The view from Swanvale in Samoa, Part 2
Jiust before leaving Samoa I filed this piece for ABC’s “Correspondent’s Notebook” and “Correspondent’s Report”
If you want to listen to it, click here.
Just over two years ago I’d traveled to the Western Province of Solomon Islands when it had been hit by an earthquake and tsunami. I felt, given that experience, I had a good idea of what I’d be seeing. But in Solomon Islands, the disaster, while no less devastating, was hard to get an idea of the scale of, as it was spread across a number of islands. In Samoa it’s laid out for you. You start at one end, and keep driving. In the centre of the disaster area nothing man made was left standing. In other areas buildings survived, barely, and some people have even moved back into them.
But in most areas, while people are there cleaning up during the day, as night approaches they return to the makeshift camps in the hills, and it’s likely that will be the situation for a while yet. They’re surviving on relief supplies, provided by donors from around the world and home and art the moment that relief effort doesn’t look like ending for a while yet.
Currently there’s an estimated three thousand still homeless in Samoa. Many living in those camps are saying they won’t be going back to the coast At least one tourist business has restarted, with a bar built by local high school students, with money donated from New Zealand and Australia. Others are expecting to do the same, and have even said they’ll be back open and offering accommodation before the end of the year.
In the time I’ve been here, you can see the cleanup has had an affect, But you only have to go another 100 or 200 metres further to see a whole new vista of destroyed buildings, wrecked cars, and rubbish. As well, apart from some hardy palm trees, anywhere the wave came ashore the seawater’s left the vegetation dead, and in the worst areas that stretches back at least 100 metres from the coastal waterline, and up to seven metres into the hills around it. If anything this line of dead plant life gives you a picture of the size of the tsunami, and it leaves me amazed anyone survived.
But more than anything it’s the human story that affects you the most. Last week I attended the mass funeral service and commemoration for all those killed. It wasn’t the speeches from leaders and church ministers. It was the line of schoolchildren from around the country, each of them bearing a wreath in honor of all those killed.
As a name was read out a schoolchild would came forward lay the wreath, bow in respect, and return to the line. That line stretched the length of the stadium at Apia Park, and the list of names took nearly 10 minutes to read. But for many Samoans the loss can’t be soothed by a national service.
Sunday the 11th of October was Samoa’s White Sunday. It’s the day the country celebrates its children, and as I drove to Saleapaga Village on the South Coast all along the way you could see children, dressed in their finest white outfits, making their way to church. At Saleapaga it was the same. The church survived, but it now stands in a wasteland of dead plants and destroyed and deserted buildings. Families were making their way down from the tarpaulin and tent roofed settlement which they now call home, and given what they’d been through and had lost, it was amazing to see they’d still made sure their children had something white to wear on their day.
And while no one’s loss in Samoa has been greater than anyone else’s, in Saleapaga lost 30 of its people. 20 of them were children, and as the parish priest explained to me most of them were toddlers, asleep in the village preschool. He told me this year’s White Sunday Service, was one of the hardest services he’s ever had to hold, and that it had been just as hard for those in the pews, knowing that this year, if White Sunday had come just two weeks earlier, there would have been 20 more white clad children in that church to celebrate.
