Yes, I disappeared from here for several months. Yes, it was slack of me. Yes, I deserve to have stale Doritos and mouldy donuts thrown at me. BUT, Before the stale mouldy food throwing commences, please allow me to explain! I wasn't blogging because: I was setting...
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Australia and her Foreign Minister ignored our questions on West Papua. But, we had to try. Because every raised voice counts. And the more people who speak up and speak out about West Papua, the harder it will be to silence and ignore them. On December...
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The Green Climate Fund is having its 15th Board meeting here in Samoa this week. So? Why do we care? The GCF was created in 2010 by 194 countries that are party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). There are 24 members of the Board, repping...
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As the Green Climate Fund holds their 15th Board meeting in Samoa, will they improve on their funding proposal and approval process? - “if [the GCF] wanted to design a system that put the poorest and most vulnerable at the end of the pipeline, they...
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Summary Having spent a fabulous and passionate evening with Jackson, Scarlet starts to believe that it might be possible for her to actually survive the Samoan wedding of the year without killing the bride (her sister) or other very important people (the rest of her family)...
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Samoa and Australia ARE friends. And yes, we are grateful. But no friendship is perfect. And gratitude should not cloud our vision and stop us from evaluating our friendships. Or asking for them to be better. Especially when it comes to climate change. Yesterday, visiting Australian...
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My late uncle, Max Wendt, was a policeman all his life. I grew up used to his familiar blue-uniformed presence. Sometimes, when kids would bully me at primary school, I would use his name in vain, “I’m gonna tell my uncle on you. He’s a...
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Strong is beautiful. When we lived in New Zealand with our children, my daughters sometimes found it difficult to be brown girls in a so-called ‘multicultural’ (but really, a palagi) country. My teenager stood out as the tallest, biggest girl in her class of palagi and...
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As a Pasifika writer from Samoa, I am interested in the stories we tell about women, the stories that shape us and help define how we view women and how we value them. As a mother, I am interested in how those stories – of...
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Eleven years ago, Darren Young weighed 140kilos. His stress levels were high, he suffered from regular migraines, and he was always tired. He drank six large bottles of Coke a day to keep him fuelled for the demands of running his own construction and steel...
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