Crazy Day, Crazy Week, Crazy Life

At times it feels pretty relentless. I often hear myself saying, “Crazy day, crazy week, crazy life.” Every day is an adventure, every day unexpected things happen, life barely goes to plan… you just need to take a breath, throw all expectations out the window and just do what you can on the day! We are now right in the middle of our first full dry season in Fiji. That means, it is the best time for building projects and teams from New Zealand are super keen to escape the cold and warm up in Fiji and so we are keeping super busy!

Mothers Day at Living Way Church

One year in Fiji, three years with MMM
We have now completed a year in Fiji making it three years in total working for MMM. We feel like, in the last year particularly, life has been a constant learning curve of so many different people, places, culture, language and way of doing things. We seem to have specialised in transition, change and new beginnings in the last three years, but our hope is that we are able to settle into where we are now for a while.

It is completely humbling to think we have ‘lived by faith’ for three years and the generosity of those who give to us. Thank you to you all! This year school fees have been something we have added to our list of things to pay for. We never budgeted for school fees as the plan was to homeschool. Our extroverted younger kids found this way too isolating in Fiji and the need for school was obvious. When I asked in an update a while back if anyone wanted to support our kids in helping pay for school fees we quickly got enough to cover the last two terms.

Recently we were given a generous donation we weren’t expecting and the next week I got my term three school fee invoice! God’s perfect timing and providence never ceases to amaze us. We have so many stories from the last three years to show how our every need is continually provided for and we thank all of you that have given generously to allow us to do this work. This has enabled us to be a blessing to those we meet and partner with here in Fiji. We have repeatedly seen that the way we can be used to bless and help people in this country is not limited to MMM and building and we are excited by the networking we can do (possibly more Rachael than Roy 🤣) in many areas.

A good photo spot and Nadi airport

Fiji Agape Mission School
Gabrielle and Kelepi have just started their second term at Agape. This school has been a much better fit for our family with the kids working at levels appropriate to them and the school being closer to home. It is a self-taught curriculum which is an easy transition from homeschooling. They are making lots of new friends and enjoying sports, music and daily devotions. They love learning some songs in Fijian and Kelepi often comes home with new Fijian words I don’t understand.

Sports Day at Agape - Go Green! (Their team did win!)

Meliki and Ola’s house project
We met Meliki and Ola pretty soon after arriving in Fiji as he is the farm manager for Oasis farm, the ministry founded by the family we were house sitting for. Meliki is also the Pastor of Saweni Central Church. They have been slowly building a home for their family for a while and whenever we have had a spare day with a team, or even half a day, we have taken them to their house to help them out. But it was a huge encouragement to them to have a talented, generous and hard working team from Picton Baptist join them for a whole week. The team worked on the floor, wall framing, cladding, roofing, gutters, plumbing and the septic tank installation for their house. It is so good seeing this house getting closer to being liveable.

A typical set up onsite

Picton Baptist did a great job at putting a team together and fundraising extra money for the project in only four months. This is pretty exciting for a church that only has about 40 regular members.

Josh had a go on the tools at Meliki & Ola's

Actually he wasn't the only one, Rachael helped out too

Homes of Hope project
For the second week of Picton Baptist’s time in Fiji, Roy took them to Suva to work at Homes of Hope. The project of renovating three bathrooms in ‘Liberty’ house has been a big task Roy has been working towards for a while, which if you have read our previous blog you’ll remember Roy and the team we had in February went there to kick it off. When we got the offer for the plumbers with Picton Baptist to come to Fiji, Roy jumped at the chance to get them involved here.

There was lots of demolition required to remove all the rotten framing, flooring and the rest. A lot of floor joists needing replacing and four new piles were put in, which was necessary but sucked up precious time. The plumbers were able to do the majority of the plumbing work on the last days which was great.

It is a tricky one when the projects are away from Nadi, as the kids are starting to feel more settled in Nadi and are less keen to go away and miss school, gymnastics and our own church. We are still working on the best balance here, but for now it has meant a bit of time in different places.

After Picton Baptist went home, we had a one week break before our next team from Northgate Community Church in Hamilton arrived. Luckily this coincided with our kids' school holidays, which also meant no gymnastics that week. That made for the perfect timing for the family to spend the first week with the Northgate team at Homes of Hope.

We were also blessed to have two builders join us from Youbuild in Nelson for most of the project, making a total of 15 people and the largest team we have had in Fiji. It is always great when we get to experience the projects and team as a family, meeting the teams, the ministries and to be involved with all that is going on.

