I remember Rakiraki

The Methodist Church in Fiji posted pictures about Rakiraki Indian Circuit Outreach at Rakiraki Town in facebook today

and the photos and story took me way back two generations to the wonderful years Peceli, me, George and Robin had living there. Peceli was the padre to the Indian community and manager of the school where we taught Religious Education on Fridays, visited cane farms, Peceli's church was a classroom in a school near the sugar mill Our good friends were the Ari Siri family and their teenage daughter was Meraia Siri who later became a highly educated Methodist minister.. Fiji became independent about that time and my Class 8 students sang a version of 'This Land is your land' at the celebration. We had three years there, many people staying with us including Loloma Tukei a deaconess, and blind Pastor Timothy, Peceli's mother and many others. I taught mainly English at Penang Sangam Secondary School. We enjoyed visiting the families on the cane-farms, yarning and drinking very sweet spiced tea. They were not rich people, their houses sometimes plastered with cow dung and the baby sleeping in a kind of swing made from a sugar bag. Our house was cement block, multi-coloured and we had two pet pigs, Kanakana and Lesu Mai. Peceli climbed the Kauvadra mountain with the local English doctor one time and brought back a vadra plant and we buried Georgie's umbilitical cord under that plant. We had a puppy called Biscuit - named after my problem with nausea one month and having to eat cracker biscuits with lemonade! This was a very long time ago.