Where to begin?

It’s been a pretty eventful 3 weeks so please bear with us if we go on a bit.

For those who don’t already know, Marine Reach’s Outreaches involve a team of local and international volunteers travelling to the villages of Fiji providing medical, dental, optometry and spiritual care. This time we had 12 international members from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, US and UK joining the existing team here at Lautoka – in all over 20 people throughout the fortnight were involved.

The travellers started arriving from Friday 3^rd October, and one by one we were introduced and started building friendships over the weekend. On Monday morning we fired up the truck and started loading equipment, luggage and humans onto various modes of transport. Before long we were well on our way to Nagado (pronounced nangando).

Setting the scene

Nagado is a large village with several others surrounding it, making a total population of about 3,000 (all of whom had toothache, or so it seemed!). It lies on the hills of the Nausori Highlands in Viti Levu, the main island of Fiji. Apart from people’s homes the village consists of a community hall, a school and a nurse’s station (nope, no shops!).

It was the community hall that was to become the location for our clinic, a dorm for us at night-time and also where we encountered our first sevu sevu – the traditional Fijian welcome ceremony. The long speeches required were thankfully carried out by Ben as none of us are too adept at speaking Fijian! Then we provided a food package as a gift rather than the traditional kava – a root that is pounded to form a drink with narcotic properties. We have discovered that over the years this imbibement has come to be abused by many Fijians and this has led to many social problems.

Clinic Set-up

While the elders of the village decided to have a kava session anyway, we promptly began constructing our clinic. Within an hour doctor’s and nurses’ stations, three dental chairs, a pharmacy and a sterilisation area had been set up, and a considerable number of people had already lined up outside. Some of the villagers saw the accompanying rain as a sign of God’s blessing over our visit, other than the fact that they had to stand outside in it! The shelter that had been promised for our waiting patients only later emerged over the next two days.

Ironically, despite all of the water from above we couldn’t get any flowing into our shower and toilet block, so we all became proficient in hauling buckets and washing ourselves in novel ways.

The clinic quickly gained momentum and everybody adjusted well to the slightly foreign conditions. While the medically trained staff tended to the physical needs there was continuous pastoral support for patients wanting to be prayed for or talked with.

More to follow…