Word: samoa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ascent Program. Sea Hawk Academy promises "the wake-up call your teenager needs." Many offer to arrange the kind of "escort service" David van Blarigan found at his bedside. The schools and camps are often isolated, either in rural America (Thompson Falls, Mont.) or in faraway locales (Western Samoa). They number as many as 2,000, estimates Alexia Parks, author of a new online report on the subject, An American Gulag, and they come in many varieties: religious, military-style, and some focused on special issues, like drug abuse. A few try to "shock" gay children back to heterosexuality...
Moments like this are typical of Cox's experience as he scours the world's flora in search of plants that will benefit Western medicine. Cox has spent years in Samoa interviewing or apprenticing himself to traditional healers. He has also traveled throughout the South Pacific, as well as in Southeast Asia, South America, East Africa and as far north as Sweden's Lapland. In Samoa alone, healers have led him and his colleagues to 74 medicinal plants that might prove useful...
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...
...foundation has since provided money for the Western Samoan village of Tafua to preserve its 20,000-acre rain forest. It helped persuade Congress to authorize the National Park of American Samoa--about 10,000 acres of forest and 420 acres of coral reefs in the neighboring archipelago. And it has helped villages build schools, medical clinics and cisterns to catch rainfall, the main source of drinking water...
...dreams that one day soon the people of Western Samoa will see the benefit of preserving not only the rain forests surrounding their villages but also the vast cloud forests that still cloak the sides of the volcanoes that form the spine of Savai'i. Here he hopes the villagers will agree to "make the biggest national park in the whole world," before the chain saws get there too. He wants them to become as excited about the project as he is, rather than have the impetus come from outside. Behind this goal lies a philosophy that runs through...