Fiji Day 2



The day started bright and early for us. The over enthusiastic boys and me woke up at 5.30am to go swimming. The rest of the time awoke not too long later and everyone was at the breakfast table at 6.30am. The nice waiter gave us a whole basket full of butter upon request and a whole jug full of maple syrup which was a little too much for us to handle…

No one dared to drink too much water though as the bus trip from Nadi to Suva would take us 3 hours and we had been warned that there would be no toilet stop on the way. Yikes! The coach ride was ok though, most of us slept the way through.. and there were 2 toilet stops.

The beautiful view from the coach ride up to Suva.

We arrived at Suva around 11.30am and there were church members waiting there to pick us up already. After loading everything onto the van we made our way to church. WOW.. nothing prepared me for the warm reception we received…

Once we stepped through the doors, the WHOLE church was standing there to clap, shake our hands and welcome us. I actually felt myself tear up when more than one of them said “thank you so much for coming here to do this…” I was like.. to us it’s a simple Mission trip to share God’s love to the children here in Suva but to them it was as if we were them viewing an oasis in the desert. That sort of enthusiasm and thankfulness that we were here.

At that point I felt as though feeding all the mosquitoes here in Suva had been worth it.. well..almost. (check out Hu Die’s feet that the mosquitoes in Nadi had a feast on..) Aeroguard and Off! Are our best friends here.

We had church with them and chatted a little bit… that was good as we had the opportunity to get to know the church members and children better. A few core church members sat down with the Missionary Pastor Herbert & his wife Esther to get orientated with the place, how the church was founded, the demographics of Suva and the church currently as well as updates on the registration numbers for the Kids Holiday Club program.

We were really blessed that our host family – Xiao Zhang and Ying Lan live along this street where there are mostly families from Guang Zhou and speak Cantonese. Grace Choy went down to visit the shops and the families and they were all very warm and friendly when they realized that they had a common language with us. (one shop owner even gave us 2 bottles of coke free!!) They all informed that they had registered their kids for the Holiday Kids Club Program and it was nice for them to be able to meet up as to put a face to with whom their kids would be with for the next 5 days.

Our host family has been very very welcoming and accommodating to us. They stocked up on basic necessities (eg. Cooking oil, rice, toilet paper!!! Etc) for us. The place that we are staying in is very basic but cosy as we are all able to be under one roof together and the living room has been more popular than the rooms as it’s cooler and it’s just nice to hang out together there. We truly have been so blessed…

In the evening, we headed back to church to attend a “factory ladies” evening service. Thank God for our gifts and talents in music.. to be able to songlead and lead the service so that Herbert and Esther could take a well deserved break and just be part of the congregation. We all shared our testimonies and made friends with the ladies who are from China.

But what a surprise greeted us when we arrived home... there were a couple of big fat black cockroaches all around (apparently they are quite common in Fiji) but still super YUCKS!!!!! Luckily the boys came to our rescue and they started a counting game on how many cockroaches they could kill in a night...... SHUDDER.

Tiredness soon got the better of us and after checking our beds/rooms for any relatives of the abovementioned dead bugs, we all crashed to sleep in anticipation of the Kids Club activities starting tomorrow.

*UPDATE: the internet here is at 10.0Mbps and uploading individual pics to the blog has proven to be quite painful. Therefore, please refer to the slideshow below for all the pics and captions of the day... :)