So this is Samoa!

2 1/2 hours after leaving cloudy and soggy Fiji I arrive in - cloudy and soggy - Samoa. The runway is right by the sea and you pass over the reef and shallow waters before touching down. Walking into the terminal building, surrounded by colourful plants, you immediately notice something different. Samoa looks as if it has won the 'best kept Pacific island' title for years on end, and has no intention of giving up the title in a hurry. If Fiji can err on the side of messy, Samoa has a touch of the obsessively tidy about it. Anything to do with the fact that it was once a German colony, I wonder? Villages, with their mixture of open sided traditional fales and more modern houses, are beautifully neat, with flowering shrubs and short grass around them. Piula Theological College, where I am staying, exemplifies this. You could hardly imagine a more idyllic setting, right by the seashore, with the backdrop of green mountains. A cave under the White-painted church opens into a deep, crystal-clear fresh-water pool, only a few feet from the sea. It's beautiful, but the students and their wives (only married men can be Methodist ministers in Samoa) pay a high price to keep it that way. Their day begins with prayers at 5.30 am followed by work on the college grounds until classes begin at 8. On Friday afternoons and Saturdays they are expected to work on the college plantation, where their food is grown. and on Sunday's, of course, they spend most of the day in church. 

There was a service soon after I arrived. Iwas astonished to see everyone - men, women and children, attending in white outfits, with the women wearing long white dresses and matching hats. This is the way they've done things for generations, and Samoa is an intensely traditional place. It makes Tonga look decidedly sloppy - and Edgehill, I'm afraid, pretty casual. Students can only leave the campus with permission of the staff. Those who are still single (and therefore have pressure building on them) live in one open-plan dormitory. 

I don't want to give the impression that this is a backwater of theological education. Mosese, the principal, is young, highly qualified (well, he and I both have PhDs from Birmingham) and a very sharp thinker. He's well aware of the issues that connect Piula with the wider educational world and of the need to balance tradition with change. There are impressive buildings and good facilities. An interesting aspect of the community is that many of them come from the Samoan diaspora in New Zealand, Australia and the US, so they've known a very different lifestyle and tend to speak excellent English. They also bring a host of skills. Yesterday, at 6.05 am a student who.'d been an electrician in Auckland arrived to fix the light in my bedroom.

I'm staying in a roomy, if somewhat delapitated, guest bungalow. I can see - and hear - the ocean from my bedroom. waking up my first thought is 'there goes a train'; then I remember where I am and realise that it's the sound of surf breaking on the reef. 

I was taken to Apia yesterday, to do some shopping. It's about 40 minutes along bumpy roads. The famous Aggie Grey's hotel is now refurbished as a Sheraton Inn and there are many new buildings - commercial and government, it seems a much more prosperous place than Tonga. I've been assigned to one of the tutorial families in the college. This means that at .7 each morning one of the students brings me a tray of breakfast and that each evening I am to be hosted by one of the couples. It feels slightly embarrassing but hospitality is taken very seriously here. 

And still the rain goes on! I've never known such an intense rainy season in the Pacific - something to do with El Niño, apparently.