Polynesia’s Night tears

Paradise isn’t for everyone !

It has been quite a while since "the new Cythera", dear to the discoverers of our island as Cook and Bougainville, has lost much of its paradise aspects. The Polynesians are in pain, but kept smiling…

To prove this, we only have to afford a night, wandering the streets of the capital of Tahiti: Papeete.  

The money of the French nuclear power didn’t benefit everybody in Polynesia

Well before sunset, the iron curtains of all businesses fell. No more available for the stroller than blind facades, rusty and threatening. And at nightfall, the mean public lighting is barely enough to let us guess the multiple pitfalls that dot the damaged sidewalks… Thus, the Polynesian first city shows its true face.

In the Paradise of poverty  

Here and there, but in the immediate vicinity of the central market, people settle for the night. Of course, there are poor wretches completely de-socialized among them. But we discover with stupor whole families of four, five, six people sometimes including very small children, ensconced under the porch of a building, sheltered from the weather and looks by vague cardboards.

Don’t mistake: these girls are boys

Those have never benefited, in any way, from billions spent by France within the framework of "the nuclear annuity". For them, it’s to be hoped that the sky will be good balmy because they would be unable to have little shelter against tropical shower. Indeed, the flow and rainwater harvesting system is nonexistent or, in the best cases, ineffective.

The minors haunt at night

The other danger and not the least, for these homeless families, lies stems from many youth groups (often minor).

They take possession of streets after sunset until sunrise and early morning. From the most disadvantaged areas of the island, these adolescents in school failure haven’t other way, to finance their purchases of beer and pakalolo (local name for hashish) than the theft.

Police force and prostitution

In the same streets of the city center, close to the Town Hall and central police station, the ladies of the night pace up and down the same streets among general lack of concern. Here again, the misery of a large part of the population is not foreign to the heavy presence of prostitution. The contrast is stark between these young people surveying broken sidewalks and the luxury 4 x 4 brand new with heavily tinted windows stopping near them. After all, tell me, we are in a township of the end of the world... Perhaps. But we are also in France. And the worst is yet to come.

These “Miss Vahine Tane (or Raerae: transvestite) contests” hit the headlines media in French Polynesia

Indeed, to look more closely, the great youth of most of these prostitutes is striking. And it should come as the first surprise to learn that many of them are minor. For most, the first steps in the exercise of the oldest profession in the world are at twelve or thirteen years! The second surprise is that the majority of them are not girls, but raerae boys. In other words, they are male transvestites. 

Children’s rights and human rights…

And these are the same minor transvestites and prostitutes who are a little later in some bars and nightclubs of Papeete. All sites which the law prohibits access to minors, which is known by everybody… Everyone can see. Everyone knows. Everyone closes his eyes.

It is this kind of unacceptable things that the inconsistency and the immorality of an extreme corrupt political class led.

This is happening today, in Tahiti, in the territory of the French Republic, homeland of human rights…

An article of Julien Gué

Translated from French by Monak

Copyright Julien Gué. Ask for the author’s agreement before any reproduction of the text or the images on Internet or traditional press.