When I was a child I always dreamed about travelling. I grew up in communist Poland. I lived like a cat behind the closed door. I believed in 4 coloured pencils till one day I saw a 24 colour set. The girl who always wore nice clothes, clothes that you couldn’t buy in Poland, got them from her mum who just came back from abroad. From another country. Another world. A world of 24 colours.
I always wanted to see that world, just as much as I wanted to try all 24 coloured pencils. I thought while people in Poland were all like grey pigeons who never went far from home, people on the other side of the curtain, the ones who know all the colours of the world, from whom nothing is hidden, are all like exotic birds who can follow the summer or like peacocks who spread the colours of the rainbow on their tails.
But not all in that outside world turns out to be as it seems. The people often just follow trends instead of the summer weather and flaunt their wealth like peacocks their tails. Pigeons would always come back home and carry that home in their minds. They might well have to eat out of someone else's hand but they could still, briefly, fly above the grey world into the blue sky. There are always two sides in whichever world you are and there are always good and bad choices. And the choices in the middle, I always forget them, can maybe give a litle of both. I never really wanted to escape from Poland but I was waiting for the door to open so I can fly in and out.
For me travels were always synonymous with discovery and freedom. If someone had asked me then what is freedom, I would probably include in my answer travelling, seeing and experiencing the world. Spreading my wings. So now that my job is to travel, you can say my dream has come true. It’s even better because with the grey from my past still in my soul, I always wanted to share the new colours I see.
I didn’t know how I could do it, I knew this desire was there within me almost like a destiny. So along came the idea of a dream job and a person I could share it with, a job with secret aspirations to change the world and make it a better place. I am not talking about fighting cancer, which destroys peoples lives, or pollution, which destroys our planet. I am talking about little things. About the employer who doesn’t turn down a person because of their skin colour; a government official who will not discriminate against anyone because of their beliefs; a rebellious young man who will not feel a need to harm and humiliate a gay-looking passer-by. I am talking about things that don’t kill us, they only have the power to wound our soul, make our minds ugly or humiliate those who choose to be different from us.
So I love what I do, what we do, and I felt that travelling was fulfilling my dream of freeedom. Then we went to Samoa and in one brief moment, I lost my freedon and went through a 3 month long nightmare. I share my job with the same person with whom I share my life and truly, if not for him, I don‘t know how I would have survived this nightmare. Being with him also helps in making the sacrifices that the work demands. He is my whole family and our home is where we create it, usually for just one week. Though we have each other, we miss people back home. I'd love to have a house full of friends and dinner parties and a garden full of fruits, herbs and flowers. I miss stability and I sometimes think about how it would be if our family was bigger but having a baby and carrying it around in my backpack to the unknown is more often frightening than exciting. And financially we have had to give up a lot too. We spent our savings on developing our ideas and neither of us wants to make our dream a commercial venture. Stubbornly we insist that the resource we create should be free.
You may say we are idealists and dreamers, I would say we are believers too. We both believe that what we do can make a difference. The project is intended to bring about more understanding of other cultures and lifestyles. We complement each other. Richard's more focused on children and education, telling them about the world and giving them more knowledge. I love to discover new cultures and share it with others. Always, somewhere in the back of my mind, there are these people far away who suffer hunger and injustice. I want to know more about them and the reasons why the world cannot be the perfect place for everyone. I want to learn their names and I want the rest of the world to learn their names too so they can no longer be indifferent to their suffering.
We travel and learn from the people we meet. We put everything we find out on a free website and ask people from other countries to contribute their pieces and help us build a picture of their world. New Zealand, being our base, was the first country we put on the website. We wanted to make the next part of our journey to the Pacific Islands but the funding available for this region was limited. We would have been better going back to Europe and making European countries involved but we felt we could give much more to the small Pacific countries where schools work with limited resources and people are more isolated from the rest of the world. What is more these places have so much to offer in terms of culture. These are the ones we need to protect from western influences so we can have this incredible diversity in the world for years to come.
We went through many problems with funding. Some of our problems, I believe, were caused by my past. A relationship with the wrong person who didn’t want to let go and who then made the aim of his life to destroy anything Richard and I may have together or achieve. At times he made our life very difficult. Some of the sponsors pulled back. We found the real reasons quite a lot later. There were times where we asked ourselves why do we go on. I felt bad knowing I left a family behind.
I was brought up by my grandama and she died 7 years ago so when I started this job I wasn’t leaving anyone who depended on me. I had no links. But then, while being away from home and going through the problems, I got surprisingly close to my mother. I never had a chance to make up for the lost time. She is waiting to see me but each time we hoped to go back home for a break, we had to cancel it. A Polish person who has the chance to work abroad is often expected to help their family. I was the only educated one, I finished two different universities and there were hopes put on me. It was really getting to me when my mum would tell me about the problems back home, aunts not being able to pay the rent or medical bills, uncles working 12 hours a day and I couldn’t do anything to help because we were barely surviving ourselves. It would be so simple to apply for different work, as so many young Poles have done and go to England or the States, find a well paid job there and be able to transfer some money back home.
