Semester One 2008

My logo work

I've been trying out some logos for stuff in school and maybe a new blog for my personal outpourings... so keep an eye out for it... check them out!

Time flies

It’s November, and life doesn’t seem to get any easier as time goes by. Oh wait, I think that’s the whole point about it, life never gets easier, it’s supposed to go up a level on the scale of difficulty. It’s almost the end of another year and in the past three weeks I’ve seen so much happening that I can’t even begin to explain. The first was my trip to Savusavu.

Savusavu was such a blast! We had so much fun there, it was quiet, peaceful and at the same time different. I’m so used to the whole hustle and bustle of Suva that going to Savusavu has opened up a lot of different experiences for me. It’s actually kinda nice to just wake up and hear birds singing – not bass pumping music blasting from some bus just down the road. The beach was just across the road from the hotel, I mean you could just walk on down there and jump straight into crystal clear sea water and swim with the beautiful fish in the harbour.

A stroll though town was another order of the day, the people are so friendly and life there seems so laidback and easy. It’s no wonder that a lot of people go there to live after retirement. But for a town that’s boasted of as Fiji’s hidden paradise, it has one really seedy night life. If you’re not hitting it out in the local club – UROSOUS yes that’s what it’s called, you can also get smashed drunk at a local house party that 90% of the time occurs by someone’s beach house.

Anyway, back to the case at hand. I went to Savusavu along with a select group of members of the Malaga Choir to perform as guest artists at the Savusavu World Music Festival. I was billeted with Tiri and Valerie but I ended up sleeping in the same room with Jason, Ronnie, Fumaru and Ana along with Chris. So, in a room set for four people, there were in actual fact, six people there, who – as it turns out – are all smokers. LOL.

The festival opening was held at the Jean-Michel Cousteau Resort Fiji, a five star place with beautifully decorated bures and posh looking villas all facing the ocean. It even has a massage parlour that’s right beside the water – here you can get a real proper spa treatment complete with Pure Fiji products. Speaking about Pure Fiji stuff, each bure is outfitted with a selection of Pure Fiji products like shampoos, conditioners and soap. In order for us to have a place of our own to change in, we were given a bure to use (Bure 19). So, while the girls were busy putting on their make-up, I was busy “hana-ing” all the Pure Fiji stuff I could find in the bure. I arrived at the hotel with an empty bag; I left with the damn thing bursting at the seams. LOL.

Our second performance was on Friday night at the hotel of our residence: Hot Springs Hotel. The only claim to fame this little place has is it’s spectacular view of Savusavu Bay and I don’t take that lightly – this place has one pretty amazing view. You wake up in the morning and you can stand in your little balcony overlooking the harbour and the island directly across from you just beckons. I loved waking up at four and waiting for the sunrise – it’s a truly beautiful sight, one I will truly miss. God! It seems like I can’t get out of talking about the place! Anyway, we performed the Bula Spirit Tour repertoire for both Cousteau and Hot Springs Hotel. The show that made a difference was our closing performance on Saturday night. We had to perform without Igelese who had to return to Suva with his family and I must say that we did pretty well without him.

Our repertoire was a combination of the Bula Spirit Tour and the Vaka production. The songs and dances picked were perfect for the show! Everything just seemed to gel from the beginning. The most exciting part for me was being able to do the hurricane dance from beginning to end, sitting down cross legged on the floor. You might not think it much but for me, it meant the whole world! LOL I was also given the chance to write the script for the show; the whole idea behind this was so that even though we had breaks between our segments, there’d be a flowing storyline. My creative juices were going out of control.

My favourite segment was segment 2 which I entitled “Aroha – Love”. It was made up of two songs and one dance. The first was Manea Koe Engara’s song, then the Ura Pa’u and finally Pese Mai Vaka. The whole idea behind the segment was that it had to show the Pacific love for life, for God, for the Arts and for each other. Am I good or what?

The whole performance was our best ever and we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. That night, we were so tired; most of us just fell asleep after having a cool shower to wash off the sweat of the performance. I fell asleep and woke up late the next morning. When I got up, most if not all the choir members had eaten breakfast and left for the church service that I wasn’t told about. I couldn’t be bothered attending the service, so after breakfast myself and Fumaru took a walk through town. It was pretty nice. But an added bonus for the day was going for a car ride with Tupou (a member of the original Malaga 2006 choir). We all went up to an estate belonging to the Hazelman family of Savusavu.

Now this estate was pretty extensive and it had an awesome view. The house was built on the highest hill and it overlooks the low lying land and the sea. From that point, I could see Koro Island and Taveuni Island. We went sightseeing through the garden and we even got several cuttings of the plants in the garden. I scored myself, two cuttings – one for a red frangipani tree and another for the small white frangipani flower tree, those were the only two that I wanted. Tupou got herself a lot of cuttings – even a sapling of the red palm and some orchids.

