Uate with partner Samantha. PHOTO: Getty Images

Arise, Prince Aku

By TONY MOORE, Mai Life Special Correspondent in Sydney

Readers who are old enough will remember the late, great rugby union player Joe Levula. Even those too young to have seen the great man in action will undoubtedly have seen that famous black and white photo of Levula in the late 1950s, thundering down the wing for Fiji, smashing all in his wake. Fittingly, while touring overseas he picked up the media tag, “The Flying Fijian”. The nickname stuck with Levula even after he made his infamous defection to UK rugby league later on in his career. Along with his prolific try-scoring ability, he was notorious for catching his opposition off guard by stopping in his tracks and throwing the ball, grid iron-like, to his opposite winger. He was a great Fijian and world sporting legend in the truest sense of the expression. Well, brace yourselves folks! The next “Levula” is already with us. Some say Akuila Uate is the heir apparent to Lote Tuqiri. I say he is already every bit as good as Tuqiri and can stand tall on his own merits. Of course Tuqiri has proven longevity, a mark of greatness in all
sports champions. Indeed, he is the first and only man ever to have played league, then union and then league again for Australia. Likewise Petero Civoniceva, the most respected elder statesman of rugby league the world over is another one of our alltime great Fijian sportsmen. All that aside, unwittingly or otherwise, the Aussie media have already dubbed the young Uate, “the flying Fijian”.

Akuila (“Aku” to those who are close to him) was born in Sovi Bay near Sigatoka in October 1987, making him
just 23. As a professional rugby league player, he is contracted to the Newcastle Knights, an NRL team based two hours north of Sydney on the NSW Central Coast. SFX Sports’ Darryl Mather, Uate’s manager, explains Aku’s contract is not up for renewal until 2013, during which time he believes “Aku will only get better”. Uate is just as comfortable at fullback as he is on the wing, having played in that position on and off as a teenage rising star. Credit, though, to Newcastle’s coaching staff that they have been astute enough to recognise the long line of world-class wingers Fiji has produced in both rugby codes by playing him on the right wing. Why does Fiji continue to produce such prolific wingers, year in, year out? I can’t imagine anybody’s ever sat down and thought about this phenomenon. Perhaps it’s to do with the open space wingers enjoy, the freedom to move, to run with pace. All these factors seem to provide a form of adrenaline rush for the naturally gifted and speedy athletes that Fiji churns out on a regular basis. In November I spent a Sunday morning chatting with Aku. At the outset, it struck me how open and engaging he was. He has a great sense of humour blended with a genuine humility and deep compassion. So many of his responses to my questions involved the word “family".

Reflecting on this briefly as a parent, I thought to myself: “I bet his folks are so proud of this lad!” Uate moved to Australia with his father David in 2003. He was then 15. Aku cited the primary reason for the move as education: “Dad insisted I should complete my education in Australia. The decision to come here had nothing to do with sport.”
They settled on the Central NSW Coast and young Aku was immediately enrolled at Brisbane Water Secondary College, a respected high school on the coast. In 2005, he was selected on the wing for the Australian Schoolboys rugby league team. A year of playing “park footy” (an expression used to refer to lower graded local club competitions in Australia), saw him talent-scouted by the Newcastle Knights. This is the club where legendary players such as Andrew “Joey” Johns, his brother Matt, and Paul “the Chief” Harragon played most of their first grade rugby league. Just after Uate’s signing with the club, Joey himself was quoted as saying: “in all my years (of rugby league), I have never seen a better athlete than this bloke” (referring to Uate). Great praise indeed from the man widely acknowledged as being the greatest player ever to don a boot! As a schoolboy, Uate ran the 100 metres in an impressive 10.82 seconds. Now weighing around 97 kilos and standing fully grown at around 182 cms, he is armed
with both speed and size, the perfect combination for a world class outside back in any code of football. However, possessing such attributes and using them to the best of your ability are two entirely different things. In 2010 Uate proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he knows how to convert raw talent and ability into points. As well as top- ping the NRL list of try scorers (21 tries) Akuila Uate was named “Dally M Winger of the Year”. The Dally M Awards Night held each year at the end of the season, is the sport’s most prestigious forum for the recognition of individual talent as judged throughout the season by respected senior sports journalists. All votes are recorded in secret throughout the year then revealed on the night. To cap it off, Aku was named in the Prime Minister’s Australian team to take on the mighty PNG Kumuls in Port Moresby in late September.

