- From Mr. & Mrs. Jone & Emeli Fatiaki – na vȧh se Jeannette & Repeka Ufiamorat
- From the Late Doctor Tukaha Mua
Dr Tukaha Mua’s account of the work at Churchward Chapel:
The Rotuman Methodist Church in Fiji’s Rotuman Circuit HQ at Rewa Street, Suva
I have a very vivid recollection of the first day at the site. There were over twenty people including women and a handful of children. It was a Saturday morning. We cleared the boundary and large bushes but there were two coconut trees at the center of the block. Someone said Makrao Faktaufon had a chain saw so Aisea Antonio, Paul Vaurasi and I went in my car to his Domain home. The family said he had taken it and gone to his farm in Sawani. We went to his farm to find him but he was not at the farm. So on the way back, we picked Paul Vaurasi’s axe and a spade.
The two coconut trees were not cut down. We chopped the roots and dug up the whole tree. Unfortunately, no pictures were taken of the first day’s workforce on the landmark where the felling of the two giant coconut trees took place.
There were several aspects to this project:
We fundraised diligently and worked from 5pm to 10pm or 11pm Monday to Friday.
On Saturdays and Public Holidays we worked from 8am to 8pm. Church funds bought morning and afternoon tea, lunch and dinner. There were special occasions when families supplied food for the workforce and this included birthdays, weddings, headstone ceremonies or the lifting of the mourning period, funerals, or mamasa. Needless to say, when the committee receives notice that somebody is going to supply Saturday or Public Holiday’s lunch, the day’s workforce numbers will double. Dinner was served between 9.30pm and 11pm depending on the particular job for the day e.g. when mixing cement to fill the large pillars, the work finishes at 9.30pm. We stop because to fill the post will take a couple of hours.
As a total novice in the building industry, we supplied the labour that built this magnificent church. There were several heavy-duty jobs many of us will never forget:
- Eight 3’ diameter manholes for the main pillars that shoulders the entire weight of the church. Rupeni Sakaiasi of Losa explains this difficult exercise beautifully. Men in turn go down and break up the soapstone with crowbar, fill the bucket and men on ground level pull it up, spill and return the bucket. At 10-12 feet, in that hot and acrid atmosphere, you look up for a second only to a small window of the blue sky. After so many buckets, depending on age and state of physical fitness, a man is pulled up and another lowered down. Seven of those pillars were named for each of the districts. It did not mean that only men from those districts dug those posts—everyone put in as much as they can. As is usual, in communal chores of this nature, everything that is funny, sloppy, insulting, or derogatory about the district is recounted for the benefit of the men from that district.
- Personally, I learnt a fair bit in that work, e.g. those giant pillars had plywood casings put in first then filled with cement. After we pour in 3 feet of wet concrete mixture. We put down these 2-3’ vibrations that shakes the concrete to avoid air gaps inside the post and on its outer surface.
- 12 mm iron rods that were to be bent at right angles 90 degrees. They put down 2 strategic posts that allowed me to insert the required length and bend it. The grinder cut the other end of the rod to the required length. We did not just make 20. It was done in 100s.
- We built a workshed that served as a kitchen and dining room, tool shed and storeroom, lounge, conference room, church hall and guard house. Several men slept there every night.
- And during a visitation to the late Doc Tukaha, before his passing away, he mentioned to Fa Hua` Sagaitu Wasile that he reckons, they built the biggest septic tank in the Nation at that time.