After 10 years of leading the nonprofit I founded, I was granted a sabbatical to take some time off and rest a bit from what felt like a decade-long sprint in nonprofit leadership. I craved being in a place where I could be anonymous, live simply and be in the natural world. I was deeply drawn to the South Pacific and her family of tiny islands or motus, as they are called in many Polynesian languages. My love of surfing and years of Polynesian dance study made me ever curious to visit. Plus I had heard from a surfer I once met that Fiji was a place where you could take a boat out to the middle of the ocean and find bejeweled crested waves peeling over shadows of dark coral reef. For me the choice was easy - Fiji is where I’d start.
After spending my first week on a tiny outer island in the North small enough to walk across in 10 minutes, I decided to make my way South to a motu called Nagigia, just off the Western coast of an island called Kadavu, home to the largest producer of kava in all of Fiji. Stepping off the plane in Kadavu on the tarmac, I was surrounded by a deep bed of navy blue water that met a backdrop of brown mountain terrain covered in lush green rainforest. From there, I headed with a boatman to the island, a journey which exposed miles upon miles of coastal rock and deep beds of reef, with not a single stretch of white sand in sight. Upon arrival to the island I noticed it was completely surrounded by reef and bordered by thick, dark green trees and plants giving it a mysterious feel. I was met by Leena, a bubbly, smiling, warm Fijian woman in her early 20’s and her team of various relatives from the nearby village. Leena showed me my bure and true to Fijian hospitality, made me feel right at home on this lush island as a guest of one. From the island, I could see the King Kong surf break, named so because the original movie was filmed on Kadavu. It presents as a mirage from afar as being fun! But upon closer inspection, let’s just say you start to understand why they named it after King Kong. One day, I took a boat ride out to see it. It looked like a sea monster rising from below, wanting to envelope you in a thick hug over a sharp, shallow reef. So I opted for the smaller surf break around the corner. The smaller break was closer to land and broke in front of tree-covered land serving as a natural sea wall that dropped off into the ocean. Hopping off the boat, I noticed the tiny gathering of brown boulders in front of me, the dark shadows of corals below crystal clear waters and the view of the green mountain in the distance. The only one out, I noticed when a wave came, the water would suck off the reef, exposing an entire ecosystem of brilliant underwater life, from purple corals, royal blue starfish, to black, spiky sea urchins. Whereas the waves up North I had surfed were bigger and broke under a deeper bed of ocean, the waves over this reef were tiny and thinner in comparison, requiring a type of precision, care and lightness in order not to touch the reef. After a rough first day trying to catch waves on a stiff longboard that only seemed to be resulting in me nose-diving on each take off, the next day I decided to change my strategy. I’d try a smaller board. It can be a struggle to find a sweet spot of balance when surfing on an unfamiliar board. Despite the shakiness I felt with this board change, I was determined. This time, a bigger wave came, sucking up and leaving only a thin layer of water between the reef and myself. As I hopped to my feet, my eyes went straight to the fish on the reef rather than down the line of the wave where I should have been looking. I thought ‘wow look at that how clearly I can see that fish’ and ‘crap, if I wipe out there’s no water between me and the reef to land on’. (This thought happened in a millisecond but I’m giving you the slow-mo version that went on inside my head.) In my slight panic, I kicked off the wave, and tumbled below as I felt a bang on my leg. When I surfaced from the water and looked down to inspect, I had a line of blood oozing from my shin from my fin. And that’s pretty much how the start of Nagigia went – bleeding over baby waves on a reef. Bummed at the injury, but grateful it wasn’t my head that was bleeding, I hopped back in the boat and Mareva, a woman who brought me out to the reef on the boat, steered us back to the island. Leena brought me some leaves of a local plant and suggested I put it on the cut but I opted instead for the triple antibiotic cream I brought with me, afraid it might get infected and that we were too far from any town or hospital to deal. Because I had an open wound, it was not a great idea to get back in the water. I wasn’t sure what else I’d do. After a quick e-mail of concern to the Australian tour operator, within days, Tim, a Fijian surfer and fisherman arrived as a guide. Tim was a tall, solid man and introverted in his slow, thoughtful communications. He gave a new