FIJI

READ

Moving Through the Streets, by Joseph C. Veramu, is a cautionary tale. It follows the lives of several young people who live in desperate poverty in an area just outside of Suva, Fiji’s capital.

These young people have largely lost any hope of moving up in the world, or even having any sort of decent, stable life. Born into poverty, they have watched their parents struggle to get by, and they don’t see any way out for themselves, at least through any means sanctioned by society. Most of them dropped out of school at a young age and have turned to petty crime as a way to support themselves.

Sakaraia recently got out of prison, where he served a hard nine-month sentence for a mugging. He has no job or family support, and no idea how to make his life better. He meets Merenia at a night club, and they decide to start living together. Merenia, who was orphaned in high school, makes her living as a prostitute.

A central figure in Sakaraia’s life is a gang leader named Onisi, who was the mastermind behind the crime that landed Sakaraia in prison. A small-time criminal and back-street abortionist who has also spent time in prison, Onisi develops a drug habit that makes him even more dangerous.

The author of the book, Joseph C. Veramu, has written books about child-rearing, education, and child development. This novel appears to be a way for him to explain to young people that the choices they make have a lasting impact on their future. It’s also a way for him to convey to society at large the dangers of allowing hopelessness and desperation to flourish. While not great literature, Moving Through the Streets delivers an important message.

COOK

Most of the characters in Moving Through the Streets are just scraping by, so I didn’t find many references to food that I would want to prepare for this blog post. I suppose the most interesting dish mentioned in the book was topoi, which is essentially a coconut dumpling.

When I looked for Fijian recipes online, I found numerous mentions of coconut bread, which sounded wonderful. The recipe I chose was from the “Hungary Buddha Eats the World” website. The only change I had to make to veganize the recipe was to use a vegan egg substitute in place of the eggs. The bread was delicious!

GIVE

If life is hard for poor young men in Fiji, it’s even worse for poor young women. When I read the following passage in Moving Through the Streets, I knew I wanted to donate to an organization helping victims of domestic violence:

               “[Merenia] knew that eventually she would be married to a labourer and would bear

               children in rapid succession. She would of course be beaten periodically, for the man

               to prove to himself that he was head of the family.”

On the GlobalGiving.org website, I found an organization that is working to educate judges and advocates in order to help women and girls in the Pacific obtain justice in the legal system. According to the project description, more than 60 percent of women and girls in the Pacific face violence in their lifetimes, yet “sentences are reduced in over 52% of GBV [gender-based violence] cases in the Pacific region because of gender stereotypes and cultural norms.”

The way this project is addressing this issue is “to change the attitudes and behaviors of judges and prosecutors through evidence (data collection and analysis) and train them to recognize how gender stereotypes and cultural norms contribute to low levels of sentencing, thereby denying access to justice for victims/ survivors by perpetuating the cycle of violence.”

More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/access-to-justice-for-women-and-girls/. 

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