Our Samoa Village Get Hired to Build Canoes!

As you recall, we did a project in Samoa (2012) where we built 16 canoes—one for each family in the village of Matafa’a—to replace those lost in the tsunami of 2009. Since the entire village helped with the project—the elders teaching everyone the art of carving an outrigger canoe—it was like canoe college. After that, one of the young craftsmen even got hired to build two canoes in a neighboring village. All that, alone, would have been a fabulous MicroAid success story.

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Well, recently, I was contacted by a guy in Apia (the capital of Samoa) who puts on a yearly festival-event featuring canoe races, traditional Samoan dancing, arts, and culture. He wanted information about the canoe project—he read about it on our MicroAid Facebook page—and was asking me a lot of questions about “where,” “how,” and “who” built them.

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The upshot is that he is hiring our village to build 20 canoes for the festival. Twenty!!!

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Again, this will be a village-wide project, where they will be paid more money than they have seen in many many years. All 300 members of the village will benefit.

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This is one of those surprising effects of the MicroAid work—the multiplier effect.

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I hope this make you as happy as it does me.

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Thank you for your part in making this happen.

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Wishing you all the best,

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Jon