At least 70 people, most of them children, have died in Samoa since the outbreak of measles began in mid-October
A group from New Zealand - called Kiwi Coffin Club Charitable Trust - have come to the aid and are making and sending smaller-sized coffins to Samoa.
The smallest of the coffins, designed for the bodies of babies, are decorated with felt butterflies, daisies, stars and hearts. Volunteers have placed a teddy bear in each of the infant-sized caskets. “It’s not easy. No-one is prepared to lose that many children,” said Tagaloa Tusani, a New Zealand-based volunteer who is organizing the coffin transport."I don't want any more children to be buried without a coffin," he said.
The highly infectious disease has attacked Samoa’s most vulnerable, with 61 out of the 70 casualties aged four and under, the government said on Monday. After causing devastation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar and Ukraine, among others, measles cases started appearing en masse earlier this year in the New Zealand city of Auckland, a hub for travel to and from small Pacific islands.There are now almost 4,700 reported cases of measles in Samoa’s island population of only 200,000.
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