Monday, 21 July 2008
The biggest event American Samoa has ever staged, is underway. The 10th Pacific Festival of the Arts, celebrates the culture and traditions of the Pacific island nations and territories, as the event has done for decades. But the festival is also an assertion of the Pacific way during a period of unprecedented global change.
It’s quite interesting to come here and witness this in a territory that is so obviously influenced and connected with the United States. One acquaintance in Apia referred to American Samoa as beyond the edge of the “real” Pacific.
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Saturday, 19 July 2008
I still remember the day a few years ago when my journalist friend Tamani Nair returned to Fiji from Samoa and told me about their famous chilli sauce and something else just as hot – Bollywood cinema.
My first reaction was disbelief. After all, even in Fiji it took a long time for non-Fijians to even consider spending three hours watching romantic drama and scantily clad Indian heroines running around trees with besotted lads in tow. But after a few decades it caught on, especially in rural Fiji where Fijian farmers worked alongside Indo-Fijians in the fields. It kinda made sense.
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Thursday, 17 July 2008
If you look back at my first blog, you will see a favourite picture from my childhood. It’s a shot of my brothers and me steadying a bamboo raft in the seas off the island of Ovalau in Fiji. I grew up with bamboo all around me being used for construction, Hindu ceremonies, and even “guns” during celebrations. It all still happens today. Head for any remote area in Fiji where there is a river and you’re likely to spot a “bilibili” or bamboo raft loaded with vegetables or cargo of some sort.
So when I found out that in Samoa, there was a project that aimed to introduce Samoans to bamboo cultivation, I was intrigued. I thought they already had bamboo everywhere in the Pacific.
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