n Mai Life thanks SFX Sports’ Darryl Mather for his assistance with this story. Mather can be contacted by emailing DMather@sfxsports.com.au.
n Tony Moore is a Sydney-based Fiji Olympian and freelance writer. You can email him at tony.moore@olympian.org

Susu Cinavou with children who live on a rubbish dump in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, where she worked with her husband.

The missionary's widow

By ALIPATE WARA
Special to Mai Life

She gave up a comfortable life in the United Kingdom as a nurse to join her husband as a missionary in Cambodia not long after marrying in 2008. Having lived in Britain for nine years, Susu Cinavou chose to put it all behind her when she wedded Pastor Metuisela Cinavou, a Christian Mission Fellowship (CMF) minister who had been posted to Cambodia by the Kinoya-based church. Cinavou began her married life in a foreign land far from family and friends pursuing what she believed was her spiritual calling – spreading Christianity to the so-called unreached peoples in the predominantly Buddhist country of 14 million souls. It was not long before she came face to face with the harsh realities of life among some of the most underprivileged people in Southeast Asia – and it was a life-changing experience. Cinavou accompanied her husband and another Fijian pastor as they spread the gospel in rubbish dumps
where hundreds of broken and homeless people in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh live. They had also begun making some headway into the far-reaches of Cambodia near its international borders taking their message to people without a written language.

But in October, barely three years into their marriage, tragedy struck when Pastor Metuisela was killed in a car crash
in the highlands of Cambodia. Cinavou brought her husband’s body back to Fiji and the funeral service for Pastor Metui was said to have been one of the biggest to have been held at CMF’s World Harvest Centre in Kinoya. It would have been understandable if Cinavou had refused to go back to the mission field after losing her partner in such cruel circumstances (she was driving); but far from it. Cinavou – which appropriately enough means ‘new light’ – believes she must finish the workher husband started, especially in the highlands of Cambodia. Cinavou hails from Saolo, Wainunu in Bua and has maternal links to Burelevu, Tailevu. After completing her secondary education
at Queen Victoria School in 1990, she enrolled at the Fiji School of Nursing from where she graduated three years later. After serving in various hospitals and health centres around the country, she went to the United Kingdom
where she spent nine years working as a nurse. In 2008, she married Pastor Metui Cinavou. She says love and obedience to the “call of God” in her life to spread the gospel to “unreached peoples” prompted her to leave the UK and join her husband as a fulltime missionary.

Arriving in her new home in Phnom Penh on June 6, 2008, the first challenge she encountered as a newlywed was having to live with her husband in a house with 30 students. The students were from various provinces in Cambodia, and had become outcasts in their homes because of their conversion to Christianity. Apart from the living arrangements, she also had to adapt to a completely new diet, which included sensitive grass, water lilies and mile-a-minute leaves made into soup. She also had to endure eating deepfried insects, spiders and frogs. “This was all part of their (Cambodian) diet. Yet I had been expecting such changes for the sake of (spreading) the gospel,”
she tells Mai Life, sitting in the living room of her family’s home at Namadi Heights in Suva.
Daily conversations with the students helped her learn the basics of the Cambodian language which she admits she is yet to master. Braving the stench and filth, Cinavou, her late husband and fellow Fijian missionary Ben Ryland managed to establish a church among the dwellers of Phnom Penh’s rubbish dump. “These people actually live in the dump and scavenge among the rubbish all day for anything edible for their families,” Cinavou says. The missionaries began a feeding programme distributing sandwiches and bottles of drinking water, a meal which those
living in the dump savoured dearly. “My heart was challenged (when I saw their standard of living), as I knew it was only through God’s love that they were able to survive in such conditions.” The Fijian missionaries have also managed to penetrate out of Cambodia into the surrounding region. This involves a network of covert converts and underground churches to avoid persecution from the hard-line mainstream religions predominate in those countries.
In Indonesia – the world’s most populous Muslim country – the missionaries have established a church among an ethnic group in Bandung, the capital of West Java province and the country’s third largest city. “Everything is still underground and (my late husband) Pastor Metui had managed to set up a Bible school with students attending without any knowledge of their families or communities due to the persecution of Christians.”