In the old Poland I knew, people had some money but they couldn’t spend it all because there was often nothing in the shops. Now the shops are enticing them with colourful packages, with promises of comfort and luxury but now they cannot afford this and sometimes have only just enough for the bare minimum. My family is poor but have their own little business. It made enough for us to live on but now with the big supermarkets opening in our country, the little dairy that my parents run rarely makes any profit anymore and is struggling to survive.
So my heart was bleeding but I could not bare to desert our dream, I could not stop believing that it is good. And each time, when I had doubts, something happened that put us back on track. Either it was the promise of some funding, help from a little company or a small operator, an e-mail from a child, an intelligent question from a troubled little face looking at us thoughtfully after the presentation we just gave, the tears in the eyes of an old man who listened to the song we recorded with a school back in Poland, the lyrics so powerful that it would always shake me back into the pursuit of our dream. And, just for me, the song Richard wrote for my 30th birthday with the last line of - “one world, one dream and then one…life” expressing so well what we both will fight for, dream of and want so much.
So , even though the full funding didn’t come through as we hoped, we discovered that there were many people around New Zealand prepared to support our journey at least in a small way. We found Eurocampers, a company whose owner lent us free a caravan for the whole length of our journey around New Zealand. Others followed, big hotels and small hostels. We accepted the invitations and in return tried to give something back. We started writing reviews. Some of the businesses, like the Heritage Hotel in Rotorua, still helped us on a purely philanthropic basis, others liked to have the reviews and promotion.
At the end of our journey around New Zealand we opened a separate travel website, with all these reviews on. Really we wouldn’t need to bother to write the One World site as it seemed we could travel even with limited funds; we could do travel writing and sponsor our accomodation in exchange for the reviews. We could become freelance journalists and then at the end, write a book about our travels. But what we really wanted was to continue with the One World idea and keep it free for all the schools. The travelling wasn’t now my ultimate dream. The dream was to learn and share.
We carried on. We decided that even though our funding was limited if companies in the Pacific would be interested in being on the snapshotsfrom website, the reviews could sponsor our One World journey and the little funding we had we could spend on transport, communication and other expenses. This wouldn’t provide us with any salaries of course and but I said earlier there were sacrifices didn't I? We never dreamed of being rich or travelling in comfort or even security, we just dreamed about new experiences, new discoveries, new colours we could share.
So we set off on a journey around the Pacific, the dream I had always had. I remember as a little girl tracing my finger on the shape of little islands on the other side of the world, learning the shapes of Fiji,, Tonga and Samoa. I thought these to be tropical paradises, strange and beautiful, unspoilt and free and I imagined how it would be if I could just go there when I fancied, move on when I wished, when I was ready to discover yet another unknown world. In my bravest dreams I could not imagine that one of these islands would become a prison cell for me, would encapture me and show me a whole world of corruption and injustice and make me realise that I was freer back in communist Poland.
But first there was a wonderful start in Fiji. It was exotic and from then on everything was exciting, exhilarating and a first. Our first Indo-Fijian friend, first house visit, first invitation for a Indian meal, first kava ceremony, first Fijian dance, first visit to a village, first experiences with Fijian customs, first mistakes we made, first visit to a school, first flower lei. All of this, so mind blowing. And then good byes, sometimes casual, sometimes really sad, knowing that you may never see again people who opened their houses for you and shared their culture and life.
Tonga was just as good. The sound of the rhythmical beating of wood on tapa cloth coming from the darkness as a proof that the old traditions are still alive; the hours spent on weaving or designing flowers, the strangers asking you to join them for a meal they have on the beach, the kids appearing out of nowhere, feeling safe and free, the doors to the houses always wide open, all was like a different world, all enchanting.
Our experience of Samoa took us out of this dream state in a rather brutal way. Samoa, the treasured island of the Pacific, the beloved home of Robert Louis Stevenson, became for us a nightmare where I felt helplessly trapped. We lost our freedom to travel, freedom to leave and go back home and the worst was that it took us more than 8 weeks to get it back. What we thought would be an “exotic paradise” became a sad reminder of communist Poland with its limits, lack of personal freedom, manipulation and corruption.
It started from a Gestapo like knock on the door. We had just spent the first of two sponsored nights in one of the most famous hotels in Apia. When we signed in the night before, it said on the form, two nights FOC accommodation(free of charge) and included breakfast. Nice we thought, about the breakfast. After breakfast Richard went to talk to the manager and unknown to me, as I was in our room, the police arrived and began to question him. The first I knew was when he knocked on the door, walked in and told me to pack as the police were taking us away. He also told me he had to pay for the previous night.
