Sunday: A Day of Solace and Comfort For Pacific People Around the World

UPDATE: If you wish to post your thoughts on this week’s tragedy in the Pacific, please post here, and also check out In Remembrance Pacific 09 to post your thoughts and tributes as well.

Today in New Zealand, there are church masses throughout Samoan congregations focused on the tragedy of this week. There are also Memorial Services beginning today in Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch and other centres I’m sure. In the coming week, there are more Memorial Services planned. I will post more later.

For now, there is a sense of people needing time to grieve on Sunday, a day that is traditionally sacred for Samoans in Samoa, especially. Tomorrow will be Sunday in Samoa, and it is unbearable to think about the significance of that day for Samoans, in Samoa especially. It is White Sunday. Traditionally, this is the children’s day and they all wear white and sing their songs. The focus is solely on the children on White Sunday.

Except as we know, so many children, and their mothers, and grandmothers have perished in the tsunami. What will White Sunday sound like without the children to sing those songs? But our people will sing their hymns, for comfort, for peace.That will give way to a full expression of the saddest grief and sorrow that Samoa has ever seen in our living generation.

Reminders of the 1918 Epidemic

I thought today of my mother stories from her mother of the 1918 influenza epidemic that hit Samoa killing around 22 percent of the local population. I’ve never forgotten her words about how the cart with the horse came to every house in the village, and bodies were packed into the back of the cart. Families were wailing and crying everywhere, Mum said. There was numbness.

To make it worse, those bodies were buried in mass graves,  and they weren’t given a family burial the way that Samoan farewell their dead. It was an epidemic so government ordered the bodies be buried straight away. (So it’s no wonder that the mention, by government, of mass burial for the tsunami deaths is very upsetting for many families. It reminds people of what happened back then in the 1918 influenza epidemic).I remember Mum saying that people in the village were just dying like flies.

This is what my grandmother, Taemanu, told my mother of those years. The sadness as my mother spoke those words to me were still felt as though it had been a recent event. That’s the legacy that grief leaves a nation. Now the tsunami 2009 with its death and destruction along the South Coast of Upolu Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga.

We will never forgot this experience…from generation to generation. I have no more words to say for now. Only silence. God Bless Samoa.