This week’s Samoalive Personality of the Week is Adimaimalaga Tafuna’i. Adimaimalaga was born on the 29th of July in 1946; she now resides at the village of Letava.
Adimaimalaga
is presently the Executive Director for the Women in Business Foundation.
Education:
“My school days were all spent in Fiji”. “I have training as a Radiographer, and worked for both the Fijian and Samoan Health Systems before computers started interesting me and I studied computer programming in New Zealand while my husband did some post graduate training here”.
“Computers brought me to work with the NPF, the US Peace Corps then to Women in Business Foundation when our founding members realised that we had created an organisation that was doing some good and needed someone to coordinate it’s programs”.
Main
highlights of your career:
“Seeing
the contribution our work has made to the quality of life in the village, for
instance, in the village of Tufutafoe on Savaii, a group of women have created
an economy in the village, which had gone through lots of hardship because of
their isolation”.
“
Seeing the organic process reach it’s goals, finally bringing our fine mat
project to the Pulenu’u committees of Upolu, Savaii and Manono and gaining
their support, and receiving the first confirmed order for fully organic coconut
oil overseas”.
Where
to from here:
“I
hope to see more village based industries being set up, more farms receiving
full organic certification and the producers being helped to market their
products directly to an overseas market, and not just being part of a system
where the rich get richer and poor stay where they are”.
“I
hope that some day, we will appreciate our wonderful culture enough to return
the fine mat to it’s original form and using it the way it was used in the
past; one beautiful fine mat to show someone how we feel, rather that a
truckload of lalaga which are so badly woven that we can’t even spread them
out for show”.