Couchsurfing!

Many moons ago when I was back in Erie I posted about some of the couch surfers that I hosted at my apartment as they were passing through Erie. I have been active on Couchsurfing here in American Samoa, but no one had yet requested to surf and actually made it to the island. However last month I was contacted by a man who was planning on coming this way for his research for his PhD and he actually made it to Tutuila!
On Wednesday after school I met with Ryan at Carl’s Jr. and we headed back to the house. Ryan turned out to be a very interesting person and a wonderful surfer who clicked with our group immediately. Wednesday night we headed out to Poloa since Ryan had a car so that he could have a chance to see the beautiful Westside at the best time – sunset.

 Ryan with Cynthia and Jessie.

Back home we sat up talking and Ryan had no end of interesting things to share. He is in his thirties and is a certified nurse who worked in the Alaskan bush but is now back at school to get his PhD in History with a focus in infectious disease. Pretty sweet huh? Listening to his stories about working in up in Nome was really interesting, but even cooler was his knowledge of the Influenza of 1918 in the South Pacific. There was one boat that sailed the Pacific infecting every island it landed on which even led to the terrible result of Western Samoa losing 26% of its population to the flu! American Samoa was actually one of the only places to have zero deaths from the epidemic as they refused to allow the ship carrying the flu to enter the harbor.

I love couchsurfing!