Brand New Face

Dollars & Paint

Give Paco A

The Pago Pago of the Fifth South Pacific Conference is to most local Samoans a tuneless symphony of green - and - white paint and of palm trees held in

place by stay wires.

BUT to the conference delegates it appears to be a good place to hold an international conference in, and on that criterion American Samoa deserves the warmest con gratulations—mixed with awe and ad miration for sheer American in genuity and know-how.

Pago Pago, as every traveller knows, has been the slum of the South Seas for so long that it has been a positive embarrassment to the rest of the Islands. In Pago Pago, and the hills beyond, the shacks have been of rusty tin, the villages lost in jungle, the roads made of dust and potholes. Western Samoans with their proud traditions and their strong matai system have almost ceased to identify their own country in any way with the dirty island across the strait.

When last I saw Pago in 1958 I was moved to write to PIM : “I won der how many South Pacific towns ever stand off and see themselves as others see them? I think if Pago took the trouble it would get a shock.

Far from being the Islands paradise that ballyhoo has made it, Pago is a most dejected town . . . American Samoans have been attached to the US for rations and quarters for so long now that it has lost interest in trying to be itself. It has no identity of its own any more.”

Well, some things are different now.

Pago has been given the kind of spring cleaning that no town ever had before, and it all happened so fast that even the Samoans are unsure of their good luck.

“You know, when I get back from lunch every day,” said my cab driver last week, “I find a mile or two of road that wasn’t there before!”

He isn’t kidding. American Samoa suddenly has 11 miles of remade, widened, tarred road (of highway standard for any island), with an other 10 miles snaking out day-by day; a 9,000 ft. jet airport that the experts said wouldn’t be finished in a year; an 800-seat community hall that without doubt is the most

modern and exciting in the South Seas; three huge new classroom blocks that would be the envy of any Territory; modern new housing— and more of everything to come now that the country has been promised $9,500,000 for 1962 and a whopping $13,300,000 for 1963.

But that paint and those palm trees! The paint, about 5,600 gallons of it, has been brushed on virtually every shack in the country. All are sparkling pale green and white— which appear to be the colours that officialdom decided on for easier con trol. The paint was sold at a dis count and the Samoans advised that in the interests of Uncle Sam’s red face a united effort was called for.

So for two months the paint brushes have been smacking away, and the day I arrived I swear the place smelled of nothing but paint.

Not all of it was done with en thusiasm. The young son of one leading Government official pointed out to me in disgust one house on a hill and announced: “My Dad had to ask the man five times when he was going to paint his house, before he finally got around to it!”

A few days before the conference started there wasn’t a pint of green or white paint in American Samoa, and an Army “paint special” flew some more in from Stateside.

The grounds around the new school buildings, where the conference is be ing held, were still being landscaped almost up to the official opening cere mony. The bulldozers and graders had quietened only in the last few hours.

The remarkable conference hall was made more beautiful by the sudden appearance of a number of fullgrown (and bearing) coconut palms in ap propriate places. These had been dug from the hills, together with a huge root ball, and moved with a mobile crane. The guy wires were added in case the wind got a bit strong on opening day and let Uncle Sam down.

The new conference hall (it will be used as a community hall after wards), is designed in the traditional fale style, with the addition of pre formed concrete arches. The roof is of cedar shingles, ordered from northern US last February, but the shipment was snowbound and arrived in Pago only in April.

The locals already refer to the hall as “the turtle”—which it re sembles in design. It cost $300,000, and looks it.

All of what has happened to Pago has happened in the last few months.

Travellers who were here a few weeks ago are already out of date.