Get the real Fiji holiday feeling...

Well I definately saw the 'real' Fiji while I was away, but not so sure about the holiday feeling?! We worked pretty hard.

It's hard to even know where to begin with something like this. The experience was totally life altering. It's one thing to hear or see about the way other people live, but another to actually go and see and experience it with your own eyes. To sit in the so called lounge room of a corrugated iron shack with 5 little kids smiling up at you and their parents welcoming you into their home. To be made a cup of coffee and offered a plate of cakes and not know how clean the water is or if the milk is off, but in your heart knowing the insult it would be to turn it down because of the huge sacrifce they've just made offering it to you, their 'honoured' guest. To sit and listen as they share a little with you about life as they know it. To see how little they have and yet how happy they are and to think how miserable we'd be if we suddenly lost all the material things we have.
To have 5 sweet, sweet little girls with toothless grins singing their hearts out for you. And then to watch them giggle as you sing something back to them.

We spent all of 1 hour visiting with people in the Wailea slums in Suva and yet it had such a profound impact on so many of the team, including myself.

I'm sitting in bed with my electric blanket on, tapping away on my laptop and really struggling to understand it all. How fortunate I am to have been born, when and where and to whom I was. Life could have been much harder than it is for me. My silly moans and groans seem grossly insignificant in comparison.

We spent the first part of the trip training at Coral Coast Christian Centre a camp at Dueba near Pacific Harbour. We practiced our dramas, songs, puppets, testimonies and the 'Your Love is Deep' dance to near perfection (haha). It was a great week of being in fellowship with each other. Afterall we had mostly all just met. It was clear that friendships were forming already. I guess that's a result of living in each others pockets.

During this first week we were able to do 2 smaller programs that were a good intro to things and a chance to practice our dramas and songs. It was awesome to see people make decisions for Christ while we were there.

The first weekend there we had about 50-60 young people from Suva come in for a camp. We discovered that a whole bunch of the boys were from a deaf school. This kinda threw me at first but we all quickly settled in to a routine of spelling out words using sign language that was very hastily picked up!

Little did we know that in the 2 short days we'd spend with those boys that they'd change some of our lives.