From the Archives: Boatbuilding Empowers Entire Samoan Fishing Community
This story is based on the telling of events by Stan Hosie in his memoir about Counterpart International’s history, The House that Betty Built.
During a 1973 trip to American Samoa, Betty Silverstein and Stan Hosie, the founders of Counterpart International (formerly Foundation for the South Pacific or FSP), were presented with a new program idea in Western Samoa.
In the capital city of Apia, the Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary were running a leprosarium that was home to a number of people that had been cured of their leprosy. These men had been trained in woodworking but, due to social stigmas and local fears about the disease, they remained at the hospital, unemployed.
After gaining assurances that the men were no longer contagious, Betty and Stan brainstormed with the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) Regional Director at the time, Bill Hussey, to create a program that would employ the men as active and productive members of Western Samoan society. The resulting program, the FSP Cured Lepers’ Boatbuilding Program, eventually became one of the largest of its kind in the South Pacific.
The boats that were to be built by the program were designed by Swedish boat builders as an upgraded version of traditional Samoan fishing boats. Their familiar form would appeal to local fishermen, while their innovative design made them safer for deep-ocean fishing. The men in the program quickly learned the boatbuilding trade from the Swedish trainers and began to turn out fishing boats with surprising speed.
While the Swedes and boat builders were hard at work, FSP staff realized that without a place to store the fishermen’s catches, there was no point in even building boats. So, FSP raised funds to install concrete ice storage wells in various locations along the island coastline of Upolu. FSP was also able to find low-interest loan funding for the purchase of trucks to transport ice to the wells. Each morning, the fishermen would stock the refrigerator containers on their boats with ice from the well nearest their village, making it easy to keep the fish they caught during the day fresh. In the evening, after a long day of fishing, they were also able to store their catch overnight in the ice wells.
While the wells were being constructed and the transportation trucks were being organized, FSP raised further matching funding to build a fish market in Apia. Before the large ice trucks loaded the wells with fresh ice each morning, they picked up the fish from the previous day’s catch. After they refilled the ice wells, these same trucks were able to return to Apia and deliver the fresh fish to the new Central Apia fish market, all before the start of the business day.
Ultimately the program created hundreds of jobs and Apia became the first city in the South Pacific to become self-sufficient in supplying fish to its own people through such a networked undertaking. What had started as small project designed to empower a few men, eventually evolved into an incredibly interconnected system that set an entire community on a path toward long-term transformation and self-reliance. A great example of how Counterpart’s focus on partnership, empowerment and innovation were evident even in our earliest endeavors.
July 14th, 2010 | Tags: boat, boatbuilding, fish, fishermen, lepers, Samoa | Category: From the Archives
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