No No No – Cyclone Evan!

I read one Samoan’s comment after reading this article, and she said, “Why does this happen to us – we are a nation founded on God?” (paraphrase). Well, the simple answer is … the happening of weather cannot be blamed on God. In fact, nothing can be blamed on God – we have our own free will, and there are times when God steps in with his miraculous hand, and times when He doesn’t.

I remember hearing Samoans say after the tsunami in 2009 that is was worse on the South East coast because they were working on a Sunday! The fact is, that it was worse on this coast because it was facing the direction of the tsunami. Even Fusi in Safata, on the same coast, which probably had people working on a Sunday, too, was not as damaged, because of the peninsula that protected it.

When we puzzle about life’s tragedies, don’t make it the only time you think about God. If you have no other thoughts about Him throughout the year, how can you possibly expect an answer when you really need it. The fact is, that He will always be there to answer you, should you make an effort to ask Him and believe what He says. But like anyone, you can’t expect an answer, let alone believe what you are told, unless you take time to get to know the person first.

Make this Christmas a time when you find out about who Jesus really is. Find time for Him, and you will no doubt be surprised at the outcome.

God Bless You all this Christmas, first and foremost, the celebration of the Saviour’s birthday.

Well, what do you say when you return from Samoa after 18 months in the hot tropical Pacific Paradise, and you are 26kgs lighter! Praise God, was my first reaction!

But really, it was so effortless – no diets to follow, no feelings of guilt after discarding a chocolate wrapper!!!

You Ask … How did you do it?

I simply lived rough in Samoa on 5 acres of plantation where we literally lived off the land. If there were no paw paws to pick for breakfast, you made do with bananas. And if the bananas were still green, you made do with coconuts. Our staple diet consisted of rice and home grown vegetables (beans, tomatoes and sweetcorn) and stir fried chicken meals (the equivalent of $NZ4.50 per kilo) over a single gas burner for most of the time I was there.

No power for eight months – and sometimes no gas as well! Kerosene lantern for light at night (or your trusty Nokia mobile if you had remembered to charge it in the car the last time you went out!

In fact, for three months over the end of last year, we had no running water either! Which is hard work when you rely on three showers a day just to keep cool and bacterial infections at bay!

Now this wasn’t what I was expecting from Samoa when I left in February 2011 to join my husband in helping to rebuild tourism after the devastating 2009 tsunami. But after 18 months of not getting the promised contracts with the Samoan Tourism Authority, and having to revert to being local subsistence farmers just like the locals down our road, we started to enjoy Samoa in a completely new light.

This is a third world country outside of the main townships and you learn to appreciate what it is like to sometimes go without food, go without home comforts, like walls on your houses, and see the criminal abuse of the people by many of the churches in this “country founded upon God”.

Too much for one blog post, but later I will expand on some of this, as I start to regroup back in New Zealand. Manuia le aso!

We truly celebrated our Lord’s Resurrection – He has been so faithful to us in our trek up to Samoa. We constantly are saying WOW – that must have been from the Lord.

We have had 5 WWOOFers here over the last seven weeks – Willing Workers on Organic Farms – they come for a week or two (or six) from all over the world. These last ones were from Germany, Italy and New Zealand (initially) – working about five hours a day on the land in exchange for accommodation and food!

It was a biggie for me, having only just returned to Samoa after a 7 week holiday visiting family in New Zealand for Christmas. I returned to NO power, very little gas, but finally we had running water to our property. It is very 3rd world on our land in rural Samoa, living like the locals, but a great experience for those who have come straight from their apartments in Europe.

We now have 17 hens and roosters, 2 dogs (well, puppies) and a garden full of ripening paw paws, taro plants, cassava, sweetcorn, tomatoes, beans, pineapples, noni fruit, coconuts, and bananas and much much more! All growing and needing weeding and watering daily!!!

I had checked our water pipeline on the property twice since the pipes started to run dry. Usually, we would get sparing amounts, but would at least get a flow at some stage each day or two. But it turns out that our “No Water” for ten days was in fact due to our neighbours uncoupling the pipes they had let us tap into .  Seems the attitude is “it’s every man for himself” when the water starts to dry up!!!

I wonder what has happened to the local water authority’s advice that we would have a new sub-main in our road in the new financial year. That was 1 July 2011, and still we are yet to see it! But then, with a drought on, I guess there was no point in putting in a larger pipe, was there?

I laughed the other night when I deciphered from a Samoan tv news article that there was a total fire ban in Samoa. I mean – what are the people supposed to do? Most village people cook their food over an open fire! What would a total fire ban be, if you were still allowed to light a fire for cooking? Too many questions. But, I still see umu smoke rising on a Sunday, so I guess they are not going hungry.

