Swimming in Church

    We were guests at the Saru Full Gospel church - the largest church in the South Sea Islands, they are happy to tell us. It truly is massive, and the congregation arrives in over twenty full-sized buses from all directions – perhaps a thousand people can fit inside. 

    The P.A. system wasn’t working, but I found that a very lucky bonus: the choir had to sing a capella, with no loud distorting amps and mics. They began filtering in at 9 a.m. for a 10 a.m. service, and the singing began as soon as the first few choir members were in the choir loft, and grew from there. There were rich harmonies with some call-and-response elements, and the congregation sang just as well as the choir – they knew all the songs and all the harmonies. It reminded me of nothing more than African churches from my childhood.

    We were ushered to the third row from the front, so we were lifted up from behind as much as from the front, and it was like floating in buoyant saltwater swells, with waves of sound raising you up to the crest and lowering you gently back down the back side of the phrase. 

    Shalon called it “surround sound”. He wasn’t so enamoured of the long sermonizing in Fijian, which we didn’t understand of course, and the hard wooden pew that we had to sit on until that part of the experience was done (the service didn’t end until well after noon); but he was assured that if he returns, he’ll get to sit in until the choir is mostly finished, and then slip out.  I think there’s an English service in a different church, where the same choir either rehearses or sings, so he might seek that out. 

    After church we were invited to Soni’s for lunch – she’s Shalon’s housekeeper. She lives with her daughter Kirty in a poor neighbourhood with very uncertain title to a tiny property that her community group has negotiated from the Fijian landholder. She’s struggling to decide whether to put money into fixing up her home (not that she has much money anyway), because leasehold improvements might simply become the landholder’s property if she was forced off her plot. 

    The wooden supports under the house have become unstable, perhaps rotted, and the back deck is dangerous – Shalon’s foot went through in one spot – but her clay over wood outdoor stove and her concrete washbasin are at the far edge of that deck. Shalon’s been trying to get her to move to a rental in a brand new fourplex built by a local charity, but she sees her current place as “hers”, rather than a rental, which doesn’t appeal to her. 

    Shalon was going to help her do some repairs, but she’s been negotiating with a contractor who is smarmy and loosey-goosey about coming up with a written quote, so Shalon has withdrawn his offer of assistance. Hopefully she’ll come around to the idea of renting, which actually wouldn’t cost her more than she’s paying to the community association already. She doesn’t have electricity, and the water supply is thin plastic piping running above ground; hers had been severed by a car driving over it earlier in the day, so she’d cooked and served dinner from bags of plastic bottles that she’d filled with water at someone else’s house further down the hill. 

    Lunch was delicious, however – it is amazing what sorts of curry and other dishes an Indo-Fijian woman can craft in battered old pots on a kerosene burner.  Here are photos of the church and of Soni's house. 

    After lunch we squeezed into the car together and took the the two ladies back to Shalon’s apartment so that they could use his shower, and then he gave them a ride over to visit her sister, who was home from her work in Australia. Then Shalon and Deb and I went to the movies. We saw The Hunger Games – not my usual sort of choice, but Shalon checked Rotten Tomatoes, and it turned out to be not so bad. Sort of a modern day Lord of the Flies, actually.

Next post: at a Fijian tropical resort