Samoa Business Women of The Year

The South Pacific Business Development Foundation (SPBD), which lends out funds for small development projects at the grassroots level, celebrated their 10th anniversary. 



SPBD's contributions to the development of Samoa's economy has been tremendous.  Like W-CAP they focus on encouraging women to follow their dreams, develop their own business and set goals thereby improving their living condition.

Congratulations to SPBD!

Utah Artist Supports W-CAP

Santiago Michalek of Utah is having an art show this Saturday, May 21st 6-9 pm.  He has generously offered to donate 25% of the price of any of his paintings that sells to W-CAP.  All you have to do is mention this post. Entrance to the show is free and everyone is invited.  We are so excited about this chance to raise money for the foundation!

A sneak peak of some of his paintings can be found on his art blog.

Ali Pili, W-CAP's founder, will be at the show and we hope anyone in town will be able to come to support a good cause!

Staff Highlight - Brooke Gurr

We would like to welcome our newest staff member and gardening facilitator Brooke Gurr.  Brooke has recently settled in American Samoa with family and we are thrilled to have her and her extensive knowledge and skills. Most recently she was involved in creating a student farm at University of Hawaii-Manoa, called SOFT (Sustainable and Organic Farm Training) Student Farm.  She also organized volunteers to start a First Grader Garden at Noelani School  in Manoa, Oahu. 

Brooke is originally from Maine and she loves gardening and nutritious eating so she's a great addition to our program.

Thanks, Brooke, for making W-CAP a part of your life!

Sewing Classes

Our Assistant Director Melinda taught sewing classes to several of the local women with the hope that they can use these skills for a future micro-enterprise home businesses.  They made bags: totes and mini coin bags w/ drawstrings and used a pattern for one-hour totes.

Here are the finished products:

Tsunami Puppet Show

One of W-CAP's first projects was to create a puppet show that addressed fears of the tsunami. The facilitators wrote the script, made the puppets, recorded the script, wrote a song in both languages, learned to work the puppets, and arranged to give our show at schools around the island.

We first went to a school in Tula, one of the villages severely hit by the tsunami. Fortunately no lives were lost, but the students are still traumatized by the memory of it all and its lasting effects.

These are the six characters dancing before the show. There's a frog, turtle, octopus, clam, shark, and starfish.

This is a cute girl named Marisa (on the right) with her friends.

We performed the show 4 times in different classrooms. The teachers were so sweet to let us come.

In this picture you can see temporary classrooms set up by a local construction company. Tula School has two, one is being used for the cafeteria and the other is the preschool, since those portions of the school haven't been repaired yet. You can see that the school is right on the beach!

Here we were with the older students (grades 6-8). I thought they'd be bored with the show, but they loved it!

Here are our performing puppeteers in action!

We drove up the the NOAA station afterwards and saw people settling up in the hills. That is a FEMA tent set up next to their make shift shelter.  Just imagine facing a cyclone in that!