Family lives off crabs

By Sarafina Sanerivi 04 December 2016, 12:00AM

Doing what you love and earning a great living from it are two things that rarely go together. 

And yet that’s exactly the case for a family from the village of Saoluafata.

For Tamalii Patu, her husband loves going out to the sea and he always returns with a whole bunch of crabs or fish.

Even though the family doesn’t eat the crabs due to their religion, Tamali’i’s husband still brings home the big catch. One day, rather than letting the crabs go to waste, Tamalii decided to earn the family some money by selling and ever since that day, the family began making living on sales of crabs and fish.

“We don’t just sell crabs; we sometimes have fish for sale too,” she told the Village Voice.

“My husband loves to go out to sea and that’s why we decided to start selling these things. He goes and catches all these different seafood so I decided to make use of it and sell it to earn a bit of money.”

“We can’t eat crabs because we are part of the Seventh Day Adventist Church but since my husband keeps catching it, why not sell them?”

Tamalii says that the money goes a long way to take care of the family’s every need.

“The money we make here helps the family a lot,” she said.

“We pay our cash power with the money, we pay the many different bill, we buy the food for the family and the children’s expenses.”

“So my husband goes and does what he loves and we make money out of it to take care of the family. We can make about $120 a day from sales.”

“We don’t have to sell all the time because after just one day of good sales, the money we make will take care of everything for the week.”

According to Tamalii, her family is doing great for themselves through the crab sales.

“My family is doing well these days,” she said.

“I actually can’t think of any differences between living in town and living in the rural villages. I guess one difference could be the job opportunities.”

“But what you find in town can also be found here in the village. We may not have jobs but we have a lot of land and the ocean to work; that’s where we earn our money.”

She says that Samoa’s way of life is quite simple; if you want to eat, then you must work.

“Life here in Samoa is not hard to understand,” Tamalii said.

“To put it simply, if you don’t have your head on straight then you won’t live a good life. There are people heavily rely on others to help them with life.”

“We have other people who just sit around and wait for things to be handed to them. In Samoa you must work hard and use your head to think what you need to do to live.”

By Sarafina Sanerivi 04 December 2016, 12:00AM
Samoa Observer

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