Word: falealupo
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...opposite her, a Westerner named Paul Alan Cox, is no ordinary student. He is a botany professor and dean at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, a world specialist in medicinal plants and, far from least in this exotic setting, the paramount chief of the nearby village of Falealupo. To people here, he is known as Nafanua, in honor of a legendary Samoan warrior goddess who once saved the village from oppression and protected its forests...
This time he brought along his wife and four young children. The family settled on the island of Savai'i in the isolated village of Falealupo, the westernmost point of Western Samoa, one of the world's poorest countries (average annual per capita income: $100). Here, far from many of the Western influences of neighboring American Samoa, Cox felt he could learn about the plants and the healers who use them before both vanished...
...Falealupo, the foundation paid for the construction of a series of connected platforms and a walkway 200 ft. high between two huge trees at the edge of the forest. Administered by villagers, the aerial complex has brought in about $1,000 a month from tourists and school groups since it opened, profit that the villagers use to maintain the forest. "This is the first time these people have made money from the forest without destroying it," says Cox. "If they keep making this kind of money and other villages hear about it, the forests will be saved...
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