Once we got to the police station, we learned that an e-mail had been sent to all hotels in Samoa by the CEO of the Samoa Hotel Association informing them that we were con-artists running a scam and they should look out for us. Part of the email contained a series of untruths she released which included the fact that "a high ranking officer at the New Zealand High Commission" had verbally told her they were looking out for us too. When we phoned them later they had never even heard of us and why should they.
On reflection I suppose we should have expected that something would go wrong. A few days earlier we had received a very unpleasant phone call from Ms Nynnette Sass, that same CEO of the Hotel Association, who said that we had approached some of her members without her knowledge which is not how things were done in Samoa. We told her that, though we might have made a mistake and not gone through the "right channels", we had informed both Tourism and Foreign Affairs about our forthcoming visit and UNESCO in Samoa were also aware of it and were indeed going to meet with us. She was unimpressed. Richard offered to meet her but she said there was no point as she knew what we were about. She rang off.
A couple of minutes later we had a call from the marketing manager at SamoaTel who we had just met and who at that meeting, said he could help us with sponsored internet access during our time there. This time he told us he wouldn't be helping, he knew who we were and what we were doing. We asked what he meant but he wouldn't say, telling us simply that Samoa was a small place and people soon found out things. Much, much later, we discovered that Ms Sass's son worked at SamoaTel.
Later that day, as we were driving, Ms Sass phoned again and claimed we had "demanded accommodation from her members". Rich said that if this is what her members were saying than they were obviously liars. She repeated that she knew what we were up to and finished by saying that she was "going to get us". This seemed an almost mafia-like threat not a professional phone call so maybe this was the warning call we failed to see.
You know in Poland, sometime ago, the Russian Mafia were taking protection money off businesses and visits from them, especially if the business owner wasn't very cooperative, could be quite harsh. In Poland "I'm going to get you" would not be ignored so why did I ignore it in Samoa. Why did I think we were safe here.
Back at the police station (had you forgotten we were there?) they looked at all the documents we had with us and quite quickly, well about four or five hours later, decided we were not crooks or frauds. The policeman who dealt with us was unhappy at first that we don’t have ID cards hanging around our necks, saying Press or One World Foundation writer or something of that sort. That would make things so much clearer. How otherwise can he be sure that we really work for One World Foundation of New Zealand even if such an organisation exists. We thought that a work permit stamped into our passport by New Zealand Immigration saying we could work for One World Foundation of New Zealand would be clear and reliable. The New Zealand government certainly wouldn’t give work permits for non existing charities, even if Ms Sass thought so, and certainly not to the wrong people, even if Ms Sass would insist on this too. If we really were frauds, pretending that we are writing reviews and “scamming out” free accommodation from the people of Samoa, like Ms Sass seemed to imply in her email, would we really produce a website with so many pages, with reviews and contacts to our previous hosts so anyone could call for a reference? Would we really have put hundreds of pages on the one world website? Would we have sent letters to the government informing them about our visit?
The policeman studied all the documents and went to make phone calls. He disappeared for a long time and we were left alone. Once the initial excitement wore off, it all started getting to me. Surely they cannot just hold us here for ever because one person decided to send an email with untrue accusations. There were no other official complaints about us and it would appear now, after we managed to have a glimpse of the email, that Ms Sass decided that we do not work for the One World Foundation she contacted. But, Ms Sass, there are several around and this one was not One World Foundation of New Zealand. The problem we had was how do you prove you are who you say you are anyway.
How long could they keep us here? I talked for a while with a young policewoman who seemed very sympathetic. Quite a few bored-looking policemen sat around the wide wooden table. I was also growing more bored and more and more impatient. No-one else talked to us and we were losing precious time in Samoa, stuck in a police station in Apia, the capital. We were supposed to have only couple of days there and then set off to Savai’i, the other large island. We had a job to do here and we would either miss out on this or all our other plans would be thrown out of sync. I felt like screaming. I needed to do something and it needed to be something that would let us move on, that would let us get on with our job.
By now it was close to the time we had been scheduled to go to an interviewe with a TV station. I went to see the policeman who was dealing with us. Are we arrested, are we being detained? The answer was no. Can we leave then. Probably. I decided to push it further and ask for a lift. That wasn’t a problem either but the mention of the TV station made him nervous. He wanted to know if we will be talking about this situation. I avoided the answer but put him at ease saying the interview was arranged a week earlier. He was happy with this and we were kindly driven to the TV station.
In the long term this may have worked against us. The journalist was obviously more interested in the latest developments than our project and wanted to know about the cause of our problems. When we told her about the email sent by Ms Sass she wasn’t surprised. She said Ms Sass had discovered some scams in the past. Could be but, knowing what I know now maybe they were not scams but innocent people like us who meekly gave in, didn’t protest or argue and ran away before having the chance to clear their name. This seemed to be Ms Sass’s claim to fame. Once our side of the story was told, the journalist, being a good one, wanted both sides of the story. She said she would approach Ms Sass for an interview.
