HER father explained to a young Koleta Marama Sivivatu that a proper village house should have three doors. That way, you can see people approaching from any direction, greet them and invite them for a meal.
Koleta remembers this being practised at their village of Veivatuloa in Namosi. Anyone passing during a family meal would be invited by her father. This was tradition in Namosi.
These are stories and traditions she shares with her four children, who include the renowned Fijian rugby player Sitiveni Sivivatu.
Giving urgency to her talks about past practices, Koleta knows communities today face increasing population and increasing needs and the land is being overused. Some of these simple traditions are being lost as the land becomes less productive and natural resources are diminished.
Koleta explains her dad was what an iTaukei person would call a liga kaukauwa, which literally means strong hands. It meant he was a hardworking person who tilled the land and was able to support all his family’s needs and also supplied crops in large quantities for vanua and church obligations.
“He told me: ‘I’m the only one who will be able to call people to come and share a meal because I have a lot of food. You will not be able to do that if you don’t have enough food. You work, you eat but you buy your food so you can’t call like I do because I plant my own. And that is the reason people now close their doors when they eat’.”
As the thoughts about her late father brought tears to her eyes, Koleta continued: “My dad was right. I believe what he said because it’s happening now even in some homes in villages nowadays. It’s sad that we are losing this part of our culture.”
Koleta, a retired teacher, is now very vocal in her province as a women’s representative for her tikina (district) and has recently added another role to her community advocacy: champion for the Wakatu Fiji campaign.
Wakatu Fiji, which is led by the ministries of iTaukei Affairs, Fisheries and Forests, and Agriculture, is about caring better for the land and forests that have taken care of Fijians for generations.
So she is sharing that message back, hoping it can help the community think differently about how they use the land and why it matters.
“I know the importance of the land and forest because my dad was a farmer but also because my grandfather was a traditional medicine healer. We survived on traditional medicine… because the hospital was quite a distance away,” she proudly said.
Koleta learned to farm, because “we didn’t have a brother,” she says.
“The four of us would help our dad on the farm on Saturdays. My dad planted everything from dalo, vudi (plantain), uvi (yams), kawai, bananas, pineapples and vegetables. We never had any shortage of food and he sent us through to school by what he earned from his farm.”
When Koleta started a family in Suva and furthered her studies at university, her dad was able to secure a contract with the university to supply pineapples from his farm.
“He would get about $600 to $700 and then would ask me if we needed help with our electricity bill or whatever else we needed. He said they didn’t need much money in the village because they had food available so he was just worried about us,” she said.
After four years of living in the village and with her close traditional ties to the chief of her province, Koleta is encouraging villagers to think twice when making decisions on developments of their natural resources. She is the only female in the vunivalu’s, or chief’s committee, out of the 10 committee members.
“As you can see we had given some of our mangrove land at Namelimeli to be developed and now there is another group of developers who have approached us promising $10 million for another 1000 acres. We were called to the provincial office and shown what they would use it for but I told our team that once that land is out of our hands we can say goodbye to it,” she said.
Koleta believes $10m can be used in a year, with little to show for it, and the community would lose what has lived on for generations — productive natural resources. With the community’s support, the developers’ proposal for a housing development was turned down by the committee.
Koleta is also targeting women in her district to practise good farming methods. She said most of their women owned dalo and yaqona farms .
“But my work is not finished because I want to give back to the land for what it has given to my family; our livelihood and traditional medicine. I also want to encourage those whose families, traditionally have been involved in herbal medicine to learn from their parents because it is very important. I am a living proof of one that has always depended on traditional medicine all my life and I’m very healthy,” she said.
And she’ll also be looking out of her three doors every day around dinner time for passers-by.
* Alumeci Nakeke is a program fellow with cChange.
