Moorea Island, French Polynesia
Wednesday, Jan 18, 2006
This is my first report to the Rotary Club folks back home. I had been planning to attend the Rotary Club over on Tahiti, the main island in the splatter of volcanic islands called French Polynesia. Tahiti is the exotic name we hear most often, but in fact, the choice tourist spots are on other islands--Bora Bora, for one.
JF and I left Tahiti after a pleasant weekend there with family and came to be tourists on Moorea, a short 20-minute ferry ride from Tahiti. Moorea is often called the "sister island" of Tahiti. It's calmer here, less commercialized in some ways, slower-paced. Sort of like coming to the country after a stay in the big city.
Paging through a guidebook yesterday, checking on things we might want to do, I came across the ad for the Rotary Club of Moorea. They were chartered only last November, so it's a brand new club that is part of a district that includes New Zealand!
Yves Pasquier, the president, was most welcoming when I called, though he told me he'd never heard of a Cultural Ambassador. He and his lovely wife were quick to invite me to the evening's meeting, which took place in a very swanky resort called The Moorea Pearl Resort and Spa.
This part of the world is famous for its black pearls-- actually they range in color from the color of eggplants through flywing, rainbow and deep purple, silver and green. So the "Pearl Resort" takes up the theme, the objects that attract so much touristic attention here.
Jean-Francois and I checked out one of the pearl boutiques yesterday. They wanted about $150 a pearl, so I don't think we'll be buying any on THIS trip!
Yves and his wife picked me up in their convertible and took me on the road that circles the island, pointing out picturesque bays where Captain Cook dropped anchor, "discovering" this place. The interior of the island is made up of tall, green peaks and valleys, all that's left of the volcanoes that created this place.
We pulled into the very posh parking lot of the Resort and were ushered into a shockingly frigid conference room for the Rotary meeting. This club has 23 members, though only 14 were able to come last night. They divide their weekly meetings into three business meetings, where they discuss club activities such as a health and anti-drug information booth at an upcoming run-walk fundraiser for island charities. The fourth meeting, which is the one I attended last night, has a presentation and a gourmet dinner at the resort restaurant. The meal ran to a hefty $45, which helped Jean-Francois decide against attending, but it was quite nice: red or white wine, salad with mozarrella cheese and tomatoes in a balsamic vinigrette sauce, nice fish steak in a honey sauce with rice. I wasn't familiar with the name of the fish, but Yves told me it was one that's found on the bottom, like halibut or cod. For desert, three scoops of different ice creams in a pastry cup.
But before dinner, we had the meeting in the air-conditioned conference room. First Yves introduced me with elaborate compliments on my French. Apparently, the French do not expect my fellow countrymen to speak decent French at all, and so someone like me, who is basically fluent, is always a surprise and a pleasure. I am always quick to point out that my gift for languages is a gift from God, and so I can't really take much credit, but it is nice to be able to communicate fairly quickly wherever I travel.
Here is Yves' speech, in English, to the Rotarians in North Carolina
I had left my banners back in Tahiti, never for a minute thinking they had a club here, so I'll be mailing our banner back here when I get to the main island next Monday or so. For the non-Rotarians reading this, it is a custom all over the world for Rotarians to exchange banners of their individual clubs when they travel. The club's collection of banners is a story in itself of where the members have been and what travelers have visited.
After my introduction, I gave a short speech about the Rotary Club scholarship program, how I came to know about it, why I applied, and what the procedure is for getting accepted. I talked about my nonprofit, Worlds Touch, and our projects in Nepal and how learning Nepali will help me with that work. And, of course, I thanked the Rotarians there because they are part of the grand network of Rotarians the world over who have made my Cultural Ambassadorship possible.
The group was friendly, and after my short speech, Yves presented me with the club banner, a very attractive green with the Polynesian totem animal, the yellow lizard (gaeko), with various symbols for happiness imprinted on it. Here's a photo of that presentation:
Next it was Christa Teihotu's turn to take the floor. She is one of the elder members of the club, and is also a leader in the island movement to preserve the environment here. She began her talk describing the beauty and simplicity of her childhood here, where there was no such thing as "garbage," because everything went into the family compost heap, or fed the pigs or chickens or was immediately recycled into other uses. Nothing wasted. Life was simple then, with all one's food grown on the land, or fished out of the sea. The rivers ran crystal clear; the sand a brilliant white.
At 10 or 12, like many of the children of French citizens in these parts, Christa was packed off to France for eleven years, for school. What she saw when she came back, roads, garbage dumps, ugly advertising billboards, cars and trucks everywhere, galvanized her into action. She has been hard at work trying to protect the fragile island ecosystem ever since. For many years, she ran a low-impact hotel overlooking one of the two picturesque bays here. Now retired, she has devoted all her time to organizing groups of local citizens to petition for stronger laws to protect the land, and for enforcement of the laws they have.
I learned, for example, that junked cars are a huge problem here in French Polynesia. They simply do not have land for junk car lots. They do have machines for compacting the cars into bales, but THEN what do they do with them? JF tells me some are shipped to New Zealand, though what they do with them THERE, I can't imagine. Here, one batch of almost 300 of these car-bales were dumped directly into a big hole that had been dug to get at the sand for concrete construction. The developers had dug right down to the sea water table. They were forbidden to fill the hole with dirt, since it would immediately wash right out and muddy the waters of the lagoon. So what did they do? They dumped 270 squashed cars into the hole, leaking oil and windshield wiper fluid and all, covered it over and then simply shrugged away any protests.
You can bet Christa will be protesting, however. She's a woman with a mission, and a Rotarian, a combination that can prove quite effective in getting things done.
After dinner, my hosts drove me back to my bungalow in the shadow of the volcanic peaks and bade me goodnight, sending best wishes to their fellow Rotarians in North Carolina.
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