Shopkeepers return to Tonga's capital post cyclone

Transcript

Lupe Ramsey owns a clothing store on the edge of the iconic Talamahu market. Now that electricity has returned to the capital she is happy to be back at work.

"It's good to be alive and we are blessed that we are safe. My kids and I, we came back to check on the store. [It's] not too bad, only some are wet but everything is safe. The water came in and all these shoes are wet but then we just put it up [to dry]. Everything is fine."

Ms Ramsey is now open for business.

"Hopefully so people can come and shop for their clothes [to] wear some [instead] of their wet clothes. So we put it up so they can come and buy at a special price."

However Suiti Leilani Alatini, a farmer who sells crops at the market says customers may be few as everyone has been hit financially.

The first day for me to come and see the market. We feel so sad because they see the food but no one can come buy it because I think they don't have money to come buy some.

Mr Alatini says while every effort has been made to salvage crops after the storm, there is far less produce to sell. He has watermelons that were harvested before the storm but other than that only a few cassava which were broken off damaged plants and some green bananas. Tausinga Taumoefolau owns a number of businesses including a central city cafe that was one of the few stores operating just two days after the storm with the assistance of a generator.

A lot of foreigners, palangis, visitors to Tonga and locals as well, were coming in here looking for a place to eat. So we just quickly put the fence [back] up and by Wednesday we opened up the place and right on time. So we managed to feed a lot of hungry folks here.

 
However Mr Taumoefolau says some of his other ventures were not so lucky. His ice cream parlour has nothing left to sell and a brand new steakhouse that was due to open on the waterfront in a month's time has now been destroyed.

I know it will take years for me to recover from all of this. Stocks from my icecream parlour were gone, power outages, but the impact of it is heavy. And to think about it, as a business man it will make you cry.  

Mr Taumoefolau says $US19,000 worth of new equipment had just been installed in the steakhouse and now he says he may not be able to open until next year. Either way Mr Taumoefolau says he is happy to see the capital begin to buzz again.