I’m still very reluctant to eat much as I recover from the ‘spew bug’ and the husbands’ mad rush of a shopping trip meant that we still didn’t have much in the house to cook a proper meal. The children are behaving remarkably well, maybe even too well – I get the sneaking suspicion they are planning something or building up to an almighty emotional outburst, considering we have just relocated to a new country, one that is so drastically different to white middle class suburban Australia, I am predicting the mother of all meltdowns very soon.
The house is ‘basic’ only in relation to the brand-new houses we were shown that are obviously marketed to the high-end expat community – unfortunately I don’t think we will ever be high end I just don’t have the OCD to maintain that lifestyle, hell I can’t even be bother shaving my pits or waxing my mo anymore! I am calling my house charmingly rustic. There are high lofted ceilings with fans in every room so that the heat can escape, louvered windows which we were told ‘you only close these when there is a cyclone’ (cyclones, I keep forgetting about that, mental note read the handbook on preparations for cyclones), 3 bedrooms, open plan kitchen dining and living area with basic furniture and two bathrooms. Thankfully the landlord agreed to leave a few items such as beds, couch, dining table and the following:
Just like any rental property, I have a shit load of cleaning to do. Let’s all go on a shopping trip! To buy cleaning supplies! We find the two major supermarkets Farmer Joe’s and Frankie’s and spend a fortune on cleaning products, basic food supplies and bottled water. The supermarkets have an interesting combination of clothing, furniture and food products. I get distracted by the 20L tubs of lard, surely restaurants are buying this right? Buying fresh fruit and vegetables in the supermarkets is very expensive and limited. They stock imported goods such as apples, broccoli, lettuce etc are, usually from New Zealand. So not only are they expensive, they have seen better days not to mention food miles. We still need to figure out where the local produce markets are because there is no way we can keep this up, and we want to buy local fruits and veg. The area where they keep the chilled goods is .... hmm how do I say this in the politest terms .... it is different. The frozen goods, eggs, dairy goods, fruit and vegetables are in the same area as the butcher, so the smell is an interesting mixture of raw meat and earthy vegetable smells. I am so sensitive to smells right now my stomach does a flip and I have to evacuate the area, but the bakery certainly makes up for it..... someone get me something deep fried and covered in chocolate! After a couple of days, I notice that the toilet in the ensuite (I know fancy right! An ensuite) is leaking ... from the poo evacuation pipe. That can not be good for our health. Ok everyone stop using the toilet in the ensuite! I wonder, what part of stop using the crapper because it is leaking don’t children understand? Also why aren’t they using their own toilet? Maybe I need to order some police tape to cordon off the area because they is not understand the words that be coming out of the mouth. As the house hasn’t been lived in for a while, I spend a long time cleaning and eradicating the swarms of disease carrying mosquitoes. Ok I might be overreacting here, but for me I would rather have a house full of cockroaches right now than the swarming mass of potentially deadly mosquitoes in my house. The children still haven’t registered the fact that these bastards are killers and that getting bitten by one isn’t just an itchy annoyance like back home. I feel like me running after the kids with insect repellent will be a constant – must I use shock tactics to get them to listen? The landlord replaces the toilet after a couple of days. We had to wait for a new toilet to be ordered in as there was no toilet with the appropriate pipe connection on the whole island, lucky we have that second bathroom right?
0 Comments
I just stepped on gecko shit – now there’s a first line! I’ve just stepped on gecko shit for the 100th time since moving into our rental property and it never gets old, it is also followed by ‘ah FFS! Where are the tissues?’
