Leone, October 03: The village of Leone is a picturesque enclave that has been a mainstay of the Samoas for centuries, a place where residents gather under beach meeting houses for rituals that are sacred to the local culture.
Today, much of the village is a bleak landscape of rubble.
An overturned van is jammed into the roof of a beach house. Four elderly villagers were killed while weaving Samoan mats and crafts on the shore. A 6-year-old boy and two sisters were swept away while on the way to school. The post office is gone. So is the grocery store.
The carnage in hard-hit Leone offers a glimpse into how this week’s deadly earthquake and tsunami in Samoa and American Samoa decimated centuries of culture on two islands that are steeped in tradition.
Samoans have been forced to forgo burial rituals because their villages are gone. Other families have had to speed up the burial process because their loved ones’ bodies were discovered in such decomposed states. The beach gathering houses, known as fale, were overrun by the tsunami.
In Samoa, the government has proposed a mass funeral and burial next week.
“I’m not sure the word ‘shock’ fully describes our sense of loss,” said Ben Taufua, whose family in another Samoan village had to bury seven relatives in a hastily dug grave. “Nothing makes sense at all. … The beach where all of this happened, all those lives were lost, it was paradise on Earth.”
The death toll from Tuesday’s disaster rose to 170, including 129 in Samoa, 32 in American Samoa and nine in Tonga, while aid efforts continued.
Survivors wore face masks against the growing stench of rot. Medical teams gave tetanus shots and antibiotics to survivors with infected wounds.
American Samoa Gov. Togiola Tulafono said the Federal Emergency Management Agency was working on establishing an office where displaced residents can get assistance for housing. Officials said the focus is shifting from rescuing lives to helping people sustain themselves by providing them food, power and water.
Ken Tingman, FEMA’s federal coordinating officer, said that doesn’t mean the missing are given up for dead.
“You never lose hope,” he said. “As we clear the area of debris, if there are bodies there, we will be looking for them.”
Tingman expected almost the entire territory to have power within three to five days, which is much shorter than the monthlong outage that was expected in some parts.
He said the federal government was flying in large generators that should temporarily restore power to most of the island.
In the American Samoan village of Afili, volunteer groups brought bottled water and lunches for the area’s 1,200 residents, many of whom survived.
Unlike in other villages, people noticed the ocean receding after the earthquake and recognized it as a sign of a tsunami. They rang the town bell and shouted for everyone to run for the hills.
“We just did it in time,” Mayor Eteuni Augafa said. “The waves were coming in so fast.”
Augafa said he was told it would take up to 10 days for government aid to start arriving. Power and running water have been restored to homes.
In Samoa, frightened residents who fled to the hills after the disaster vowed never to return to their seaside villages.
“It’s a scary feeling, and a lot of them said they are not coming to the coastal area,” Red Cross health coordinator Goretti Wulf said near the flattened village of Lalomanu on the devastated south coast of Samoa’s main island. “The lesson they learned has made them stay away.”
Workers at Lalomanu’s makeshift emergency supply base began carting water, food, tarps and clothes to 3,000 people in the hills. Wulf said drinking water was the most pressing problem. It is the end of Samoa’s dry season, when rain is scarce, and the water pipes that supply the villages were destroyed.
Burial was another problem.
One family in Lalomanu buried nine members from four different generations, from ages 2 to 97.
Seven relatives were placed in a single grave on Thursday. One body had been retrieved from the ocean only hours earlier. Sina Edmund Taufua kissed the cheeks of her dead son and daughter, ages 6 and 5, as a relative supported her bandaged arm.
The dead were buried without coffins, their bodies covered with a woven mat, during a service that blended traditional Samoan culture with a Christian church ceremony.
In Leone, about two dozen soldiers and airmen from the Hawaii National Guard on Friday had the heart-wrenching task of searching through muddy debris for a missing 6-year-old boy, identified by family members as Columbus Sulivai.
Bill Hopkinson, a village chief, said the boy was on his way to school with his 8-and 10-year old sisters when the quake struck. “When the earthquake hit, instead of seeking higher ground, they came running back home,” Hopkinson said. Both girls died.
Leone residents estimate the tsunami destroyed about one-third of the coastal village, population 3,000. The victims were mostly elderly or toddlers.
Villager Charissa Siu managed to save her young nieces, who were sleeping. But she was unable to save another relative, Michelle Eneliko, who was sick in bed and unable to move. The body was found 50 yards away.
“It was very bad, a very horrifying experience for me when I saw the high waves heading to our village,” Siu said.
Leone is one of the largest villages in the territory and eventually became the center of Christianity on the island. Extended families gather in the open-air guesthouse every Sunday.
Save L.A. Tuitele said the tsunami has had the unexpected consequence of bringing villagers together. The 62-year-old Tuitele sat in a circle of men next to the foundation of a destroyed house, sharing stories.
“It’s sad that it happened,” Tuitele said. “But this brings most of the people back here, it brings back the pride that most of the people have here in Leone.”
–Agencies