Now I don’t have the time to finish this so I’ll continue this train of thought later…

New Blog

Hello my dear beloved readers.... if there are any...lol there's a new blog on the site, it's called :SILENCE BROKEN and it recounts the struggles of young people within the Salvation Army here in Fiji. Click on the link, have a look and lemme know what you think:

Silence Broken Fiji

Fiji Idol - contestant 69

don't laugh

Reminiscence: **Words Unsaid**

This is an essay that i wrote for my LL114 assignment one:

There are moments in life that prepare you for the future; it could be many things, from a birthday or even a funeral. Strangely enough, it was the latter that did exactly that, a funeral made me realise how precious life is. If you’re wondering what that means then read on because mine is a story of many contradictions. I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions. Here’s my story: it all begins with the day that my older brother became sick.

It was Diwali of 2005 and my father told my brothers and me that we would spend the day doing some work on the garden, pulling out weeds, cutting the grass and collecting the rubbish for disposal. By midday we were working at full swing and my brother, Jese was busy pulling up some unwanted bushes from the hedge. He must have been pulling very hard on the plants because the exertion caused a few blood cells in his lungs to burst, although he didn’t know this at all.

That night, Jese felt weak and cold, and because he was asthmatic, we made sure that he was warm and my parents gave him a massage before he went to bed. From then on, it all went down hill. Within 2 days he was unable to stand, having to crawl to the kitchen or even to the bathroom. My parents were alarmed and took him down to the Colonial Memorial Hospital. I was never close to my brother and took this news with some indifference.

Jese was immediately hospitalized and under constant watch. Day after day, he became even weaker, but there were times when he was strong enough to sit up and chat with us. The doctors constantly moved him around the hospital, sometimes changing wards after spending just two hours in a new wing. To me, it seemed that this constant moving around weakened him even more than the treatment could help, which was saying a lot because they were injecting very strong medicine into his system. My mother and my cousins had taken shifts to watch over him, both day and night. I was told to stay home and make sure that everything is prepared ready for my parents and siblings. In the whole time Jese was in hospital, I had only been in to visit may be three times and in those visits, I just stood by and watched as everyone else had a chance to talk with him and share their experiences. Finally, he was moved into the Sukuna Ward, where he was to spend his final days before he succumbed to a sleep that was to last forever.




Friday morning, and it was just a few days after the Diwali clean-up. Jese had spent 3 days in hospital. My father had promised me a gift for my birthday and said for me to wait until I found what I wanted. Looking around town, I found the perfect thing. It was an mp3 player that was on sale and cost only $70.00. He agreed to it and so we went into town, did some banking, bought some batteries and purchased my new mp3 player. The batteries were for Jese who wanted some fresh ones to replace the old ones in his cd player. It took us a good portion of the day to get all this done. We left town and made our way up to the hospital, where the unthinkable had happened. My brother Jese had died.

It happened around 2’o clock and that was the time that we were out hunting for my mp3 player. We parked the car outside the ward and walked in together, holding our new purchases, mine the mp3 player and dad carried the bag of batteries. The curtain to Jese’s room was drawn closed and as I walked in, the sight that greeted me was the last I had expected to see. Jese lay on his bed arms crossed across his abdomen and his face covered. My mother and younger were both crying and for that split second, I was speechless. I felt like I couldn’t breathe; I didn’t know whether to cry or to scream. I stood there shaking and then my mother tells me to hold my father’s hand because it looked like he was gonna fall over with shock.

Till this very day, I still carry that memory fresh in my mind. As I thought of it more and more, one thing keeps coming back to me. It was the thought that of everyone in my family, I never had a chance to say goodbye to him. My dad had his chance early in the morning as he left to bring mum home from the hospital. But I never did, in all the visits, every time I had the chance to, I didn’t get to say goodbye to my brother who I now realised loved me but in his own special way.

It was that day that set in motion events that lead me to where I am now. Things at home were never the same; I had to spend many nights lying on the floor next to my mother holding her hand whenever she went to sleep because she always had bad nightmares of that Friday. I handled my grief in many ways, crying myself to sleep at night, drinking my way through weekends letting the hangovers represent the pain I couldn’t feel inside. I felt empty.

