In Memorial
As the eldest in your family of sixteen, you worked hard from an early age to help your parents with making a living. With other brothers and sisters right alongside you and seeing extreme poverty for all if nothing drastic was done. Father, you had the wisdom and courage to decide at age of fourteen that you will have to educate yourself to escape poverty not only for yourself but help your siblings escape this also. You had to milk over seventy cows daily seven days a week (no machine) in exchange to go to school. You graduated and became a teacher. Your early teaching was mostly a one-man school where discipline, hard work ethics and subject excellence in those that showed potential, and survival through gardening were taught to everyone. Father also kept a close eye on his family and helped in whatever shape and form to get them ahead in life.
Father was always aware of his potential. While still a full-time teacher, he bought a small sugar cane farm in Vakabuli Lautoka that was producing four tonnes of sugar cane. He worked the farm to later produce over 1000 tonnes of sugar cane per year becoming the largest single producer of sugar cane in his sector. He then diversified to pineapples and became the largest producer of pineapples in Fiji producing over 350 tonnes of pineapples in a season.
What lessons we can learn from you, father, there are hundreds of lessons but here are two we highlight:
1. Your past doesn’t have to define your future: - Deciding and acting to secure your future with the right levels of dedication, a hardened mindset, and determined perseverance does take you there.
2. Assume responsibility for those around you in need: - Father was a master at doing this - When the entire community around him was well he was at peace. There is an endless list of things he organised for others’ well-being, be it timber for home, finance for business, a guarantee of business loans, road for villagers, farm planting material for new farmers, a shoulder to lean on etc. He knew about the power of giving, to be far greater than anything else. Even when he had little himself, he never stopped taking responsibility for those in need.
Father, you had to overcome many obstacles throughout your life to give us these meaningful lessons of life and this blessed lifestyle of ours has now extended to three generations. We are forever grateful for what we have received from you in lessons and life. We miss you dearly.
Singh, Rahim, Rothheudt & Yates family here and abroad.