Clock Tower - centre of Apia. Normally photographed in sunshine, but rain clouds on the hills are common in the afternoons.
It’s Sunday again and in this Sermon from Samoa, I explain how easy it is to, and share the folly of . . . you guessed it . . . shooting the messenger. No Samoa bashing, I promise! It’s all for the positive in cross-cultural understanding today!
Samoa can get personal – sometimes REAL personal - but this passion is a two-edged sword.
I love the passion behind the Samoan smile. They’ll do anything to help you and make you happy here. As a Palagi, you are an honoured guest in their home. Great social kudos is gained by having a Palagi guest, and no expense is spared to give you what you want. Their thinking goes along the lines of “Please come in and all will be well!” and the smiles are from ear to ear.
These are all genuine words. They are absolutely true – both what I write here and what Samoans say to Palagi. It is rare to be treated with disdain in Samoa when you are a Palagi guest in a rural Samoan village. And the passion and drive to “perform” usually goes much more than just a desire to see you happy. It is more like a deep desperation to do anything and everything possible to oblige.
And there-in is the rub – the desperation to please.
Now we’re getting into dangerous ground, but deep psychological pondering explains this to me as a fear of being shamed if the Palagi is not pleased. Not for everyone, all the time, but for many it is – increasingly-so.
We’re not supposed to talk about things like that here, and if you do, well then that passion to please can turn on you 180 degrees. If it does, then it virtually always gets deeply personal, with the same passion fired up against you as it did, a moment before towards you, and this is the point of this post: “What happens to a messenger who dares to speak the unspeakable?”
I’ve experienced the resistance to hearing the truth many times in Samoa and was warned about the way that people and society can turn on you here. I know of many Palagi who have paid a high price for not understanding it.
If you’re lucky you’ll be invited to leave. Mostly you will actually want to leave, fast. If you are unlucky, foolish or blind, you will get whacked and possibly worse.
This learning is all called understanding Fa’a Samoa (the Samoan culture/the Samoan way). Putting it more diplomatically,as an elder statesman in the tourism industry here once explained to me, “Fa’a Samoa is all about diplomacy“. I’ve got other more direct words, but diplomacy sounds good for the moment!
I learned it the hard way. I got whacked four times with a big Samoan fist to the head, jaw, neck and shoulder (in that order) when I dared to stand up to a Matai on his own land. I was right, he was wrong and it has since well and truly proved so, but that’s NOT the point. The point is that causing offence, or embarrassment is wrong over here and if you are the messenger, you will get shot. End of story!
It’s not the first time that I’ve learned that life is not fair, but a few weeks after the hiding, and after having worked out why I (the messenger) got decked (a Samoan version of shooting) I had a MUCH better understanding of the passion behind the people here.
When looking at the people Samoa has blessed the world with, we naturally first look at the Rugby greats, and other top achievers. When we look at the cultural experiences we clearly love the smile, and the beauty of the sandy tropical beaches. But I love the passion lurking below the surface; the driving force that says “Proud to be Samoan” – and it seems that 45,718 others on Facebook do too!
Passion, like feelings of love, technology (contrary to what some think) and money, is morally neutral. The same passion that carried Paul to persecute the church, is the same passion that God used to take the Good News of Christ into the furtherest reaches of the known world at the time. The same passion that drove a man to punch me up, is the same passion that can now support me, love me and stand by me as a brother (Uso), working together to help each other achieve that which we were both designed for, made for and destined for.
The key to breaking through however, is to go beyond the surface into the root cause, the drivers of the passion and to deal with this.
I understood the matai who decked me. I knew the difficulty that he had with the ‘demon within’ that caused him to lash out in violence. I knew that at some point, he would have to face reality. I knew that deep down he was listening to me and I prayed that in time he would understand, so when I knew that he was truly embarrassed and repentant (and it was not just an attempt to save face, as it so often is up here), I gave him the chance to learn more about me, to help him understand me and my motives to help him.
I did the right thing by extending grace, and showing Christian love and forgiveness when it really, really hurt and in time a miracle happened, and he too did the right thing.
I got whacked because I was the messenger, and when I caused pain, the other guy lashed out at what was causing the pain – me. Perfectly natural, but proud and immature.
