It had been drizzling off and on all night, and then about three in the morning the patter of drops on the thatched roof of my fale suddenly turned to the thunder of a genuine tropical downpour, drowning out the sound of wavelets breaking on the beach a few yards away. I rolled over on the mattress and peered up through the mosquito netting, waiting for the rain to find its way through the coconut thatch and begin dripping on me.

The fale, like the others around me, was simplicity itself - an oval wood-plank platform about eight feet by six set on pilings about 18 inches above the sandy ground. The palm-thatch walls were divided into eight panels, each made up of three overlapping segments that could be raised by drawstrings - Flintstones venetian blinds - leaving the interior partially or completely open to sun, breeze, and the gaze of passersby. My mattress, with its sheets, pillow, and mosquito net, was the only furniture.

Except in the matter of size, my little holiday fale was essentially the same as the permanent homes of most villagers on Savai'i, the larger of the two main islands of the independent South Pacific nation of Samoa. (In 1997, the little country dropped "Western" from its official name.)

Primitive in appearance, the fales are clearly an important element of the fa'a Samoa - translatable, inadequately, as the Samoan way or lifestyle. Except for the elaborate meeting-hall fales, they are simple to build, and, when they wear out or are blown down, just as simple to reconstruct. Perhaps equally important, their simplicity and openness reflect a communally oriented society in which, for instance, a village committee periodically inspects each fale for cleanliness and order. Friendliness seems to be an outgrowth of that openness, and in the time I had spent there so far, the islanders' amicability had struck me again and again.

Many Polynesian-Melanesian nations claim to embody "the South Pacific as it used to be," but independent Samoa is the only one I've seen that emphasizes societal preservation to such a degree. Leadership remains largely hereditary, and the basic, essentially feudal, societal structure doesn't seem to have changed in the past thousand years.

The fale hasn't changed much in that time, either - because it works. For proof I had the fact that my own little fale's interior remained entirely dry even after the downpour, a credit not only to thatched workmanship but also to the inverted V of galvanized metal that crowned the roof-line, finessing one of the more difficult problems of thatched construction while hinting that the fa'a Samoa might be adaptable if there is a reason to be.