefing and be broken into teams to be sent out to shelters. We were assigned to assess the Leone shelter and get information from the people staying there. We were told to collect contact information, the number of people displaced, check the water and food supplies, and assess the health and hygiene of those who were staying there.

The shelter was well maintained and, while we there, staff from the department of public health were giving each of the shelter residents a check-up. I spoke with the head of the shelter and some of the people who were staying there to put together a list of things that the residents said that they needed. The list I’ve put together at the top of the e-mail is based on what I was told by shelter residents. They told me that most of the people staying there were infants, that the children could use games to play, and that many of the people staying there were sleeping on the floor.

After leaving the shelter, we drove back to the Red Cross to check on the available supplies in the warehouse and see what we could offer. We loaded up a puttering diesel truck with 100 floor mats for the shelter and 50 cots to set up at a new housing sight for the Red Cross volunteers that were due to arrive from the mainland.

With the truck loaded, I jumped in the driver seat as a Samoan named Sam ambled into the cab next to me. Sam had lived in various parts of the U.S., but had recently relocated back to the American Samoa. Several other Samoans piled into the back of the truck to help secure our cargo and for the short ride to drop it off. We left the mats at the shelter and then spent the next two hours setting up cots in a Catholic school’s outdoor gymnasium.

One of the most poignant moments from my day came at the very end. I was driving back from setting up the last cots at the high school gymnasium when one of the Samoans asked me to stop so that he could get out. A guy I’d been working with all day and whose name I never caught was from the village of Poloa.

Poloa is the village on the westernmost tip of the island. It’s a remote village and, even on good days, there are only two buses a day that run that far west. The village is split with half of it on low flat land and the other half built into the side of the mountain chain that stretches across American Samoa. The people who live on the mountain were fine, but nearly the entire low lying area was washed away – including an elementary school where one of the WorldTeach volunteers was placed. Luckily, the casualty rate in was relatively low because most people made it to higher ground, but there was still tremendous destruction.

This guy had left his village and trekked it for nearly two hours to get to the Red Cross shelter to see how he could help other people who may have been in even greater need than the people of his village. What caught me was, that despite all of this and his long road home, he said, “I’ll see you again tomorrow.”

I’m inspired by the way that people, like this guy, are able to think beyond themselves and offer what little they can to help others. Over the last few days, I’ve experienced frustrations with finding a productive means to volunteer, confusing organizational structures, jurisdiction disputes between the Red Cross and the local government, and reports in the paper of homes and businesses being looted and yet, I still find hope.

Many of you have offered to collect donations or send relief supplies. I hope that you will and sincerely thank you for your support.

Have a great weekend and know that I miss you all,

Steve

Tsunami in American Samoa

Good Morning,

Thank you for your warm wishes and concern. It’s been an interesting two days here in American Samoa. I spent a good portion of the day remarking how strange it is to be in such a small portion of the world that is suddenly rocketed to international recognition, especially given the circumstance.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been working on a unit on plate tectonics with my science classes. For my fifth graders, we have been talking about volcanoes, but for seventh and eighth, we have been discussing earthquakes and tsunamis.

Yesterday morning, I was sitting in my living room, eating a bowl of LIFE cereal on our surfboard, turned make-shift table, and looking over the answers to an earthquake crossword puzzle that I had given to my students the previous day. I started for feel low vibrations shake the house. The bus driver lives behind our house and usually leaves for work about this time and I assumed that he had to bass turned up unusually loud this morning.

As the vibrations continued and intensified, I looked down at my worksheet, over at my textbook and realized that this was too forceful to coming from the bus’ subwoofer. I went to the front door and opened it to look out into the yard. I watched some high school kids stop in the street and look around the village. My roommate, Alex, came out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway as we watched our neighbors dog stammer around the front yard both confused and scared.

As the earthquake continued to shake the house, we watched as the papers on our table began to slide to the floor, water in our dish basic sloshed from side to side and a plastic vase fell off the shelf and onto the floor. The earthquake lasted for what felt like a minute, and then things settled back to normal. Not sure what to make of things, Alex headed to school and I continued to ready myself for the day.

I had just put on my uniform when Alex returned triumphantly to the house to inform me that school had been cancelled. He had been informed by one of the student teachers that school was cancelled due to the earthquake. Not sure what to do and failing to recognize the full magnitude of the situation, we watched from the front door as students streamed down the street and back into their houses.

