Ten people were killed and more than $80 million dollars worth of damage was done by the worst floods ever in Fiji in early January, 2009.

Among those who will remember these floods for generations are the 650 villagers of Votua, on the banks of the Ba river on the western side of the main island of Fiji.

A few days before the downpour began, Rupeni Mara, a 64 year old elder of Votua collapsed and died of a heart attack while working in his garden. His body was put in Nailaga mortuary, about five miles from the village, to await his funeral on Friday, January 9th.

On the following Wednesday and Thursday the rain poured down in torrents. The villagers placed their possessions on top of beds, tables and shelves. At one end of the village men tied a 75 meter long rope between a number of houses leading to a double storey building in case people needed to take shelter there.

Boats searched around the village in the dark, alerted by calls for help from different houses. They ferried people to the school where between three and four hundred people were packed like sardines. It was standing room only. No one could lie flat. Sleep was impossible as they stood or hunched together in wet clothes, sweating from the humid night and the body heat of their fellow villagers. Vicious mosquitoes biting them added to their misery.

People prayed the rosary and sang hymns and periodically checked the height of the water. Some of the old ladies spoke of the end of the world. Others lapsed into an exhausted silence broken only by desultory questions and comments to one another.

This flood surpassed, in the Ba area, even the infamous 1931 flood. The vicious currents and the slow pace of subsidence also distinguished it from previous floods. From Thursday evening until the following Wednesday morning all of Votua and many other parts of Ba province remained under water.

On Friday morning Rupeni’s grieving family received a call from the Nailaga mortuary telling them, that with electricity cut off, his corpse should be removed immediately. Burial in Votua village was now clearly impossible. After a number of phone calls the elders decided that they would try to ferry the coffin by boat from the village to Nailaga. Then they would bury Rupeni in the nearby Catholic hillside cemetery of Varoko.

Two boats set out from Votua - one with the coffin accompanied by the village catechist, Ramoce, and the other with an elder, who knew the layout of the cemetery plots, and a dozen young men to dig the grave. The men avoided the Ba river and kept to the water channels between the sugarcane farms.

On arrival at the morgue, they placed the body in the coffin, carried it to the cemetery where the catechist conducted the burial service during a pause in the rain. They wrapped the coffin in one small mat instead of the four or five large mats traditionally used. These had been prepared, but were left behind in the village because of the floods.

Afterwards the catechist, Ramoce, remembered that Rupeni had told him, and his own wife, that he did not want expensive traditional mats to be wasted on his funeral. Instead, he wanted those mats to be donated to the Church. Ramoce wondered at the extraordinary circumstances that brought about compliance with Rupeni’s wishes. 

Votua will not easily forget the second week of January, 2009. The circumstances of Rupeni Mara’s funeral will be long remembered.

Tens of thousands of people throughout Fiji, whose few possessions have been washed away, are faced with a struggle to survive. But if it is true that we discover our deepest selves in a time of crisis then, once again, Fijians have proved to be a courageous, wise, resilient and communitarian people. Friends of Fiji in many parts of the world are responding generously to this heroism and to the efforts of the people of Fiji to rebuild their lives.

Fr Frank Hoare is a Columban missionary and has recently returned to Fiji after being on the International Leadership Team in Ireland