Kiwi brothers restore a little paradise

The beach at Lalomanu during the tsunami (left) and after the Jennings brothers helped with the clean up. Photos / Brett Phibbs, Darryl Jennings

Two New Zealand brothers have provided hope for Samoans dealing with the devastation of the tsunami, overcoming barriers to clean up an beach important to the villagers.

The Samoan village of Lalomanu was hit hard, with hundreds of people injured or killed.

Just three weeks ago the beach of Lafaga, in front of the Litia Sini resort, was covered in rubble, wrecked cars and fallen power lines and trees.

As soon as Darryl and Glenn Jennings of Wellington heard about the disaster they made plans to fly over to restore the sandy beach they had often visited with their families.

The brothers arrived on October 10 and stayed with the owners of the resort, the Sini family - whom they had got to know over the years - in a fale with 20 others on higher ground.

That same day, they began the extensive task of clearing the beach with the help of the Sinis and two Kiwi women who came across their mission.

The brothers used a piece of corrugated iron they had found in the wreckage as a sled. They loaded rubbish on to it and pulled it along using an electrical cable as the handle.

Darryl Jennings said he later bought a piece of nylon rope from Apia and tied it to the back of his rental car to help pull the sled along. The rubble was moved into piles along the coast.

"At the beginning of the mission we were the brunt of a few jokes, the couple of Palagis scratching around in the broken concrete," Mr Jennings said.

"But as we went on we started to gain traction and we started to clear some areas ... We were basically working dawn till dark every day.

"We literally hauled tonnes of concrete and coal and building material and fale posts off that beach."

Mr Jennings said he spent about two days in meetings with Government officials and the contracting company controlling the diggers in Apia to get the piles cleared, taking along the village chief, Taula Sini, for support.

The digger company had been contracted to the Government Land Transport Agency (LTA) and was primarily responsible only for clearing the roads but Mr Jennings managed to talk it into helping with their clean-up.

But last Friday, the brothers were told the diggers would stop work the next day at noon when Government funding stopped. After the tsunami, the Government had provided emergency aid to the area but as the roads had all been cleared and most corpses recovered, the digger contract was to go to a tender process.

However, Mr Jennings said people around Apia had heard about the brothers' clean-up efforts with the man-made sled and their mission had gained support.

"Come midday the next day, nothing stopped. All the digger drivers and truck drivers worked with us until about 3pm or 4pm.

"Ordinarily they would have got a real caning for that, they would have got a real telling-off.

"But they didn't because the manager of the contracting company was on the beach with us. Normally he would have been given a telling-off by the LTA but the LTA was on the beach with us on Saturday. All these people got on board and finished it."

He said the main reason for this was that the clean beach was a "symbol of hope" for the villagers.

"All the locals from around the area had a very strong attachment to that piece of the beach.

"People driving past would pull in just to look at it ... They are living in what looks like a landfill. And it gave them the hope that their bit of landfill can turn back into that, too."

The Jennings brothers were given Samoan names by the village chief. Darryl was named Lafaga Sini after the beach they cleaned and Glenn was named Faili Sini, because of his skills on the guitar. Faili means band.