MAINTAINING GAIA

Last week I travelled to a small and very remote village called Lutukina to assist in a wetlands workshop the WWF was facilitating.

The journey to the village was long and hard – a flight to Vanua Levu island, a two hour drive as far into the mountains as a truck could take us, and an another hours walk to the village with a horse carried equipment and luggage.

The result, however, was well worth it. Lutukina is an incredibly beautiful village; one completely isolated high in the mountains on the bank of a wonderfully tranquil river.

It was soon clear after entering the village that white people are not seen regularly. In fact, after asking a village elder, it seems like there has never been a white visitor to the village in living memory (even during the days of British colonial rule) and because a lot of people don’t leave the wider area, some had never seen a white person before. It resulted in a very interesting, if not also intense, week.

The purpose of the visit was to help facilitate a workshop – more specifically a workshop on the river system that runs through the region and how the communities can best live sustainably alongside it.

The WWF visited the area (called Dreketi) in 2008 and helped the communities to apply for a grant from the Global Environment Facility to help them manage their resources better and develop in a sustainable manner.

Happily the $30,000 (US) grant was approved and last week’s workshop was the first in a series of workshops that aim to help the communities better utilize their resources in a sustainable manner.

It was very clear, despite being unable to properly communicate (directly) with anyone, that the grant and upcoming workshops were greatly appreciated. Nothing like this had ever been undertaken in the Dreketi before and it was clear that over time a number of bad practices had been adopted that will easily be corrected with a little education.