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In the Samoan language, the word "tei" means brother, sister, cousin -- a word that exemplifies the nature of extended and very close Samoan families whose grief over last week's deadly tsunami resonated here and around the globe.
And like any family, Utah Samoans and their friends waited in anguish for news about relatives in western and American Samoa, hard hit by huge waves launched by a magnitude 8 earthquake on Sept. 29.
The latest tally of the dead is about 170, among them the very young and the very old. Lost with the elders were centuries of history that, in the Samoan way, they teach succeeding generations.
"Today, there are a few books around, so the old ones keep wisdom and pass it down to children and grandchildren and so forth," says Gaugau Tavana, an international educator now living in Spanish Fork. He lost his niece to the tsunami, and her mother, his sister, was badly injured.
Reared in western Samoa by his grandmother, Tavana had the foresight to record and transcribe her teachings.
"It's a rich legacy ... I'm so glad I did that," he says.
The wisdom of the elders also captivated Paul Alan Cox, a Utah-born ethnobotanist whose LDS mission in Samoa left him fluent in the Samoan language. He later returned for years of research into the medicinal properties of plants, taught to him by the elderly women who serve as healers in the Samoan culture. One result of his work there is Seacology, a
Cox also recalls Hurricane Val, which struck the islands in 1991. He was working on Savaii Island then, and says the wind was so ferocious that people pressed themselves to the earth to keep from being blown away.
At one point, he says, an elderly man remembered a lava tube and took 300 villagers to shelter there until the hurricane passed.
Last week in Samoa, it was the elders who knew that when the ocean suddenly drains, or when they see fish flopping in the waves, that a huge wave is coming, and they tell the younger people to run.
Given that so many Samoans live close to the ocean, Cox says, it's "a miracle" that even more people weren't killed,
But when elders are lost, so is the equivalent of a limitless encyclopedia -- history, genealogy, culture. Cox notes that dementia is relatively rare among older Samoans, probably because they spend so much mental power remembering and retelling what they know by heart.
"I worry about the great amount of cultural knowledge lost," said Cox, who became so acculturated in Samoa he was made a chief in the village of Falealupo.
It all makes me think about the things I meant to do and never got around to: recording my parents' life histories, or the evening conversations between the aunts and uncles on a summer evening.
I listened, though, and still can tell the stories that need to be told, but there will always be gaps and omissions that can never be filled.
Maybe one of these days I'll pick up my tape recorder and start telling stories.
