Happy New Year

We Live Here Now

(Even if we don't know where 'here' is)

"There is nothing that cannot happen today."

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One of the last and most beautiful sunsets of 2024. 

I will be twenty-eight this year. Next month, it'll be exactly one year since I last heard my mother's voice. My MA module website is opening in four days. How ready am I to be a proper student again? Very ready and also completely terrified about the prospect of having my effort be under the academic microscope again. I'm studying at O.U (Open University, U.K). It's the university that produces the highest number of CEO's in the United Kingdom, and one of only two U.K universities to have Middle States Commission Accreditation in the U.S. I'm also the first Samoan on this scholarship scheme (Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarship), and second Pacific Islander ever. So, no, I'm definitely not under any pressure right now. 😂

Recently all kinds of excessively cool stuff has happened for me. I know. I'm still not halfway through telling the story of my U.S trip. Oh well. Life happens. Every interim is also a hectic precipice at which some other great thing is happening. We are just voyagers. We only come so far on our own skill. It's the waves, the tides, the winds that move and shake and shape our courses. And thank heavens for those! Sometimes going straight is going the wrong way. I'm a product of so many off-course journeys. Detours. We are all part of this great accidental plan. 

I'm a new Commonwealth Correspondent for the YourCommonwealth Youth blog. First Samoan to be in this space. I'm the official Samoan ambassador for Space Kidz India's all-female lunar satellite project, Mission ShakthiSAT. Another first for Samoa and Polynesia. We did CHOGM and the Commonwealth Youth Forum in October. I got to lead the drafting of the new youth declaration's opening pillar. 2024 was a year of firsts. Dark humor irony: the only thing that wasn't a first was losing an immediate family member. I've lost five so far! In order: my brother Gabriel, my sister AngelRose, my adopted brother Sabbath, my Dad, and now my mum. Also, because extended family tend to be just as close as nuclear ones in the Pacific,  I lost my grandma just after my dad, and that was VERY painful. VERY! All I can say now is this: being first is not easy. This is probably why we honor "firsts". Human culture is obsessed with initiation, with discovery, with pioneer-ism. 

This year my brother Daniel is finally getting his Bachelor's Degree from Monash University in Melbourne. He's going to be the first grandson on both sides of our families (our parents' siblings and first cousins) to graduate from an international university. I will never understand how he manages to be so resilient and also so composed. He never says too much. Never does too much. Some days I wish he was my older brother. He's calm. Cool. Ah, well. Perhaps my overly loud manner is good in its own way. It gets things done, and that's about ninety percent of what being an eldest/first child is about in the Pacific. The ten percent is about taking the blame when things don't happen. I'm still struggling with both. But who isn't? 

In this new year, I am hoping to see more miracles but also to be more kind- to others, and to myself. To say yes to blessings and also say "not now" when I simply can't take anything else on. I'm a chronic people- pleaser. And a workaholic. It'll take some time to learn to step back in that way. But as I inch closer to thirty (oh my Lord😳), I know that I need to start investing rest and peace in my mind and body if I want to live longer than my parents did. I owe it to myself to see sixty and seventy and beyond, and if I ever have children of my own, I'll owe it to them to make sure they don't end up orphaned like my brother and I did.