Paul and Ruth volunteer in Samoa

Update from Samoa: If I'd known how expensive and hard to access internet was here, I wouldn't have been so rash to promise regular email updates! Haha. So it is with sincere apologies we cobble together this one to get to you before we head back to NZ at the end of Nov! Thank you so much for your support. We really dig it. I'm glad we have been here. I suspect we'll have a bit of trouble getting 2-year old Theo back to Wellington after this. Shoes?? What are they? Hoody, trousers, socks, woolly hat?? Unlikely. And where are all the dogs I can run free with?? For privacy and confidentiality we can't take any photos of the girls in the shelters, or tell any of their stories. But I am very proud of the jungle-like corner of the shelter that has been converted into a working garden with the help of the crew at the Women in Business Development organic gardens, check pics on facebook.com/minuittheband, (much respect), and the roster the girls have initiated to weed and water it and get the veges from the garden onto the plates. The last three months has been all the things you'd kinda expect: flat tyres, borderline takeaway coffee, broken car battery terminals on Sundays when no shops are open, getting locked out at the front gate in a massive tropical downpour, the neighbours tackling night-time trespassers, carrot cakes and cupcakes, taro and hundreds of cups of cooked rice. At the shelters there are smiling faces, wheelchairs, pregnant girls with aspirations to be lawyers, accountants, nurses and teachers, and they all sing 'Lean on Me' like it's their own story. The budget for milk formula at the nursery with babies under protection might reach NZ$6000 this year. You can't skimp on that. I'm going to miss cooking Tuesday lunches at the House of Hope shelter for 33 kids, (including the toonai White Sunday lunch which featured a Size 2 - baby spit roast pig - thanks uncle bill and aunty helen!), computer lessons, volleyball games in 30 degrees heat, stalking wholesalers for food discounts, looking into solar power options, chasing goats back into their pens, trying to keep 10 litres of ice-cream frozen between the wholesaler and the shelters, origami, playdough, pumpkin soup, kale moa, palusami, squeezing your own coconut cream, staying up all night to finish editing a video funding proposal whose deadline was gmidnight, Paris timeh (ooh-la-la), documenting anti-bullying presentations at high schools for TV news, sitting on the front porch at 10pm in shorts and tshirt writing some tunes with the boys from the SVSG Juniors crew about changing the cycles of violence in Samoa, watering a brand new vege garden at sundown while the sounds of the kids singing their devotions floats over from the other side of the property. We don't ask for much in life, but we do ask to be safe and to have the choice to be able to live it how we like, and have a laugh along the way. I'm not sure what else there is. Fa'afetai lava. See you soon. Paul, Ruth and Theo