Dress for succcess.s

 
They were seventh grade boys and girls. 
It was fall 1973.  I along with another haole(mainland white guy).  taught a Sunday School class at a church in Honolulu, Hawaii.  The class was made up with many Pacific Islanders.  Mostly from Samoa and a few Asians.  The boys often came bare foot and just wearing jeans or white pants with a colorful print Hawaiian shirt.  Girls wore Muu Muus and sometimes without shoes as well.  My fellow teacher and I often wore typical local Sunday morning looking white pants, white shoes, and an Aloha shirt.  All very casual.  To me shoes or no shoes was just fine.  Bring’em on.  It was all about what we taught, not how we dressed.
However, there was this one particular Sunday morning when a married couple from the mainland came and wanted to sit in and observe the local kids.  This couple was from somewhere in Tennessee and dressed as such.  He was a bespectacled man wearing his best pinstriped dark business suit with conservative tie and wearing dark mainland shoes.  Looking like he just returned from a corporate bboard meeting.  And she with her freshly painted face and bee hive hair-do and Sunday’s best stylish dress.
The reason this fashionable couple came to observe the locals is they had plans to become Missionaries.  Missionary’s to be located in Western Samoa.
The following Sundays they came again but were still dressed in their mainland best.  He in his dress suit and she with her bee hive hair.  I think they came back a time or two more and then flew back to the mainland.  It was told to me by others who were familiar with the couple that they were sent to Western Samoa to be missionaries and still insisting on wearing their suits and big hair but could not acclimate to the oppressive heat and humidity, stayed a month or so, and moved back to their Tennessee home.
The whole experience for the Tennessee couple was like dressing up for a downtown New York City party but going to a barn dance.  What do we learn from this?  What is the old adage?  When in Rome, do as the Romans do.  Or at least dress like Romans while there.