I stood in front of the desk in my jandals and togs.
‘Prime minister,’ I said, hoping it hadn’t sounded like a question.
‘Uh,’ he confirmed.
What happened is this: the quick brown dog went at the lazy palagi idling along a narrow street after dark and took a bite out of the back of my leg. It felt like an electric shock. I squealed like a girl, and ran away. I was staying at Eden’s Edge Hotel. ‘Help,’ I said to the receptionist. ‘Sit,’ he said, and then he ran away.
I heard him talking to Mepa Apelu, the lovely funny woman who managed the motel.
‘A palagi has been bitten by a wild dog!’
‘What palagi?’
‘A guest.’
‘Where?’
‘He’s over there.’
‘No, where was he bitten?’
‘Leg.’
‘How bad?’
I craned my head around the corner. Mepa, the receptionist and the cook were at the open-air bar. Smoke curled from Zap mosquito coils on the floor. Geckos fled along the ceiling.
‘Bathe his wound in water.’
‘Boil the water.’
‘No, from the tap.’
‘That’s too hot!’
‘Now it’s too cold.’
‘Salt! Add a pinch of salt.’
‘Here.’
‘That’s too much.’
‘What else?’
‘Vinegar.’
‘Really?’
A woman joined the conversation. I recognised her boozy voice; she was a guest, a Samoan woman staying with her eight-year-old son. They were expecting his father to arrive from Australia. While she waited she drank heavily, and screeched vile abuse at her son in the middle of the night. Another of the guests, a lesbian from Canada, gave the boy swimming lessons in the motel pool. She gave him a mask and snorkel, and he learned to dive. He was quiet, sensitive, anxious. He adored her. She was in Apia for a week. Everyone at the motel braced themselves for the boy crying his heart out when it came time for her to leave.
His horrible drunk mother said, ‘What’s happened?’
‘A palagi has been bitten by a wild dog.’
‘Where?’
‘Leg.’
‘No, where’d it happen?’
‘Why?’
‘Because you need to find the dog.’
‘What for?’
‘You’ve got to take out a hair of the dog and put it on the wound. Old Samoan remedy.’
‘Okay. Is this ready? Feel.’
‘No. The water’s too hot.’
‘Here.’
‘Now it’s too cold!’
‘More vinegar?’
Samoa was somewhere between First World and Third World, leaning to the latter. It was rows and rows of tins of Oxford corned beef, it was St Joan of Arc Primary School, and Robert Louis Stevenson Secondary School, where the initials RLS were spelled out on a lawn in bright flowers. It was shops selling enormous dolls with white skin, taxi drivers hissing in the shadows, ‘Want a girl?’ and a young guy with peroxided hair sweeping banyan leaves off the pavement next to a van marked WONDERFUL TAKEAWAYS. It was the glow of leaves burning in clumps on the side of the road at night-time, and signs at the airport and throughout the island that read NO TO RAPE AND INDECENT ACTS. It was eels, roosters, dogs.
It was the loneliness of Leota Laki Sio, manager of the grandly named Galusina Village Resort on the coastal road that circled the island. You couldn’t go anywhere near the water. Big waves exploded against rocks. The road was bombed with potholes. The resort had 22 rooms; when I called in it was entirely empty and Leota was sitting all alone in the restaurant. He opened the resort in May 2010. ‘We’re still growing. We’ve had our ups and downs, uh.’ I asked about the ups. He said 30 people making a New Zealand film stayed at the resort for ten weeks. He pointed to a table. ‘Nat Lees sat there, staring out to sea day after day.’ It’s possible the Auckland actor was blissed out, but it sounded more like a case of clinical depression.
There were a lot of wonderful places to stay on the beach all through Samoa. Galusina Village Resort wasn’t one of them. Sio said, ‘It’s a different experience from the normal sand and sea resort.’
