Samoa - Stewardship

  • The Samoan shampoo flower births in the beautiful flower garden of Pago Pago. It closes around each petal and squeezes its juices from her delicate body. The petals cream like a mustard bottle at a picnic. The hand of man grasps under the flowering blossom, receiving the juice of nature.
  • Samoan ginger bud, shyly peeping out of its shell, sits quietly atop a bed of greens. At a distance, a fly drinks in the nourishment it offers and a rugged boulder watches over the bud protectively and with care to make sure that such beauty is preserved for man to appreciate.
  • The Bird of Paradise flower challenges its way vigorously, silhouetted against the dominance of its surroundings, constrasting with the beautiful color it produces. In retrospect, nature speaks for itself. Respect and appreciate our gardens of Eden.
  • Yesterday: What was the impact on our ancient environment when the caldera we live in erupted? If we really treasure the beautiful land formations it created, we’ll keep them clean. Conservation is our business!
  • Today: Let Rain Maker Mountain own the panorama of nature. Like the flimsy man-made ship on the edge, let’s stop trying to conquer nature and become responsible stewards. Bubbling jewels of delight, the clean sea waters will salute us forever.
  • Tomorrow: People cast a foreboding shadow on their planet and its ecology today. Let’s learn to use its resources wisely or else we’ll lose it all. Conservation: it affects everything and everybody everywhere.
  • Appreciation of traditional plants to sew an ula spurs a person to admire the beauties of nature, always with the eye of seeing an end product, garnering the eyes of the admirers. Tiger lily, whose broad root base rises up, holding its bundle of long yellowish-orange elongated leaves, surprises and delights the unaware. Though unusually covered with a sheath of dried stem coverlet, the light green layer enveloping its base - when cut, removed, shaped into rectangles, peeled, and separated - are individually sewn, usually reflecting the brilliance of white glistening snow.
  • Like a tailor, the maker of the ula envisions how a warm yellowish-orange leaf would look, cut-sewn and contrasted against a glossy white rectangle, folded at the ends, pressed together and sewn, one after another, forming a tapestry of designs limited only by one’s desire or initiative.
  • Beautiful, shimmery red petals of a Teuila blossom, adored by many for its red intense blushing color, are plucked and snipped into delightful single petals, daring to be strung with the contrasting white and warmness of the yellowish-orange hues, awaiting to compliment the wearer of the ula.
  • Shiny affluent puddles into dancing silver shadows. Plastic wrapped for eternal damnation, mankind’s waste spills, mixing on nature’s innocent lap.
  • Where does it go? Into the vast, welcoming bosom that nurtures those named Pacific Islanders. The rocky shore hungrily gnaws at the ocean, fervently craving more for the coming year. Meanwhile creamy stones mark the absence of folly.
  • A sweet forest of lemon-lime hooks is home to languidly spilling droplets-suspending, pooling, thoughtfully waiting for their turn in the life cycle. What a poignant reminder that hopeful life continues.
  • Drinking that cold refreshing juice is so good when you're thirsty. That cool, sweet liquid traversing from your dry cracked lips slowly, smoothly rejuvenates those gasping, minute cell-ends of your water-deprived body. We do that like a cycle. We thirst, we drink, we live. How about the bottle? Does it end there?
  • Water is used to quench our thirst. The plastic bottles, caps, and warping plastics are used to avail ourselves of water, especially in urban areas. Water is a recyclable resource. It is the same with plastic. Can we picture our world if water is not recyclable and we use it all up?
  • This empty bottle is crying for help. It is because of neglect and lack of respect to our environment that this bottle is murmuring for aid. It is a waste of our recyclable resources.
  • The ground crew volunteers are happily posing as they tirelessly clean the campus for the PREL conference. Picking up trash is one way of showing or a practice that needs to be engaged in order to show that we care about the environment and maintaining its beauty.
  • Ants are quietly marching and searching for a delicious meal between the crevices of this old wall. They are curious little creatures who stop at nothing in covering every wall of the classroom, running back and forth to provide food for the colony. Meanwhile the bricks are displaying their ocean blue colors, inviting ants to pick up every piece of food lying around in the area.
  • What more can I say? With plenty of food and the lush green untouched environment, I found myself attracted to the comfort of my new home. I have been longing for a peaceful, spacey, and clean surrounding to raise my family and do what I do best - meditating.

During the July 2002 Pacific Educational Conference in American Samoa, several educators attended an all-day Picturing Science workshop. Workshop activities focused on showing teachers how to implement this project in their classrooms. Using the Pacific Standards for Excellence in Science as the basis, participants discussed the theme of STEWARDSHIP. They created a word board and discussed all the words and concepts related to the theme. Then, picking from six main categories within stewardship - plants, landforms/geology, natural resources, water, recycling, and animals - participants used digital cameras to take three pictures representing their selection.