Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home

Excerpt: We celebrate together at a pig-on-a-spit, luau kind of thing. They go vegetarian when they learn the menu isn't available, saying they aren't completely kosher but do draw the line at pig. To me, it's just another adventure, going to a pig roast with practicing Jews and having our blond six-year-old teach their children about making money.

I hope you enjoy this sixteenth chapter from my book, Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home. Please visit www.faithofholland.com to purchase the complete book with 15 maps, and a 24 page color insert of 85 photographs. You will not be disappointed. I guarantee it.

A Tearful Goodbye

Bula. Say boolah. Fijian for hello. It's the best greeting we've heard yet. It's cool to walk down the street with people saying bula to you, and to return a bula to them; better than hola, bon jour, malo, even hello. Bula.

Savusavu is a city with a downtown about 400 meters long and a bunch of shops with loud music pouring out of them. The shopkeepers and the music are mostly Indian, the music occasionally punctuated with pop or hip-hop.

Greggii makes himself known here. Lorrie and I go for lunch at the Copra Shed Marina restaurant, and the staff asks where Greggii is. People always grab him and hug him, and if he isn't with us, they ask where he is.

This happened in Tonga too. I'd go to the market, and the woman at the back stall would ask where Greggii was. One time she asked me to tell him his order would be there on Saturday, when we never knew about his ordering anything. This woman said the stuff would be ready, and that it was going to cost T$7.00, the exact amount Greggii was due in allowance. When Saturday rolled around, Greggii and Lorrie went to the market for some last-minute things, and when they got home, Lorrie was a little upset with Greggii because she didn't know he had stuff on order from this woman. Then, she was a little upset with me because I did know. Greggii came home with a war club and a god of love carving, which looks just like the god of the sea and all the other gods�"a nice haul for a six year old with seven Tongan dollars in his pocket.

On Sunday, we go to the Methodist church. We don't understand anything except what little they say in English for our benefit. What impresses me most is the church bell. Every church we've been to since leaving home has had regular bells. Bing-Bong, Bing-Bong, Bing-Bong. After we sit down in this church, which we think starts at 10:00 but in fact starts at 10:30, we hear a loud Thunk...Tink-Tink...........Thunk...Tink-Tink...........Thunk...Tink-Tink. We go outside to a little gazebo where a woman swings a club against a big old hollowed-out block of wood, emitting a loud, pleasant Thunk...Tink-Tink.

***

During our friendship with Smilla, we knew this time would come. We agree that see you later is better than goodbye, and that seems to help. Their plan is to leave Smilla in Fiji for the cyclone season, ours is to make Australia. They will return to Sweden for several months.

On our last night together, we go to dinner, where we try to discuss our own relationship to Christ with them. Helén has joined us for church several times; not that we've been going a lot, but when we have gone, she's joined us. She tells us Thomas has hard feelings toward religion of any sort, Christianity in particular.

Thomas doesn't let us get too far before he makes it known we are offending him. We want to present them with a Bible, but Thomas refuses to have one on Smilla, or even to accept it to ease the umbrella of discomfort we opened. Thomas says, "That book is responsible for more bloodshed than anything else in the world. Ever."

Long after Fiji, and after hashing it around in the air of different cultures, I begin to understand Thomas's view.

Too often, the Bible is used to justify actions toward others rather than to guide individual lives. Jesus' teachings are personal. If He wanted to, He could have addressed those Big Bad Romans, or justified a Jewish empire based on the evil in Samaria or Egypt or anywhere else, but He didn't. Nowhere did He advocate political involvement.

He speaks to me personally, about my life, my sins, and my relationship with Him. And He speaks to you personally about the same in your life. The only time the Bible instructs me to worry about your sins instead of your salvation, and you to worry about mine, is when those sins interfere with building His Church.

Thomas knows that whole nations, powerful nations, my nation, two millennia after Jesus taught, are using His name to build empires that bow to new Baals with innocuous names like The Economy, Globalization, and Free Trade.

God is 100% in charge of salvation. But I wonder if the profit gained by those contracted to wipe out evil in intentionally misrepresented worlds, with the noisy evangelical support that accompanies it, hasn't condemned millions of people like Thomas to blindness toward God's love and grace, and interfered with the building of His Church. Simply put, Thomas sees the United States' heavy-handed approach to foreign policy as Christianity in practice and, from that perspective, doesn't want much to do with Christ.

Thomas and Helén give us a DVD of photos of our time together and say not to open it until we get to our first anchorage. We return to Faith with both the DVD and the Bible.

***

We planned to be underway by 10:00 AM, but Faith won't start. Our cranking battery is dead. I try jumping from the house batteries, but those are useless for cranking. Then I try jumping from the generator battery, which doesn't work either. Finally, after we monkey-around with our portable charger hooked to the generator, the engine starts.

We sail out of Savusavu to Koro Island, in the middle of the Koro Sea, about a third of the way toward Fiji's main island of Viti Levu. We stop for the night without going to shore.

When we open the DVD of photos of our time together that Thomas and Helén gave us, a note tells us they don't understand how friends can talk about religion, casting further uneasiness on our first day apart.