He kissed his small son good night. The boy trotted back into his house, past the resort’s swimming pool, which was the size of a home pool. It was a home pool. Leota had built the resort on his own property. He said, ‘There’s room for improvement.’ He needed an occupancy rate of 40 percent to begin to make a profit, but the rate was about 30 percent. The rooms were basic, there was a boring playground, and the sea smashed angrily at rocks. He said, ‘It’s a very nice view, peace and quiet.’ He was right about it being quiet. A sign on the road advised happy hour at the resort bar between seven and nine. It wasn’t happy. I left Leota sitting alone as dusk gathered around his sea-sprayed folly.
At the nearby village of Fagali’i I heard claims that Leota had built the resort with money – as much as 28 million tālā – he had won in a lottery in Australia. What did they make of the resort? ‘Crazy!’ Tanielu Pololua, 39, joined in the laughter. It was the sight of Pololua that had drawn me to the village. He sat in his open-air fale and washed blood off his sapelu. It was a poor village and the knife seemed to be more or less his only possession. He spoke about it with something close to reverence.
‘When you got a sapelu, oh man, you can cut grass. It’s a bread knife – it does all those things!’
Bits of chicken and onion were on a chopping board. ‘If you don’t have money,’ he said, ‘you have chicken. It’s the cheapest.’
I asked if he had electricity.
‘Yes.’
I asked if he had hot and cold water.
‘No, just warm.’ There was a row of about 30 beer and soft-drink bottles on the floor. His kids collected them to sell for money.
‘It’s good to talk,’ he said. ‘I’ve been sick the last few months.’
He breathed heavily when he talked. I asked if he had heart disease.
‘No, pneumonia.’
His weight was the elephant in the fale, so I asked how much he weighed.
‘I think it’s 468,’ he said.
He wore a lavalava and no shirt. The lavalava revealed the classic build of a sumo wrestler, even two sumo wrestlers. But he was also a matai, a chief, with gentle eyes and a soft voice, and I thought of him as holy. His five young children crowded around him, eager for his touch. He picked them up like kittens and stroked their arms. I asked what he wanted them to achieve in life.
‘To serve God,’ he said.
The womanly prime minister was hospitable and rambling. We chatted about more or less absolutely nothing for 20 minutes. Just to get things rolling I remarked that Samoa’s situation seemed perfectly hopeless.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there are always ways people can earn more and make a future for their children, but a lot of people don’t know or understand how to work the land. I know why people go to New Zealand. A salary is an attraction for them. But what a lot of people don’t know is that there are lots of outgoings to life in New Zealand. There are church commitments, remittance money to send home, bills. People say children can get a better education in New Zealand. But you can get the same education in Samoa. People say there’s a higher standard of living in New Zealand. But I encourage them to stay here and develop Samoa. We have the land. Opportunities are endless. We have lots and lots of coconuts.’
But there weren’t any jobs. According to US State Department figures, only eighteen percent of Samoa’s population were in salaried positions.
‘We used to export cocoa to Europe,’ the prime minister said, ‘high-flavoured cocoa. Now we export none. We need people to work on the land. Taro … bananas … inter-cropping … organic farming. …We offer people incentives but they don’t take advantage of them. People always grab the easier options.’
He seemed to be blaming Samoans for Samoa’s predicament. ‘I am giving you the view of a lead
er who needs all the hands he can use,’ he said. ‘We cannot speedily develop to give people jobs. Progress is being made but it’s slow.’ He mentioned Yazaki, a Japanese-owned auto parts company in Apia. ‘It’s the biggest one we ever captured.’ It employed a workforce of 2,000, but jobs were cut to about 800 after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011. ‘They’re still here,’ he said, ‘but they probably regret it, and want to leave, and are regretful they ever came here in the first place.’