meaning to the temperament chill. He went out one day to surf King Kong and came back with small, bloody gashes and scrapes on his back from hitting the reef. It didn’t phase him though. To Tim, it was just part of surfing. And yes, he did put the leaf stuff on his cuts. At the time, Tim also was the son-in-law of the King of Fiji, and seemed a perfect bridge in connecting guests to the local traditions and ways of the area. Surfing was only one of Tim’s many talents. He was an experienced fisherman too. With Tim now on the island, we starting trolling in a boat searching for birds, catching yellow fin tuna, building fires from scratch to roast our fish on a remote motu, and going on hikes in the mountains to search for crabs as bait. It was a simple delight to be able to feel the pace of life and to have someone give me a peek into the incredible harmony of how the community of this region lived with the natural world. And, I learned some interesting things about reef rights in this part of Fiji. In Kadavu, local villages owned the rights of the reefs surrounding their villages. So if you were wanting to fish on the reef, you’d have to dock your boat, pay a visit to the chief, do a kava ceremony together and then ask for permission to fish. If you just go and cast a long line on the reef, there were men from the village who served as watchdogs who’d swim out and cut the line. So there was still a very old world etiquette around the ocean and reef rights in this region. Tim and I were eventually joined by a few more visitors on the island and so I was no longer a guest of one, which was great. I did manage to catch a few waves. I paid a visit to the local village and their tailor who sized me up without taking one single measurement and sewed me a perfectly fitted skirt and top. To this day I am still in awe at her seamstress skills. Towards the end of my stay I managed to also get stung by a Portuguese Man of War jellyfish. Then, a cyclone ended up ripping through the region, stranding us on the island and cancelling all flights out of Fiji. What I thought would be a surf adventure with food, surf, music and people ended up being a surprising immersion into a stunningly beautiful, traditional and remote part of the world, with humble people so welcoming to share. I was not a guest in some resort in remote Fiji; I was a guest in someone’s home. As I share with you this trip from 14 years ago, I’m present to our record high ocean surface temperatures we’ve had this year resulting from the ocean absorbing 26% of the world’s carbon emissions. These emissions come mostly via fossil fuel use in energy and transportation. When I think about such a tiny place in the world as Nagigia, where people’s entire subsistence depends on their natural ecosystems, delicate reefs and minimal tourism, and where there were zero cars, climate change is an injustice to say the least. Despite contributing the least in global emissions, it is these small island nations of the world that are the most vulnerable to climate change. Fiji has been the first of island nations to relocate an entire community due to rising sea levels and climate change, forcing communities to leave behind their ancestral lands. (Article) Today, there is no tactic they can take like cutting fishing lines to protect their reefs when the threat is existential; the warming gasses are already spread in the air and throughout the sea. How do they stop that? I know our global target is to keep warming below 2°C, a target that would put many island nations under water. So the small island and developing nations led us to focus our target to 1.5°C instead, a global goal formalized in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Though the goal has been stated, it is of increasing concern by the world’s leading scientists that that is even realistic at all. It makes me think how important it is to acknowledge our global impact on one another when it comes to climate. Only when we expand our consciousness and are able to connect how actions of the global north impact the global south and ensure the communities most impacted have an equal voice at the decision tables will we be able to truly tackle climate change though a justice lens. And only when there is some level of accountability in impact of emissions on vulnerable nations will we have true justice. We are now in an era where Mother Nature is requiring of us to not only clean up our pollution, but to realize how the choices we make, from transportation to materials design to the food we cultivate, impacts entire communities in the most remote parts of the world. Perhaps what’s needed at the moment is a collective reframe of our presence on earth. Maybe we need to consider ourselves all as just travelers here - temporary guests on this beautiful, big blue planet. If we have the ability to create such impacts in far off places of the world, what is our ability and role in reversing them?