But the reason for the fire ban is obvious – there is a drought here. Water is scarce, especially on Savaii, and parts of Upolu. Our own area, up in the Aleisa hills overlooking Apia, that gets its fair share of rain clouds, has had poor water supply since we have been here – and that is nearly four months now. We were told there would be a new sub-main down our road once the budgets had been approved, because they were out of 2″ pipes until after the new financial year started in August. Well, hello, it’s October, and no sign of our pipe yet!

We started with connecting into a half inch PVC pipe supplying the non-resident neighbour – who occasionally filled the water tanks for the cattle. Being downhill from us, it meant we could go without water for a day as he called by in the morning to turn the tap on, and returned later in the evening to turn it off – if we were lucky. But that was in the deal, so we got a few water barrels and made do with what we had.

When this even dried up for days because of the narrow pipe,  we tapped into the other neighbour’s 3/4 inch pipe and had a more regular supply. That became infrequent as the water authority turned the pressure down during the early part of the week, needing us to buy a pump just to get it up to the header tanks on the roof. It was always available at least once during the week to get the whites ready for church on Sundays – so we made sure to build our higher usage around the days the water flowed.

Somehow I have managed to produce a crop of over 500 tomatoes and 25 sweetcorn off the land, and beans coming out our ears! Another crop of tomatoes that made very poor growth to start with have now leaped into life with more regular watering. The pineapples continue to grow despite the lack of water, as do the staple crops of taro and taamu.

So, I will light no fires, as I am told to do. (Except my gas cooker and mossie zappers, right?) But I will still see smoke arising from around the village next Sunday, as always.

5 things I learned from the chickens outside my tent in Samoa –

1. Stay close to Mum, she will always keep a lookout for trouble while you are busy eating!
2. If Mum chirps … Beware … you better respond quickly, or you might not live to tell the tale.
3. Follow Mum’s advice and actions – she gets up on the high rock for a reason.
4. Don’t fight with your brothers and sisters, it only distracts you from more important issues, like eating.
5. There is always one chicken who is adventurous and wants to do his (generally always the male chick) own thing, and not follow Mum.

Now, I don’t just have two cuddly yellow chicks visit me each morning – like the picture. They are far too quick for me to actually capture them on photo! In fact, I have about five families/generations of chicks to wake me every morning at 6am (7am this morning thanks to Daylight Saving over the weekend!)

This all started about three months ago, when I noticed a mother hen and her four baby chicks arrive and start pecking around our bananas for insects and other tasty morsels! I thought at first they were from the neighbours (the ones whose dog bit me – much more placid these animals, my thinking!!!)

I had fed the chooks for my parents when I was younger, living in a country block of land in the Bay of Plenty, but we never had chickens, that I can remember! So, I was enthralled at these chickens, and how Mother Hen taught them to forage for food, scratching up the ground for them until they got the hang of the ungamely waddle themselves!

This continued … I chased them away from my tomato plants a few mornings, but I watched them grow and become more independent from Mum. Then one morning, the chicks arrived, now quite big in their own right, three roosters and a hen. I wondered what happened to Mum, but decided they must have been making it on their own in the world by now.  I heard later that the neighbour’s had been attacked by dogs and he had his shotgun out chasing them away from his property. “Funny, he wasn’t so quick with the shotgun on his own dog when it attacked me”, I pondered!

Anyway, it turned out the chickens must have told their buddies we had no dogs on our property,  so they started visiting en masse. Next, a new brown hen with five baby chicks, in all shades of cream and brown; then a jet black hen with about 11 chicks of varying shades from black to grey and some with white tufts is unusual places!  Roosters would come over from time to time, and crow some sort of strangled attempt to crow, at all hours. (I wondered if their throats were dry in the tropics and they could get it out freely!!!)

One fine morning we were awakened by an unruly clamour and saw an older rooster chick half-flying, half-running past our kitchen with a dog very close at his heels. What went on behind the tree I will try not to imagine, but as we all ran and yelled “Halu” to the dog, it fled back to where it came from, but all was still and quiet behind the tree. It was sad to see his brothers and sister head off down to see what happened a while later, when the all clear had presumably been given.

After that, Dennis made a dog trap that stung the noses of any dogs who dared come sniffing around our area – and we heard the yelps as they disappeared off into the darkness for a few nights until they learnt their lesson, and now we hardly see any dogs around at all! That’s amazing for Samoa, where the population of dogs is probably more than people on this small island!

One morning another three medium sized chicks fooled me, turning up for the first time. I got confused at first who they belonged to, but eventually decided they hadn’t got an attached parent that I could see, anyway. But, I also noticed my 11 black and white chicks had reduced to seven and was sad to think that some dog may have been licking his lips with feathers protruding!

So with the scene set – about twenty chicks and another eight or so adults here every morning – what have I learned about life?

