Life of language and medicine
‘‘Language makes us, enriches life. If you do not have that knowledge and belief in yourself and your language, you will be left behind.’’
GP/lexicographer b February 13, 1928 d November 3, 2019
Semisi Ma’ia’i used medicine and language to transform lives. His career as a general practitioner certainly transformed the lives of those he treated. And language, well now, that was an addiction.
At the heart of both was Ma’ia’i’s Samoan culture. He spent most of his long life preserving and translating Samoan words.
‘‘Language makes us, enriches life,’’ he once said. ‘‘If you do not have that knowledge and belief in yourself and your language, you will be left behind.’’
His legacy is not only the generations he served as a GP, but the Samoan language itself preserved in a glossary and dictionary, the latter four decades in the making.
Ma’ia’i was born on the Samoan island of Savai’i, and raised in the village of Sapapali’i. The eldest of three, he and his sisters all but brought themselves up after the early death of their mother when he was 11.
He recalled how his mother visited the hospital several times but was often unable to communicate what was wrong with her. In later years, communication between doctor and patient would be a motivation for his penning the Samoan/ English dictionary.
Their father moved them from their village to the capital, Apia, where they would have better access to school. He encouraged them to study hard.
His strong influence paid off for the children. All three were among the first in Samoa to be awarded scholarships to study abroad.
In 1947, Ma’ia’i was chosen to go to medical school in Fiji. He didn’t want to go at first – he had always felt his calling was to become a minister of the church.
But his father persuaded him to concentrate on medicine, promising he could do what he liked with his life once he finished his studies.
So he went to medical school in Fiji, followed by three years working at Apia Hospital. With a bursary he came to New Zealand, first to study English and gain his University Entrance, then on to Otago Medical School, where he graduated with his medical qualifications in 1962.
Flying into Aotearoa in 1955, he recalled noticing how close to the houses people grew their apple trees. ‘‘It was a long way from the village,’’ he said in
Navigators, a book on Pacific health leaders.
He met Jenny in 1963 at Wellington Hospital, where she was a charge nurse and he was completing his registrar years. The couple married in 1964 and went on to have two sons, Kim and Chris.
After a stint working in Samoa, they returned to Auckland, where he worked before taking up a position as a GP in Kumeu, northwest of the city.
He was the only Samoan GP working in Auckland at the time, and Samoan patients came from far and wide to be treated by him.
‘‘Many could not understand English very well, especially medical terms, so there were big barriers to using Englishspeaking doctors. So they came and they brought a lot of other issues which weren’t medical with them too,’’ he said in a 2010 radio interview.
‘‘They came with or without appointments. They just showed up in carloads.’’
Noticing this gap in the Samoan medical language, he was inspired to begin compiling a book of common medical terms that he translated into Samoan. He tried to build his own Samoan words so he could escape the use of transliteration, the process of transferring a word from the alphabet of one language to another.
He believed this transliteration was ‘‘bastardising’’ the Samoan language. ‘‘I realised that we would soon lose our language if we kept doing this,’’ he said.
He published a Samoan medical glossary in 1991.
His love of words gave him a formidable work ethic, rising at 5am to get three hours of study in before heading off for his day’s work at the surgery.
For years he would squirrel himself away to write and translate. Words, he once said, were his second family. An addiction.
His Samoan/English dictionary was 40 years in the making. Starting out with notes scribbled in pencil on paper, his work eventually made it on to a computer and finally into a book, Tusi’upu Sa¯ moa, published in 2010. It was the first Samoan/English dictionary.
Ma’ia’i received the Queen’s Service Medal in 2003, and in the 2011 New Year honours was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) for services to the Samoan community.
In 1978 he set up the Pacific Health Welfare Society with Tongan GP Leopino Foliaki and in the 1980s he gave regular talks on Pacific Radio presenting a Q&A session in which he translated questions and gave advice in Samoan.
Ma’ia’i had strong views on our laws around alcohol. In 2010, he was part of an action group calling on politicians to shake up New Zealand’s liquor laws.
Alcohol was like a communicable disease, equal to cancer, he once said. He felt it was his and society’s duty to show compassion, to find ways to reduce the temptation to buy alcohol and make it less easily acceptable and available.
Ma’ia’i, who retired from general practice in 2003, was a born scholar, and his work with words and language was his vocation.
His wife Jenny, who survives him with their two sons and grandchildren, says he never wasted a minute of his 91 years. – By Bess Manson
Sources: Ma‘ia‘i family, Navigators – Pacific Health Leaders Share Their Stories (Mike Fitzsimons/Nigel Beckford), National Library, Radio New Zealand.
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