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After founding and running a nonprofit for 12 years, I found myself wanting to do anything but nonprofits. In fact, the farther I could get away from nonprofit work, the better. I had a list of highly viable potential career choices I would explore instead: storytelling surfer, shoe designer, organic farmer to name a few. I had just launched brown girl surf and farming seemed like an additional good idea at the time. Tilling the land and harvesting food was a far cry from sitting behind a computer writing grants or schmoozing donors. I thought I should start small. Perhaps just with a garden. Yes! That’s what I’d do! When I thought of where or how to begin, I immediately thought of my friend Jenny. Jenny is one of those generous souls with the flexibility of a gymnast but with a moral compass of an arrow. I met Jenny while we were studying classical Indian dance together in San Francisco in our 20s. Aside from sharing a love of dance arts, we also ended up sharing a common tendonitis injury (due to the eight pounds of bells we wore on our ankles stomping various rhythmic patterns of the dance with the bottom of our feet). Who knew when I introduced Jenny to Uli, my towering, burly, kinesiologist body worker with Ukrainian roots, that she would not only heal her tendonitis, but she’d also fall passionately in love with him. They’d birth two babies and transport their life to Maui living on a land trust off the famous Hana coast. I told Jenny about my idea of coming over to visit and help design a garden and she was totally down for it. As I’m a person that learns best by doing, I considered this training as I navigated through my first major professional transition. Within weeks I had arrived at Jenny’s to acres of lush green land tucked away off a winding and increasingly elevated coastal highway. There was a modest single room structured house with jalopies out front. Yellow and greenish fruit were scattered all along the ground as if it had rained lilikoi and Surinam cherries the night before. There were apple bananas, chili peppers, rosemary, coconut, papaya, and jackfruit trees as well. The sun was blindingly bright and the backdrop of trees ranged in color from palm green to cedar pine. The black volcanic soil was so fertile that if you spit a seed in the ground, the earth would send back up a plant in a few days. The land had a power I had not felt ever before. I was to camp out back in a tent Uli had pitched for me atop a wooden framed platform in front of hundreds of acres of wild forest. You could see remnants of a former civilization of sorts through the opening of the forest, as if once upon a time there had been roads paved through the grasses. Uli told me that if you traveled further into it, you would reach Maui’s deepest fishing seaport. I never went that deep into the forest, but kept to my tent platform and the open areas of grass and fruit trees behind the house. During the day, we’d try to break up a small patch of earth with hoes. We tired quickly from the sun making progress at a snail’s pace. I don’t think we realized how difficult it would be to get a garden going with Jenny’s other competing priorities of tending to a family and earning income, not to mention having unreliable transportation and being so far up from town. At night, after helping Jenny prepare dinner and clean the kitchen, I’d walk down to the platform to my tent. I noticed the winds seemed to get more aggressive at night, rattling the platform and bristling the leaves of the trees. Sometimes it would rain. On one particular night, the winds got really wild and the platform shook. Only this time, it felt different. It started to periodically vibrate, as if a surge of electrical current was running through it. This was not a sensation I can say I had experienced ever before. I brushed it off as just part of the already odd weather patterns. I felt afraid to fall asleep. What is this energy? Where is it coming from? Is there something here? I kept myself awake as long as I could before I eventually fell asleep. The next morning, in my sleep hangover, I walked up the grassy hill to Jenny’s one-roomed house. In our morning conversation I told Jenny and Uli about my night and that it felt like there was something supernatural going on down there. They both looked at one another in a knowing way. Uli said I was not the first guest to have noted disturbances in the night down on that platform. He suggested wrapping an offering in a tealeaf to whatever energies were at unrest and to state my intention for being there, which was to help my friend make a garden. I ended up doing this hoping a ceremony of intention setting would settle the space a bit. The following night, the winds returned as usual and I lay on my sleeping bag wide-eyed and weary of the night, keeping myself awake for as long as possible. This time, when I peered out of my tent into the darkness of the night, I saw a strange floating light up by the house. My heart started beating harder and I could feel myself start to break into a mild sweat. My immediate thought was someone was on the property with a flashlight. Then I thought, I’m in the middle of nowhere, so maybe they are just gigantic fireflies like the ones that used to come out on summer nights in Jersey when I was young. My third and most logical explanation was that they were just an outside light fixture. To test my theory, I closed one eye and, looking