Stowaways' Deaths Bring Native Fijians Together -- Countrymen Here Mourn Their Loss, Discover Each Other

Conversation at a funeral:

How do you think it must have felt diving into that water?

Like a hammer.

Like being eaten up by a big fish.

Like fire.

On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, about a hundred native Fijians gathered together in a Lynnwood cemetery to pay their last respects to four young men they hardly knew. Most did not know them at all.

Yet the four were not strangers; they were countrymen whose motives were all too familiar. They wanted a better life, and thought they would find it in America. On Fiji, they stowed away on a freighter that crossed 5,000 miles of ocean. Before the ship could dock in Seattle, the four plunged into Puget Sound to avoid arrest, intending to swim ashore and disappear into the good life.

They suffered hypothermia and drowned. Their bodies were found in the early morning hours of March 16 off the northern tip of the Kitsap Peninsula. As news of the deaths spread, native Fijians from Los Angeles to Vancouver, B.C., converged in Seattle to take part in a week-long ritual of grieving, and in the process, seemed to discover one another.

"We have never had that many Fijians come together here," said Francis Vesikuru, who settled in the Seattle area nearly two decades ago. "I met Fijians that I'd never met before, and got to know a lot of others better. . . . This tragedy has united the community."

Vesikuru, co-owner of a vacuum-cleaner shop in South Seattle and one of the organizers of the funeral, said the community for years had been fragmented and contentious. The gathering, he said, fostered new networks and commitments that could be the start of a formal native Fijian community organization.

That Fijians needed such an organization became apparent when the time came to bury the four men. No one could pay for the funeral expenses. The victims' families were too poor, and the local "community" was too loose and disorganized. Had Vesikuru not come forward to take responsibility for the $6,400 bill, the men would have been given an indigent's burial: county-paid cremation and inglorious storage in a mortuary closet.

It was bad enough the four died the way they did - young, healthy islanders who grew up in a place where children are expected to swim before they're expected to walk, and then they come here and drown?

"It was the cold," said Vesikuru, referring to the 42-degree chill of Puget Sound waters. "They had no idea how cold this water could be."

For an island nation of 700,000 people, the death of four countrymen is news of great magnitude. It was the talk of the nation for days. And local Fijians spent hundreds of dollars in long-distance calls spreading the word.

So it came to be that native Fijians from up and down the West Coast arrived to pay their last respects to Baptiste Florian, 32; Setareki Naduva, 27; Cavavou Vakacagigi, 20, and the fourth man, who is still not identified.

The mourners came not only because the victims were native Fijians, but also because every Fijian understands the desire to come to America. It's a shared desire, one woven into the fabric of life in Fiji. The mourners knew, and empathized with, what drove the men to jump off that ship.

"It is good that he is buried here," said a tearful Pasipa Nenelevu, mother of the 20-year-old. She and her husband, who live in Sacramento, were the only parents of a victim able to attend the funeral. "He wanted so much to come to America. He called me twice in December. He said, `Mom, what about me? When can I come?' Now he is here."

One hundred or so live here

One hundred or so native Fijians live in the Seattle area, clustered in the city's Central Area, Kent and Shoreline. The majority have arrived within the last five years, many from Sacramento and San Francisco, where an estimated 500 to 700 reside. There may be up to 50 in Portland.

The numbers are small but increasing.

They come to the United States to go to school or find work so they can send money home. All is not well at home. The waters are warm and the beaches white, but far too many people feel trapped by their poverty, a legacy from the country's complicated colonial past.

"My brother needs a new house and a new farm," said Taka Lakoi, 41, who moved from Fiji to Woodinville just three months ago. "When you have a thatch roof, it's difficult when the hurricanes come."

Hurricanes are a part of life on the tropical archipelago.

Fiji is made up of 800 islands in a horseshoe configuration in the South Pacific, east of Australia. Its land mass is slightly bigger than Hawaii's. The native people are primarily Melanesians, who resemble Africans, but they have for centuries intermixed with Polynesians, who have lighter skin and straight black hair.

The islands were a British crown colony for nearly a century, during which indentured laborers from India were brought in to work the sugar plantations. Through a series of colonial edicts, the native Fijians came to own most of the land, but the Fiji Indians, once freed from their service contracts, ended up controlling, along with Europeans, most of the country's economy.