I love the story that Jay Abraham tells in his book Getting everything you can out of everything you’ve got” of Charles Lamb who says, “Don’t introduce me to that man! I want to go on hating him, and I can’t hate a man whom I know.” This attitude is very much alive in Samoa – very much alive, and especially when you cross someone! This hatred, whether it is racism, or offence or immaturity, is always highly moderated because your detractors will ALWAYS smile at you and tell you that they love you and that nothing is going on, when it is, but that is just Samoa.
Understanding generally brings maturity, but sadly many here seek neither understanding nor value maturity. Passion – yes. Maturity and wisdom – well they struggle to float in the sea of Fa’a Samoa where appearance matters most.
The experience I’ve mentioned here is only one example out of many I could quote. For example, we currently have a major difficulty in working with the head of the Samoan Tourism Authority (STA). That’s probably the understatement of the year, but I won’t go into details here yet because we are still working the issues through. However in general terms, the feedback that we have had from the tourism industry here is universally condemning of their conduct and performance. In fact from our casual enquiries over the last 18 months, less than ten percent are actually neutral towards them (or actively work with them) when you really get down to it, and it is off-the-record, a huge 90% are negative in some way.
Whenever a tourism operator attempts to raise concerns, they have to do so under the cloak of confidentiality “for fear of reprisals“. Now, in Samoa, complaining is clearly a national past-time. Even more so than the Western world, politicians and government employees here are simply unable to speak honestly because the local tabloid will ping them and promote the nay-sayers negativity as “news”. The gossip-mills and pull-down machine would kick into overdrive. So we have stories of progress and speeches that mean little and conferences and meetings that all give the appearance of things being well, when under the surface there are real issues.
The truth is that the Samoan tourism industry is in crisis. The new board has a major challenge on many fronts. It has an industry that is hurting and largely unsupportive; a culture that does not naturally want to work together, nor have vision, nor understands marketing or the Internet; a competitive marketplace that is years ahead of Samoa in thought, practice, technology and market awareness (think: Fiji & Bali); a global marketplace that is being increasingly destablised daily* and discretionary spending of the public that do travel is reducing; the after-effects of a billion dollars of global 2009 Tsunami negative press; and a product that really does not yet “cut the mustard” in the market-place.
This should all be a bitter reality-check for all involved in Samoan tourism – the new Minister, the new Board and the CEO – and direct, affirmative, creative, visionary leadership and action should result. It hasn’t and will be a miracle if it does happen because at the moment we’ve been knocking on doors for 18 months and have basically had the big run-around and are seen as the trouble-makers.
The point here is not whether we’re successful or end up working with the government, the point is that as messengers, telling the truth, I cop the flak – both personally and anything we are associated with. In Samoa, that flak carries all the passion that Fa’a Samoa can drum up, and believe me . . . it gets personal and can hurt!
For the record, I do not think that STA has done nothing or is totally incompetent. I definitely think that they need help, and decent direction with their vision and strategy. A different management style would go a long way to alleviating a lot of the negativity. Some of the things we’ve seen certainly causes is to raise our eyebrows, but if we can do something positive with them soon, things may be a little different. If we were not convinced that we were called to be in Samoa and that this is a “God-thing”, we would have been out of here ages ago.
So, enough about Samoa tourism for the moment and onto the issue of shooting the messenger.
I’m a messenger. I haven’t always been, but I have naturally grown into the role over the last few decades and seem to have an increasingly prophetic role. I speak the truth, hopefully in love, into a certain situation – either an individual, a business, or other situation. As such, I am usually always the first person to cop the flak.
Sometimes a messenger can get it wrong. Sometimes a hidden area of arrogance, pride or personal hang-up can get in the way of a clean message. Fortunately I’m failing less and less as I get smarter and am humbled more but the thing is that when we have paid the price; when we have done the hard yards; when it is clear that we care; when we have proven our commitment and it has been shown that our motives ARE pure and that we genuinely WANT to help a person, business or whatever – THEN our message can be heard, and the messenger can be resurrected from the dead and listened to as he should.
This has occurred for me more than once in Paradise, and is likely to be a repeating pattern. First I speak a message and start something – an idea, a business, some advice. Second adversity strike – either opposition, gossip, mistrust, misunderstanding or whatever. Third a showdown or big pow-wow clears the air. And lastly, if I’m lucky, we’ll breakthrough and have a friend for life.
And that’s worthy of a celebration – after all it is a Sunday in Samoa.
* I believe deliberately.
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