About five minutes later, the town elders began to ring the bells and the call was echoed throughout the village. Alex and I walked to the front yard and began to sense a degree of panic in the air. The pre-kindergarten teacher yelled from her front yard that we were in danger and needed to get to higher ground. At this point, we began to hear an audible slurping sound and watched as the water level in the bay in front of our house began to go down. We scuttled to pack our belongings not sure of what to expect – lap top, iPod, camera, electric toothbrush. Alex ran out the door toward a pick-up truck about 200 feet down the street and I grabbed a fistful of T-shirts.

I stepped from the front porch – the slurping sound had become nearly deafening – and people screamed from the back of the truck to run as fast as I could. I slammed the front door and ran full speed for the truck – still clutching the t-shirts in one hand. I got to the truck and hoisted myself headfirst into its bed.

The driver accelerated out of town as a wave began to rush against the sea wall and cover the road behind us. As we raced up the mountain, we looked over our shoulders to see the road fully submerged and the water beginning to spill into our front yard.

We got to the top of the mountain and found half the village perched on top and looking down over the bay. Together, we spent the morning watching the bay drain and swell and wondering what was left of our village. With limited access to news information, misinformation on the mountain ran rampant with conflicting stories and a wide range of reports regarding the degree of the destruction in our village. There were reports of widespread damage, that the earthquake had destroyed Hawaii, and that there might be impending food shortages. However, despite the news, we felt comforted seeing the smiling faces of our students and hoping that the ones we didn’t see had made it to higher ground elsewhere.

By lunchtime, Alex and I were parched and needed food. We hiked to the next village up the mountain and watched as 25 cases of SPAM, 100 loaves of bread, bag after bag of chips, and countless bottles of water were being loaded into pick-up trucks. We were informed that the Tsunami had hit both sides of the island – our side had received less of the damage – and that there were approximately 1000 people taking refuge in the mountains.

This was the first time we were able to recognize the scope of the disaster. We were informed that 10 people had been killed in Pago Pago and that nearly all of the territories capital had been flattened. Worst yet, there were reports that a larger wave had yet to arrive.

Upon hearing the news, we decided to return to the mountain top with the rest of village and await word that it was safe to return home. During this time, I borrowed Alex’s cell phone – I had left mine on the table – and finally got a signal to call my sister in Hawaii and my mom back in Virginia.

We spent the afternoon, eating Oreo’s and playing with the kids of our village, before returning home to survey the damage. One of the pictures, I’ve attached is of our living room and the other is of Pago Pago. In the end, we were very lucky and damage was limited to a muddy living room and standing water in our kitchen. Pago Pago had is much worse.

Without power or potable drinking water, we sat on the front steps of our neighbor’s house and caught our breath after a long day and were sitting there when the pulled up. I spoke with one of the volunteers who lived further inland and found out that she still had electricity and running water. We caught a ride with our neighbors and headed in that direction. Having heard of total destruction in Pago Pago, we braced ourselves for the worst.

We drove through town and saw mangled cars, overturned buses, torn apart buildings, stone walls reduced to rubble, fences shredded and mangled soccer goals. Numerous small ships had been pushed hundreds of feet inland. Whole stores were gutted, cars pushed horizontally up against buildings, and one drainage ditch was filled with the scraps of dismantled cars. We watched people load bags and bags of buns from the local McDonalds- it had been boarded up – and we stared in awe a forklift slowly made its way down the street.

Alex and I spent the night in relative comfort last night and will shortly begin the trek back through Pago Pago to help repair our village, comfort our students and find ways we can help the clean-up effort in the coming weeks. It was quite a humbling day.

Thank you for your support and God bless.

- Steve Atwell

Impressions - The First E-mail

Talofa!!

Well, I’ve been in American Samoa for about two weeks now and finally have my own pad in the village where I will be teaching. I have some pictures posted at
http://steveatwellamericansamoa.shutterfly.com/.

In the meantime, I figure I’ll catch you up and share some of my experiences thus far.After a brief orientation in Los Angeles July 20 with the other 33 volunteers, we boarded a plane for Honolulu and from there to American Samoa. While exciting, this was a little unsettling because we still didn’t have any idea where we would be sleeping or exactly what to do when we arrived in American Samoa. We got off the plane and proceeded through customs with the hope that there would be someone waiting for us on the “other side.” We were greeted by a number of the Department of Education (DoE) staff members, our WorldTeach field directors, shell necklaces, and a giant banner that said “Welcome WorldTeach Volunteers!” We loaded our luggage in the back of a truck and boarded a school bus to the near-by vocational high school, which would become our home for the next two weeks. We quickly segregated the guys from the ladies and threw our luggage down on the floor mattresses to establish residency.

