October 30

Tonight's lesson in Eternal Marriage is one on temporal preparedness.  I  chose to focus the lesson on budgeting.  It is interesting that when I asked the class who had savings accounts only 2 of the 18 that were on time to the class had a savings account.  As an aside, one of the young adult men made the statement that savings accounts cost money and that one had to have a job to open an account.  The rest of the class heard him, so I asked the class if that was true in Fiji.  It is not.  Nice way to start class

I created a little budgeting exercise.  A family owes money (LDS Primay tuition, back rent, etc.) and needs to find a way to save or earn enough to pay their debt.  I was shocked when many of the students decided that they would just cut a little out of the electrical bill and the water bill.  They had no idea where a family is able to cut expenses and where they are not.  In fact, one of the girls got so frustrated with the exercise that she said, "I would just move in with my family in my village and live for free." Finally we did the exercise as a class which was an eye opener to most of the students.  We finally determined that it would take at least four months to pay the debt back.

"If this was your family, what would you do once you had pain of your debt?" I then asked.  Only one student said that they would keep living on the tight budget so that they could put money in a savings account.  Hearing their reasons for spending or saving was very interesting.  I was so grateful for the words of the Prophets that have cautioned us to never live to the ends of our means--to always have money laid away for emergencies.  It is a totally new concept to these Fijian young adults.  They actually calculated how much money they would save in an entire year.  They were really impressed.

Both Scott and I were amazed that not one of these Fijians thought to grow some of their own food to save money especially as many vegetables and fruits grow here without any effort on man's part.

The other day we got into some slow moving traffic caused by road construction.  As we were driving down Edinburgh Road (the main road into downtown Suva from our flat) and I noticed a huge bunch of bananas in a banana tree just off the road.  I started counting and by the time we had hit the bottom of Edinburgh Road (4 blocks) I had counted 13 bunches of bananas waiting for someone to pick them as the land they were on is public land.  No one owns it.  No one planted the banana trees.  Free for the taking.