 A lot of the education system here in Samoa is all like talk and talk. Teachers come and they write on the blackboard. Not so many kids are taking on science. I think it's the fun part that they are missing. Imagine Samoa is all based on making science fun and relevant to society. My name is Sohail Samuela Ali. My role in the Imagine Samoa Science Circus is a science communicator. The cup and card experiment, all it needs is a cup with probably half full of water. You put the card over the top and then you flip it upside down. There's nothing mind blowing about that. But it's when you remove your hand from the plate and the plate stays on the cup that you get this universal aha moment. This was the first experiment Joe first introduced to me before I joined the Imagine team. I was pretty surprised, I don't know whether it was magic or whatsoever, but it was all pure science as Joe explained. He's a talented man. The beauty of this experiment is it showcases what we're about with Science Circus Pacific. It's about breaking down some of the barriers to science, using simple items to showcase some really awesome phenomena. So Science Circus Pacific is an Australian government funded program and we look at building capacity in education across the Pacific. In Samoa, the main partner that we're working with is an NGO called Imagine Samoa. And that's headed out by Ruth Mogbelport. And her goal is to set up the first Science Center in the Pacific outside of Hawaii. Ruth has a few really young budding science communicators. I'm going to use my five bin. So a lot of teachers, they go through a lot of challenges trying to make fun science. My favorite part of doing the show is basically when I see the kids engage into the science, that's something that we want to see as they grow up. They take on science. When COVID happened, originally we were like, OK, we just we just hold tight. We're in a holding pattern for a month. No, we'll make that three months. No, that's six months. Oh God, it could be two years. Since COVID Joe left Samoa and there was just me, Jade Akinese and a few others doing the shows all by ourselves. Do you remember the second one? In the beginning, I had no confidence to say in front of the audience. When the lockdown happened, I realized that majority of the team members that were more outspoken than me are locked in the other countries. And I decided I have to step up. Purple, it's not that bad, actually, because there's a bit of blue. What we ended up doing was like, well, OK, we know that we have a space in Samoa, a factory that belongs to Ruth and her husband, that we have run training in before. It's where our team feels comfortable and safe to learn. So literally, we bought a laptop, a projector and got Ruth to get a screen over there in Samoa, sent it all across, and within two weeks, we'd essentially gone back to business as normal in Samoa. COVID gave us an opportunity for Jade and Sahel to need to step outside their comfort zone, enabled them to show themselves that they can do this and they are capable. And since then, they've gone from strength to strength. Last time we spoke, you mentioned there were some climate experiments that you were... What were they? Now we're doing a show on climate change. What we're presenting is the effects of climate change. This is such a hard thing or a challenging thing to communicate as a white outsider to someone in the Pacific, because my experience of climate change is completely different to theirs. You don't want to go in there and give them a simple fun experiment to showcase increased storm surges when they're living there. We're going to use our imagination this time. Now imagine that water is our ocean. How can we take some of those experiments, add some new ones and maybe change our messaging so that we can then talk about climate change in an empowering way in schools? And not necessarily in a positive way if the story isn't positive, but you do want to be empowering. They've heard of climate change, they've heard of the words, but they weren't in debt of how it's affecting us until that one experiment I did, which is acidic water, and that got their attention in that I said, if this continues, our fish will die and we won't have any seafood. When I said that, immediately a lot of gas and they're like, no, not the seafood, don't take away our seafood. After the show, the kids would come up to us and talk about the climate issues. Some of them were pretty sad, some of them they wanted to make a big difference. One of them raised their hand saying, should we start by cleaning the mangroves, the beaches? And I said, yeah, that's a good start. You can ask your community to help you. Some knowledge and a meaningful way of understanding an issue is the first step to empowerment. And we need to start somewhere because climate change isn't just a scientific challenge. It's an economic one, it's a social one, it's a political one. Once you have that understanding, the problem may seem a little bit less scary. And you may find that you have somewhere to start to then think about, well, what can we do about this? We want to keep on doing these kind of shows. We also hope that they can make a difference.