Up until 2007 the prison punished inmates by locking them in solitary confinement for seven days, naked. Two years ago 41 prisoners staged a mass breakout and hijacked a bus; police shot out the front tyres and negotiated a peaceful surrender. The prisoners said they were protesting about being ‘fed and treated like animals’.
A friendly guard sat in a hut outside the gates.
I asked him if I could come in and look around.
No, he said.
I walked over the road to the lost village of Falelauniu.
The government of Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi had ordered that Falelauniu stay out of sight and out of mind. I had not read about it when I walked over the road from the prison. I didn’t know what it was. It didn’t look like a village. It looked like what it was: a slum. It was a human rights abuse worse than anything alleged at the prison. It wasn’t leaning towards Third World: it was firmly, blatantly, Third World.
I approached the shack closest to the road. Five or six young guys sat inside on the bare floor and glowered. They called out someone’s name. Fesouaina Matalavea, a pretty 22-year-old, came over. Yes, she said, she could speak English – she worked in Apia as an information officer for an aid agency. The savage irony of it hung in the air. I looked around at the shacks, at the slum, and said, ‘What is this place?’
‘We were moved here by the government,’ she said. ‘We used to live by the sea in Sigo before the tsunami. They said, “It’s better you move.”’
‘Was the village devastated by the tsunami?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing happened to it. We were okay. The government just used the tsunami as an excuse to move us. They wanted the land back to put up a government building.’
‘And they kicked you out?’
‘They gave us 3,000 tālā to move out.’
‘That doesn’t sound like much.’
She laughed and said, ‘It wasn’t much.’
She wasn’t bitter. She said, ‘It’s not really terrible. It’s good because it’s more like fresh air than in Sigo.’
It was in the middle of nowhere opposite a prison.
I read about it later in Samoa Observer, in a story about building materials donated to Falelauniu by Vaughan Simpson, general manager of construction company CaBella Samoa. Simpson is a well-travelled individual, and in the region has been involved with major international companies such as Fletcher Construction. The Falelauniu situation opened his eyes to the darker side of Samoa, a place he calls paradise. Driving around he couldn’t believe what he saw. ‘I’ve seen a lot of poverty throughout the Pacific and … I haven’t seen worse.’
A businesswoman in town, who preferred not to be named, was shocked by the poor quality of life of people at Falelauniu. Lost for words, she looked around the place and cried; all she could mutter was, ‘It’s very sad. I don’t know.’ After spending half an hour talking with members of one family she offered to pay for the education of their children for a year and to ‘help out in other areas where they’re in need, such as dishes, clothes and housing. Whatever I can, I’ll do it’. Driving back to Apia, she tried to describe the environment and daily living conditions but couldn’t. All she could manage was, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this is happening in our country.’
There was another story about villagers forced to root around the Tafa’igata rubbish dump in search of expired tins of food. In response, a government official visited Falalauniu and threatened villagers with legal action if they didn’t stop talking to journalists.
‘He’s a journalist,’ Fesouaina said as she showed me into one of the shacks. One of the old men sitting on the bare floor got up and closed the door. A couple of old ladies sat on chairs in the main room. There were children playing on the floor, their skin covered in sores. There were flies everywhere, all over the floor, all over the bodies and faces of the kids. There was one decoration hung on the wall: a cracked mirror. The boys wore shorts. The girls wore skirts and no knickers. A baby was asleep on a pillow on the floor. He had a mosquito net around him; compared to everyone else he was living in luxury.
There was rubbish on the dirt outside the house. I pointed at a low wall built from concrete further down the hill. ‘The bathroom,’ Fesouina said. ‘It’s not finished yet.’ A small taro plantation, dogs, chickens, flies, stench: it was just another day in the life of Falelauniu, the disgrace of Samoa.
The older kids lay on the wooden floorboards and did their homework, writing down sums with worn-down pencils in damp exercise books. It was good to think of them at school and away from their wretched hut for at least a few hours, but the bus fare to send the four kids to school was eight tālā a day. Fesouaina was the one person in the household who had a job. She said she earned 15,000 tālā a year.
I tried calling her a few months later. I was put through to the CEO of Sungo. ‘She doesn’t work here anymore,’ the woman said. ‘Her position was terminated.’
It was like being told she’d died. I thought of the pretty 22-year-old in clean clothes in the lost village, that disgrace and national scandal, that incitement to line up Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi next to a wild dog and know which one to put down first. I thought of when I stood with Fesouaina outside her shack on a beautiful sunny day at the end of the wet season and asked