When New Years came, I vowed to never leave words unsaid between me and anyone else I know and love. I can only hope to catch up with Jese when my turn comes round, so I can tell him everything that I could never say before. I promised myself that I would live my life to the fullest, never have regrets and do everything I possibly can to ensure that my family knows how much I love them. When I was accepted into the University of the South Pacific (USP) early last year, it was an achievement not only for me but also for Jese because it was his dream for me to complete my education with a tertiary degree, a dream he’d wasted when his chance came round.

The day that my brother died was the day that my life changed, physically, spiritually, mentally and emotionally. I had to mature in many ways and it was often an unpleasant process. But I’m glad that I can move on from there and do my best to achieve the goals I set for myself in New Years. Two years on, I realise that I’m no longer the same person I was before. I’m not sure that’s a change I’d actually welcome but as the days go by, I know that they will mold me to becoming a better brother, son and friend for everyone within my sphere of influence.

It's been a while....

well, i don't know what sparked this reunion with my blog but i felt that i have spent too much away from this most important lifeline of mine. i don't have much to write in this post but i will post an essay that i wrote for my first assignment for my LL114 class... it's a narrative essay and it talks about my experiences during the time that Jese passed away. I do apologise for not putting anything new up but now i'm back and i've got lots to add and say... heck i've got the time to do it so why the heck no??? lol

stay tuned for more updates....

big luvin!

**tired**body weak**mind leaving me**

well... hows things here... lolz... i can't remember the last time i posted sumfin here and the worst thing abt it is that i can't bother with putting up the link on this post.lolz.

i spent the whole day @ Dolphins Foodcourt (next to ROC 1) selling tickets for the Secondary Schools Music Festival. The festival is a revival of what used to happen in Suva's social calendar round abt 10 years ago. it was a major event and a lot of people are remembering the times when they used to sing in the old festival a long tym ago.

oh you might have noticed that i am sometimes slipping into IM speech.... it's coz i spent a lot of time on bebo. i'm beginning to fall in love with that website. i think it's waaaayyy cooler than hi5 and maybe myspace too.

anywho... i spent the whole of today selling tickets and stuff... i'm tired... have a meeting after this for the May committee and the worst thing about this is that i have no money to make my way home. hopefully, i can catch a ride either with Tiri or Nemani.

i'm getting really tired these days and sometimes i think i'm losing my mind. the whole thing with my fees and what not, i'm just preparing myself for the worst. i'm gonna start preparing my CV for my work applications. i'll get Jason to help me. i'm scared.

last night, during devotions, i prayed and i had never prayed like that in a long tym. i'm slowly pulling my life threads together but sometimes its not helping. i just pray that God will help me work through this tough time.

i'm gonna leave this off here. don't forget to holla at me.

**hopeful**

**anger**

dad told me that the reason FNPF haven't paid my fees is cause they lost my application form. **fuming**

**fingers crossed**

filled out another form last night and i hope that they pay it by the end of the week or else i'll be kicked out of uni for this semester.

**wondering**

**hopeful**

**bored again**

my life sux

well, my life goes from shit to worse than shit and with each passing moment, it gets even worse. i just found out today that the guys from FNPF haven't paid my school fees and i've been de-registered. i have no idea what to do now. i'm totally lost. i have to let mum and dad know soon.damn it.

i have to find out what's the cost for registering again (money) and then pay for my fees (money) and also pay the fine for late payment of fees (money)... i have no idea where i'm gonna get the money from. GOD help me plz.

i feel another depression episode settling on me. i'll keep you posted on all the details.

Wednesdays....

now what the hell do i do on wednesdays??? i've had my radio class at 9 and then there was my show Graffiti on at 12 (now over).... oh that's right. i'm free from now till 3pm which is when i have a politics class.lecture actually.

i'm just wastin time hea. like i usually do.

can't be bothered typing major stuff coz now i am seriously hungry. like madly hungry.i hunger.food.need food.desperatly need food.

waddup???

Hello my beebles....

well, today is graduation day for the University, we've got over 300 graduates and i wish them all the best for the future. now, as for me, i am singing in the graduation ceremony this afternoon. i'm a soloist for the USP anthem, i used to hate singing this song but after Igelese changed it and made it more funky, it's become one of my favourites. he's got an amazing talent that man, i'm just amazed at the way he can take an ordinary song and make it sound extraordinary. the choir is absolutely amazing.

i'm a bit tired from last night, i watched happy feet late last night... OH BUT WAIT! i am sooo happy today coz yesterday i was able to get my hair braided (and real nice too) by Luisa and i'm just lvin' it. i've always wanted to get my hair braided like this. i'm over the moon about it. my excitement was so strong, that i couldn't sleep last night coz i was busy thinking of how good i look (VANITY!!!)

i realise that i haven't posted a picture with my blog in such a long time. so i've posted my fav comic strip, Ginger Meggs: