Picture: Aunty Fi taking a break after working on her farm.
The fact that she does more on
her farm, than any of the other men in her cluster, has 66-year old Finau Wong
respected by those who know of her on Ovalau Island in the Lomaiviti Group.
Like other farmers, Aunty Fi, as
she is fondly referred to, religiously follows a strict timetable like
clockwork. That is her number one principle in life – time management.
Farming runs
in her blood as her father was also a farmer. Her mother was from Koro,
Lomaiviti while her father was Chinese; from the motherland.
She took up
planting after she retired from full time employment and gave it her undivided
attention after her husband passed away.
Speaking in i-taukei Aunty Fi explained that she planted
yaqona, cassava, dalo, pineapple, cabbage, long beans, eggplants, and Chinese
pumpkin.
It is indeed remarkable
to watch this petite woman, hike about an hour, every day, Monday to Saturday up
to her farm located in the steep hills behind her home in Draiba, Levuka.
Her daily routine begins with her
feeding her chickens and pigs in the morning, then she prepares lunch for her
grandchildren, after they leave for school that is when she prepares to go to
her farm, taking her lunch too as she will be there the entire day, cleaning,
clearing, and planting till she returns in the afternoon.
While some may
find the fact that Aunty Fi is the only woman in her small group of cluster
farmers, she on the other hand, does not think it is a big deal.
Her cluster,
like other clusters had set a target to plant 1,000 yaqona plants every year
for three years. Today, she has achieved that three-year target with more than
3,000 yaqona plants already in the ground.
For her,
farming is where her interest lies and that is all there is to it.
Aunty Fi
thanked the Ministry of Agriculture for providing building materials for her
farm house and yaqona planting materials that has now expanded due to her daily
commitment.
Aunty Fi’s
message to other women was simple: time management was vital and if you do not
have anything to do, go outside and plant. She urged women not to drink too much
kava, instead, spend time farming as that was more useful.
She was assisted
under the Ministry of Agriculture’s Yaqona Development Programme whose
objective is to improve infrastructure development to support household
livelihoods and commercial agriculture. Infrastructure development meant
providing farmers with farm shed, nursery materials, water tanks, and planting
materials.
-ENDS-