New Food Helps

Hurricane Sequel

Vavau Recovery

Prom a Vavau Correspondent Now, just six months after having been devastated by a

major hurricane which raged

through the group for 40 hours in March, Vavau is well on the way to recovery.

VISITORS are amazed at the amount of rebuilding which private home owners have done. In spite of having no outside help and few financial assets, most local families are once more comfortably housed. Dwellings are, for the most part, smaller, because there was a heavy loss of timber and roofing in the storm, but they are, on the whole, better built than were the old houses which they replace.

The feeding problem, which will not be finally solved until the December yam crop comes in, is the most press ing one at present. However, with the recent handing over of the distri bution of relief foods to the Medical Department, everyone is now getting a fair share of whatever is available.

Under Tevita Puloka, head AMO at the Vavau Hospital, a fortnightly distribution of powdered milk sent by the Government of New Zealand is being given out to babies, the sick and the aged. Because few Tongans include rice in their normal diets, many of them were confused when they got their first share of the rice sent by Australia.

Intelligent Help

Realising this, AMO Puloka instigated group-wide rice education.

Copies of a few simple rice recipes were distributed to the various villages and were also read out over ZCO, the new Tongan broadcasting station in Nukualofa.

Nurse Meleane of the Vavau Hospital and Secretary Tui’ifua ’Utoikamanu of the Vavau Langa Fonua Women’s Committee, con ducted demonstration cooking classes at the hospital and at various local committee meetings. Their work has been valuable in aiding the people to get the greatest possible benefit from the help they have received from overseas. , .

Miss Katelina Keti, a Vavau woman who is at present a member (Over)

of the Pasadena, California, household of John Eliot, a former Governor of American Samoa, was, with Mr. Eliot, responsible for sending to Vavau a shipment of “MPF”, Multiple Purpose Food, the wonder low-cost vitamin meals which were developed by scientists at the California Institute of Technology and have done much to relieve famine conditions all over the world.

Under Nurse Meleane, who is in charge of the new programme for feeding hospital patients, various ways of using “MPF” to supplement native foods, are being tried. It is hoped that a later shipment will make it possible to distribute “MPF” to schools and to some of the outer islands whose people were the greatest sufferers from the hurricane.

This photograph of Neiafu, the main town of Vavau, Tonga, was taken a few months before the hurricane.

There are now a few gaps in the landscape.