We all feel something right now, but can't figure out what. Sure, we're sad, because that's the way with goodbyes, but it's more than that. A flood of emotions engulfs us as we recall the past nine months, from that first baseball game at the Panama Canal Yacht Club. God laid in our path this family, these friends who coached us into this life and stood by us when we were ready to hang it up. The bond we've groomed, and that they've groomed with no less effort, bears a bountiful harvest in a friendship we will cherish forever.

In the morning, we leave for Makongai. Fifteen old buildings and the foundations of a once large village surround the anchorage. The leper colony and hospital used to be here, but the concrete stairs are all that remains. A quarter mile away, following a path cleared in the jungle on what used to be the village's main road, there's a graveyard with a hundred graves marked by concrete crosses and European names. Kara, a Fijian who lives here with her husband and baby, tells us all these people worked at the leper colony. Kara and her husband work in the turtle and giant clam sanctuary that has taken its place in the abandoned buildings.

In Savusavu, we learned of the kava ceremony from a British expatriate who had lived on his own boat there for several years. Kava is the root of a pepper tree, and it plays large in Melanesian culture. We left the Polynesians in our wake at Tonga and are now in a part of the world populated by Melanesians and Indians. This latter group was imported as slaves to work the cane fields in colonial Fiji.

We learn to carry kava on board, a collection of woody roots that bundles easily in a page of newspaper, so that when we get to a new anchorage, we can go to the village chief and present this bundle while asking permission to anchor. It's all cloaked in ceremony, most of which we probably get wrong, but people everywhere seem to appreciate an honest attempt.

Following Makongai, we anchor in the lee of a small island, and with our kava in hand, we dinghy to shore and ask for the chief. Since he's away, we're escorted to a substitute chief. We present our kava to the substitute chief's assistant, who looks it over and hands it to the substitute chief. After inspecting it, he nods to the assistant, who in turn gives us permission to anchor and invites us back for the kava ceremony at 7:00 PM.

The kava ceremony includes all the men in the village and us. The kava is ground with a large mortar and pestle, and placed in something like an oversized sock as a filter. Then, over a large bowl, water is poured through it. After that, the sock is tied on the end to simulate a large tea bag, and stirred around in the bowl to get all the good stuff out.

Then, half a coconut shell is filled with a ladleful of this concoction and drunk by the most important guy in the room, the substitute chief. There are twelve men, plus our family, and this filling and drinking goes around several times with the guy managing the kava bowl asking, "High tide or low tide?" with every cup. It tastes like mud and has a slightly narcotic effect, but we don't get much more than a good night's sleep from it.

In the morning, we motor-sail to the town of Levuka on the island of Ovalau, Fiji's oldest colonial era settlement as well as the colonial capital.

We spend the next several days moving and the nights at anchor, as we move west along the north shore of Viti Levu, Fiji's main island.

Our last stop on Viti Levu is Lautoka, where we anchor near the port terminal and clear out at Fiji's Customs and immigration. We walk into town to run errands and stay long enough for the tide to come in. Our dinghy is tied to the main pier, where semi-trucks load on or off the cargo vessels and where cars ferry officials, dock-workers, and crew to and from the city. The pier is built on concrete pylons, allowing water below. When we return from town, our dinghy is wedged under the pier from the rising tide. I must work from somebody else's dinghy to let all the air out of ours so it will float low enough to be freed from under the pier. I go to Faith to re-inflate it before retrieving everybody.

***

Musket Cove, a fine resort, is our last stop in Fiji. The beach is lined with bures�"say BURR-ray, or bungalows�"and a store, a laundermat, a couple of restaurants, and three pools; all manner of water sports are available. We're tied to their dock to clean Faith inside and out. Across the dock from us, on a sandy spit, is a bar where we eat several meals. To eat there, you bring your own food, light a fire in the grill with their firewood, cook using their bar-b-cue tools, eat it on their plates at their tables, and buy your drinks from them. Cokes all around cost about $7US, and it's the nicest dining-out we've had in a while. It's hard to blame them for the service though.

We're at a nice resort in Fiji, but it could be Florida, Hawaii, The Caribbean, or anywhere else with sunny beaches and white guys being served by people who aren't white guys.

At Musket Cove, we meet a great couple from Melbourne, Australia. Again, it's Greggii who makes the introduction after meeting their two boys first.

In the sand near Faith and the self-cook restaurant, Greggii sets up a booth to sell headbands and crafts he weaves from palm fronds. He meets Brendan and Andrew there and teaches them how to do it. The boys end up selling a few pieces to some passersby, and each of them makes a couple of dollars for his efforts.

After Greggii introduces us to Craig and Toni, the boys' parents, we're talking about how we stay busy on Faith. I tell Craig I just finished reading a fascinating book about Jewish immigrants in America and how they started selling pots and pans from pushcarts in Pennsylvania to adapt to change, and become some of the leading business-people in the world.

Toni says she understands. They're Jewish, which I don't know until they tell me, and her grandpa started his business the same way in Australia. On their last night of vacation, it's Craig's birthday. We celebrate together at a pig-on-a-spit, luau kind of thing. They go vegetarian when they learn the menu isn't available, saying they aren't completely kosher but do draw the line at pig. To me, it's just another adventure, going to a pig roast with practicing Jews and having our blond six-year-old teach their children about making money.