over at the light, used my thumb to block the light. If the light doesn’t move beyond my thumb, then it’s likely a static house light. If it moves from behind my thumb, then it is definitely something else. As I covered the light with my thumb, it didn’t seem to move. Phew! But when I opened both eyes and moved my thumb away, a second floating light appeared. My heart raced further. And then, just like that, they disappeared. The next morning, I walked up the grassy hill to the main house eager to share with Uli and Jenny my sightings. Jenny seemed to know exactly what I was talking about. “Yes!” she exclaimed! “And it looks like someone is walking around with a flashlight and then it just disappears,” she said. She went on to explain she had seen the lights as well on a different occasion, and freaked out thinking someone had come on the property. When she attempted to go out the sliding glass door of her house to investigate further, the lights would just disappear. Upon hearing this, I decided I’d sleep on the couch in the main house for the rest of the time beneath the loft where the family slept. In the days following the orb sighting, I learned a bit more about the story of the land behind where I had slept. According to neighborhood lore, the forest area was site of a farming village, the people of which were massacred by Kamehameha I as he attempted to unify Hawai’i. Clearly, energies were not at rest. Land was not at rest. Heck, I was not at rest! The land felt unsettled. And, it didn’t feel right for me to stay until the land received whatever it needed to be settled. So I cut my trip short, and headed over to the Big Island to stay with my friends Bryn and Danny, who lived a less off the beaten path lifestyle and whose land bore an array of flowers, fruits and trees, and seemed to welcome my stay with open arms. Jenny did eventually get the garden up and running after several years and amidst a few more orb sightings, which did eventually subside. She took her time to develop a reciprocal relationship with the land, listening to it and receiving visions over time on how the garden should take shape. She grew this interest into a career centered on gardening, permaculture and education with a dream still in tow to live reciprocally with the land. I never did manage to become a farmer. But I did become a storytelling surfer ;) and did manage to journey to far off places centering my work and life around the ocean. Now, 12 years later, I find myself in a career evolution, feeling a calling again to the earth. This pull recently led me to attend San Francisco Climate Week, a week long event featuring everything from practical, hands on gardening and ecology education gatherings to panel discussions on the silver bullet solutions of carbon capture. The plethora of ideas and efforts around climate were wildly inspiring. Though the rush to find solutions to mitigate climate change and move us towards a zero emissions future has spurred a slew of innovations, technology and designs across various sectors, I can’t help but remember what Maui showed me so many years ago – that the land holds messages, life and powers that need to be felt to be understood. Perhaps it’s this lack of feeling that has gotten us to where we are in our relationship and reverence for the earth. Learning to take our time with the earth, nurture the earth and feel the earth is an equal, if not more important part of the solution to this crisis. To me, this is the most urgent relationship we need to move towards in order to create and preserve the planet we wish to see for ourselves and for future generations to come. Inspired by travels to Maui, Hawai'i in 2012. Farhana is a Creator, Coach, Explorer, Founder & Terra.do Fellow
The roosters aren’t silent,
Cock a doodle doo-ing in the village grass, On an island in the outskirts of Southern Fiji, The lady that sized me up and sewed the blue dress with the hibiscus flower print to my exact size, Without. Taking. One. Measurement. The sun hitting the green grassy pastures, The wooden shacks for the chickens, The church that was bright and sunny, Where I met the woman there from Kandavu, And she had on the same type of skirt the lady had sewn me. Across to Samoa where the homes have no walls, A bright pink sheet hung with clothing pegs dividing my room from the rest of the platform, The fried reef fish Fanny’s relatives cooked, wondering if I should avoid eating it, Lonely Planet said avoid all fresh reef fish because of the toxins. This is what it looks like, Driving to the kids’ school, Their white shirts and red short uniforms, I can only remember the last time I remembered, Was it red shirts and white shorts? Needing to be accompanied at all times in those parts, Because a single woman cannot not be attached to a family unit. This is what it looks like, Back to Fiji, Royal blue starfish off the reef, Juxtaposed against our fuchsia kayak, The island nights Tim provided, The fishing we did in between, Freshly caught Yellowfin tuna, The Fijians calling dibs on the head and tail, the most coveted parts of the fish Just like my dad, Like true Bengalis they just know what’s good. This is what it looks like, A spire of green grass, The cackle of a chicken, Village huts, Homes with no walls, Seamstresses that can sew a perfectly fitted dress at the bat of an eye, This is what it looks like, To be in Old Polynesia. Inspired from travels in 2010 & 2011 to Kandavu, Fiji and Savai'i, Samoa |