Ten years ago, Salacieli Serevi’s tears were printed across the front page of The Fiji Times.
The photograph captured the raw grief of the then 10-year-old crying openly.
A daughter who had just learned that her mother was not coming back.
That image broke hearts across Fiji.
On February 20, 2016, Salacieli was a child sitting in the dark, listening to houses shake in the wind.
Today, she is a 20-year-old university student mapping out a future in Information Technology.
Between those two versions of herself stands that one night – when Cyclone Winston struck Fiji and took her mother.
Inside her uncle’s home, used as an evacuation centre at Qelekuro, Tailevu, Salacieli stayed beside her youngest sister as the storm raged outside. The walls trembled. The wind screamed.
“It didn’t sound normal, it sounded angry,” she shared this week during a break from her part-time job at RCL Services, where she balances work with lectures, carrying both responsibility and ambition.
There are nine Serevi children. That night, she thought only of them – their safety, their closeness, their breathing in the dark.
Her mother, Sera Tinai, had gone to retrieve some belongings and was meant to meet them at the evacuation centre.
“I was expecting her to come back. She always came back.”
Morning arrived slowly, heavy with the smell of debris and salt. When the winds eased, villagers stepped outside to devastation – homes flattened, trees uprooted, possessions scattered like fragments of a life interrupted.
Then came a scream.
“Then we heard a loud scream. It was my dad. People ran towards him thinking he got hurt.”
In that moment, the possibility of loss had not yet entered her mind.
“It never crossed my mind that it was my mother. Not even once.”
Some realities are too unbearable for a child’s heart to predict.
“When my father told me it was my mother, I didn’t want to believe it.
“I kept thinking she would walk into the house. I kept waiting to see her.”
But she did not walk in.
Instead, the country saw a photograph of a little girl crying for her mother – tears streaming down her face, grief too large for her small frame.
She remembers everything.
“It’s like a bad dream I can’t wake up from. A bad memory glued to my brain.”
In the months after Winston, the Serevi family rebuilt in the quiet, determined way many Fijian families did. Salacieli completed primary school in Tailevu before moving to Suva to attend Ratu Sukuna Memorial School.
“It was hard to leave home because home is where I felt close to my mum and the rest of my family, but I knew I had to continue with life. My mother always told us that school was the way forward.”
While her older siblings paid her tuition as a private student at the Fiji National University, she insists on working to pay her way through the rest of her school years.
“I want to manage my fees on my own. My family has done more than enough.
“I think about my mother every day. My memories of her have never faded.”