This was successfully avoided for a long time till the journalist growing more and more impatient decided to go ahead with or without it. But even though Ms Sass had, by then, enough time to come up with new accusations, which were explained more as suspicions, I think she may still have been uncomfortable that we had challenged her authority and her public viewpoint. From here on I believe she took our wish to allow the truth to come out as a personal challenge against her and an insult to her abilities.
Anyway back to the police station because we were still not free to go yet and that is where the camera crew from the TV station took us after our interview. When we got back, the shift had changed and we had to explain everything again from scratch. The new officer turned out to be far more efficient though and an hour later we were allowed to go back to the hotel. He had called the hotel owner who, learning the true situation, apologised to us profusely, invited us back and offered quite a few extras in a desperate and in fact very genuine attempt to make up for the unpleasant event. She was taken in, she said, like so many others would be, but she had the decency to admit to the mistake and apologise. I should have checked my facts, she said, before alerting the police. But in her favour was the fact that she was entitled to believe that the CEO of the hotel association would know her facts before blackening someone in the eyes of all her members.
That, perhaps, should have been the end of it but it was just the beginning. No one thought to suggested that Ms Sass should now withdraw that email. From that moment on we were treated, by the hotel industry and later the whole of tourism it seemed, as crooks. We felt we were being watched, wanted and hounded by Ms Sass and later also the national newspaper who seemed to take great delight in helping Ms Sass uncover the “scams”. Unlike in communist Poland, freedom of the press is available in Samoa. However in our view that freedom was abused as they seemed to think they were “free” to attack us with no justification, little in the way of facts and a frightening level of, quite frankly, despicable inuendos. There appeared to be a view that the paper should support Samoans in right and wrong, good and bad. Truth took a back seat. Decency wasn't even in the same car.
A day or two after our police experience we left for the island of Savai'i. We were unsure as to what welcome we would receive but we felt that it was unfair to take our fears out on the whole country and punish Samoa because of what this one individual had done. Also, if we did leave the country totally, we felt that Ms Sass would be allowed to say whatever she wanted and convince people that we were not genuine, and we could not defend ourselves.
Almost as soon as we arrived in Savai'i we discovered that, to belong to the hotel association, was almost like belonging to the communist party in pre-1990 Poland. You don't need to think for yourself, in fact this is very much discouraged. All the thinking is done for you by the so-called elite. It appeared that not one, but at least two e-mails were sent around about us. Soon we learned it would be almost impossible to find accommodation anywhere even if we were prepared to pay for it. "I don't know who to believe and I don't know you but I have to listen to what the Hotel Association is telling me”, we heard on more than one occasion. We also came across a little old lady who was simply scared that she may lose her membership in the Hotel Association if she took us in.
There was the thought of doing it all incognito but we are quite a distinctive couple and once the rumours spread around, and it happens very quickly in Samoa, we were doomed. We felt like wanted criminals. We felt torn apart between staying and fighting or just leaving. We didn’t need this mess, we didn’t deserve this suspicion that surrounded us. We were worried our work could suffer because we didn’t feel free; didn’t feel free to ask people for information, for an insight into their culture, for help. We didn’t know what to do.
Partly thanks to a car rental company who, a bit earlier had offered us a sponsorship deal for our time in Savai’i and did not pull out of it even when we told them about our problems with the hotel association, we continued. Having a car was a blessing otherwise finding accommodation would have been very difficult. Just driving around we were able to find someone who was not a member of the hotel association and gladly agreed to put us up. We so enjoyed our stay with these genuine, friendly people that we feared even more leaving their place and facing again the tourism industry, with views distorted by the Hotel Association.
While staying there, we met the local pastor and he suggested we visit a local primary school. We went there the next day, me dressed in a traditional puletasi, a gift from our host's daughter in law. The presentation we gave there became a highlight of our visit to Savai’i. At the end of our talk to the students the head teacher stood in front of us with tears in her eyes saying what a great opportunity it would be for her students to be a part of the project, to be able to share their culture with the rest of the world. She said she was hoping we would still work with them even though they don’t have computers and thanked us for opening the eyes of her students to their own culture and what they have and what they can share. On the verge of crying she hugged us and blessed our visit to Savai’i, hoping it would be a wonderful experience for us and promised that, when we visit them on the way back the following week she and her students would have some work ready and we could take it with us and put it on the site. We were really touched.
Then we moved on, uncertain of how we would be welcomed elsewhere but inspired with our short stay in Salelologa. In Manase we found a place where the owner was happy to take us in but the staff seemed very suspicious and in fact one of the receptionists told me that though she cannot challenge her boss's decision, she simply didn't understand why he decided to help us as they should be listening to the Hotel Association. She added that she was going to write to them and tell them where we were staying as in the latest e-mail Ms Sass had asked that if anyone saw us they should inform her so she could keep track on us.
