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 1976 remake of 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?

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