Pacific Profiles
Recipe for Development
Maddison Nena Uses the Past to Grow the Future.
Date of birth: April 21, 1952.
Education: University of Guam, BA Social Science
Factoid: While studying on Guam, Nena was a night shift cook/supervisor at the popular King’s Restaurant, a job that stimulated an interest in starting a restaurant on his home island.
Maddison Nena is about as unassuming a guy as you’ll find around the Pacific. One day recently he walked into the Kosrae Village Resort — a small, island style bungalow hotel operation in which he’s a partner — in a T-shirt, jean shorts and rubber slippers, looking like a Kosraen just back from an afternoon’s fishing.
But Nena is Kosrae’s resident visionary, pioneering what could be one of the Pacific’s most successful eco-tourism/conservation projects. The fact that Nena comes from tiny Kosrae, population 8,000, an island with just 80 hotel rooms and a visitor count to match, only accentuates the significance of his accomplishments — a work that is very much still in progress.
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Returning home from the University of Guam in the early 1980s, he signed on as the state’s tourism coordinator, a position he held for 13 years until 1996. During that time he had a chance to visit many islands, including the Caribbean, and attend numerous eco-tourism workshops. It made him want to do something in Kosrae to give visitors “a sample of the village.”
While running the government’s tourism program, he built an office of local materials with a thatched roof.
“People who came to visit Kosrae were very excited by the buildings,” he says. “It got me thinking about developing a resort.”
But it wasn’t just for visitors. Nena says he wanted to do it “to open local people’s eyes to show that local people can build it.”
A series of visitor bureau advertisements in Skin Diver magazine brought Bruce Brandt and Katrina Adams to Kosrae in the early 1990s. Nena found they shared a similar dream, and soon thereafter a partnership was formed to build the Kosrae Village Resort. Despite government red tape and difficulty leasing land that delayed things for some years, the KVR was built and now has 10 thatched units and a large thatched roof restaurant.
As the KVR was getting established in the mid-1990s, Nena was already moving onto his current venture: Kosrae’s expansive Utwe-Walung conservation area and marine park. The state government established a large section of the island as a conservation area, and Nena is turning it into a living monument to responsible use of local resources and tourism development.
The marine park’s visitor center is an airy building hewed from local materials, replete with solar-powered lights, flush toilets and showers. The center is the jumping off point for local elementary and high school students to learn about Kosrae’s unique marine and mangrove environment, the islands’ dozens of medicinal plants, and the many legends and stories that accompany them.
The marine park also takes visitors for tours on outboard engine-driven outrigger canoes through the winding waterways of the rare and lush mangrove forest and swamp that serves as a moat around much of the southern part of the island — with an absolutely superb narrative offered by driver and guide Tadao Wakuk, known as Kosrae’s “last storyteller.”
“We sell the tours to the local hotels and train locals in the village to do the tours,” Nena says. “It has value to both locals and visitors.”
During one week in late May, Nena had 200 elementary students coming in one day, and a hundred high school students out for a picnic on another. “We always give them a talk first to give them ideas for conservation,” he says.
Nena’s work hasn’t gone unnoticed. Last year, he was awarded the Seacology Foundation’s Indigenous Conservation of the Year Award for his success in forming the Utwe-Walung conservation area. His work is also being funded by the South Pacific Regional Environmental Program as one of 17 similar projects in the region supporting conservation linked to sustainable tourism development.
As the marine park and visitor center takes off, Nena is looking to other income-generating projects for nearby residents. He sees possibilities everywhere, from soap and coconut oil processing, to banana and breadfruit chips.
He’s not talking grandiose plans for exports to the United States, but rather increasing local food supplies and products and income for rural villagers through self-sustaining, environmentally friendly activities. Nena’s drive to integrate development with environmental protection will no doubt generate increasing local support, particularly as residents see the economic benefits of his long-term and locally- crafted vision.
Photo: Floyd Takeuchi