Oh, tropical paradise you are nothing like the brochures make you out to be. To be fair, there is a gaping chasm between holidaying on a tropical island, staying in a lush resort having your every need and want pampered for and living here. Thus, begins my story. It has been eight weeks since our family moved to Beautiful Samoa – the website and all it’s amazing tropical pornography was the only thing that got me through the shit storm of a move here; I would visit it often and daydream about my life in paradise. You would think that at the ripe old age of 39 my cynicism would have shielded me from wistful daydreams, that I would have more sense, and less naivety – HA! Such an idiot. But how did we get here? I won’t bore you with the minutia of our decision to change lifestyles; we’ve all been there, wanting to get out of the rat race, to live a life that would have a positive impact on this planet blah blah blah. Suffice to say there was a job in Samoa and we agreed to check out of white middle class suburbia (the children didn’t really get a say due to their ages, but they were involved in the discussion and seemed excited about living a life like Moana – thank you Disney). But it’s not like Moana (thanks Disney) because Moana isn’t real and the world she inhabits doesn’t and never really existed – only in a beautiful composition that resulted in one of the best Disney movies so far. I’m going to take you back... back to when we arrived in Samoa (insert wavy memory image here) to where our story begins. Week 1 – Arrived 5am at Faleolo International Airport after travelling for only 6 hours from Australia we all feel like crap. S is over her illness, E is at the tail end of the stomach bug and I am starting to feel a little unwell. Yay children the vectors of all things snotty, spewy and pooey. The airport is small and basic (due to upgrading construction), if I wasn’t so tired I would have enjoyed the traditional band that was playing to greet us, as it was we spent a long time getting our passports and visas checked, and fatigue had now turned to exhaustion. Why am I wearing jeans? It is so damn hot and humid. We are picked up at the airport by G’s work, thank God they have a mini bus otherwise we would have struggled to get all 6 suitcases to our hotel. It’s pitch black and I can’t really make out where we are going, how we are getting there or our surroundings. I have a sharp stabbing pain in my stomach and I can’t keep my eyes open let along start small talk with our driver and HR staff member, however my sensibilities kick in and I start to ask banal questions about the weather, the different churches we pass and the speed limit (because I am not sure what that is exactly) – turns out it is a rough guide – good to know. For such a small island the drive to the hotel feels like it takes forever, I’m trying desperately to log landmarks such as supermarkets and petrol stations for future reference, but I know that is a futile exercise. When we get to the hotel we are all so tired and bedraggled that the bright sun is burning our retinas now and I can only assume that the rest of my family feels the same as me – where is the bed? After sleeping for pretty much the whole day it was time to hit the pool! This is what I have been waiting for; sun lotion, bathers, pools, blue skies, palm trees and a fresh coconut by the water. Yet, these stabbing pains are getting worse and now I am vomiting .... a lot! In between the vomiting (which is happening more frequently than I would like) G and I are continually telling the children mosquitoes are not your friends, put your repellent on! Mosquitoes can kill! Nothing like a bit of hysteria to get the message across. Not sure what the long-term effects of DEET are, but according to the travel doctor we saw before we left, it isn’t as bad as contracting Dengue Fever, Chikungunya, or Zika so for now we are bathing in the stuff. G starts work straight away, and I am now alone with two children in a hotel room too sick to even leave the bed this is going to be interesting.... Room service it is, and it looks like a visit from a doctor! The Doctor prescribes antibiotics for a mystery illness either caused by something I ate, drunk or the weather and medicine to stop me from puking all day (scary internal thought ... Am I Pregnant?). The staff are so sweet, and their constant fussing over my health and the children is truly touching, I want this to last forever, surly this is the life we are going to immerse ourselves in and love for the rest of our lives. The medicine starts working and I give in to the children’s constant begging to swim in the pool – ahhh this is heaven. Back again to lounging by the pool, drinking tropical fruit smoothies, eating – remember eating? Actually putting food into your mouth, swallowing and keeping it down? (nah not pregnant, surely not pregnant right? Can NOT be pregnant). I am dislodged from my holiday bliss by the fact that:
