Today is the beginning of a three day Prosperity Conference for Pacific People out in Manukau (Telstra Center).
It's about time the Ministry did this.
Pacific people are constantly burdened with familial, church, community obligations that drains so much of their limited resources.
Every Sunday, cash donations are read out in CCC of Samoa Churches, for e.g. faifeau’s donation (alofa/peleti), taulaga nuu ese, taulaga Samoa, saogatupe a tiakonoetc etc
Meanwhile, the villagers are struggling to make ends meet.
The same sad story applies to Samoa:
Case 1Lalomalava Village, Savaii.
There are approximately 300 people in Lalomalava.
Children start school at the local government Lalomalava primary school. If you visit the school, you will find 10 basic rooms, run down desks, old blackboards, and hardly anything else.
After Primary School, many attend Mataaevave High School, where most of the district students attend. This is much worse than Lalomalava because there more than 200 studentswithin congested space, with pitiful limited resources and poorly trained teachers.
Money does not come by easily for people in Savaii.
Many still rely on subsistence for sustenance. This is not for being lazy to produce surplus, but because you get very little returns for a year’s effort of growing taro, kaamu, fishing and the selling it for a lousy $SAT20.00=USD8.00
A teacher at primary level usually earns approx $SAT5,000 per annual. How’s that for pathetic?
Case 2: Salailua Congregational Christian Church, Savaii, Samoa
Salailua is like many other villages in Samoa, proud hard-working people who religiously attend church twice every Sunday, and donate to the church.
A few years ago, they built a monster, aka, house of worship in the midst of the picturesque seaside village.
In came the concrete slabs, expensive outside lamp posts, carpets, chandeliers, and air conditioning!!!
Now thats gonna quarantee their place in first class heaven!!!
The end result is that they couldn't pay off the thousands owed to the Bank so the rest of the church goers had to pay (thru the headquarters in Malua).
See what pride does to people, it blinds them of the real important things in life, like your children, close-knit family. We have a problem, but the well-fed priests are not gonna come up with answers, nope, not if it means they have to give up prime beef for a night.

The Culture Moves Conference started on 9-12th November 2005 in Windy Wellington, NZ.
I was very fortunate to get a grant from Creative New Zealand to attend the three-day meeting.
Delegates came from as far as California, Hawaii, Darwin, New Caledonia, Austria, Easter Islands.

The three convenors were Dr Katerina Teaiwa, April Henderson and Sean Mallon, all of whom did a great and monstrous job of bringing all these awesome activities and people into one perfect venue: Te Papa Museum.

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting and hearing the diverse interesting perspectives, from academics, chereographers, dancers, potential sponsors..etc etc.

The performances by the travelling groups were simply stunning, I wish I could have memorised every move, every expression.
Some stuck to traditional conservative yet graceful moves, some were more for the dramatic, others simply gave it all, hip-thrusting, head-shaking, arms flailing, girls thrown in the air, men in tantric-like state and Chamorro boys screaming to booming drum beats.

I have a few images glued to my mind, Peter Rockford Espiritu,(chorerographer/artistics director) a ballet dancer who has incorporated this with Hawaiian moves, danced so....fluidly, so so passionately. At the end, i felt so macho after seeing him sway to a 70's beat.

Sugarpop, who breathed, lived and aged with the revolution of funkstyle and hip-hop before J.Lo and Micheal Jackson destroyed the original efforts of a few. He belonged to the group Lockers.
He was witty, straight-up, no nonsense kinda guy who stood up during the panel discussion and excalimed "I gotta pee!"

There were a very few moments where i felt dissapointed. With an academic dominating the discussions with irrelevant academic blurr that left the rest of the crowd staring at the ceiling, a Samoan man who claimed to be a traditional dance expert, never mind the Cook Island drum beats during the sasa and the foreign actions used. Some egos need to be deflated periodically.

Nevertheless, the networks made, knowledge acquired, experience absorbed made this Conference a success.
It can only get better from here.
I came reminded again that dance is more than expressions. It is bringing together people, it is breaking barriers, forging new relationships and giving inspriration to many.

Ia Manuia!!!