Lending a hand in Fiji

BEYOND THE beaches and luxury resorts is a side of Fiji few tourists know about. Like the 4ha parcel of hilly land in the rainy capital of Suva, where a collection of simple concrete and wood buildings form Homes of Hope, an organisation dedicated to sheltering and protecting women (and their children) in Fiji who have been forced into prostitution, sexually abused, trafficked and enslaved. They have come to this semi-remote collection of buildings to escape cruelty and exploitation.

Opened by an American couple on an empty, tree-filled space, Homes of Hope has a kitchen and dining area, kindergarten, dormitories, basketball court, office and smaller dwellings, with more at various stages of development. There is also a guest house, where I am staying while on a volunteer tourism trip to Fiji.

Volunteer tourism, also known as voluntourism, is a fairly recent term used to coin the experience of combining volunteering with a bit of sightseeing abroad. Increasingly popular with travellers looking for more than the usual lie around on a beach or backpack through hostels experience, they began cropping up in the 90s thanks to demand from students wanting to do something more meaningful during their "gap year" or what we call the big OE. Ecotourism, adventure holidays and smaller community-based projects continue to spring up to fill this demand.

My trip has been arranged through Hands up Holidays, a company started by New Zealander Christopher Hill. He had done some volunteer work building houses in South Africa, and wanted to provide similar experiences for others, so he chucked in his "unfulfilling" career in corporate finance and set up the business.

"I found it a challenging, enjoyable and inspiring way to travel blending the two at the time there was no one offering a combination of volunteering and sightseeing, so I put them into practice and decided to leave the job," he says. My trip is organised along these two widely divergent parts the first, staying in a luxury resort for two nights with some sightseeing thrown in, and the second, assisting at Homes of Hope.

Tourism is the number one industry in Fiji, followed by sugar cane, and on my ride from Nadi to the Pearl South Pacific Resort on Beqa Lagoon, the taxi driver, Ajnesh, pulls over next to a large field of the bamboo-like stuff. Shirtless men with fabric swatches tied around their foreheads bend in the heat of the afternoon sun beating at the cane with machetes. Ajnesh tells me they are some of the poorest paid workers in Fiji just $10 a day. He says economy-wise it's been getting difficult since the coup food prices have gone up, unemployment is increasing and wages are low. Everyone is looking forward to the proposed elections next year.

After a three-and-a-half-hour drive we arrive at the resort. It is postcard beautiful palm trees, clear ocean lapping outside the window, cocktails by the pool. It doesn't take long to settle into island time. There is much to be said for a couple of days alone with some books and time to think. On my second day I visit the local arts village followed by a Zipline tour a flying fox over the local forest canopy. Hands up Holidays attempts to link travellers with locally owned businesses this one is owned by an American but the staff are Fijians.

On Friday it's time to relocate. Another taxi ride takes me the hour or so to Suva and over pot-holed dirt roads, doubling back through several villages until we find the place. Fiji's population is 54% indigenous Fijian and 38% Fijian Indian (slave labourers brought over from India by British colonisers in the 19th century) and most live in ethnically homogenous villages; Fijians with a chief and predominantly Christian, and Fijian Indians without a chief and mostly Hindu.

Breakfast is at 6.30am sharp. The women rotate kitchen duties and after three days I'm dying for some fruit and vegetables. They live on thin soup, white bread, dalo (taro), cassava and sweet, milky tea. Homes of Hope are in the process of building a series of vegetable gardens. The money that was provided to set them up, through American organisation Shared Hope International, is being relocated to other projects around the world and the pressure to become self-sustainable is on.

Each volunteer chooses where they would like to be. I have offered my rudimentary skills as a teacher and gardener, so my first day is spent at the women's "college", a room on site with five young women studying towards their high school degrees. The rest of my time is spent helping dig in the new gardens and cleaning the pre-school.

In three short days I achieve very little but meet some of the most inspiring women and children. Although I had difficulties as a non-Christian in a religious environment that tells its pupils "yes, we will help you, but only if you believe as we do", there didn't seem to be anyone else in Fiji aiding people in similar situations.

"The idea is it's still a holiday for people but they can dip their toes in the waters of volunteering for four or five days and see if it's for them, and hopefully get inspired to do more volunteering," explains Hill.

"Our biggest hurdle is awareness, the more people become aware that they can actually travel like this, the better it is for everybody, because many times we've explained the concept to people they say `wow we've never heard of anything like that' and more often than not it strikes a chord with people very quickly they've just not been aware of it."

* Bonnie Sumner travelled courtesy of Hands Up Holidays and House of Travel.

- © Fairfax NZ News