This would also be true for the Tamil people of Malaysia, right up to Mongolia nearing the border with Russia. These
are the networks in place which will be helpful in spreading the gospel in the region.” The missionaries know full well the consequences if their covert operations and underground churches in the region were to be discovered. Sometimes the end result of discovery is fatal. But it is being among the Kuy (pronounced Koo-ee) people of Cambodia that has impacted most the life of this Nightingale-turned-missionary. These tribal people occupy the highland regions bordering Laos, Vietnam and Thailand, and have beliefs steeped in animism and folk Buddhism. Perhaps some of the most underprivileged and neglected people in the region, they have a distinct language which is still unwritten. On her first encounter with the Kuy people, she had to be simple and humble in her approach as she had just spent the past nine years in the United Kingdom, one of the beacons of capitalism. “It requires our everything both psychologically and physically,” says Cinavou, adding that sometimes they ate the intestines of animals and drank its blood. “A normal meal for them would be rice with salt, while for Christmas last year we
had banana stalks. It touches me to see this. “Being a missionary is all about building relationships. When we eat their food, to them it means that we are part of them. We have to go and sit and talk with them because their way of life is totally different from ours.” On one of their trips to the highland region in October, the car the couple was
travelling in crashed near the village of Rumcheck in Previhear province. Pastor Metui was hospitalised but died days later. Despite the heartbreak, Cinavou seems composed and optimistic saying she is looking forward to returning to Cambodia to continue the work her husband began there.

“God has placed in my heart to build a health centre and church there in the place where the accident occurred.”
The village had been resisting missionaries for the past 13 years, but Cinavou believes there will be a breakthrough” in the village and ultimately in the surrounding areas: “I believe that God will do great things and that he will open doors.” There are plans to establish a training centre to commemorate her late husband’s life. The centre will train converted Cambodians so they can spread Christianity to their own people. Her passion to work with the Cambodians has not been dampened by her husband’s death, and Cinavou even foresees living out her life as widow among them. “I’m returning to Cambodia to live amongst the Kuy people – and I am willing to die there.”

n ALIPATE WAQA is a senior politics student at the University of the South Pacific.

United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) UNIFIL Commander-in-Chief, Major-General Emmanuel Erskine inspects the Fijian Battalion during Medal Parade at Battalion Headquarters, Qana, Lebanon. May 1, 1980. PHOTO: UN Multimedia

Dying in the name of peace

It was late 1986 and I was only 21 years old, a private. I remember watching dawn break over southern Lebanon and the sweet smell of cider and desert sand mixed together filling my nostrils. I was in Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission from 1986 to 1987. It was an exciting time for me – I was young, energetic and looked forward to my first tour of duty. But I was not prepared for the tragedy that would strike so early on in my career as a soldier. It was
Thursday, November 20, just a few months after arriving in Lebanon. I was doing my rounds with Corporal Sakiusa
Navoko visiting the checkpoints in the Fiji area of operation in the buffer zone that separated Israeli-controlled areas from Lebanese areas. We were checking up on their wellbeing and delivering supplies like water.
Then we came to Checkpoint 1-26 which we called Checkpoint Nairai, after the Lomaiviti island. Four Fijian soldiers
were manning that checkpoint: Lance Corporal Jovilisi Yaya, from Nakaseleka, Kadavu; Lance Corporal Koloba Cavuilati from Vuna in Taveuni; Private Joape Cavu from Ono-i-Lau and a soldier I remember as Dakai from Macuata.

