Bingo!

Friday marked only two weeks until Cynthia is leaving to go back to the states, and she has a few more things she needs to cross off her list before she leaves. One of the them was Bingo.

“Bingo?” I hear you asking. “Why would you want to go to bingo in AmSam? That seems really random.”

 Like Nelly says, It's getting hot in here.

It is not at all random – it is a cultural obsession here. Gambling of all other sorts is illegal here, but the churches are allowed to hold bingo games to raise money for the church’s needs. This has been going on for decades and as a result bingo is highly ingrained into the society here. The bingo games range from games between 15 people in the little church in Manu’a, to the massive bingo nights at some of the largest churches on the island. The bingo is actually a big problem for some families as many people have a serious gambling addiction. I’m not exaggerating, there are some men and women who spend all their family’s money at the bingo games which actually run six days a week. To add to the problem, when the adults play bingo the kids are often left to their own devices and this is often blamed by many locals as the reason for a section of our students’ bad behavior and lack of care about school as there parents are never around.

Gambling for Jesus!

Regardless of the pro-bingo and anti-bingo debate we new we had to go try it at least once when we were here, and as Cyn is leaving soon we decided to hit it up on Friday. We headed to the one of the biggest bingo games that is held in Ili’ili every night, and that we drive past frequently. When we arrived we were amazed to see just how many people were there – after a quick look in all the rooms and the outside areas, and some mental math we estimated that there were between 600 – 700 people playing bingo! We only have 60,000 people on our whole island, so it’s quite a lot.

Can't even fit everyone in the two huge rooms inside.

Cyn intensely focusing. 

Turns out just to play amount of games is $15, which I can’t afford so I just watched while John, Cyn, and Rosemary played – occasionally helping spot a number. Cyn later let me play one of her games and it was actually more stressful than fun. While I was watching I was thinking about just how much it costs to play bingo, and the people by us told us they come almost every night! Many people were playing double sets of games, so that’s $30, and they were playing the intermission games which total another $14, and the early bird games which total at around 12$. So that is $56 not including food that they are selling. Yikes.

Despite the morality of the church taking advantage of the people's gambling problems the night was a fun change.