Kelepi found a great spot to read on a trip to Leleuvia Island with the
Northgate team

Given the size of the team, we were able to split up and work on two of the staff houses, getting 'Botiki' house into a habitable state for the first time which is great to now have new staff accommodation available.The team did a great job and made heaps of progress, however the job in ‘Liberty’ turned out to be bigger than first expected (as is often the case with renovations) and the team were given a good taste of some of our daily frustrations, like when we paid for materials but before they were delivered they had been sold to someone else! Working with the suppliers who were on ‘Fiji-time’ made everything slower than it would be in New Zealand too.

We had intended to complete that project by now, but Roy wasn’t willing to rush the quality just to get it done ‘on time’. We have unfortunately seen many examples of work teams (not MMM) coming over to help but basing the whole project on what they can complete in the limited time frame they have, rather than working to the required standards even if that means multiple trips to finish. In the end it can cause more harm than good. That is everything we don’t want MMM to be. So we are making plans to take another team back for one more week to finish the project properly.

Homes of Hope is a large site with many buildings and lots of maintenance needs. They need someone like Roy working there full time. If you or someone you know could tick that box then please get in touch.

Moving House
In the middle of June we moved house! We had been house and pet sitting since July last year in rural Sabeto and now we are in a new rental in Nasoso. We are discovering all the things we don’t actually own after a year of living in someone else's home. We bought a new mattress and Roy built a bed base as he couldn’t face spending so much on one when he could make one. We bought a nice cosy blanket, as it turns out we may have acclimatised a little as we were finding the cooler dry season pretty cold at nights. We may have even got a team to bring over some winter pyjamas! 😆

A New Kitten
One sad part of leaving the house we had been house sitting for the last year was saying goodbye to the pets. Our kids all love animals, Josh is a big cat fan, Gabrielle loves dogs most, Kelepi loves both. Josh would often do his school work surrounded by pets. The week before we left I was feeling a bit worried how he would feel leaving all the pets as I joked they were his classmates.

Then I had a call from a friend, “I just rescued a kitten that had been dumped on the side of the road at the traffic lights that was about to get run over, I wouldn’t usually ask, but do you want it?” She had stopped traffic to crawl under a car and rescue the kitten at the red light. I couldn’t say no, so as soon as we moved we took on a new kitten! Why not keep the crazy life crazy by getting a kitten while hosting a team, having just moved house and unpacking boxes?!

The kids liked the idea of calling it a name in te reo māori, so decided on 'Whero', (the Māori word for red) as it was rescued at a red light. Whero is well loved and has provided a lot of fun and entertainment in our house.

Every kitten needs a personalised duplo house

Coming up…

The rest of our year is going to keep us very busy with four teams coming from New Zealand for projects plus plenty of other things in between. We are grateful that after a slow start here there has been no shortage of volunteers this year with many of them already talking about coming back.

The year is flying by and we are looking forward to visiting New Zealand later this year. We often talk about the things we miss from New Zealand… having friends and family around, drinking water straight from the tap, actual milk, gluten free bread, treated plywood, L&P, affordable chippies, fresh mushrooms, roads with reflectors and streetlights, KFC, Subway, Pak n Save, The Warehouse, Mitre10, Bunnings, normal building materials, fish and chips, Super Donut Hero, cashless shopping, reliable internet, trustworthy and affordable repair services, feeling safe enough to go for a walk around the block, classic NZ surf beaches, bugs that stay away and/or die when requested… the list could go on! Of course we miss all the people too, so we would love to see you all when we are there, it’s just tricky working out how to fit everyone in, so get in touch if you want to make it happen.

We appreciate all the goodies that people bring in their luggage for us!

The plan is still to be back in New Zealand over most of December and January and we would love to see as many people as possible before returning after New Wine and Festival One for another school year. Our current work permits expire in March 2024 and we intend to renew them. It feels like the longer we are here, the more impact we can make. We have put in a lot of work to get this far, we would really like to keep pushing on with it for now.

If anyone in Waikanae needs a house sitter in the first two to three weeks of January please keep us in mind and get in touch (we specialise in taking care of pets, can provide referee’s 😂). Otherwise any Kāpiti options could be good too.

If you are new to our updates and want to read the story that got us to this point, you can check out our blog here. Thank you so much for all your ongoing support, prayers and encouragement.

Until next time,

Roy, Rachael, Josh, Gabrielle and Kelepi