This reminded me of my grandma's stories about communism and the secret police. You could never be sure who spied on who and the whole communist propaganda was based on the idea that members of the communist party had to be more loyal to the party than any other ideology in life. If you were considered an enemy of the communists (or in Samoa, the Hotel Association), you could get into big trouble. In both cases, as we discovered, there were always ways to prove that you were guilty even if you were innocent.
This comment from the receptionist scared me a bit. It had the feel of an obsession and it became obvious that Ms Sass would not accept the truth and would remain determined to prove that she was right. We were waiting for a moment when we would do something wrong and she would pounce. In fact in the very resort where they were happy to update Ms Sass about our whereabouts, we had all our money stolen. This indirectly gave her the chance and she jumped at it. After we had the money stolen we ended up, at 9.00am in the morning, on the petrol station, which had had no petrol for the previous two days, with no more than 38 tala in our pocket, no credit on the phone, no place where we could stay and feeling completely lost and hopeless.
We thought the petrol will be there in the morning, so we were told the day earlier, but now we were informed that it won’t arrive before 3 p.m. We needed to be at the police station as soon as possible. The next hour was a complete nightmare. I felt like a lion trapped in a cage. With cramps in my stomach, I walked in circles. We knew the guy who stole our money and this was just another huge disappointment with someone we to some degree trusted. There was no logic in what he did because we learned he actually didn’t really benefit financially. He spent a lot of the money he stole on buying himself new clothes and a mobile phone to convince us of some strange story he had made up about his boss from Apia coming over to Savai’i and bringing him all this stuff and asking him to stay longer in Savai’i. He had said he would pay us back and that was why we waited a day before going to the police. Then he just ran away and that was why we found ourselves on that gas station, helpless and hopeless. Apparently the previous night the guy had got drunk and given away most of the stuff he bought. This made little difference to us.
An hour or so later, as my cramp got worse, we saw a van belonging to the company from whom we had rented the car., They stopped by us and asked if we were returning the car today. We said that was the plan but we were waiting for the petrol. We told the guys what our problem was and they felt sympathetic and offered to pick up the car on their way back and deliver it for us if we happened to find a lift to the police earlier. We agreed we would leave the car key in the fales on the other side of the road with the sister of the owner of the rental company.
We spent most of that day and the next with the police. When we arrived at the police station we had a report ready for them and a folder of photos of the “suspect”. We were also able to tell the policeman at what bank he exchanged the New Zealand and Tongan dollars he had stolen from us. Yes, we were able to find this information out but how is a separate story. The policeman copied all the documents and photos onto the memory sticks they proudly carried around their necks but when we asked if they will send it straight away to Apia because this is where the suspect was, we were told no because there was no internet there (and presumably no fax) so they would wait till Monday and take our report across on the boat to the main island. We now only had to survive the weekend till Monday when we could have some money sent from England, provided of course we could make overseas phone calls from somewhere.
Once we left the police station it was too late to get to the school. We hated to think we might have disappointed the kids who prepared some work for the website. We tried to contact the head teacher but she wasn’t available on her mobile. We couldn’t get to Silia’s fales, where we had initiially stayed from where we were, so we had no idea where we could spend the night. In the end, fate came to our aid. We met an old chief who said he could offer us accommodation and he would be going to Apia on Sunday so he would take us across in his car. We accepted the offer with relief. We were really tired and dreamed only about going into the little room we were shown by his daughter but it was impolite as the chief wanted to know the details of our story.
Finally we got into bed about 10 p.m. Half an hour later a loud knocking on the door made us jump out of bed. The daughter said there were policemen in the hall and they wanted to talk to us. We put on some clothes wondering if they might have already arrested the suspect and went out only to find out the policemen came to question us as they got hold of the e-mail sent by Ms Sass to all the hotels implying that we are frauds and were abusing Samoan hospitality. This was a real slap in the face. We tried to explain first calmly that this had already been investigated by the Apia police and suggested the policemen contact them. This didn’t work. The police wanted to investigate everything independently and the old chief also got alarmed and wanted to know the full story.
My nerves were close to breaking and I tried not to think about the four hours we spent with the Apai police. However, unlike the Apia police, the Savai’i police could not grasp straight away a concept of sponsorship-in-kind. The situation was made worse by the old chief, whose motel was a member of the hotel association (or Polish communist party as I kept thinking of it), completely changed his attitude to us and decided in his mind that we wanted to get help from him under false pretences. Apart from the motel the chief also ran something called the “church of the divine mercy” and he saw sponsorship in kind as the work of the devil.
