Page 26 - IB December 2024

Climate Change Climate Change

Line in the sand .... Sitella Rasiga with an indigenous engineering concept to stop erosion at Nalase Village, Fiji.

SAVING THE VILLAGE ONE

ROOT AT A TIME

By Netani Rika The villagers had exhausted every means possible in their
attempts to hold back the onslaught of the constantly rising
Deep in the Rewa Delta on Fiji’s largest island, Viti Levu, river.
the river gradually clawed away at the banks, finding its way A cement wall funder by the Fijian government and
into the villages, destroying food gardens and threatening floodgates provided by the European Union crumbled and
local homes. buckled. Villagers resorted to filling bags with sand but the
For the villagers of Nalase, the situation had become dire. relief was temporary.
Water lapped at the floorboards of the community hall and With each receding tide, bags were dragged into the river
seeped into houses at high tide. to add to the silt of hundreds of years.
Even the cement walls erected along the riverbanks failed Rasiga recalled the moment the solution to the villagers’
to hold, sliding into the mud and disappearing under water. climate change issues became glaringly obvious.
Sitella Rasiga—pursuing a Diploma at the Pacific Theological “The young people had gathered in the community hall
College—recognised the existential threat posed by climate after filling sandbags and shoring the river defences,” she
change from lectures she had attended. said.
“Suddenly, all that we had been learning about just came to “Our elders were talking about the failure of the system
life in front of my very eyes,” Rasiga said. and how despite the abundance of knowledge and technology,
“I’d gone to the village for a four-week research stint and nothing could hold back the force of nature. Then, I asked
the riverbank had started to slide into the water. At high tide, about ancient knowledge. You know, the wisdom of our
we could hear water touching the floorboards and the grass ancestors.
was dying.’’ “Nothing had prepared me for the response of the older

26 Islands Business, December 2024