Chong calls for family unity to fight drug crisis
THE head of the Catholic Church in Fiji, Archbishop Peter Loy Chong, has spoken of the need for families to spend quality time together and communicate with their children, in order to avoid familial disconnect.
Archbishop Loy Chong said with the current drug problems that Fiji is facing, one can only prevent the issue from seeping into households by not being too attached to mobile devices as this has been one of the main contributions of the drug problem, especially for children.
Then there is the issue of globalisation which the Archbishop said had the ability to move the world and that it had negatively impacted today’s society.
“Let me begin by putting this thing in a bigger picture. The drugs, the domestic violence, the other negative things that are happening,” Archbishop Loy Chong said.
“There are a lot of extractive industries that are causing a lot of tension in villages such as Namosi, and all this comes under the picture of what globalisation does to human beings.
“They say globalisation has a mantra. Mantra means you keep repeating something that drives you.”
Archbishop Loy Chong said the mantra for globalisations was market and profit.
“You’re always thinking of what’s marketable and what can be turned into a commodity and how much profit you make out of that.”
Archbishop Loy Chong said he’d compare globalisation to a ship going onto the ocean with many people at the bottom level of the ship.
He said the bottom part of the ship reflected the world’s poor people.
“Very few people are on top of the deck. Nobody knows who’s captaining the ship. We have no idea what map he uses, but one thing we are sure of, is that if this boat keeps on going like this, it’s going to run aground. It’s going to wreck.
“That analogy is what our world is like. If we don’t change the way we do things or the things that we value, and we keep allowing money and profit to be the decider, then this is what is going to happen.”
The archbishop said society would find itself in a wreck, like high numbers of drug cases, domestic violence and extractive industries.
“The Government did a BandAid job giving payment to the people of Vatukoula, but how do you stop? “They have not stopped those kind of injustices around the country.
“It was like a Band-Aid solution that one. That’s how the injustices are going around because of similar businesses like mining, gravel, sand.
“When you allow globalisation to continue to take its course, this is what will happen.”
Why do you think mobile devices contribute to a negative impact on people’s lives, especially with these drug cases happening?
“To come to the drugs part of the globalisation is fast communication,” Archbishop Loy Chong said.
“The phone, social media, all these, how you can transport things.
“Before you can talk about sovereign borders, you can protect your borders. What comes into your country, what comes into your house, what comes into your life.
“But that border is vanishing, you can easily cross the border and enter into individual lives.
“So, with the cell phones and the fast communications, though it makes communications easy, it also disconnects us.
“Because there’s a loss of human relationships. We’ve lost a lot of creative ways of conversations.
“People are sitting down together at one table but not really talking. Everybody is busy with their phones. You see it with families as they gather.”
The archbishop says if society is not careful, it would make individuals lack relationships “and because of that, you’ll have a lot of children who come out of domestic violence who cannot talk to anybody”.
“And parents who cannot listen because everybody is busy with their phones and they’ve lost the art of talking.
“So, people will resort to things like drugs to ventilate. To get out of whatever is haunting them because we cannot talk about things, many people are undecided and they resort quickly to their mobile devices, find out how to relieve their pain and venture into drugs.”
How do you find a way out of this?
“I preach about how families can be prophets, like Amos,” he said.
Archbishop Loy Chong recommended a concept that the Catholic Church is currently promoting — the need for a spiritual conversation as a response to the drugs, domestic violence, the suicide cases or people on the verge of committing suicide.
He said spiritual conversation was an opportunity for families and groups to listen to each other and then listen to God.
“It’s not a complicated thing. Anybody can do it. You don’t have to be a holy person who attends church regularly, in fact, any person from any religion can do this.
“Because it requires two very important things, and that’s speaking from the heart and then listening.
“Two things that God has given us, the mouth and heart to speak and ears to listen and you don’t even have to have a degree to do this.
“So, the first round we create an atmosphere, an environment that is conducive to this kind of thing, and sometimes in silence, we can just read a little passage from the Bible.
“It does not happen all of a sudden, you kind of have to build it up slowly.
“Practise it and eventually there’s an atmosphere of trust and children will be able to speak and parents will need to learn to listen.”
How do you engage in spiritual conversation?
The archbishop said in the first round, each person speaks from the heart, especially for parents.
“There’s no moralising or coaching or no telling children what to do. It’s just to listen and allow a time of silence to allow what you are listening to.
“The next round is what you hear from the family. What moved you as families to listen to each other.
“It’s a movement away from self to the rest of the family.
“The third round, then we move to God or a higher power.
“Ask yourself, what is the insight we can get from listening?
“What is God telling us to do? We move away from what mom and dad are saying, and we move to God level.
“What is God saying to us? “From there, we have some kind of commitment to what God wants us to do.”
Archbishop Loy Chong said what this creates is speaking from the heart, and listening from the heart which is what families lack now.
“If children are carrying worries or parents don’t know how to speak to their children, it will build up and could lead to suicide among kids.
“When we talk about the social problems, you can’t just take the drugs alone, and the supplier, It has linkages.
“Trying to analyse the social problems, is to understand the linkages this has with other things.”
Archbishop Loy Chong drew an example of a nice juicy Hawaiian pawpaw on a table.
“It just does not appear like that. It goes through a whole process where it will end up looking nice and tasting sweet.
“So planting, the soil, the manure, rain and sea, these are the processes it goes through to get to what it looks like now.
“The same thing with the social problem.
“This is what we are trying to tell the Ministry of Home Affairs that they will need to have a social analysis to understand and to solve this problem, you need to understand because this issue did not just drop out of nowhere.
“There are economic reasons and there are market profit reasons that you need to consider in order to resolve this thing.
“You can’t just take it from the surface level, and think that you can address this issue without understanding.”