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INTERESTS
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 Diving & Fishing
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Whenever I get the chance to go down to my
village on Fiji's Coral Coast, I love nothing better to do than to go fishing, speardiving
or gleaning on the reef at low tide with a couple of my numerous uncles, aunties and
cousins. We would eat some of the stuff raw like fish roe and clam right there on the reef
then afterwards, we would light a fire on the beach and roast the fish or lobster in the
coals and wash it all down with some cool coconut juice.
On the right is yours truly on a bilibili, a craft made out of
bamboo logs lashed together with vines from the forest. The bilibili is often
used to fish with a handline, dive or cast nets from when in deeper waters.
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Music
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Music is a great part of my life. I have
been privileged to play bass in our church band and am also stand-in bassist for a
jazz trio called Blue Monks. I like listening to all sorts of music as long as it is not
like really, really heavy, heavy metal stuff.
On the right are Victor Wooten and John Pattitucci, two bassists who are
currently hot on the world music scene.
One of my favourite bassists is Jaco who wrote the song "Chicken" a midi copy of which provides the background music to
my homepage. You can hear Jaco doing a solo on a rendition of "Teentown" by
clicking on his photo on the right.
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Rugby
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Rugby (both codes) is another love. A couple
of years back I was fortunate enough to be picked to represent the University I attended
and our village first XV. I now have two dodgy shoulders and an equally dodgy ankle to
show for that phase of my life . Nowdays participation is restricted to sitting in front
of the TV and watching my favourite rugby union and league teams like Fiji, the Canterbury
Crusaders, the Brisbane Broncos and the
Canberra Raiders.
On the left is a cousin from the village who played for the
Canberra Raiders rugby league club in the early nineties.
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Camping
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Another favourite pastime is going out
camping and hiking. As kids, my brothers and I would build wigwams at the back of
our house and attempt to sleep in them at night only to be driven back indoors by clouds
of mosquitoes and the rain. In 1989 I was fortunate enough to be sponsored by Air Pacific my employers at the time to
attend Outward Bound Australia where over 50 of us from different countries all over the
world spent almost a whole month in the tropical rainforests and islands of North
Queensland.
My funniest camping memory though, has to be when on a hike over the Welsh
mountains in winter, a crazy Belgian Doctor, an equally crazy English Lawyer and yours
truly tried to sleep in a two-man tent in the snow as a Welsh blizzard howled all night.
None of us had much sleep that night. The Belgian was lucky he did not suffer from
frostbite because his boots were sticking out the door of the tent most of the
night.
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God
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God is perhaps the most important interest
in my life. Ever since I discovered how real he is (while reluctantly attending a local
Christian youth camp in May 1988), I have come to appreciate life and its meaning a lot
more. Jesus Christ was a big problem for me as a
sociology graduate with socialist/marxist leanings until that fateful Camp when I
encountered God in a funny, powerful and liberating sort of way. I finally realised that
he was not only the solution to my problems but to those of my society and the world at
large. If you have read this far, I would like to invite you to make time to discover God
and his plans for you. God bless you.
I currently participate in the life of a methodist church in the centre of
Suva called the Wesley City Mission and am a member of a christian covenant community
called Patmos which is part of the Sword of the Spirit community of
communities.
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All we like sheep
have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way, but the Lord has laid on him the
iniquities of us all.
Isaiah 53:6
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