A very happy and prosperous new year to you from us all here at Fataiekuasi.com. We can all agree that 2009 was a tough year for everyone at least on the financial front. And although we ended the year with a tragedy (Meleufi’s house), we’re still grateful that grandma Meleufi is fine and that no one was hurt. But even if no one knows what will become of each of our families by the end of this new year, we sincerely pray and hope that much better things will come your way during 2010. We'd like to kick off the new year with these suggestions:

COST OF OUR WEBSITE

If you’ve noticed how our website contains no advertisements, it is because ours is not free and that someone needs to pay for it. Each year, our website costs in total $100 US Dollars (= $20 USD for the domain name ‘fataiekuasi’ + $80 USD for the webhost). Relative to other hosting packages available online, ours is pretty cheap! We’re happy to tell you that our sponsor has agreed to cover these costs until the next family reunion in 2011, after which one can only hope that someone else will step up.

OUR REPORTERS’ “SALARY”

If there’s one thing that has made our site interesting for many of you, it’s the regular news updates from our reporters. As a way of encouraging them, we’ve offered to give them a small ‘salary’ at every Christmas. Having discussed this with our sponsor, she has agreed to continue this but it will be based on the number of updates from each reporter.Our reporters from Tonga, Fiji and Samoa will earn $10 Pa’anga for each news update while the other reporters will earn $5 Pa’anga per news update. E.g. if our man from the Lalokalosipani puts up a total of 20 news updates this year, he should get $200 Pa’anga for Christmas. Why don’t they all get the same? Well, we think that it’s a lot harder and more expensive to post news updates from the islands. Agree?

OUR TWO ADVISORS

We have the honour of inviting cousin Stan (Canada) and uncle Tavo (Europe) to be the official (unpaid) “advisors” of our website. Their main role will be to keep an eye on what is published on our site to ensure that they are all in line with both our family and Tongan values.

OUR FEATURED VIDEO

You may have noticed that we have embedded a ‘featured video’ on our homepage. This is intended to highlight special family events such as wedding, funeral, etc, as well as the possible live broadcast of family events via our site in the foreseeable future. Should you have a DVD or video files of a special event in your family, we would be delighted to highlight it on our homepage just like Fatai jr’s wedding. To get us your video files, go to www.mediafire.com. 'Log in' to our account there using: Email = admin@fataiekuasi.com Password = matahau676. You can upload up to 200 MB per video file and be sure to let us know. Should you need help with ripping files from your DVDs or uploading them, we'll be happy to help.

UPLOADING PHOTOS

Some of you have had difficulty uploading photos to our site. What you need to watch out for are the names of the files of your photos. Please make sure that the names of your photo files only have letters or numbers and nothing else: no apostrophe ('), no underscore (_), no hypen (-), no semi-colon (;), etc. From experience, we have found that if the names of the photo files contain only letters and/or numbers, uploading them is easy. Give it another try!

With much ofa and best wishes to you and your family for 2010,

Admin Team, www.fataiekuasi.com, our little home on the web!