Don Clare, the present Branch Committee coordinator, first sighted Fiji in 1952 on his way to Gilead School by ship with 16 other students from Australia. Said Brother Clare: “I remember standing on the deck of an ocean liner and viewing, for the first time, Suva harbor, surrounded by beautiful hills and clothed in deep, many-hued greens. I thought: ‘What a lovely place for a missionary to work!’ We spent that day with a small band of about 20 local publishers and one lone missionary, Brother Bill Checksfield. It was a most enjoyable day. All 17 of us expressed our thoughts that Fiji would be a grand missionary assignment.”

What happened? Brother Clare continues: “As our course of study drew to a close in July of 1952, we anxiously awaited announcement of our missionary assignments. What a delightful surprise it was for four of us, Harold and Lena Cater, Clive Taylor and me, to learn that we had been assigned to Fiji! And what a bigger surprise we received when we were asked to take up secular work in order to get into the colony of Fiji.”

Why was this necessary? Well, for a number of years the Society had made applications for missionaries to enter Fiji. The government continued to reject them. So a new method had to be used to get these four Gilead graduates into Fiji. They were to enter as tourists and then endeavor to obtain secular work. This they did in March 1953. They were instructed not to attend meetings for some months and to witness only out of town to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Eventually, though, they began to increase their theocratic activity and were able to assist the sole missionary, Brother Checksfield.

“I have always been convinced that the Society’s sending us to Fiji at that time was directed by Jehovah,” Brother Clare recalls. “For us to obtain residency so we could take up missionary service, we had to remain exclusively in Fiji, doing full-time secular work for five years. In later years brothers from Australia, Canada and England came to Fiji to serve where the need is greater, but they all had trouble with the Immigration Department once it was learned they were Witnesses. The result was that they had to leave the colony when their permits expired.”

WITNESSING IN FIJI

Brother Cater describes the work at that time: “The people were friendly and had the underlying island-style philosophy of malua or ‘tomorrow will do.’ Most of the year the climate was hot and humid. Rural areas up to that time had received very little attention, so this is where we started our preaching. It was difficult at first, for here most of the people spoke little English and we were still attending Fijian language classes. Soon, though, I was able to give short talks in Fijian. The public meeting work in the villages grew, and we were able to encourage a Fijian brother to accompany us. The procedure was to contact the village headman, witness to him and arrange through him for a place to give the public talk. After the talk it was thatched-hut-to-thatched-hut work. No doorbells here! Instead of chairs, mats on the floor were offered.”

MISSIONARIES GAIN RESIDENCY

After five years of doing secular work, the four Gilead graduates who had arrived in 1953 gained residency, and Brothers Clare and Taylor took up the full-time preaching work again. Brother and Sister Cater stayed on for some years, helping the brothers to maturity. They then had to return to Australia in 1960 after the birth of their son.

[Picture on page 176]

Donald Clare, present Branch Committee coordinator, and his wife, Eunice, who was Fiji’s first pioneer