21.10.08

Kavala Bay

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What a weekend! We left home early Sunday morning.... as in, 4:30 am. We cast off from the dock at about 6, and headed for Kadavu.

Most of you who know me know what/where Kadavu is, but for those who don't, it is an island about 60 nautical miles south of the main island where we live. We have had church work in Kadavu for several years now, and it is expanding every time we turn around.

There is new church in Kavala Bay, Kadavu: 6 weeks old. That was our destination. We arrived, hiked in to the new shed church building, and sat down for the service. That was at around 10 am. By 10:15 or so, the people had arrived. This 6 week old church has 62 people attending! We had a couple hours of items (dances) .


So, Pastor Aseri is speaking away in Fijian, and I am listening very carefully and following pretty well. It is very tiring to listen and understand a language that you do not know very well, and although I could understand most of what he said, if I lost concentration I would immediately lose track of what was going on. At one point in this process, Pastor was merely announcing each upcoming item, so I relaxed a bit, and looked around at all the people crowded into the little shed. Suddenly, the flow of words from the front stopped. I looked up, starteled. Pastor Aseri was looking in the direction of our family. I scrambled to reconstruct in my mind the last few words said. Something about Mom... me...song...now. hm. This was sounding like something that might require some kind of response on our part. I struggled to look intelligent. Fortunately, after a very long few hundredths of a second, Pastor Aseri translated into English.
"We are just wondering if maybe Radini Cindy and Danielle might have a song for us?"
I looked at him, and then looked at Mom. We were obviously both thinking the same thing. We had just gotten over a fairly severe cold... no voice, the whole bit... and had only recently re-aquired the fine art of talking. Neither of us were at all sure we could croak out a song... but hey... why not?

I quickly leaned over and whispered in Mom's ear the name of a Fijian song that we both knew very well... this was no time for fancy newly learned productions... and headed for the mike, Mom close behind. This particular song, "E na Mata i Jiova" calls for immediate singing by both parties of the duet. I began enthusiastically and heard not a sound from my side where Mom was standing. I checked to make sure she was still there... sure enough, there she was. I casually wondered for a while why she wasn't singing, until finally after a few eons, certainly comprising the space of at least half of the first word, she joined in.

Mom later explained that she had only heard the last two words of the title I had whispered to her, "i Jiova"... unfortunately, those two words refer to a different song, one which calls for the second singer to jump in on the chorus! ... so she was somewhat confused when I started a different song than I had declared... yes, very confusing, I understand completely. All worked out for the best though, we completed the song in a semi-croak-free manner and resumed our seats.

Dad preached, and Pastor Aseri translated... I really love listening to translated sermons. Everything is run by you twice, you get to hear every point from a different angle, you are given time to think between sentences, it's great. And it was a sermon worth listening to twice... of course the story of great-grandpa and the cobra in the fire was at the end, as this was a new group of people who had never heard that story before. I do love that story.

After the service... which ended at around 1pm... we had lunch. Oh such a lovely lunch it was... good Fijian food is... very good. I won't say hard to beat, because Mum's cooking can beat anything else on earth, but it is certainly worth consuming.

After lunch, we sat for a while and then had tea. Don't laugh. This is a former British colony, we must have our tea. After a few years, it becomes addictive and an afternoon seems somehow incomplete without a good cup of tea.

At around 4 or 5 we headed back out to boat, had a round of Rook (which Dad and I won, of course), and folded down our bunks for the night. We spent a little while examining stars... there is really nothing quite like stars in the outer islands. No city lights... no clouds... the Milky Way stretched from one horizon to the other... some planet hung low in the sky in front of us, so bright that it reflected in the water below...truly incredible. Makes you feel so small... and God seem so huge and majestic.

Finally, we all went to bed... well, no, not quite all of us.

I slowly drifted off into oblivion, settling into the soft rocking of the boat, listening to the gentle creak of my bunk, when SUDDENLY I hear this yelp. After the yelp came the peculiar sound of Fish On Deck. It's kind of a flappy metalic sound... hard to describe... comes from the frantic flopping of a fish that has been jerked up out of its watery abode and onto the metal deck of the boat. WHAP WHAP WHAP. Small sounds from Quinton as he scrambled to control his catch. Bright blinding light as he flipped on the lights and held up his trophy for all to see. Held it up... as in, oh hello, please get the fish out of my face if you don't mind. Finally the fish disappeared from view, the light went off, and I went back to sleep, thankyou very much.

I slept awesome... but then... I sleep awesome all the time. At 7:30pm, it's like, watch out, I am going to sleep wherever I am. Yes, 7:30. Don't laugh. I get up early, too.

Monday (yesterday) the seas were lily-pond flat for the trip back, but we caught not one fish, no not one, not even a small one. How sad. A moment of silence, please, for the fish-less voyage.

When we got back to dock, Mom and I took the truck and ran up to the butcher and Cost-U-Less for some groceries while Dad and the Q cleaned up the boat. We finally got home and I ran for the shower... something about salty ocean air, just makes a hot shower seem absolutely wonderful.

I have put a few pictures into this blog, but of course they don't all fit, the rest of them are in the october folder of my Picasa album

And so we reach the end of this delightful post, those of you who are still reading, congratulations, you have persevered through to the finish.

-Danielle