Rebuilding shattered lives

By ANTHONY HUBBARD - Sunday Star Times

THE DEATH wave still rolls, two months after it broke on the shore. Salome Aleni sits with her kids under the blue tarpaulin, telling the story again of the tsunami – how it swept away the family and the fale, and how baby Rano died. The children look at her open-mouthed, sometimes smiling. It is an astounding story, and they star in it.

They were racing up the hill behind Lalomanu beach when the wave hit them. "All I could do was gather the children to my bosom and cry to God to save us," Salome says without emotion. Uili, aged two, is playing with a long kitchen knife on the floorboards. Next to him are shiny new pots and pans.

Salome recalls that when she came to, she still had Uili clutched to her chest: "He wasn't breathing. I started calling out to my husband and he came. He was wailing and crying that he had lost the baby." Her leg was broken. "I thought Uili was gone, but I kept sticking my fingers down his throat and by the time I got to the top he was spluttering and crying."

An older child takes the knife off Uili and he potters about beneath the heap of boxes piled on the floor. The family built most of their flimsy open hut on the hill, with the Red Cross supplying the rafters which hold the tarpaulins. They lost everything that day, and now they wait for a government "tsunami house".

It is likely to be a lengthy wait: some 400 houses are needed, and there are delays. Salome tells a story of confusion and unfairness in the distribution of aid, and how things improved after a newspaper wrote about it. Hers is also part of a bigger story of love and generosity, in which New Zealanders play a big part.

Salome doesn't make a fuss about any of it. "You never know what Samoans are thinking," says Aggie Grey, grand-daughter and namesake of the Aggie Grey whose hotel in Apia, one of the most famous in the world, she now runs. "They shoulder a lot of pain and they are very private people."

On one thing Salome is adamant: she will never move back to the beach to live. "My husband's family are encouraging me to go back, but I say, `It is easy for you to say, you didn't experience it.' I can work there during the day but there is no way I am going to stay down there with my children."

The family's tourism operation at Lalomanu – nine beach fale, two European-style houses, a toilet and shower block, and a small restaurant – was annihilated. Since then they have had to live on charity, and it has proved a mixed blessing. Government aid came to the village and was distributed from there – but Salome says some families got more than others. "I am not speculating [about the reasons]," she says through an interpreter. "But some say some are getting more than others because they are relatives."

A story in the Samoa Observer newspaper a month after the tsunami said aid was failing to get through to all who needed it, and pointed to cases of local favouritism. This story, hotly denounced by Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele, seems to have sparked a change in the system. After it came out, Salome says, officials from the government and aid agencies visited and asked families what they needed. Boxes of goods, addressed specifically to the families, hers included, were then sent to the village.

There was also a glut of some forms of aid. "I stopped taking clothes because there was an excess," Salome says. And yet other things were not to be had – such as teapots. Her husband, Aleni Sulu, had seen people unloading teapots from containers at the village, but somehow they never got one. Eventually, when the system improved, a teapot arrived. There it is, over by the kerosene stove, one of the huge metal ones favoured by Samoan families.

And the tale of the teapot has a twist. It seems the agency which sent it was the Samoa Tourism Authority, which was

running its own informal aid chain – and our guide and interpreter today is authority staffer Gardenia Elisaia-Brighouse. The two women look at each other and laugh.

BRUCE HAYCOCK of Manukau left New Zealand on his 38th birthday this month to come to Samoa to build tsunami houses. He says he got two birthdays because of the quirk of the international dateline that puts Samoa a day behind New Zealand. He paid his own fare and is happy to work for nothing.

"I want to use my skills to help other people," says Haycock, a Baptist and an electrician.

The local people put him up and "they are great. They are so hospitable and always good for a laugh". It takes several Kiwis to lift the teak poles for the fale, he says, and only one Samoan. Haycock will spend two weeks as a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, the New Zealand branch of the charity which has contracted to build the tsunami houses.

On a hot day in the village of Lepa, the prime minister's village, Haycock and fellow Kiwis, colleagues David Bamford and Brett Baker, of the Salvation Army, are turning out modular ablution blocks for the fale. Anoai Sikome, 13, the youngest of 11 children, comes to help them after school.

"That's my house over there," he says, pointing to a ruin near the beach.

New Zealand volunteers are everywhere in Samoa. Auckland builder Mark Williams is helping rebuild Sinalei Resort, badly smashed by the tsunami and the source of a famous emblem of the storm: a blue fishing boat wedged in the air between a palm and a fau tree.

"They are nice people, mate, and they need a hand," Williams says simply. "I'm only too happy to help."

The Kiwi builders, says Filia Tamasese, wife of the Samoan head of state and patron of Caritas, a Catholic charity sponsoring 70 tsunami houses, "are wonderful, wonderful people".

So far only three tsunami houses have been built. The hardware shops can't keep up with the demand for materials, says Tamasese, in charge of Caritas's building programme as well as being patron ("I'm supposed to sit around and play ladies"). The aid agencies aren't the only ones working. "Lots of Samoans are building their own houses. They're not just sitting around waiting for the government."

The Habitat builders hammer away amid the desolation. "When I first got here," says Haycock, "I thought it was a ghost town." This stretch of the south coast is exactly that: a levelled landscape with bumps of blasted house foundations, sometimes with a tent on top. The people have moved into other fale or into tents and tarpaulin homes on the hill behind.

At Lalomanu beach, ground zero of the catastrophe, a pink concrete fale has been reduced to a cluster of bent pillars. On the grave in front – many Samoan houses have family tombs on the section, some large and grandiose – someone has laid a green dress, weighted at the corners with small rocks.

