She had spent all her married life pregnant and having children, and by the time she died, in her 30s, she had had half a dozen children. That's probably why she wasn't diagnosed as terminally ill until it was too late.
Her last few months were painful and awful. She lay at home, too ill to take care of her children, while her husband worked six days a week to earn about $300 a week.
There was no food in the cupboards, no fridge, no washing machine. The house was in an advanced state of filth and disrepair.
Their plight was discovered by a truancy officer, who came to the house to see why the children weren't going to school. She called in the social workers, who did their best to help, organising a benefit, collecting food parcels and clothing for the children, and going beyond the call of duty to scrub down the house and buy a duvet for the sick woman.
Initially, the social workers tried to find out what church the family attended, but the family seemed reluctant to seek help. They were ashamed of their circumstances, and because the woman's husband was an overstayer, they had become used to avoiding official attention.
They were impoverished in every sense of the word. They had no education, no capacity at all to cope with their situation. And apart from members of their extended family, who seemed to be no better off, they were isolated. If they had friends or community support, there was no sign of it.
That's why the funeral came as a shock. About 100 people turned up, including four church ministers. There was a profusion of fine mats and thousands of dollars worth of food.
The ministers and their wives sat at a table groaning with food, being fawned over and waited on by the extended family, while the dead woman's children hung around outside, apparently forgotten. None of the family seemed much interested in comforting them.
Afterwards, as is customary, the ministers were gifted fine mats and money. They drove off in their capacious, late-model vehicles, loaded up with boxes filled with beef, chickens, cans of corned beef, tins of cabin bread biscuits, taro and several barrels each of salt beef.
If they spared any thought for the motherless and obviously needy children they left behind, they didn't show it. The remainder of the food was divvied up between the rest of the congregation and extended family. When a social worker called on the family a few days later, there was still no food in the cupboard.
Apparently, this is what the Pacific way has come to mean for some people.
A social worker I know tells me that she often sees examples of this. Poor Pacific people giving beyond their means, borrowing money to meet unreasonable expectations. When do the churches give back? That's difficult to answer, given the increasing excesses of some of our church leaders.
I have heard of ministers arriving from Samoa, demanding the latest four-wheel drives and expensive renovations to the already substantial houses provided for them. I've heard, too, of the unrealistic pressures put on congregations by church fundraisers.
It's not only Pacific Island churches, of course. I've seen well-heeled pastors in fundamentalist churches preaching the virtues of tithing to the more financially struggling members of their congregations.
I wish they would preach the virtues of staying at school, the cost of having more children than we're able to care for, and the wisdom of investing in our children before we invest in church buildings or ministers' houses.
Of course, there are some Pacific church leaders who have the best interests of their congregations at heart, who take ministering seriously. I have fond memories of a minister who used to make the long trip out to see my family in my younger days, armed always with groceries.
My father, too, was a lay preacher in a Wellington church for many years, until the Samoan head office sent in a new minister, whose first priority on arrival was to build a new church. My father, who had been the church's treasurer for many years, could see that congregation was too small, and too poor, to afford the crippling mortgage repayments.
I'm proud to say that he opposed the move all the way to the High Court, and saved the congregation from agreeing to a deal that would have bankrupted them.
But too many church leaders seem to be blind to the realities of their own flock, and few seem to have the abilities needed to lead our communities in the 21st century.
We are flush with ministers and chiefs, our community, but I wish more of them were worthy of being called leaders. As one social worker told me: "The churches need to get real about the problems that Pacific families have, and start challenging the culture. They need to lower their expectations of people because some of them are just perpetuating the poverty we see."
So is culture the problem? My feeling is that the problem is not so much our culture as a perversion of it. I know, of course, that Pacific cultures are founded on values of love and respect, of the interconnection of family and community, but I've often struggled to find these values in some of the staunchest proponents of traditional culture.
They insist that culture is immutable instead of infinitely adaptable and evolving. But in trying to preserve our transplanted culture, to freeze it in time, some of us have ended up distorting it, even corrupting it, until "being Samoan" in New Zealand becomes more about the trappings and rituals of culture than it is about identity and the values that underpin it.
If we had been true to those values, that mother of six wouldn't have had to wait until her funeral before her community showed up.
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<i>Tapu Misa:</i> Where was the church when this woman was dying?
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