It was outreach time again in Marine Reach Fiji last week (yippee!). We took a large team which included our staff, DTS students, overseas volunteers, a local pastor and his wife, YWAM Suva workers and 6 kids. We flooded the small village of Nausori Highlands with our clinic and ministry teams, and by the end of the week I would doubt there was a single person in the village hadn’t connected with our team in one way or another.
Over the past year we’ve been trying to develop our outreaches to become more ‘holistic’. Recognising the limited impact a short term medical mission can have on the long term health of a community, we have been shifting our emphasis from pulling teeth and giving out tablets to focusing more strongly on health education, mental wellbeing and spiritual health. At every turn we are seeking to love, motivate and challenge people, as well as meeting their current healthcare needs.
This past week it was a joy to see this happening at a greater level than ever before. Alongside the normal running of the clinic we had ministry teams doing house visits, a team that visited the local school on several occasions to offer health education and kids ministry and we ran exercise classes for back and knee pain. We showed the Jesus movie in Fijian language using our projector one night and had most of the village squeeze into the church hall for the occasion, with more people outside watching it through the windows. A total of 25 people had committed their life to the Lord, and many more had had their faith strengthened, their dental pain relieved, their wounds treated and illnesses diagnosed.
Another issue that arose was the number of women who came forward with stories of domestic abuse. For some of them it was the very first time to speak to someone about their fear and suffering. On most outreaches we meet at least one woman who we suspect is being abused at home, and occasionally they will talk about it and allow us to pray and counsel them on their options. It was both unusual and heartbreaking to have woman after woman come to us individually and speak openly about the violence they were experiencing at the hand of their husbands. In response a number of our team decided to meet regularly throughout the week to pray and talk about this issue: was there anything that we should be doing here in this village to address this?
Fiji has the 4th highest rate of domestic violence in the world. 64% of women here live under the fear of being physically or sexually assaulted, and this figure does not include emotional abuse or abuse from men other than their partners. Every day 43 women are injured, 1 is permanently disabled and 71 women lose consciousness because of domestic violence (http://fijiwomen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/1.pdf). One of the biggest obstacles to tackling this problem is that it is both veiled in silence and accepted as normal within the communities.
In our group we wrestled with the need to stand up for justice whilst protecting women, respecting culture and recognising our limited ability to influence a complex social issue. In the end we took the opportunity to share with the women present after our second exercise class. We invited Ben and Kaba to talk about their relationship as Fijian husband and wife. Ben talked with them about their purpose and value, not as slaves but as having been made in the image of God. There were quiet murmurs in the room as he spoke to them. It may have been the first time they had ever received a message like that.
We were also encouraged to hear of how we had helped the village nurse. Just prior to our coming she had packed her bags and was ready to leave. She was under a huge amount of pressure to meet government targets in all the villages under her care following the cyclone. She was on call 24/7, not allowed to go and visit her kids, had lost her faith and was spending most evenings drinking kava. She attended our morning devotion on our last day and expressed how our presence had blessed her, how we had come at just the right time, how she now felt empowered to continue her work and how she had decided to recommit her life to the Lord.
It’s nearly impossible to get a measure of just how much impact we have when we go on outreach. I do know however that as human beans we hold potential. Whether we like it or not, our words and actions – or lack thereof – can and will influence people around us. Our choices matter.
And so I hold on to this: that as we are faithful in the small things, as we love those around us with the time we have, as we continue to be willing to step out and take a risk, then we open the door for change.
Hi,
You might find this manual from the WHO useful.
URL http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/44350/1/9789241564007_eng.pdf?ua=1
Also Available from http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/activities/intimate/en/
The disheartening message is that any programs that have been effective have involved a massive amount of work, hard to deliver on outreach. The other side is that local radio can be a big part of it, used to air plays dealing with the subject and discussions of it. That can reach lots of villages simultaneously and prepare the way for your team arriving. Do you have any contact with local radio or anyone at the DTS who has the ability to write a drama?
One of the big points is that it doesn’t work simply to work with women. There’s even some evidence that empowering women without working with men actually increases the rate of assaults.
What you did with getting a Fijian couple to speak was entirely right, though. You need (at least one) man to talk to the men and the more the audience can relate to him the better.
Some of the successful projects have started with meeting the village elders and discussing the issue to get agreement that they don’t want domestic violence to happen. Once the elders have agreed, they spoke to the prominent women too (usually older). Using volunteers from both, they formed a group of people women could approach if they were experiencing violence, and know that they’d be taken seriously. Only once this structure was in place and had support, did they start having community meetings separately for all the men and all the women.
This was combined with radio broadcasts, murals depicting good attitudes and groups to discuss alternative ways of dealing with conflict.
Thanks for your helpful tips Jenny. This topic is one we have never sought to address before, but felt we couldn’t ignore on this occasion.
Two of the team members did actually talk with the men in the village but since neither Ali or I were present for it we didn’t write about this here. We also spent time discussing all of this with a local leader, a pastor who will follow up with the households who came forward (with their permission of course).
In short, we did what we could in the time we had, and are now seeking God’s guidance on whether this is something we should explore further for our next outreach. We know we need to tread wisely. Yet despite being faced with our own limitations in the face of this huge problem, we believe in God’s business of transforming lives and communities, as He did in us.