Page 7 - Bulletin #67 - November 2020

Picking Up the Pieces at Fiji Organic Village

Philip Mirkin

By 2017 our ecovillage was shattered—devastated by disaster, deserted, with
only pieces remaining. How would we begin again?

Here’s the background:

Fiji Organic Village (FOV), formed in 2007, went through some incredible challenges. In
2011 European cybercriminals stole our website and diverted funding from our
homestay program, eliminating most of our income. This split the community and peeled
off a few members who were convinced by the conmen to help their nefarious plan.

Then my mother had a heart attack. This sent me, the manager and one of the cofounders,
to the States for years to be there for Mum. Then she suffered a series of strokes. As a
result I would not be able to return home to Fiji for over five years. The income
evaporated. The farm was hit by Hurricane Evan in 2012, sinking our smaller boat, and
scattering some of our members to other islands in search of jobs and income.

Then in February 2016 we took a devastating blow: Hurricane Winston slammed us (and
much of Fiji) with 280 kph winds, destroying seven of our aging cottages, including my
lovely home that was built for me as a thank you for donating that (now sunken) boat to
the village. Other islands like Koro Island suffered much worse. The villages and homes 7
across Koro were literally flattened.

Many of the trees in our food forest were blown over (breadfruit, banana, and papaya
farm crushed), and our cassava fields were flooded, destroying much of the rest of our
livelihood. All we really had left was coconuts, yams, and a few pineapples. For us the
cleanup process was long and intense and is still not complete. Most of the farm has
recovered, but still awaits fruit on most of our new banana and papaya trees.

When I finally returned to FOV in the summer of 2017, our beautiful 17-acre ecovillage
was completely abandoned. Two of our bures (cottages) were barely standing there on
the beach in skeletal form, just some posts and beams teetering at odd angles, a stark
reminder that we were all lucky to have survived. The rest of our homes had already
been torn down by the younger members as they were damaged beyond repair. All the
organic parts of these buildings were cremated: burned, buried, and returned to the
earth. There was not much left but a few pieces of window and door frames, scavenged
from the debris, plus the PVC pipes from our community bathhouse. My personal home
was wiped off the face of the Earth.

It broke my heart. After all the work I did to fund and build the ecovillage, collecting our
extended family and other ecovillage members to join us, everyone was gone. The bath
house was heavily damaged by a massive tree, another direct hit; only the community
kitchen, dining room, and office/first aid clinic survived intact.