posted September 7th

with guide Are & son

As a registered charity in Fiji, we usually do distributions of school books & library books in village schools, along with some clothes distributions to needy families; however this was the first time we’ve distributed toothpaste!

In fact, the many boxes of adult & children’s toothpaste came from England, as part of last year’s very large shipment from the UK, in co-ordination with Children of Fiji charity. While we have plans to distribute more in orphanages & other needy institutions in the coming weeks, we thought it important to at least get started with a small distribution in a very poor settlement not far from where we live. We actually discovered the settlement while looking for short cuts to try to cut down on the extremely long & circuitous bus that we take when travelling back from town….

We were blessed to have Japanese friend Michiko help us with the distribution. It turned out that many of the families we visited were from the island of Kadavu & to our great surprise, we found that Michiko spoke not only quite good Fijian but also knew some sentences in the Kadavu dialect: a great ice-breaker!

We’re also thankful to Are (pronounced Aray), our local guide. We asked him to take us to the poorest families & in fact we wouldn’t have succeeded without his expert knowledge of the area & its people.
Although our distribution was a ‘local’ one, in fact every family we visited had come from quite far away & so we actually reached people from all over Fiji: Kadavu, different parts of Vanua Levu & the Lau island group!

with Japanese friend & helper Michiko