This fell a bit short of inspirational. He was similarly downbeat in a newspaper story a few months later on the subject of a proposed multimillion-dollar Chinese-owned hotel. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ he said. ‘Nothing has materialised from the big proposals we regularly get.’ The comments were made after he visited China on the way back from a United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries in Turkey. The conference, too, aroused his temper. The UN had voted for Samoa to ‘graduate’ from Least Developed Country to Developing Country status. Samoa, the prime minister objected, wasn’t ready. The conference in Turkey had been ‘a waste of time’.
He had won three elections and been in power thirteen years. His ideas for changing Samoa’s way of life seemed whimsical – switching traffic from driving on the right to driving on the left, and altering Samoa’s position on the International Date Line, literally bringing the country up to date with the rest of the world. An opposition MP criticised the proposal. That MP, said Tuilaepa, was ‘very stupid’ and an ‘idiot’.
He was just as dismissive of TV3’s John Campbell’s attempts to ask him about allegations of misappropriated tsunami aid money. He sent TV3 a semi-literate letter of complaint. He wrote: ‘Please note I am signing this message and not by some other kind of idiot. Only idiots recognise and emphasise the importance of other idiots.’
You could say he threw his weight around. It was not a pretty sight. He sat behind his desk, massive and puffing, surrounded by toys. The gifts of leaders of many nations were displayed in cabinets and on walls.
It was Friday afternoon and he wanted to go home and watch rugby on TV. We made even idler chit-chat as he gathered his things. He kept his wristwatch on the desk in front of him ‘so I can watch it all the time’. The politician he most admired was Bill Clinton, ‘but of course what he did to that girl was very bad’. No, he said, he didn’t believe that God created the world in seven days. ‘He created the world instantly.’
I remembered to inform him that I’d been bitten by a dog.
‘Where?’
I stood up and showed him the livid red bite on my leg.
‘No, where did it happen?’
I told him.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we have a programme of shooting wild dogs.’
On my last day I stumbled across Hell. On the way to the airport I had plenty of time, so I headed off along the coastal road and into the jungly interior, up a steep dirt track and on to a long dipping road, empty of traffic and people, until by chance I came to a prison. I’d read a few things about Tafa’igata Prison. It sounded like a terrible place. It was built during the German rule from 1900 to 1914. In 2010 the US State Department released a damning report, noting that some prison facilities were nearly a century old. It continued: ‘Only basic provisions were made with respect to food, water and sanitation. Diplomatic observers reported that each concrete cell held ten to 15 inmates. Most cells had gravel floors, no toilets, poor ventilation, and almost no lighting.’
Up until 2007 the prison punished inmates by locking them in solitary confinement for seven days, naked. Two years ago 41 prisoners staged a mass breakout and hijacked a bus; police shot out the front tyres and negotiated a peaceful surrender. The prisoners said they were protesting about being ‘fed and treated like animals’.
A friendly guard sat in a hut outside the gates.
I asked him if I could come in and look around.
No, he said.
I walked over the road to the lost village of Falelauniu.
The government of Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi had ordered that Falelauniu stay out of sight and out of mind. I had not read about it when I walked over the road from the prison. I didn’t know what it was. It didn’t look like a village. It looked like what it was: a slum. It was a human rights abuse worse than anything alleged at the prison. It wasn’t leaning towards Third World: it was firmly, blatantly, Third World.
I approached the shack closest to the road. Five or six young guys sat inside on the bare floor and glowered. They called out someone’s name. Fesouaina Matalavea, a pretty 22-year-old, came over. Yes, she said, she could speak English – she worked in Apia as an information officer for an aid agency. The savage irony of it hung in the air. I looked around at the shacks, at the slum, and said, ‘What is this place?’
‘We were moved here by the government,’ she said. ‘We used to live by the sea in Sigo before the tsunami. They said, “It’s better you move.”’
‘Was the village devastated by the tsunami?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing happened to it. We were okay. The government just used the tsunami as an excuse to move us. They wanted the land back to put up a government building.’
‘And they kicked you out?’
‘They gave us 3,000 tālā to move out.’