We went through another hour of interrogation during which the old chief completely took over. My nerves let go. I couldn’t think about anything except how unfair it was that the little criminal who brought all this on us was running around free because the police had no e-mail to follow this through and obviously no time to deal with it as they were dealing with us and we were going through this mental torture. The old chief was also incredibly abusive and believed that he could just shout at us any time he felt proper. I wanted only to go back to our room and cry myself to sleep. The chief looked at me and in his “divine mercy” said we should go to sleep and leave all the documents with him and he would carry on with the police and also decide how to proceed with the case of the thief.
I was woken up in the morning by the sound of a loud discussion in the hall. Richard was already awake and talking to the chief and the police in the hall. I dreaded joining them but I could not stand thinking of Richard needing to defend himself alone. I went to the hall and sat next to Richard. I tried to steer the conversation into the theft case but I wasn’t listened to. The chief decided to take a certain position in the whole case and nothing could sway him. I was innocent, young and beautiful and taken advantage of. I was a stupid bimbo who was taken away from her country and dragged into this whole scam that Richard was running. He would ignore the fact that I was an equal partner in the project and that snapshotsfrom was in fact my idea. He thought I should run away, he actually presented me with a little story suggesting it, and Richard should be punished in hell for his scam and for his arrogance. Sponsorship-in-kind is an evil concept and we have no right to bring it to Samoa because Samoa was a commonwealth country and there very strong on human rights and asking people for free accommodation, even if it is in return for promotion, is strongly against human rights.
There was no real way we could defend ourselves. We didn’t want to stay and suffer more of this abuse but we had nowhere else to go and the chief seemed to have now taken over the police investigation into the theft. Again following a few tears, as only this seemed to work on the old chief, his divine mercy agreed to our suggestion that we should go back to Manase and retrieve the mobile phone that the thief, after getting drunk, had given to someone there. He ordered the police to do so and the excursion back to Manase was organised. The old chief gave us and the policemen a lift to the police station (did they come 4 km by foot?) and we set out.
When, some two hours later, I was sitting in front of a little police station near Manase where our friendly policeman had brought for questioning the woman who had been given the mobile, and a local policeman was standing outside with his ear on the wall listening to what was happening inside, I could not help thinking that spying obviously is not considered too bad a thing in Samoa. Ms Sass asked all the hotels to basically report on us and now this policeman didn't even try to hide it from us that he was desperately trying to find out what's going on inside. You see these guys had no communism and live in open fales and still they had perfected the art of spying. The woman who got the mobile cleared it of all phone calls and messages. We told the police we sent some to her and explained to her that the mobile was bought with the money that was stolen from us so how could she explain deleting all the calls. Apparently she made some calls to a boy friend and didn't want her husband to know so she deleted everything. The police appeared happy with this explanation.
We came back to the chief and survived the rest of the day. We tried to stay out of the house as much as possible though we didn’t avoid another argument. We really needed to sort out some stuff and as the daughter was really nice and friendly I asked her for help. She offered to make one phone call for me to a mobile phone though, scared of her father, she said she would use her mobile. A couple of hour later the chief had a good shout at Richard who took it surprisingly calmly. He said we were abusing his hospitality by asking his daughter to make calls for us whilst she has no money. Apparently in his culture it wasn’t polite to refuse so we just shouldn’t be asking. The explanation, that one it was me not Richard and two, how can we than ever ask anyone for anything, didn’t work so it was obvious it was just another chance to have a go at Richard, who didn't seem to care what the chief thought anyway.
As promised the chief took us to Apia though there might have been a problem because, despite what he had originally promised, we had to pay for our tickets and rather carelessly we spent 2 tala for a couple of mangos so we were two tala short. “What now”, the chief said, “who is going to pay it?” He waited till we searched around our pockets and found the required 2 tala. An hour or so later and after few prayers said with his daughters, the chief drove to a little shop and offered us some cold beer. We politely refused. Then he drove us to Apia and offered us a stay in his Apia house. We politely refused. Then he tried to find out where we would stay the night and tried to do his best to convince us to stay a few more nights with him which would be, he thought, far more sensible. We politely refused explaining we could not take more advantage of his generosity (and take more of his abuse) and hospitality.
Again, we survived another night and managed to make a phone call from the New Zealand High Commission. We could breathe again once Rich got hold of his son, explained the situation and asked him to send some money to us by Western Union. “Consider it done pops” said David and we knew we could trust him. “What’s Western Union” - he asked afterwards. He obviously coped with Western Union and as soon as we picked up the money we contacted PK rentals to arrange a payment of something like 80 tala we owed for filling up the tank and to ask for the return of Richard's passport, left as a guarantee. After many calls, a week or so later, we were told that the company, acting on the advice of Ms Sass had put in a complaint to the police about us obtaining credit by fraud, the sponsorship deal now becoming that because we were crooks.
