When it comes to natural disasters, much of the attention has focused on recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile.
However, people are still picking up the pieces from another quake, in a region closer to home.
Nearly six months have passed since an 8.3-magnitude quake struck the Samoan coast, killing almost 150 people.
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Now, there are signs that these hardest hit villages are slowly coming back to life as some locals dare to rebuild.
Building under way
New 'fales' - traditional Samon homes - are under construction at the Taufua Beach Resort in Lolamanu, where huge walls of water killed 43 people.
Sili Apelu and his wife, who run the resort, lost 14 family members including their baby-grand daughter.
They themselves spent six weeks in hospital, before coming back to rebuild the resort.
“We never had any thinking that we're not going to build or that there's going to be a tsunami the next day,"Apelu told SBS.
"We knew that tsunamis and earthquakes are part of creation and the first thing that came to our mind is to try to bring our workers back to work put them into their jobs so that their families could make some money,” he said.
However, tourism on the island has been slow to recuperate.
New villages emerge
Almost 200 metres above the coastline lie former shelters, to which villagers escaped when the tsunami struck the low-lying regions.
They have now become entirely new villages.
Despite not having good roads, running water and electricity, many residents of the new villages say they are happier here.
