Tribewanted: Vorovoro

From the Daily Telegraph Earth Blog

My lungs felt like they were going to burst as I clung to the rock on the seabed.

Finally, after what seemed like minutes, I reached the target number in my head and let go, kicking the fins behind me as I sped to the dancing lights above.

Ryan, a twenty-five-year old from Hawaii, was our June chief on Vorovoro and he was teaching me how to free dive and spear fish.

He was remarkable under water, holding his breath for a minute at a time, lying flat on the sand six meters below the surface waiting for the fish to come to him. Release. A mini underwater earthquake erupts as all the fish fly in opposite directions away from the impact. All except one, left quivering with the three prongs puncturing its scaly skin.

Ryan swims to the surface and cuts the gills with a small knife before clipping the fish to his belt. ‘Ok, you saw that?’ I nodded. ‘Your turn. Here, look at that same coral head, the red fish with the big eyes, you see it?’

I tucked my body and kicking one fin in the air out of the water as Ryan had taught me and diving vertically downwards. Equalising on the way I pulled the rubber band taut on the spear as I approached the place where the red fin was giving its owner away.

I got closer, it wasn’t swimming away. I held out the weapon in front of me. I was two feet from it now, I didn’t want to miss. I let go and speared the fish just behind its big eye. Lunch.

Self-sufficient?

One of our goals on Vorovoro Island is to become as self-sufficient as possible. To us that means we would like to be able to grow our own fruit, vegetables and herbs; bake our bread, roll our pasta, farm our chickens and goats, and catch our fish.

The kitchen ovens are fired by driftwood from the beach and the left-overs are composted. So are we self-sufficient yet? No; far from it.

The challenge has been two-fold: Firstly we have had to grow our food from scratch. This was going pretty well until a cyclone swept across the island in early February and destroyed all the progress we had made in the gardens, and killed some of the chickens.

Six months later and the gardens – each named by the tribe members who built them: ‘Keeping up with the Jones’s’, ‘Fruitopia, and the bridge to smoothie dreams’, ‘A patch inbetween,’ and ‘Chicken Free Zone,’ – are coming up nicely. Now we can at least harvest cabbages, capsicum and beans on a daily basis. I salivate at the thought of the day we can cross Fruitopia’s bridge.

The second challenge has been a cultural one. Although we have had fantastic input from a talented Fijian horticulturalist, the idea that we should grow all our own food and not simply take the easy option and the boat once to twice a week to town, doesn’t make complete sense to the locals. Why grow something when you can afford to buy it?

But slowly, with help from our horticulturalist, we are getting there. And as I said to the girls in the kitchen, the more money we save not going to town, the more we can spend on people to help with the gardens.

Saving dollars tends to drive the changing of minds here over global environmental concerns. Better still the tribe members have just started spreading the self-sufficient seed to the neighbouring island of Mali, where in the primary school last week they taught the first lesson of the self-written Green Club: ‘Grow your own veg’.

But what about lunch?

The spear guns came from Hawaii with Ryan, who spent six weeks diving around Vorovoro with Marau, one of the foremen who has been employed to help build the tribe village

On his last day Ryan offered Marau one of his shiny $400 spear guns as a gift to thank him for his friendship, and for helping him map the good fishing spots. Marau, a large proud Fijian man, was tearful. The gift of the spear gun did not just symbolise the end of the time Ryan and he would fish together, but would also provide a way for Marau to fish for his family that he would otherwise be unable to afford.

The tool would make him more self-sufficient, just as I had briefly become, having speared my own lunch. Its tasty meat and skin fried in garlic had reawakened me to the cycle of life that is so real and simple that we need to use it as a way of motivating ourselves to find ways of becoming more aware of what we’re eating and at least buy more local produce.

I’m sure it’s easier isolated on an island in the pacific than being round the corner from Tesco Extra, but here we learn faster.

I am never going to hug trees like they were members of my family but with the Vorovoro experience growing in my back pocket I hope I will always respect the natural environments and species of the Earth and do my best to conserve them so that someone just like me a long-time from now can spear a fish under the same rock on the Vorovoro reef and enjoy their lunch.