I am about to go offline. I was planning a short (matter of hours) in Samoa but after realizing my deep love for the people and the country, I will extend it out to six days and take the boat to American Samoa.

It will give me six days to live and dwell among the Samoan people.

I, for sure, want to use part of the time to see what I need to do to set up SamoaHope as an NGO in Samoa. I also want to spend some of the time meeting with religious leaders about the vision.

This is the hour for Samoa!

I will land on Friday around Midnight. As of now, I plan to stay in the Airport until I can catch the 4am bus to Apia. (Can we say go local!) I will go to the South Coast and spend a day or two in the village with common people. I love to just sit and spend the day eating bananas and drinking hot tea. I am sure also drinking some kava will happen!

It will be a time of eating the umu (the earth oven), drinking coconuts, and just spending time with some good village peeps. I will also plan to join in with their worship service on Sunday. (though few services are in English in the village)

SamoaHope is ultimately about the villages of Samoa more than it is about the city of Apia. While about 1/5 of the people live in Apia, I would bet that half of those are really villagers living there only for a job. Most of them go back to the village every weekend.

On Wednesday, I will have to go and spend the night at one of the “high dollar” place to stay on Lalomanu Beach. (By the way, high dollar is $38 including dinner and breakfast on the beach).

I will probably stay again at Taufua Beach Fales. They are some of the most amazing people on earth. Great place too. This is one of the places that was hit directly on September 29, 2009. They have rebuild their lives and rebuild their business.

I am looking forward to spending some time with the banana vending machine, drinking tea all day with them and talking with the family again. I also will try to spend alot of my time there on Wednesday writing The Blue: How a white boy is bringing the Kingdom to Polynesia. 

Also, Wednesday is a FiaFia show. If you don’t know what that is, google it.

It has a cost. I was going to fly over and use an old ticket I never used. It would cost me roughly $22 to change and a round trip boat trip will be $65 but it is worth it. I will love having 5 hours hanging out with locals going to see love ones in American Samoa. It is a great time to just connect with people. The good news I will still have that flight to use when I am short on funds to do an outreach to Samoa. I think paying the extra $40 for a boat trip that will also have my return  to Samoa in March paid for. Yes, by doing it this way, I basically have my NEXT trip to Samoa paid for completely. Is that not awesome?