TRAGEDY IN PARADISE

Things grew here. Climbers smothered coconut palms and entire fields of taro were lost under blankets of vines. Papaya trees carried the weight of their large green fruit and hibiscus bloomed as though ready to burst. Villagers collected mounds of ugly noni fruit on bright blue tarps. Young men batted at swollen breadfruit, hanging like fluorescent green beehives. There was a sense of abundance in this fertile soil and it wasn’t hard to imagine that anything introduced would flourish and spread like wildfire across the island.

So, when a passenger carrying measles boarded a flight from New Zealand to Samoa in August last year, spread it did. The result was that by early January, Samoa’s Ministry of Health had reported nearly 5700 cases of measles and 83 measles-related deaths, most of them children under five.

The theories as to how this happened are vast. “There has always been measles here,” Kiona Lemoa says as her husband, Pastor Manuele Lemoa, preaches loudly inside the white Elim Church of Amaile, on Upolu’s south-east coast. The sermon was the last of several they’d been conducting about the various manifestations of the devil. “But this measles is different,” Kiona Lemoa continued. She fanned herself against the dense heat with her husband’s literature. “This one has come