“I was afraid that I would be murdered,” said Rafaele, glancing across the room at the group of Fijian villagers. It was after midnight and the soporific effect of the yaqona was beginning to show. The villagers, however, nodded with sympathetic understanding. “Well, you know what I mean,” he continued, “Since I was a boy, I had been hearing that Indians are dangerously quick-tempered and would use their sugarcane knives to murder when angered. When I was getting into the van that was to bring me to Naleba, I was sweating. ‘It’s very hot,’ I said, but really it wasn’t the sun that caused the sweat. It was the fear.”
“When we reached Naleba and arrived at the family where I was to spend the next two months I looked all around as far as the eye could see. There was no Fijian village anywhere. I have travelled to other countries like Tonga and Samoa, but I tell you this was the first time in my life I felt was outside Fiji.”
Someone offered Rafaele another bowl of yaqona. He swallowed the milky brown liquid in one drink, shook his head slowly, chuckled and continued. “It is terribly important to give it a go. It is discouraging at times, very tough at times, rather annoying at times, hopeless at times and yet personally enriching.”
Rafaele was a Marist seminarian who had finished a pastoral year away from the seminary. He worked first in a parish among his own indigenous Fijian people. He asked to spend some time among the Indo-Fijian people also. The two communities largely live separate existences and remain suspicious and critical of each other. So Rafaele was venturing into new territory.
He began with a seven week intensive study of the Hindi language. His interest and motivation sustained him through the six hour daily drilling on new words, new sounds and sentence patterns. Living with an Indo-Fijian family during three weeks of the course gradually accustomed him to Indian cooking.
But the real testing time arrived when he left the familiar surroundings of Suva city and went to live with a farmer’s family in Naleba, fifteen miles from the nearest town. He couldn’t sleep on the first night. He felt awkward moving around the house. The local people spoke too fast and used too many strange words for him to handle. Time seemed to drag. Everything was strange.
Taking full part in the work of the household helped Rafaele to a break-through. He planted yams, sugarcane and helped dig a well. Cutting sugarcane was the toughest assignment, as he had never done it before. It was the hot season. A scorching sun burned down from a cloudless sky every day. The crushing season was speeding to a close and the cane cutting was behind time in Naleba. Farmers were worried. They farmers and their families were working double shifts in the fields.
Rafaele had a touch of sun-stroke which put him out of action for two days, but he refused to quit. He worked with a group amid the cacophony of shouted orders, playful banter, and occasional arguments. They rested occasionally by day in the blessed shade of a mango tree. They discussed the events of the day around the yaqona bowl at night. Gradually sounds became intelligible, ways of reacting became more predictable and growth in mutual understanding and acceptance happened.
Rafaele made a surprising personal discovery. “I began to discover more about my personal spirituality – that I am more easily in contact with God through manual work than through reading prayer books.”