• Life for some is fleeting – here one minute, gone the next. I experienced that myself when I lost my older brother in a car accident over 30 years ago. Make the most of life, love family and friends while you have them, because while you can remember once they have gone, you can no longer hold them close. Regret becomes a haunting word. So live life forgiving as you need to each day so that you don’t go to bed with regrets at night.
• There are always enemies on the prowl, so keep your ears and eyes open and keep safe. Know where you can go for safety, but don’t let your safety become a chicken coup that stops you from venturing out to taste what the life has on its menu.
•  Respond quickly at the first sign of trouble. If you leave it too long, it might be too late to do anything to protect yourself for the future.
• Be thankful for your parents’ advice as they were teaching and nurturing you. And – Mum’s, boys will want to go their own way at times – you just have to keep a look on them from a distance for them to become the ‘rooster’ they are meant to be, and be able to look after their own family in the future!
• It’s always better to eat together with parents when you are younger – it is a nurturing time. So, parents, set the example and adhere to it, despite the business of the day around you.
• There are varying levels of independence and growth and parents need to know when to guide their little ones closely, and when to step back and let them do things for themselves. After all, if they are with you, they won’t starve!

Well, after six months in Samoa, I don’t feel the need to tell you how many weeks it has been anymore! Besides, there are more important numbers going on in people’s minds at the moment. I’m referring to Rugby World Cup scores – and I have to not only know how the All Blacks are faring, but also how my “adopted” Manu Samoa team is doing as well!

I commented to a friend that she wasn’t at the local Hamilton game a few nights back. Her reply – “I don’t do rugby!” Try saying that to a Samoan at the moment – then again, I think it is better left unsaid!

It’s funny.  When we launched the limo a couple of months back, I was stopped late at night by the Police and politely told we could not fly our Samoan flags as this is an honour reserved for just the Head of State (somewhat akin to NZ’s Governor General). When I told him I had seen plenty of taxis flying the flags, so I had been unaware of the rule, I was told they were trying to catch all those ones too, and stop them. Well – I would like to see them try right now – the whole of Samoa has the flag flying while “The Manu” are at the RWC.

I kick myself that I missed the opportunity to wish the best for the Samoan team when I spoke with the PM out in the VIP lounge at the airport on Thursday! He was off to New York, via a short stopover in New Zealand to support his team playing Wales this afternoon!

So last night, the Irish upset the South Africans. “Shame”, the Sprinboks’ supporters will be saying. Everyone else will be trying to draw on some long lost Irish heritage to give them a reason to suddenly back the boys from the Northern Hemisphere! My pastor did – he traced back his ancestry to the original relations, Adam and Eve!! My son did, momentarily, but was quick to point out the Warriors made it to the Semi’s, so I guess that made it all OK!

I can hear the generator starting up – that means Dennis might just be getting a tv going for us to watch the Samoa-Wales game this afternoon. I hope so – it is not nearly as much fun watching the commentary typed up on the screen via the internet, but with the high price of the internet here, we don’t watch videos! It would probably cost as much as a good seat at Eden Park for the Finals!!!

I will be coming home for a well-deserved break early October, for a few weeks. Looking forward to that – and my son’s 21^st birthday. That happens to be on the RWC Finals day – now I find out! Where were the tickets selling when I needed some? Anyway, we will schedule another birthday date, and I’ll take my gorgeous grandson, Tyrell, north with me for the long weekend, to visit his great grandparents! I can’t wait. He will love sitting up high on the Northliner bus and seeing what is going on all around him! I hope there are plenty of lambs springing about. Just the right time of the year!

Until next time, Fa’a Soifua. (And Go the Manu!!!)

Update:  Just finished watching a GOOD game between Samoa and Wales. Samoa held a narrow lead at half-time with a hard-earned try in the final minutes to leave the field at 10-6. Wales fought back hard and took out the game 17-10 with a converted try near the end. Manu Samoa did their country proud with their effort. Well done, team.

At last – this week we ‘flushed’ the loo for the first time in the three months we have been here!!! For those who think it must … well … smell – our toilet is finally installed with running water and flushing out to the septic tank at the push of the button! Some think – so what! For us, it is “Progress” that has been well-earned. You can take too much for granted, you know!

We have been tied to the computers over the last week, getting eveything ready for the launch of the new initiative to boost Samoa’s tourism numbers, that we plan to launch in New Zealand for 2012. You might find a link to it on my Facebook Profile, for some inside news, if not, check out www.dennis.co.nz for a blog post about it. We have already had some good feedback from corporate sponsors we have been to see. Looking forward to finally getting going on a project since closing the Airport Lounge last November.

I have overcome the dreaded blight on my tomatoes with some heavy-handed pruning. Funny to see 6ft high tomato plants with no leaves until half way up the stem, and at least five bunches of tomatoes on each plant. I have started to make and freeze salsa to use the fruit as it ripens. Once this harvest finishes by the end of this month, the salsa should keep us going until the next patch of plants ripen in about eight weeks time. Loved eating our first carrots tonight – very tasty.

