Samoa begins burying tsunami victims

Taitasi Suapaia Fitiao is preparing for every parent’s nightmare – burying her child.

Her six-year-old daughter Vaijoresa, the youngest of her seven children, was ripped from her arms as an enormous wave from Tuesday’s tsunami swept them up.

As she floated away, out of reach, Vaijoresa pleaded: “Mummy, please.”

“I just can’t believe that she’s gone. At such a young age, you know? No parent should have to bury their child. It’s supposed to be the other way around,” her mother said sitting on her front porch next to a shrine to her daughter.

Funerals are being held with heart-rending frequency in American Samoa and neighbouring Samoa, where tsunami waves roared ashore after an earthquake with a magnitude of up to 8.3 in the Pacific Ocean, killing at least 170 people.

A national prayer service for victims and survivors will be held today at the headquarters of the Congregational Christian Church of America Samoa, the largest religious denomination in the US territory.

Territorial governor Togiola Tulafono said the service would bring the community together in the aftermath of the disaster.

In Samoa, scores of grieving people made a heartbreaking decision yesterday to sign over victims of the tsunami to the state for burial rather than take them back to ravaged villages for traditional funerals.

Government ministers told a congregation of 100 village and family leaders in a traditional open-sided Samoan meeting house that the state would pay the costs of mass graves of up to 20 in a new cemetery in the capital Apia on Thursday, following a memorial service in a nearby sports stadium.

The proposition was voluntary and the government will consider financial assistance to grieving relatives who elect to take their loved ones home.

Government minister Fiana Naomi said she expected about half of Samoa’s 129 victims would be buried there.

Tears welled in her eyes as she said the mass funeral was a radical departure from Samoan tradition, but many of the village homes near where the relatives would traditionally be buried were gone and might not be replaced.

“The government sees the devastated areas, there are no buildings there, some villages might be relocated, people have lost everything and they can’t hold ceremonies in the usual ways,” she said.

“Usually they’re very large communal ceremonies, but this is memorialising this event to serve as a constant reminder to us that we need to be prepared for natural disasters.”

The burials come as officials shift their focus from rescuing lives to providing survivors with food, water and power, but stressed it did not mean they were giving up on the missing.

Electricity and water services were restored in about half of the affected villages in Samoa and American Samoa, and almost all of the territory was expected to have power from generators within three to five days, said Ken Tingman, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s federal co-ordinating officer.

The death toll also includes 32 people in American Samoa and nine in Tonga.

The village of Leone, the centre of Christianity on the island, was a bleak landscape of rubble. The beach meeting houses that had been the centre of cultural rituals and family meetings were destroyed. An overturned van was jammed into the roof of one beach house.

Leone residents estimate the tsunami destroyed about one-third of the village, which has a population of 3,000. The victims were mostly elderly or toddlers. Four villagers were killed while making crafts on the shore.

Samoa’s tourism industry, meanwhile, said it feared a “second tsunami” of holiday cancellations after the deadly waves wiped out some of the South Pacific country’s most idyllic white-sand beaches and resorts.

Tourism is Samoa’s largest industry and travel industry representatives visiting the main island’s wrecked south-east coast said about a quarter of the tourist accommodations had been destroyed.