Correspondent's Notebook

Sorrow of Samoa’s White Sunday

16 October 2009

Pacific correspondent Campbell Cooney thought he was prepared emotionally for reporting the disaster of the Samoan tsunami. But the reality, he discovered, was different.

For nearly a fortnight, I have been in Samoa reporting on the aftermath of the tsunami, which struck it, American Samoa, and Tonga.

Just over two years ago I’d travelled to the Western Province of Solomon Islands when it was hit by an earthquake and a tsunami.

I felt, given that experience, I had a good idea of what I’d be seeing in Samoa.

But in Solomon Islands, the scale of the disaster, while no less devastating, was hard to get an idea of, as it was spread across a number of islands.

In Samoa,  it is laid out for you.

You start at one end, and keep driving.

In the centre of the disaster area, nothing manmade 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 their 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 at the moment that relief effort doesn’t look like ending for a while.

At present there are an estimated 3,000 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.

Other businesses are expecting to do the same, and have even said they’ll be back open and offering accommodation before the end of the year.

You can see the clean-up 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 sea water has left 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.

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.

I attended the mass funeral service and commemoration for all those killed.

It wasn’t the speeches from leaders and church ministers that affected you most.

It was the line of schoolchildren from around the country, each of them bearing a wreath in honour of those who died.

As a name was read out, a schoolchild would come 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  October 11 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, Saleapaga lost 30 of its people.

Twenty 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.