We spent close to two weeks trying to get in touch with the Savai’i police, who by the way also failed to deliver the information about our thief to the Apia poloice, to find out about that complaint. I left many messages explaining that our passport is being withheld and the company were using their complaint as a reason for holding on to the passport. I said we missed our flight. Two flights, three flights and we are running out of money so we won’t be able to support ourselves in Samoa. No-one came back to us. No-one did anything. No-one really cared. Maybe they were too busy trying to catch our thief but this was just wishful thinking on our side as the police did nothing about the case either. We asked Apia police about the theft but they were unaware of anything. They did not receive any information or photos.
In the end and in great desperation we visited the Commissioner in Apia. It took him less than two hours to dismiss the complaint. He told the company that there were absolutely no criminal charges against us and no question of any fraudulent behaviour. Despite the letter from the police stating this and the complaint being dismissed, the company still refused to give the passport back. Our money was almost gone. The police said they could do nothing more as this was now a civil case. The company were claiming that we owed them about 50 times more than the 80 tala. So, it would seem that the company could really demand any amount of money from us and we should either pay them or they can keep us in the country? With no court order? With no investigation? Just because they decided to. Where is the old chief with his human rights I thought? Don’t we have a right to go back home?
We asked the car rental company for the invoice to see what amount they think or claim we owe them. They could not send anything to us immediately. In the end, a week or so later, they sent us, instead of the invoice, a copy of the letter that they had sent to Ms Sass two weeks before, outlining their claim for compensation from us which amounted to about 4200 tala. They were charging us for the sponsored rental, they made up some amounts for petrol and also claimed that we damaged the very first car they gave us, we had to swop cars twice, yet they happily exchanged that car when we returned it. There was also an amount of 300 tala which brought us more tears, this time from laughing. This was claimed for out of pocket expenses; this being the use of a computer to produce a CD with the info about the company and the printing of a page of paper with changes we were asked to make to the info on the CD before we put a page for the car rental company on our website.
The involvement of Ms Sass was pretty obvious. How did she know we had the car from the PK Rentals? Samoa is a small place and she obviously likes to know things. She does not like to know though about what we really do. She still seems not know about the existence of One World Foundation of New Zealand and still claims there is only one genuine One World organisation and we don't work for them. She confuses a tourist website with an educational website and points out we have no cultural information of any value on the tourist site. She is happy to share her ignorance publicly. Though she doesn’t like to give interviews to the TV journalist who professionally tries to show two sides of the story, she is happy to talk to the local paper which publishes first a series of rather defamatory articles for which only PK rentals and Ms Sass are interviewed and some old quotes from us put in.
Nevertheless apart from being briefly entertained by the requested “invoice’ we were pretty depressed. Till the amount is paid the company refuses to return the passport. We have run out of money and but for a kind invitation from Aggie Grey’s hotel who offered us a free room for however long we needed it, I don’t know where we would have been. There might be someone else who would take us in and in fact we did stay with a collection of friendly people who would stop us on the street to express their sympathy, asked us not to think badly about Samoa because of what had happened and offered help. But with the stress we were going through, without having a safe haven of the hotel, we might have cracked completely.
We went through a time when, though sleeping in luxury, we would eat 1 tala rice vermicelli soaked in water boiled in the electric kettle and soaked in the hotel wash basin. This we would mix with a 1.70 tala tin of sardines for dinner. We suffered in silence and luxury. And we suffered more and more the closer it was to the Christmas and the New Year and the more obvious it was becoming that we will be trapped in Samoa , away from home and friends, for both of these occasions. The car rental company had now decided they would not talk to us and all communication should go through their lawyer except that they didn't have one. They said they would give us a contact to the lawyer after New Year but on the 5th January, my birthday, we were told that they would give the contact of their lawyer only to our lawyer, not directly to us. We didn’t have one and I don’t think any lawyer would take either of the cases; ours because it was too risky, there seemed to be some high-up people now getting annoyed with the whole situation and the media interest it was receiving, theirs because, well, I hope there are no lawyers that stupid even in Samoa.
Eventually, after the intervention of the British Consul in New Zealand we got the passport back in mid January but even then the rental firm refused to hand it back at first then, when it was inevitable, the British Consul having contacted the Samoan Foreign Office and their police, they made a big show of it on TV, actually giving it back to immigration which seemed strange. But not for long. The next day we were called to immigration, meeting the assistant CEO. He returned the passport and told us to be on the next flight, which was of course impossible.
Meanwhile the media had been having a field day. TV stations, and Samoa has two of them, were generally speaking impartial, telling all sides of the story. but the Samoan Observer, the only national newspaper, showed no impartiality at all. An editorial appeared which quite frankly was one of the most disgusting pieces of journalism I have ever seen, the writer almost inviting Samoans to beat us up. Then a regular columnists displayed how to break the libel laws of any civilised country and then possibly plumbed even deeper depths than the editorial by hinting, or implying, that the work we do is often pretended to be done by paedophiles.