The great mounds of debris have now been cleared, but there is still rubbish scattered from the shore to the steep green hill behind. Sheets of corrugated iron lie twisted like lolly papers. A pair of huge greenish sports shoes lies next to a broken dinner plate. There is the skeleton of a louvre window. A thin wooden cross stands in front of a porta-loo and a smashed armchair: "Jesus is Lord," says the inscription.

Some have criticised the government's $WS18,000 tsunami house.

"It is very, very small," says the combative editor of the Samoa Observer, Keni Lesa. "If you consider that the cyclone season is coming up, it should have been a closed-in house with louvres so that when the rain comes it offers some kind of protection. You could do a whole lot better than that."

Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele disagrees. "It is not the purpose to build a cyclone house, it is to provide some kind of relief, full stop," he told the Sunday Star-Times in his Apia office. "Almost all of these people can build their own houses, if given time, with [help from] relatives overseas."

An $18,000 house "is a blessing that no one of them could ever dream about. In fact, I thought if we could provide $5000 it would be sufficient."

Indonesia had built expensive cyclone-proof houses after the Boxing Day tsunami five years ago, but could not afford many and so thousands of people got nothing. And the tsunami house had been designed so those who wanted larger ones could extend them.

Samoa now faces a $370m repair bill, but there is an upside. The government had a long-term plan to shift low-lying villages to higher ground to avoid rising sea-levels caused by climate change. The tsunami, says the prime minister, persuaded villagers to move "without further urging from the government. So it was a kind of benefit in disguise".

There had been claims for 600 houses, but the government checked the requests and reduced the number to 400. Some people whose houses were only slightly damaged had asked for a new one. "It happens all the time," says the PM.

Goretti Wulf, health co-ordinator for the Samoan Red Cross, says lists submitted by local mayors of affected families contained names of people who didn't exist, or of family members who lived in Apia, which was not touched by the tsunami. "A lot of politics is going on out there," she says. The Red Cross does its own independent assessment of needs and its own distribution of aid.

The PM says the government checks the claims' lists "because mayors do not always provide foolproof information". However, he rejects allegations, made by the Observer, that shopkeepers had bought aid food and goods and re-sold them. The government had checked the supply system and could not verify the story. However, he admits it was "possible" this had happened.

There were many agencies supplying aid, he said, and though the government had tried to co-ordinate their efforts to ensure no family got too much, this had sometimes proved difficult. He recalls telling one aid agency that after Cyclone Hector he found a man with sacks of rice, supposedly destined for Manono village. But "Manono village was least affected by the cyclone and this fellow is a well-known crook." Now the aid agencies, the NGOs, the UN, and the New Zealand and Australian High Commissions are all represented on the government's Disaster Council, which the PM chairs. "There is nothing hidden. All are accountable, all are transparent."

THE TSUNAMI breeds nightmares and kindness, terror and tall tales. "Old people still shake when they talk about it. Children cry when they come down to the beach. They want to go back," says Wulf. "They no longer enjoy playing in the water," says Congregationalist pastor Ualesi Isaraelu, of Saleapaga village, where most of the families now live in tents or temporary shelter on the hill.

Teachers have become comforters. Lalomanu Primary School has a roll of 137, but only about 100 attend at present. Principal Maulolo Ioane is not chasing up the missing kids. They have enough to cope with, she says, and by the beginning of next year they will be ready to return. In the meantime, the children spend only half the school day in lessons. The rest of the time "we let them play", she says. "We are just trying to make them warm."

There are tsunami legends. Wailing and crying can be heard from the sea at night. God sent the wave to punish the people or the particular villages for their sins. God sent the wave to punish the government for forcing the people to change from driving on the right to the left. A woman and a child took a taxi from a cemetery to ground zero, and on arrival the driver turned to find his cab was empty.

"All conversations," says Elisaia-Brighouse, "eventually come back to the tsunami. You tell and re-tell the story to force it to make sense."

Some tourists gave all their clothes and flew home in what they were wearing. Some sent backs thousands of dollars to help.

"An Austrian journalist who had been out here rang me and said, `I'd like to donate something, although it's not very much.' It was 5000," says Elisaia-Brighouse.

The storm exposed the great strength of the Samoan community, and perhaps some of its weaknesses. The aiga or extended family is the heart of this society, and it binds with steel. On the day of the disaster, Anne Leunga, co-principal of Samoa Primary School in Apia, took tents and tarpaulins to her relatives on the south coast. When she got there, other tents and tarpaulins were already going up. The story was repeated the next day.

The complex system of kinship bonds, of reciprocity and of the power of the matai, perhaps lies behind the tales of favouritism in the early distribution of aid. Isaraelu says people in the village complained that aid was not being distributed fairly. As a result, he and other matai were put on the local committee to help oversee the system.

The aiga is the source of comfort and strength, he says, and it is helping the people come to terms with death and woe. So is the church, which has a power and presence unimaginable in New Zealand.

Since the tsunami, "the Samoans have become more religious than ever", says Aggie Grey. "When I used to go to church at 6am on Sunday there weren't many people there. Now it's full. I think we are just thankful we are still alive."

Isaraelu says the tsunami has not made people question their faith – rather, it has strengthened it. He finds himself acting as counsellor, a useful role with a people who, he says, "don't easily express their feelings".

Last week, he invited the congregation to come forward and talk about the tsunami. "There was a very good feeling afterwards."

Isaraelu says the kids are now starting to swim in the sea again.

Satitoa is a ruined village of shattered concrete houses: the Mormon church a battered shell, with empty windows and bent walls. Inside, a horde of kids are shouting and chasing a ball through the puddle on the floor.

Where once were pews and sacred paraphernalia, they hold a tug-of war between the girls and boys. It is a strange scene of devastation and hope.

The wave still rolls, two months after it broke on the shore.