Nielson Fiji Adventures: A trip to a very remote Village

We spent two very interesting and long days in a very remote Village in the mountains of the interior of Fiji. Much of the road was rough and would have been impassable without our 4-Wheel Drive Toyota Prado. The scenery was spectacular along the way.

At one point, the bridge had been washed out, so we just drove through the river.
Fortunately it hadn't rained for awhile, so the river wasn't too deep today.

This is the river beside the village, which has been known to have huge floods
rising by over 150 feet during days of torrential rain, from time
to time, causing the people to evacuate in the middle of the night.

When we arrived at the Chief's home, we parked our vehicle in a safe place.

These are some of the houses in the village.

The Chief invited us for breakfast, so we are now just making our way to his home.

This is the Chief's home, where we must take off our shoes and hats to show respect.

The Chief, Noa Seru, was thrilled with the gift of sunglasses we gave him.
He kept wearing them, and didn't want to take them off.

We were given some special bread, rice cooked in coconut milk, and mint leaf tea for breakfast. All of this... while we sat cross legged on the floor. It was kind of funny when a random chicken hopped through an open window to join us for awhile, before exiting again. It took some courage to eat the bread for breakfast, after watching a number of flies land on it; but we had to be polite, and not offend the chief. Thank goodness, we never got sick.

This is the Chief and his wife, standing there with my wife, and Frank Stanford.
Frank (from Calgary) is the one who has helped us get into the villages, schools
orphanages, and churches to do eye exams. He is very busy with humanitarian service,
including helping villages with their water supply. He has sure made our job a lot easier.

This is the school we went to, following breakfast with the Chief.

These are 4 of the teachers at the school.
Don't they look great in their Bula shirts?

One happy boy...

These boys were quite comfortable wearing their school uniforms - Pink Sulas!

Lined up waiting for their eye exams.

The girls pink dresses matched the boys pink sulus.

These kids are happy and know how to have a good time.

The Kindergarten class was so cute.

Once we finished the school children, we moved on to check the eyes of several adults.

Because this was a remote village, many of the children and adults couldn't converse in English, so I had to change my approach to the eye exam. I had to depend on my Retinoscope, which is an objective method to measure what glasses they might need, rather than asking them which is better, "number one or number two"? This meant the eye exams were quite short. It allowed me to examine 140 children from the Elementary school, and 54 adults, for a total of 194 eye exams. It was a long and tiring day, and I don't think I could ever do that many eye exams in a single day, again.

At the end of the day, the Chief surprised us with a supper made by some of
the women in the village. They don't use chairs or utensils to eat with, so we
sat with them on the floor, with our legs crossed, eating a number of unique
dishes of food, some of which we didn't recognize. Most of it tasted great!
The women don't usually eat until the men are done, but they made an exception
for my wife, as she was part of the eye care team. We made sure we left lots
of food for the women who had worked so hard to prepare the meal.

The next morning, we went to the village town hall and found these palm leaves
left out to dry, in their preparation to weave mats. Some of the leaves were
berried in the soil to provide a dark brown color, to give the mats some color.

This cute little pig went to the market..... (located just outside the town hall).

When we arrived at the village town hall, we found all these people waiting
on the floor mats. They just don't have, or use chairs in their homes or public bldgs.

While the ladies were waiting to have their eyes examined, they
sorted out their yarn to prepare for weaving floor mats.
Don't they look great in their colorful Jumba Sulas?

This is the view from the town hall, where we did the eye exams.

Isn't this a well decorated village town hall?
It was a little difficult examining eyes in such
a brightly lit room, but we managed okay.

Ann was kept very busy helping many ladies select their reading glasses.
The ladies were very grateful, as now they would be able to see
better to prepare food and do all their crafts and handiwork.

On one of our days off, we visited the "Garden of the Sleeping Giant".
It's a beautiful Orchid Garden that was created by "Raymond Burr"
(from Ironside & Perry Mason) before he passed away several years ago.

We quite enjoyed the beauty of it all.

The garden was a wonderful place to take a break to relax a few minutes.

A rather unique tree to stand in...

A nice place for a swing...

Very large corrugated leaves...

Okay, so I decided to join the tree huggers!

We then went to the nearby, "MUD POOLS AND HOT SPRINGS".

My mother would never let me do this when I was young...

They convinced us that the mud has special healing
powers and anti-aging factors, so we rubbed it all over us.

Can you believe what a good tan we have?

This better work!

After 15 minutes, we were allowed to go into Pool #1 to wash off the mud.
The sledge in the bottom was about 2 or 3 feet deep, and felt rather strange.