The mystery illness makes a comeback and we still haven’t found a house yet .... clock is ticking. Remarkably G finds a rental property that won’t leave us struggling to buy food every week. Many of the houses they showed G were in expat compounds and something lifted out of a display home catalogue for desperate housewives! Thankfully, G decides to rent a property that is in our budget. As I am perched over my sick bowl praying that this vomiting with stop, G describes our new house and uses the term ‘basic’ many times; I get the feeling he is trying to brace me for something. The day we leave, I can barely make it to the hotel room door, but we have suitcases packed and a rental car on its way, so I must get my arse moving and there is no way I am going to be sick forever. I’m too sick and after dumping our stuff in our new ‘basic’ home I’m being driven to hospital and there is where we spend the next 5 hours being moved from the Emergency Department to the out-patients department and finally seeing a doctor. My middle-class sensibilities are being assaulted by the standard of cleanliness and lack of equipment I am witnessing as I fade in and out consciousness. I am sent to a room that can only be described as a room out of the SAW movie series to give a urine sample – if the sight alone didn’t make me puke then the smell of festering urine certainly did. I pee as quickly as humanly possible into a sample jar and barely do my pants up as I stumble out of ‘the room’. After being moved from seat to seat, I see the Doctor who was amazing. His genuine concern and help was heart warming and he also tells me I am NOT PREGNANT (I nearly cry). After a brief discussion about not drinking the water unless it is bottled, not eating food in certain places and how the weather can also make one feel this way, I am prescribed another dose of antibiotics and finally a beautiful injection into the butt to stop the vomiting. In retrospect my experience at the hospital was at the time confronting, yet it made me realise the amazing work of the staff as they care for patients with limited resources and constraints that us privileged douche canoes wouldn’t understand – I am such a dick wad. Friends keep messaging me through Facebook or other social media platforms telling me how ‘brave’ I am, how they are ‘inspired’ by me because we took on a massive ‘challenge’ by moving our family to Samoa.
I am none of these things. In fact, all I am is a collection of lost opportunities bound together in the coarse fabric of procrastination and lack of motivation. The tendrils of regret are stuck to me with the glue of fear. Hot, burning, oppressive fear, the fear of failure. So, I would like my children to know the truth, that they don’t have to be bound like me, oppressed by fear. They should take every challenge so that at the end of the day they will have succeeded where I have failed – by living. I have told myself for so many years, so long that I can’t even recall when it started that I was not good enough. This is now the bread and butter of my psyche, it is my default setting. So, when a new challenge arises in my life I use this as an excuse for why things don’t succeed, why I don’t get that job or why I find it difficult to write that story. In all honesty, it is not that I am not good enough it is because I didn’t even really try; because maybe I didn’t feel like I needed to. And then ... then I start to deconstruct my fear and see that my wants and needs to succeed come from such a privileged position that the only thing for me to do was fail, because there was no way I was going to reach that unobtainable goal. If I kept telling myself that I wasn’t good enough, then the failure was justified, and I could hobble on without truly making a difference. For me, my white privileged lens only allows me to see success in a narrow way. I want to achieve so much and because I have been raised with a construct of social normative practices that say to me ‘you are white, you are young, and you have the right to reach these goals’ that I didn’t even work for it – failure is the only true outcome of this. This is not an academic piece, that has been well researched using journal articles – this is me writing to my children letting them know that my biggest failure was allowing myself to be sucked in. Slowly, without even noticing it I came to believe that success was measured in terms defined by ones’ career, wealth, material possessions, academic achievements – isn’t it success that we have survived another day? Isn’t it good enough that we have made it to the end of the day and had food in our bellies, clean water to drink and a safe place to rest our heads? I am not brave, not in the slightest. Moving to Samoa was not brave it was necessary. It was necessary because I don’t want my children to reproduce my life. I don’t want them to unconsciously or consciously expect life to trundle along with the expectation that life with ‘just happen’. I want my children to feel the challenge in every cell in their body and take that challenge, even if it means falling flat on your arse and failing. |
AuthorExplorer of words and worlds. Categories
All
Archives
February 2021
|