He went from doing nothing to doing everything he can to stop domestic violence

As a boy growing up in Tonga, Simi Poteki remembers watching a couple get into a fight that led to the husband beating his wife.

His father told Simi, “Turn away, stay out of it. It’s not your problem, that’s his wife, she belongs to him, you have no say.”

And so he stayed out of it.

The boy grew up, stowed away on a freighter bound for North America, got caught, stowed away on another ship, then another. By the time he was 23, he’d stowed away on seven ships, and got caught every time. Simi Poteki was a lousy criminal.

But his persistence, in a convoluted way, proved to be his way out. Just before his 24th birthday, a sympathetic clerk at the American consulate heard his story and took pity on him, granting him a visa and green card so he could come to the United States legally and see what he could make of himself.

That was almost 50 years ago. Simi, 72, is retired now, able to look back on a successful career as a bus and truck driver (including 2 million miles of safe driving with Utah Transit Authority). He and his first wife, who died in 2002, raised four children, all of them grown and raising families of their own.

And what’s he doing in his golden years?

Leading a cause that encourages men to stop beating their wives.

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It wasn’t until Simi married his second wife, Susi, that he stopped staying out of it.

Susi had been married three times before, and every husband had one thing in common: they beat her up. When she left the third one, she was fed up enough to become an activist against domestic violence.

When she and Simi were married in 2010, she began educating him about how wrong it is for men to think women are their property and they have the right to hit them. The message really sank in when Susi invited Simi to come with her to San Francisco for the Asian American Pacific Islander Violence Prevention Conference of 2014.

“That’s where I started to understand that I had been around domestic violence all my life and didn’t know it,” recalls Simi. “So I told my wife, ‘when we get back to Utah, if I see there’s a problem I won’t just leave it alone.’ When I came out of that conference I realized it is our moral obligation to stop it.”

Once back in Salt Lake City, Simi rounded up seven other men from the Tongan community and they enrolled in a 19-week domestic violence education course given by the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition. Every Thursday night, for four hours, the men attended their classes. When they were finished, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill signed their certificates.

Then, to keep the ball rolling, Simi founded a nonprofit group he called KAVA — Knowledge Above Violence Always — to provide a forum for Polynesian men to talk openly about domestic violence and what to do about it.

Simi knew the challenge was enormous. He was well aware he was advocating to stop something many Polynesian men didn’t even know existed.

“In our language there’s no word for it, there’s no meaning. What is domestic violence?” he says. “First you have to define it, but to define something that is not in your language, how in hell you gonna do that?”

But the person who once stowed away on seven ships tried anyway. And bit by bit, KAVA Talks — the online forum where men can talk man-to-man about domestic violence — grew into a viable force. Nine years later, it’s going stronger than ever, welcoming not just Polynesians to its online discussions, but men (and sometimes women) from all races. The website is pik2ar.org/kava-talks.

Simi understands talking it out isn’t something that comes naturally to his peers.

“Polynesians think a therapy group is a bad thing because people will think you’re crazy,” he says. “People will say, ‘Oh, he’s going over there because there’s something wrong with his mind.’ Of course there’s something wrong, but that doesn’t make you a crazy man.”

The objective is to get men to stop and think before they turn to violence, and to educate the community how important it is to get involved.

“The worst thing you can do is say nothing. When you see violence, yell, do something that distracts, that breaks his concentration,” advises Simi. “Then you walk the other way. Don’t try to stop violence with violence. That’s the wrong way to do it, because you are then worse than what happened. But speak up. A lot of times, if you say something, somebody else will say something.

“I grew up in an environment of abuse and everything is tolerated when it comes to violence. I was in my 60s before I realized how this is wrong. I don’t have a degree or anything but I can visualize what is going to happen to the next generation if we do not try and stop it now. Men have to step up to the plate.

“Maybe we’ll never stop it in our lifetime, but at least we can talk about it, at least we can do something.”