By Augustine Minimbi
Elia Komaitoga is your typical Fijian lad. At 22 years of age, this tall, strapping bloke is a resident of Nakasi, a suburb about an hour out of the capital, Suva.
No stranger to hard work, Komaitoga farms at Nasilai, near the delta town of Nausori. The other half of his time is spent at the University of the South Pacific, where he is working towards a Bachelor of Commerce.
His climate change experience began on Koro Island, in the very center of Fiji where in 2016 the strongest cyclone ever to hit the Pacific made landfall.
“When I was in high school, I thought the answers to climate change and global warming was just a one way thing,” he said.
As he relays his story, the atmosphere that the pavilion at the University of the South Pacific in Laucala gives is very tropical. There are birds chirping, leaves rustling and rarely a student in sight, a contrast from the torrential rain of only a few days prior.
Elia, like many in Fiji, has had an intimate experience of what happens when a murderous cyclone comes into your community and crushes everything. In fact, the Fijian word for cyclone: na cagilaba, literally means “the wind that kills.”
The destruction meted out by Cyclone Winston in 2016 on his: Nacamaki, on Koro Island, a two-day boat ride from Suva, did just that. Fourty-four people died in Fiji during that cyclone.
“What had happened in Nacamaki, they just built their houses next to the sea. And so when the cyclone came, all the houses that were built near the ocean were wiped out,” Komaitoga recounted.
Such devastation is not just physical; it affects mental health too.
“One of my uncles, I call him Ta Lailai. He’s the younger brother of my father. What had happened was that whenever there was a lot of rain and loud, really strong winds and the roofs… they’d be shaking. He’d just stop wherever he was in the house and he just crouched down and he’d be looking around and you could see it in his eyes. He was still very scared, still traumatized from Cyclone Winston.”
As the climate crisis worsens, Komaitoga worries about the family farm in Nasilai.
“Whenever me or my uncles or my dad want to go to the farm and continue with the harvesting or continuing with the cleanup to weed out any other grass, we can’t do that due to the cyclones. Everyone’s forced to stay inside. Roads are closed, or flooded, or both; therefore, also affecting the progress of the farm,” Komaitoga said.
“When you are in school and you’re really focused, you’re progressing well with readings and assignments and quizzes and activities. And all of a sudden, some really big cyclone comes and then you’re stuck at home for a few days and it really, really stunts your progress.”
“Sometimes, it makes me not want to continue with schooling again, because it’s really messed up my progress. It affects me emotionally and I’m not in the mood anymore. Not mentally set as I was before.”
Elia Komaitoga
Right: Elia Komaitoga walks in from the entrance to campus after a long period of study. Komaitoga is a third-year Bachelor of Commerce student at the University of the South Pacific, majoring in both Economics and Human Resource Management. Photo by Augustine Minimbi
Despite his dark recollection, Komaitoga is surprisingly optimistic when asked what the overall effect of climate change was on his family and himself.
“The effects, in my opinion, will make my family and myself stronger, to be smarter, to adapt, adapt faster, and much better to the current changing weather conditions,” Komaitoga said.
Komaitoga’s family copes the same way many other Pacific families do for whom natural disasters are normal occurrences.
“How do we cope? We just really sit down and talk about it as a family. Talk about it and discuss it,” he said. “We let out our emotions and then we plan out from there, what to do, what not to do, what to buy, what not to buy. And we just continue to work from there.”