These men were a jovial bunch, always looking on the funny side of life despite the gloomy situation we were in, especially with bombs exploding regularly. Corporal Navoko and I chatted with the four at the checkpoint, sharing jokes and laughter. In the 15 minutes we were talking, nobody noticed that an unidentified car had snuck up nearby. We said our goodbyes and were preparing to leave when Corporal Yaya called out to us: “Wait, you forgot something.” He heaved a bag of oranges into our tank. It was orange season there and they were quite plentiful. “Taste the oranges of Lebanon,” Cpl Yaya said with a smile before waving us forward. Not five minutes after we had driven away, an explosion erupted in the distance behind us. We had just entered our base. I remember remarking to Cpl Navoko about how big the explosion sounded. As we sat down to have our dinner, a call came for “battle order”. A “battle order” comes only in time of danger, when we are required to wear our armour and prepare for enemy fire. Excitement and fear filled my young 21-year-old mind – I was ready for anything. We got into our combat gear, helmets, and armour and kept watch for any enemy threat. We waited from 6pm till 8pm until our captain Meli Saubulinayau gave the order: “Stand down!” There was no threat detected. We assembled and stood at attention for a debriefing. I’ll never forget the heavy silence that night before Captain Meli Saubulinayau cleared his throat and said: “It is with deep regret that I inform you that we have lost three of our
comrades in a roadside bombing at Checkpoint Nairai. The victims’ names are Jovilisi Yaya, Joape Cavu and Koloba Cavuilati.”

No words could express how I felt. I turned to Cpl Navoko and said to him in my dialect “I ’auvu daru sa ’alouga’a sara (My friend, we have been very lucky) but it does not change that fact that we lost our friends.” Those men’s bodies were blown to pieces. They couldn’t find Cpl Jovilisi Yaya’s body until the next day. It was hanging up in the trees. They could only identify him through his moustache. How we cried that day. We were in our early twenties, and shocked at the waste of life. We were also shocked at our close shave with death. If Cpl Navoko and I had stayed five minutes more to chat with our friends at Checkpoint Nairai, I would not have been standing here to tell you this story. As for the oranges, I kept them until they had rotted. I refused to eat it because it reminded me of those men’s lives and how our life is just like an orange. For me, oranges are a symbol of those lost soldiers’ lives. I tell this story to remember my fellow comrades in arms who died in the course of working for world peace.

These photos show the sheer dilapidated state of Vunidawa District School in Naitasiri.

Helping hands for a
forgotten school

By MATILDA SIMMONS
In the heart of Vunidawa valley up in Naitasiri province is Vunidawa District School, an 80-year-old institution, where students are carefree and laughter abounds. The children are oblivious to the sad conditions they endure daily.
In November, Mai Life accompanied 20 students from the University of the South Pacific’s Management Students Association, to Vunidawa where the tertiary students volunteered their time and resources to bring some life back into the aging school.

What greeted us was heartbreaking: classrooms which appeared to be on the verge of caving in, windows with almost every single louver blade missing, rotting wooden floors, a library in name only with whatever tattered books in it piled carelessly at one corner of the room. Mereoni Tamanivalu, the general secretary of the Management
Students Association, was inspired to organise the project on hearing of the conditions at the school. “When I called to find out the needs they had I was moved because of the many good little things that the MSA could offer
them,” she said.

The school is run by a committee and serves children from six far-flung villages: Nakorovatu, Vuisiga, Naqara, Matailobau, Naqali and Delaitoga. For years, the committee that is supposed to be in charge of the welfare of the school appears to have done nothing of substance at the school which opened in 1930.Until recently, the 145 pupils were drinking from one tap. “It was frustrating,” says head teacher Penijamini Ratabamusu. “The students had to line up just to wash their hands during lunch, making it so time-consuming,” he says. Says Tamanivalu: “I wouldn’t want to point it out (the lack of development at the school), but this is about helping the students of the school. We are fulfilling one of our objectives of MSA to help improve the water amenities and to build good bridges of communication between USP and different cultures and communities around us.” Assisted by Campus Life at USP, which provides services that foster a sense of community among other things, the MSA group installed new water piping and multi-taps and helped plant vegetables.