Well, the Tueila Festival came and went last week, and apart from a bit of a flurry on Facebook over the livestreaming of some events, it was all pretty quiet. A bit of rain dampened the spirits a couple of days, but overall, they say it was better than last year. It is a festival that promotes Samoan culture, markets and sport, with fautasi (longboat) races, umu preparation, carving, dancing, (including fire dancing ‘siva afi‘) and craft making. I just wonder how many extra people came to visit Samoa for the festival, which had many tens of thousands of dollars spent on running and promoting it.

When I came to Samoa I was uncertain as to whether I really wanted to be here. But if I wanted to restore our marriage, I had no choice but to come. Now I totally understand my role here, as a support for the vision Dennis has been given. We have worked hard together on developing this vision into reality, especially over the last three months up here in the bush!

Tonight I was walking back from the garden and you would have thought the driveway was lit by a street light. It was so bright. But, it was the moonlight – a beautiful clear night. Now that I have adjusted to living in rural Samoa, I enjoy my walk to the ‘Throneroom’ (we still call it Clochemerle). My massive garden takes me an hour each morning and evening to water (if there is enough coming in the pipes), which involves pumping the water up to the header tank first to get any sort of pressure from the garden hose, beyond a dribble! It is winter here, which is a little cooler in the evenings, but still hot during the sunshine hours. So, if I end up having to bucket water to the garden in the sunshine, it can zap me of all my energy!

I am ready to book a trip home – probably near RWC finals weekend, which is also Sam’s 21st birthday. The IRD kindly credited my account with enough for an airfare from overpaid Income Tax last year! So welcome … I can tell you! Until next time, take care … enjoy the rugby all my NZ friends and visitors.

Faa Soifua.

Harvested the sweetcorn and had our first meal – what a sweet treat that was! A few meals from the beans, but the tomatoes are s-l-o-w ripening!! One nearly turning red, out of about 450 last count!!

Three months of using the long drop – not a milestone I am particularly pleased about – and I may have a flush loo in a day or two!! Dennis and I built the framework and steel for the concrete roof, and will pour the concrete later today as it cools down! Then the inspection hole covers and it will be ready!! Learnt a lot about pioneer life starting from scratch up here in Samoa, starting with just a bush-covered piece of land. It’s hard work, but it makes everything you achieve, however small, so much more worthwhile.

It’s a conundrum though. One minute I am out developing the land – the next, entertaining the Prime Minister as he checks out his proposed website in my ‘huge mossie tent come office’. Later, I am ‘speaking’ with gifted professionals around the globe, and then I rush off to cook over a single gas-cooker in my camp kitchen, from a very limited range of foods! Talk about a “Tale of Two … Lifestyles”.

But, that is what Samoa is like. The rich and the poor live side by side. There is no real “Million Dollar Mile” like I remember from Milford/Takapuna. But there are extremes in accommodation, set beside each other in the same village. One house might be palatial, behind a 2m fence and gate, and the neighbour’s could be made from cut-down local trees, thatched roof, no walls, and no privacy from the passing road traffic. The one thing they probably have in common though, is a couple (at least) of dogs!

It is 3 days short of 6 months since I relocated to Samoa. The best thing for me so far, has been the bonding with my husband as we embark on this journey together. It is not an easy task, to be called into a country to work with people who need help, but for whatever reason, find it hard to accept it. The world is changing, and while it is nice for cultures to stay tucked up in their own little world, if they want to earn the tourist’s dollars, they have to learn to engage with them, where they are at. In tough economic times, if businesses are not engaging on the internet – they are going to miss out big time!

I have learnt a good deal about gifted people, their struggles to get their ideas valued, and the loss to society if they are not given space to develop. What are we educating gifted students for, if not to make their lives more meaningful, and give them access to answering the world’s problems in their unique ways? Education of the gifted for me, does not stop when they graduate, but is a lifetime mission.

With my creative-gifted husband, I am helping others to understand him and accept him for who he is, and helping him to understand his impact on others, as we work to achieve the goals of our SWAP Foundation in Samoa. We want to put Samoa on the ‘Internet’ to lift the tourism spend here, by investing what we know about internet marketing and fresh, new business ideas. I see the ups and downs as the frustration of being misunderstood grips him. When your mind is running faster than the others around you, and you can see the vision clearly, there is an unrealism that seems to take place, while waiting for others to catch up, understand, or get with the programme. But, he has enormous patience and stickability – failure is not an option he accepts freely.

Gifted advocates who live with giftedness on a daily basis are essential for smoothing the waters around gifted individuals, helping to make them understandable to the public. It’s a tough job, but one I accept as my mission.

Fa’a Soifua, for another week. May yours be filled with the joy and gratefulness of learning something new every day.