Fijian teacher and storyteller Joji Raqio has provided some powerful insights into teaching in rural Fiji during the pandemic. His Twitter feed has entertained and educated people across the nation. Here he tells his story.
My name is Joji Seseu Raqio and my family is originally from Nasaqalau, Lakeba in Lau. Interestingly I am a part of the second generation of my family that was born and brought up in the village of Rakiraki here in the Ra province where my paternal grandmother is from.
My paternal grandmother Joji Seseu (I am named after him) left Nasaqalau as a young man and eventually ended up at Rakiraki where he met, married and settled down with my paternal grandmother Litiana Leba Bolobolo from the chiefly household of Uluda in Rakiraki.
I joined the teaching profession in 2004 after graduating from Lautoka Teacher’s College in 2003 after two years of study. I was first posted to Nasau District School in the interior of Ra and spent 5 years there. I was then transferred to Malake Village School also in Ra and I stayed there for three years. In 2012 I was transferred to Mataso Primary School and have been here ever since. I had come to Mataso a single man but now I am happily married to Reavi Kinikini who is from Narikoso, Mataso and we have a son Mitieli Bose Tuinasaqalau who just recently turned a year old.
I joined Twitter in October of 2016 and I have never regretted it once. I have more often than not used the bird app as a platform on which I am able to relate stories and experiences that I have been able to collect all throughout my 18 years of teaching. Twitter has also provided me a platform and an opportunity to interact with individuals from all walks of life who I do not personally know. Those interactions have led to some very interesting resolutions.
One such example was back in February of 2020 when I had put up on Twitter pictures of our students from Nakorovou village crossing the flooded Wainisici river to return home after school. That tweet immediately went viral with mainstream Fijian media organisations and journalists picking it up and reporting on it or sharing it on their respective social media platforms. The issue of the village not having a bridge was therefore highlighted with the villagers and students having to make life and death decisions whenever there was heavy rain.
A few days after the tweet had gone viral an individual who had connections with the Japanese Embassy contacted me on Twitter and things began to look good with a group of men from an Asian company coming to take measurements and scouting for possible sites on which the bridge was to be built. Unfortunately with the onset of the first and second wave of the COVID19 pandemic those plans have had to be suspended.
Another example would be the story that I had initially shared on Twitter about my mother taking in and looking after our Indo Fijian elderly neighbour Aunty Parmesh Gopal who was involved in an accident and was unable to walk. She had never been married and was living alone with almost all her immediate relatives overseas. That story also went viral, and I was eventually contacted by Fiji Times reporter Ana Madigibulu, who the wrote the story and it was published in the Fiji Times with the Fiji Sun sharing the initial tweet on their Social Media Watch Page.
Just recently (2 weeks ago) I had also shared on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram the incident in which a fire completely destroyed a fellow colleague’s school quarters and a Fiji Sun reporter called me for an interview. An article on the fire incident was published in the Fiji Sun two days later. This then raised awareness of the plight of the distraught teacher and her four children which eventually led to teachers all over the country sending in $1 contribution each through M-PAiSA. The teacher concerned has finally received that assistance today. In addition to that, she has been receiving assistance in cash and in kind from first here in the local community, here in Ra, all over the country and overseas.
In terms of the stories and experiences that I have shared on the bird app, they are true stories that really happened. The scary stories and the funny ones that I shared, to my astonishment and surprise, received a lot of response with individuals asking for more.