The result has been essentially two separate societies within Fiji: one made up of more prosperous Fiji Indians, who have retained their Indian language and customs, the other a land-rich but struggling population of native Fijians who are mostly subsistence farmers. The two groups, while cordial, generally don't mix, and the same is true for their transplanted populations in America.

Stowing away on ships is common among native Fijians, said Tom Brown of San Francisco, a 24-year-old native Fijian who got his name from an American grandfather. Brown drove 15 hours to attend the funeral of the four men.

"They did it because of the life back home. That's why they all do it," he said. He speculated on how the four boarded the freighter, California Star, in Fiji. They probably waited until night before rowing a dinghy to the side of the ship, climbing the ropes and sneaking on board with a small supply of food. "That's how it's usually done."

Stowaways to Australia and New Zealand, he said, are much more common, but stowing away to America has become more frequent as news of successes has circled back home.

For most native Fijiians, legal immigration to the U.S. is not a viable option. To get a visa, a potential immigrant must show sufficient financial resources to stay in the U.S. That is nearly impossible for people whose average income is $40 a week.

Brown said he knows of a couple dozen Fijians who made it to San Francisco using the same method as the dead men: jumping ship before docking and swimming to shore.

The key, said Brown, is to jump as close to shore as possible, and in San Francisco Bay, anyway, you must watch for sharks.

When someone dies in Fiji, everyone in the village or island participates in the grieving ritual. And what is North America but a big island? It was fitting that if they could attend the funeral, they should, so North American Fijians began arriving in Seattle even before the bodies had been identified.

"Though we are not related to these boys, they have an identity and we have an identity: We are Fijians," said Uate Baleilevuka of Portland.

In the week preceding the funeral, a Shoreline house rented by five Fijian men was converted into a communal house of mourning. Somehow word was spread that this house would be the meeting place. Every day for a week, native Fijians from British Columbia, California, Oregon and Washington arrived bearing food, gifts and condolences.

Ceremony is very formal

The gifts were formally presented to the hosts in an exotic ceremony of singing, clapping, reciting and kava-drinking. Kava, a tranquilizing tea made from the dried root of the pepper plant, is a sacramental drink imbibed to mark births, marriages, deaths and visits from special guests.

The kava bowl, called a tanoa, was placed in the center of the main room. The floor was covered with woven mats. A man scooped up the kava with a coconut shell, called a bilo, and then passed the shell from person to person. Once everyone had drank, the process started over and was repeated until the kava ran out or everyone fell asleep.

Next to the kava room was the "moaning room," where tapa cloths, brought as gifts for the dead, were strung across the walls and stacked in bundles on the floor. Here people cried and moaned. "In Fiji," said Brown, "you could hear the cries from a hundred yards away."

In the kitchen, men and women - mostly women - worked to prepare meals for the following day. Outside, a pig awaited slaughter for the post-funeral feast, which would be cooked inside a lovo, or "earth oven," essentially a barbecue pit dug into the ground and covered by layers of mesh, cloth and soil.

On some nights the house was filled to capacity, with mourners singing and crying and drinking and praying through the night. Sometimes nobody slept. The idea was to keep it continuous until the funeral March 26 - exactly ten days after the four had been found floating in Puget Sound.

The funeral and burial were handled by a local mortuary.

The services were rendered perfunctorily, with typical American efficiency. It was obvious that some of the Fijians were dismayed by the seeming detachment with which the cemetery crew worked.

In Fiji, the dead are buried on their own land, with the graves being dug and later filled by the closest friends and relatives in another elaborate ceremony. In the Lynnwood cemetery that Saturday afternoon, the graves were dug and the coffins lowered and graves filled by a bulldozer.

Some in the crowd of mourners approached the graves once the coffins had been lowered, but the cemetery crew told them to back off. It was dangerous to be so close, the crew foreman said. Mourners seemed bewildered. How could they let a machine bury their countrymen?

At that moment, the mourners seemed far from home and out-of-place. "How can they be so cold?" a Fijian asked, referring to the work crew. That word again. It is a despised thing among Fijians - coldness. And yet it is inevitable that, as they make the 5,000-mile leap from island intimacy to mainland anonymity, they will face it over and over again. It may be part of the price of the good life.