Rainforest                                                          

Samoa, 30 years ago

I had been working with two villages in Savai’i on a rainforest preservation project funded by the Swedish Society for the Conservation of Nature when the cyclone hit.  I was back on Tutuila. Our island, a hundred miles east, was spared.   What little news we could get from Savai’i was dire.  Our Environmental NGO, Le Vaomatua, quickly organized, collecting relief goods—food and clothing.  We set up donation stations outside grocery stores and collection bins for clothes.  Within four days, in time to catch the next ferry west, we had enough to fill a borrowed flatbed lorry, piled high and covered with donated tarps.  

I did not take the ferry ride.  I flew over to Upolu and met the boat in Apia.  I hooked up there with a woman chief from Savai’i, whose name but not she has slipped from my memory. We had to get the truck and its load cleared through customs before the boat headed on to Salelologa on Savai’i.  It would be leaving soon.

 The cyclone had damaged Upolu as well, and the government officials wanted our shipment to stop there. They insisted that, as relief goods, it all had to be turned over to the local Apia Red Cross.  Otherwise, if we took it to another island, they would charge import duties on it all—many hundreds of tala, which I did not have.  While she—God, what was her name? She was a force—went off to fight the officials in their offices, I went to the boat where our truck was still parked to check on it.  The customs officers there knew what was going down.  We talked.  They had their orders, but they did not like them.  Some were from Savai’i.  One of them—the one with the most stripes on his tunic’s sleeve—filled in a form setting the worth of our truckload at just two hundred tala, at 15% duty.  I paid the 30 tala, got the official clearance stamp on the document, and stayed with the truck on the trip to Salelologa.  Only the guys at the top were pissed.  We got everything divided and delivered to the villages.  I stayed a while.  That piece of climax rainforest is still preserved.