Funnily enough, when the first article about us appeared, and this one was a genuine piece about the work we were doing, the editor was rung up by Ms Sass and asked why he had been taken in by us. Not content with that the TV news were asked why they were running the stories and toward the end got a letter from the Prime Minister himself suggesting they should stop reporting about us and our situation. The journalist turned out to be a little bit of a rebel and ignored it.
But the influence that was put on the media again reminded me of a communist regime and the censorship from those days. The Samoan paper proudly displayed "Freedom of word" slogans in their offices. This makes it far worse. They were free to chose to print just one side of the story and print letters and editorials which broke many of their own code of ethics, which they also liked to display proudly in the paper. Suddenly I realised just how much the media can be used in a hate campaign and also how easy it is to manipulate facts and influence people. The fact that the paper made no attempt to show the facts and find out the truth wasn't just bad for us. It was the only paper in that country and Samoans relied on it for information. What is the use of doing that when you find out that your paper is lying to suit someone else's agenda. At least in communist times everyone knew the paper was government controlled, here those who control the press do so more subtly.
While all this was going on we were still trying to get to the bottom of the stolen money. We knew who the thief was, he had confessed to us but we then gave him a day to pay us back, as he said he would, but he ran away. Stories about his arrest varied, he was, he wasn't, but finally nearly a month after the theft they caught him, charged him, he confessed and they let him go until his court case. So here we were imprisoned in Samoa and he was free to phone us and even tell us Ms Sass had paid him to follow us but maybe you shouldn’t believe that.
Mind games or confusion, incompetence or corruption, your guess is as good as ours. The police took a month to catch him and two weeks to answer the fraud charge against us. Should it really take that long. Each day was an incredible frustration, each time we missed another flight brought me to the verge of hysteria. Richard for the first time as long as I have known him also didn't cope well. One day he just stopped talking. His voice was gone. Someone said it could be stress.
I had never felt that trapped in my whole life. And I was trapped not in my own country, not with family around and everyone else in the same situation. This was supposed to be a democratic country not a communist regime. It says it supports human rights. Yet we have no right to be free, no right to return home, no right to live it would appear because the police or government doesn't care if we have anywhere to sleep or anything to eat.
Once we picked up the passport there was a big push from immigration for us to leave the country. We got a visa extension and theoretically we still had some time left in the country but the immigration officer kindly offered to book our flights the very next day. However, the flights were fully booked and we found out that we had actually lost our sponsorship deal because of the negative reports sent out of Samoa. This meant we would need to pay full price for our flights out of the country. This would also mean we would lose sponsorship for flights to other Pacific Islands we planned to visit in the future. We needed to rescue this deal and our sponsor was prepared to reactivate it provided they got a simple statement from the Ministry of Tourism saying they never supported nor saw any proofs of the allegations made by Ms Sass.
We asked for that letter, naively believing this would not be much of a problem. The Minister had left the country and passed it on to the CEO of Tourism who eventually met us. She couldn't do such a letter until she had investigated things but we had told her of our problems about ten weeks before, so what had she being doing about them all this time. It seemed that she wouldn't finish her investigation until the immigration officer had got rid of us. And he wanted us out indecently quickly. We explained that we needed to wait for the letter as, having had the money stolen and having spent the rest of our funding on our prolonged stay in Samoa, we were unable to pay for the tickets. The immigration officer said he would "pull some strings" and book us a flight on Tuesday. This was the date of the court case about the stolen money so we asked if we could stay an additional two days but this was out of question. The airline was threatened with a 20,000 tala fine if they wouldn't fly us out of the country.
Luckily nature was on our side and arranged a cyclone in Fiji so we stayed long enough to find out that the court case was only a plea hearing and the guy didn't turn up anyway. If he had it would have been fun as he was being charged under his mother's name not his actual name. It seems he may have offended before with that name, so using his mother's, he became a first time offender. What right did we have to ask questions when we weren't supposed to be there. Having got this far, you won't be expecting them to issue an arrest warrant when he failed to turn up, will you. No, they just said we've called it an adjournment and he can turn up another time.
On that same Tuesday the Immigration CEO went on television and said we had been issued with a removal order, something they just forgot to tell us. So we left. Off to Fiji with no onward ticket, the pulled strings not reaching beyond there, and wondering what would happen. In a way we hated to leave. During the time we were held there we met so many nice people who supported us and made some real friendships. We felt like a bird for whom someone opened a cage and who was afraid to fly into freedom because the cage was all he had become used to. We were sent into the unknown. We had no idea how much damage was done to us in other Pacific countries. We did not know how we can get out of Fiji. All this time we wanted to leave so desperately but now it felt like our wings were broken. Such mixed feelings.
We got no letter from Tourism but we received a good bye letter from Immigration to make up for it. It was handed to us on the airport. It was a document banning us from Samoa forever.