The lecturer that acompanied the USP students, Jone Lako says: “We feel blessed that we are making a difference
in the students’ lives and the community as a whole. We hope that the presence of USP students will speak volumes to the younger generation of Naitasiri and specifically the Tikina (District) of Matailobau.” The pupils Mai Life spoke to were not too concerned with the conditions at their school saying they were used to it. However, they were happy to have more taps to use. The school will be celebrating its 80th year this month. Head teacher Ratabamusu says the school’s rundown wooden buildings hosting the class two and three pupils will be demolished, making space for new classrooms. It couldn’t come sooner.

n If you can help the school in anyway, contact them on phone 3609944 or PO Box 9, Vunidawa, Naitasiri.

Training of student nurses in a section of the Pathology Laboratory at Tamavua.

Nightingale’s legacy

By RICARDO MORRIS
It may be a little known fact, but Fiji’s nurses can trace the lineage of their profession in this country right back to that legend of nursing herself – Florence Nightingale. The first qualified nurse to work in Fiji was Frances Caroline Valentia Webster-Wedderburn, who was trained by Nightingale and sent to Fiji in 1892. Webster-Wedderburn arrived in Fiji a decade after nursing was established here, although before her arrival there was no formal training of nurses. The first hospital was built in 1882 at Baba in Levuka, on the site of what is now the Levuka Public Secondary School hostel.

Nursing tasks then were performed by untrained European women under the supervision of a doctor. A year after her arrival – in 1893 – Webster-Wedderburn began training European women as nurses. In 1897, Fiji produced its first qualified staff nurse, May Anderson, who had undergone a full three years of training. In 1900, Anderson was conferred the Oder of the Royal Cross by Queen Victoria for the work she and her staff did in tending to sick and wounded soldiers who were transferred to Suva from Her Majesty’s ships following the disturbances in Samoa from June to September 1899. Also in 1900, the Colonial Hospital (later Colonial War Memorial Hospital) was recognised overseas as a training hospital so that Suva-trained nurses were granted equal status with nurses trained overseas.

The hospital by then had more than 100 beds increasing to 150 by 1920. Webster-Wedderburn went on to become
the first qualified matron of the Colonial Hospital, then based at Walu Bay. She married Paul Frederick Straube in Albany, Western Australia in 1895 and returned to live in Fiji where she died in Labasa on September 10, 1932. She had no children.In the early years of nursing in Fiji, medical staff had to contend with outbreaks of infectious diseases that wreaked havoc on a population that was yet to develop a resistance to the diseases. In the 1800s, there were two serious outbreaks of dysentry and measles after locals came into contact with European sailors. Influenza caused untold deaths in 1918 among the indigenous population.

In the early years after a hospital was set up, the medical establishment consisted of a very small team. The chief medical officer was in charge of the hospital and he was assisted by a resident medical officer, a matron (Webster-
Wedderburn), a staff nurse (May Anderson) and orderlies (prisoners). The “asylum” for mentally ill patients was staffed by a superintendent and a warden, while the hospital for leprosy patients was looked after by Catholic
sisters. In 1901, Anderson endorsed the decision to train i-Taukei nurses after succumbing to an illness herself. In the
same year a record number of 4,258 i-Taukei babies and children died in childbirth or as a result of infanticide.
The first local women to be trained as nurses went on a six-month course to learn simple midwifery and general
nursing skills. The six i-Taukei women were: Vitinia from Lau, Elena from Rewa, Taina Nakuta and Arieta Vakabuna
of Ba and Makereta Marama and Lice from Tailevu. From these six, an entire nursing education system grew.

The Central Nursing School trained nurses from 1954 to 1986 and was subsequently upgraded to the Fiji School of Nursing. Fiji has become a pacesetter for nursing education in the South Pacific accepting regional students. Statistics show that in 100 years of nursing and nursing education from 1882- 1992, a total of 2720 nurses graduated from Tamavua, 302 midwives completed the local programme. The current Nurses Register has a record of more than 3000 registrants. Since 1995, the Fiji School of Nursing has graduated more than 2000 nurses with a Diploma in Nursing. While Fiji’s nurses have never had problems working internationally, plans are now being finalised to upgrade FSN’s qualification to a Bachelor of Nursing degree.