#2. Fiji is rich in culture

When people ask where I want to work. I usually say just in Fiji. Whatever it may be, it should just be in Fiji. I do not like the concept of “brain drain” in our economy. What happened to being proud to be in your nation, trying to build a better place for all our people and having to maintain and sustain our heritage. One of the things I find to be very interesting is our culture and the quirks that come with it. Some of it is not even documented. Some have been passed from particular clans over generations and not even recorded in our history books. I find it a wondrous opportunity for us to learn from what happened in the pre-contact period. A couple of weeks ago I was in the island of Viwa. This island has quite an interesting history. Apart from the famous Reverend John Hunt being the first missionary in that island, this place is also rich in culture and traditions. One of its very famous monuments is this. I was not even sure whether it was a stone or a stump of a tree, but it has been there for a long time. It is said that even if the whole of Fiji was having a drought, if any of the children of Viwa Island came to peel a strand off this monument; it would rain, but only in Viwa Island.

Ealier this year I had gone with two friends to a beach in Navua called Tonitoni Beach. I recalled thinking why is it named Tonitoni and I thought that it could have been named after the village nearby but I was told later on that this beach was named Tonitoni because it was the place where cannibals “dipped in” their food [humans] before eating them. Tonitoni means “to dip in”, hence that was why the beach was called “Tonitoni.” Here is a picture of Tonitoni Beach. I must tell you though that we did get lost while trying to make our way back into the main road. It took a while but we made it back somehow. Luckily there was enough fuel to bring us back to the main road before we ran completely out. 

Three weeks ago, I was in Macuata in Vanua Levu. It is a very beautiful place. While coming back on the ship called Spirit of Harmony, I met these two people who worked for something that had to deal with national heritage and culture. I was very interested in what they had to talk about. One of the things they talked about was the removal of this artifact from the museum because it was rotting. The people who were supposed to be maintaining it, didn’t do a good job looking after it and so it had to be taken out. That artifact was in the image of a man in his traditional clothes made out of wood, and wearing traditional clothes. I remembered that this artifact was the only one I remember back when I was in primary school. We would come for a trip and this artifact would somehow really scare me. It looked so real. I used to think that at any one time it would blink at me or come after me and my classmates if we turned our backs to it. So hearing that this object would be removed from the museum, made me a little sad. I had planned on scaring my future little kids with it when I eventually got around to that stage.J Such is life I guess.

Two years back I was in the chiefly island of Lau. It was a very interesting place to be in. I had been a part of the volunteer scheme that would help build their hall in Yadrana. This was because just a while back we had a tsunami come into that part of Lau but luckily it was a small one and no one got hurt. They however did not have an evacuation Centre. That hall we helped build was for their meetings as well as if anything like that was ever to happen again, they would have that place to be in. Somewhere in this island was this cave. A really dark cave with so many snakes inside it. They say that if a girl was pregnant and did not tell anyone, she would be lost in there for days until they took a ‘sevusevu’ and offered it to the priests. While the rest of my team was excited to go on this tour.  I said I was not going to go in. Sure I am adventurous, but snakes, that is a big NO –NO. The cave is said to have been filled with really cool nice water and the snakes do not bother you and it is very dark in there. I also did not want to go because I have got no idea how to swim and the thoughts of snakes sliding around was not exactly my idea of how to spend a day.  While I loved the idea that this was a very interesting heritage for my people, it was just a little too adventurous for me.

There are so many other places in Fiji that have their ‘mana’ and heritage. I would like to write them all but these ones are just a few I want to talk on. My Fiji is rich in culture and traditions and heritage. I just wish we could publish it all on paper so that our future generation could understand and have this knowledge and be proud of it. We got westernization coming in, that everyone is forgetting our culture and accepting western ways of living, eating, etc. While I appreciate the westernization, I also wish that we would keep the values of our culture and traditions and hold it in great appreciation amongst all the change.