We met upstairs in the kitchen to discuss the orientation schedule and enjoy freshly baked chocolate chip cookies!!Over the course of the next two weeks, we would sit through numerous lectures from the DoE, presentations on SPED, the Samoan language, reading programs, an introduction to the local/only library on American Samoa, reef biology, an education non-profit, public safety, and public health. Dispersed throughout the schedule, we had an island tour, a beach visit, a hike, and free time to explore our respective villages. Some of the most memorable parts of being in American Samoa have come from the limited time we’ve had in between lessons.

After the island tour on the first day, we swam in the lagoon in front of the vocational high school. There were about 20 volunteers in the water, throwing the Frisbee and laughing as the sunset over the cascading green mountains on one side and a full end-to-end rainbow bookended the lagoon on the other side. It was a truly warm welcome to American Samoa. During the course of orientation, we went snorkeling out by the airport where we saw a sting ray and a full spectrum of tropical fish, went on group runs, explored the town, and played tennis at the local tennis club. But, our Thursday night toga party may have topped all of that. Our group was looking for something new when we decided to throw a toga party. I woke up from a nap at 8:30 p.m., took my bed sheet, threw it over my shoulder and tied it off with a belt. I convinced my roommate to do the same and we ventured upstairs to try to convince others to join in. We quickly hit critical mass and, by the end of the night, about 25 people were in togas, and dancing around the kitchen. The next morning, we had a meeting with the principals of our schools. I think we managed to pull overselves together pretty well - especially after a little coffee!!

Exhausted, slightly overwhelmed and with pounds upon pounds of handouts, training wrapped up this past Saturday. We said goodbye to each other and headed out for our respective villages.My village, Vatia, has 300 people living in it and is isolated on the north side of the island – which is narrow north to south and wide east to west. It’s about a 45 minute bus ride over the mountain ridge and down the other side from, Pago Pago, the main city in American Samoa.

When I got into Vatia, I met Marx, an 18 year old who is studying pre-law at the island’s community college and a guy who works for the National Park Service. Marx has been tremendously helpful and the guy from the NPS promised to show us some hiking trails and good fishing spots. I’ll be teaching at Mt Alava Elementary School which is pre-K through eighth grade with each grade comprised of one classroom and each classroom is its own building. School starts next week and they are still working on renovating some of the buildings. There was a big district-wide meeting this morning and I finally found out what I am teaching ... I'll be the entire science department at the elementary school and I'll teach seventh grade. I have 10 kids in my class and will teach reading and writing to my seventh graders and then have the sixth and eighth graders come to my class as I send mine to learn history and math.

I’m living with another WorldTeach volunteer named Alex who also is at Mt Alava Elementary and teaching history. Alex just graduated from the University of Texas, but has lived in Singapore and London before moving with his family to Texas. Our house is the guest house on the property of a local family. We’ve got a small kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms, and a large common space. The best part is that we have two giant trees in out front yard for shade, a log to sit on and a giant lagoon about 30 yards from our door – we went snorkeling the first night we moved in. We’ve had another volunteer named Matt staying with us as he waits for his landlord the finish renovating a house on the West side of the island.Today, Matt and I hiked from Vatia up the ridge to Mt. Alava.

It was a rugged, steep hike that took almost two hours and had steps and ropes at certain points. When we got to the top there was spectacular view and we could look out on Pago Pago Harbor to the south on one side and see across the island to Vatia on the other side. We sat up on a patch of grass and watched a ship navigate through the harbor, fruit bats gliding up and down on air currents, and the clouds breaking on the mountains to the west of us. We made plans to camp up on the ridge for night and then hiked back down to Vatia as the sun was beginning to set. Back in town, we were stopped on the road as the evening bell rang and everyone stopped what they were doing to observe 30 minutes prayer.

Matt and I sat on a concrete step catching our breath and remarking on the strange and wonderful place that we will call home for the next year. I hope that you are doing well, enjoying your summer and finding the time to do something you enjoy.

Best wishes and tropical thoughts,

Steve Atwell

P.S. Here's how to contact me address & phone:
Address:
P.O. Box 5411
Pago Pago, American Samoa 96799
Phone: 1-684-258-0101