When you wake up in the middle of the night to strange noises of the howling dogs and roosters of Apia’s surrounding area which, it takes a while to accustom with these new impressions. 

Especially when you are so far from home that it is almost impossible to get any further afar from your home country Germany. 

When boarding the first of three different planes you have to use to get to the final destination, you find yourself struggling and start asking yourself if it was the right decision to come to Samoa to spend a full semester abroad in the context of your English studies.

It is by no means easy to leave your beloved ones behind to gain a foothold in the tumultuous world of print journalism for the upcoming six months, but as time slowly flies, you start to accomplish simple things day after day. 

After a certain amount of time, you are suddenly able to remember your way back home from work on Samoan streets which a couple of days ago looked scarily similar to each other. 

You also learn to get along with the local people and you are in the position to experience a friendliness to foreigners even if they do not know where you come from. 

Disappeared has the strange feeling you used to have when putting on your Lava-lava in the morning, having in mind that to the local people, you are a Palagi, coming from a country most of them have never visited. 

You start to feel the urge to explore the exotic South Pacific country you find yourself in and you recognize that a journalist’s work is certainly the best way to do so for the coming six months. 

*Mathias Huckert  (pictured left) is in Samoa with Projects Abroad. He is on a six month internship at the Samoa Observer. Mathias is studying a BA Comparative Literary Studies and Translation and BA English: Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures at Saarland University, Germany.