Row of houses in Navala
I was back in Ba Parish for two weeks to help Fr Pat Colgan, the Parish Priest, over Christmas. The sky was blue and the sun was bright on the Sunday before Christmas as I left Ba town at 8.00 a.m. for the 40 minute drive up the mountains to Navala village. There was a wedding included during Mass. A couple of small hitches occurred but the teacher from Navala and his bride from Vanua Levu were married in the eyes of God and the Church. I had a quick cup of tea while a couple of adults distributed the sweets I had brought for the children. I gratefully accepted some mats woven by the women folk as an offering to the parish for the wedding.
The driver, my spokesman and I sat in the van and proceeded a further 40 minutes into the hills. We were lucky that the weather was dry because previous rain had cut deep furrows into the road where it climbed the hills. But it was hot! It was after mid-day when we reached the stream in front of Tabalai village. Catholics from two nearby villages sat with two extended families from Tabalai in the main room of the host’s house and overflowed on to the surrounding verandahs.
After Mass I sat outside on the verandah. A young boy was asleep across from me, with one leg pointing to the ceiling. While the men mixed the yaqona the children came to me for sweets. A catechist’s daughter had married into the village about 40 years previously. Her husband and another family became Catholic. Happily, the present catechist will soon be joined by a younger man who has volunteered to begin 3 years study at the catechist school in 2023.
Back in Navala that evening I was glad to take a refreshing shower and have a rest. We drank more yaqona that night to accompanying snores of a visiting lady. She lay behind a curtain in the top part of the single roomed thatched house. The locals referred to the snoring as ‘an electric saw.’ The next morning, after breakfast in my room at the back of the church, I was invited to the groom’s house again for a formal farewell yaqona from his family. My two companions and I returned to town with happy memories of Navala and Tabalai.
by Fr Frank Hoare
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