A Day at the Lagoon

Environmental issues on Rarotonga have not gone unnoticed, with several agencies seeking to raise awareness and educate the community of the detrimental effects of the way we live. These agencies aim not only to focus on the negatives but also want to show us how we can alleviate these problems by making small lifestyle changes ourselves.
Lagoon Day presents the perfect opportunity to convey his message. In fact the events slogan recognises that- “We are the problem – We are the solution.” For the past three years Lagoon Day has been teaching people about environmental issues, how we contribute to the problems and why we should care about them. In this vein we spoke to Angie Tuara, the agent responsible for conducting a community survey at this year’s event, about getting the message of the day across.
In the course of our interview Tuara told us that it was evident that the community is still largely unaware of its affect on the lagoon environment, specifically stating; “This year we noticed a lot more adults that have come through, especially the traditional leaders. What they’ve found is that although we’ve been running this for three years, because they haven’t been coming in the last few years, they’ve just been astonished by, for example, the lack of life in our lagoon. I thought it was common knowledge on the Island.” Tuara further asserted- “What older people remember from their younger days is no longer that, today they noticed a lifeless lagoon.”
Tuara said she felt that the most important aspect of the community survey she was conducting was to improve Lagoon day for next year’s set of visitors, and that the feedback the event receives from the students and booth holders helps them plan for future events stating; “There’s an advantage (with the feedback) in that we can then know how the booths interact with the students to make it more interesting and make them more part of this.” Ultimately their aim is to spread further awareness of the issues, in a bid to start correcting past mistakes.
Although organisers of Lagoon day hope to reach all age groups they recognise that the majority of their audience are school children. Thus the event has been catered with this in mind. The Ministry of Marine Resources (MMR) made their posters very informal and very simple, designed to grab children’s attention. They also brought touch pools filled with clams and sea urchins to show some of the local marine biodiversity, but they also brought pools with examples of the type of refuse that is damaging for lagoon life such as plastic bottles, that cause some of the problems.
Rebekah Daniel from the Ministry of Marine Resources told us that; “We’re educating them (the children) about what they can do to play their part in making the marine environment cleaner.”
Dorothy Solomona, also from the MMR, explained to us that the students; “...are our storytellers to their parents, they’re going to tell their parents you can’t do this...because this is going to happen in the lagoon or this is going to happen on the land...Because of them, some parents have made changes in their lives.” In this way the event reaches out into the wider community. Solomona went on to say about the MMR- “What’s happening inside the lagoon, we can’t change it unless people, on land change their attitude, change their behaviour.” The success of the message of lagoon day therefore rests on the students themselves.
To try and establish then if this message was getting through we spoke to several students, one told us, when asked what they had learned that day, “I learned how to keep our environment clean.” Another told us “They taught us to separate cans and glass”. All the students we spoke to, when asked if they’d be telling their parents about what they learned at lagoon day, gave us a resounding “Yes!” Results can’t be determined in the short term but the overall sentiments of the school children would suggest that the issues they were presented with were understood, however it is only in the long term that you can rate the success of initiatives such as Lagoon Day.

Headlines : Times 290 02 March 2009
- Lucky $1,000 winner
- Century old palm trees and the French connection
- Koutu Nui takes part in Raui meeting in Moorea
- WOM Award Dinner for Ake Hosea-Winterflood
- Island of Atiu to host Koutu Nui AGM in June 2009