‘That doesn’t sound like much.’
She laughed and said, ‘It wasn’t much.’
She wasn’t bitter. She said, ‘It’s not really terrible. It’s good because it’s more like fresh air than in Sigo.’
It was in the middle of nowhere opposite a prison.
I read about it later in Samoa Observer, in a story about building materials donated to Falelauniu by Vaughan Simpson, general manager of construction company CaBella Samoa. Simpson is a well-travelled individual, and in the region has been involved with major international companies such as Fletcher Construction. The Falelauniu situation opened his eyes to the darker side of Samoa, a place he calls paradise. Driving around he couldn’t believe what he saw. ‘I’ve seen a lot of poverty throughout the Pacific and … I haven’t seen worse.’
A businesswoman in town, who preferred not to be named, was shocked by the poor quality of life of people at Falelauniu. Lost for words, she looked around the place and cried; all she could mutter was, ‘It’s very sad. I don’t know.’ After spending half an hour talking with members of one family she offered to pay for the education of their children for a year and to ‘help out in other areas where they’re in need, such as dishes, clothes and housing. Whatever I can, I’ll do it’. Driving back to Apia, she tried to describe the environment and daily living conditions but couldn’t. All she could manage was, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this is happening in our country.’
There was another story about villagers forced to root around the Tafa’igata rubbish dump in search of expired tins of food. In response, a government official visited Falalauniu and threatened villagers with legal action if they didn’t stop talking to journalists.
‘He’s a journalist,’ Fesouaina said as she showed me into one of the shacks. One of the old men sitting on the bare floor got up and closed the door. A couple of old ladies sat on chairs in the main room. There were children playing on the floor, their skin covered in sores. There were flies everywhere, all over the floor, all over the bodies and faces of the kids. There was one decoration hung on the wall: a cracked mirror. The boys wore shorts. The girls wore skirts and no knickers. A baby was asleep on a pillow on the floor. He had a mosquito net around him; compared to everyone else he was living in luxury.
There was rubbish on the dirt outside the house. I pointed at a low wall built from concrete further down the hill. ‘The bathroom,’ Fesouina said. ‘It’s not finished yet.’ A small taro plantation, dogs, chickens, flies, stench: it was just another day in the life of Falelauniu, the disgrace of Samoa.
The older kids lay on the wooden floorboards and did their homework, writing down sums with worn-down pencils in damp ex
ercise books. It was good to think of them at school and away from their wretched hut for at least a few hours, but the bus fare to send the four kids to school was eight tālā a day. Fesouaina was the one person in the household who had a job. She said she earned 15,000 tālā a year.
I tried calling her a few months later. I was put through to the CEO of Sungo. ‘She doesn’t work here anymore,’ the woman said. ‘Her position was terminated.’
It was like being told she’d died. I thought of the pretty 22-year-old in clean clothes in the lost village, that disgrace and national scandal, that incitement to line up Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi next to a wild dog and know which one to put down first. I thought of when I stood with Fesouaina outside her shack on a beautiful sunny day at the end of the wet season and asked her if she’d ever gone to New Zealand. Yes, she said, once, when she was fourteen. What did she think of it? She looked so happy when she said, ‘Civilisation.’
Mt Roskill
Welcome Home
And God created Mt Roskill. For years this dense Auckland suburb was known as New Zealand’s bible belt, with more churches per head of population than anywhere in the country, the Christian cross rising above a low skyline of red slate roofs. It had its own special weirdness; its powerful concentrations of faith and ecstasy swirled in the air like a mist. Also, you could smell the fear of sex even when you drove through with the windows wound up. You still can, especially on Stoddard Road, where the traffic – freight vans, removal vans, cool-store vans, flatbed trucks, beat-up second-hand Japanese jalopies – runs bumper-to-bumper between the lights at Richardson Road to the east and Sandringham Road to the west.
Civilisation Page 11
