🛖🪴FaleTele 🪴🛖

A samoa faletele (big house) is a house that is used to host meetings for Matai's , family gatherings, funerals, or chief title investitures. I wanted to share my thoughts today after I had a bit of time to reflect on my trip to Samoa recently. As a few know, I was bestowed as a Tuilagi Matai (Chief Title), and with that came my responsibility to understand and invest back into my Samoan heritage, culture, village. My interests have been at all-time high, just learning and discovering everything from how the Matai system works, where do all the chiefs sit and why, the ava ceremony , architecture design to whatever I haven't been familiar with when it came to what goes on inside a Samoa faletele. So here's a few notes I made - It's an important house of gathering that it is located at the front of all other houses and whats fascinating about the faletele is each part of the faletele has a meaning behind it , from the pillars that represents traits like dependable, loyal, faithful, patience, willingness to try, humility, honour.etc To the roof meaning Alofa (love) , Fa'aaloalo (respect and dignity) to Tautua (service and responsibility). If you know me you"ll know where my heart and soul lay with the man upstairs. He gave me a vision years ago when I started off this journey, and it was a picture of a house, with the pillars representing the Pacific Islands and the roof representing the world. This was me, understanding what part we have to play within the Pacific. I am feeling blessed and grateful but also thankful for letting me share today. Alofa atu Andrew #2023 #PasifikaRiseUp #Matai #MataiWatches See less