An historic church located near Fiji’s National Sports Stadium has an adjacent meeting hall with antiquated kitchen and toilet amenities. The church offers a hospitality ministry for the continual bookings for their hall so that sporting and cultural groups travelling from around Fiji can come and stay there while competing in tournaments at the stadium.

The church hall is their ‘marae’, the visitors home away from home, as it’s the only free accommodation option available that allows them to travel to Suva for their competitions.

The Church welcomes them and provides a safe, homely and loving place for them to stay.

Sadly, their kitchen has a leaking roof and rotten floorboards, and toilets are a ‘little worse for wear’.

Golden Oldies are keen to support their vision to upgrade their facilities so their church hospitality ministry can continue.

St Christopher’s Home continues to provide loving Christian care for children aged 0-18 years old. Many volunteers provide support with donated goods and funds supplied, yet their needs continue.

A new boy’s home has just been officially opened and the boys are moving in during the Spring, with new Home parents to care for them.

Another possibility being explored by Golden Oldies is education scholarships being promoted to help the children with their studies and vocational dreams.

A Church Primary-High School is centred in the heart of surrounding squatter villages. The children reluctantly attend the school because no other school will enrol them. The school is their only choice for these students to get an education. It struggles with truancy, drugs, student low self-esteem and societal bad stigma from attending the school. That was yesterday.

Today, due to the inspiration of a Principal, Chaplain and teachers, the school is becoming a school of first choice.

Golden Oldies continue to provide educational and sports equipment for the school, and now are investigating the creation of a trade’s academy within the school, that could lead to the real hope of jobs for senior students.

Moving into this village last year, a young couple built their own house with tin and sticks.

“We’ve planted a garden and go fishing, but my husband has no job. Is there a seasonal job in NZ for him?” The outside cook stand is used even during the Suva monsoon rains. After these rains, all their worldly possessions from their one suitcase are usually wet and they have to constantly dry their belongings outside when the sun reappears.

Golden Oldies have a dream to see if over time, their home could be upgraded to a mud-brick house, along with some small business ventures for jobs that will support their village and church.

Fiji Corrections claim to have the lowest recidivism rates in the OECD. Their transformation of prisoner’s lives is through education, trades training, officer-prisoner collaborations and post-release support programmes.

For the first time ever, Golden Oldies were invited to meet and converse with the prisons own Golden Oldies inmates. Tears flowed as the prison ‘Golden Oldies’ within their barbed wire compound were able to chat, be encouraged and pray with the team.

Following this, the Prison brass band and cultural war-like dancers, comprising of officers and prisoners together performed and then mingled with Golden Oldies. A moving experience.

Donated goods totalling 300kg consisted of medical supplies and equipment, bibles and Sunday school story books, educational materials, sports equipment and shoes, bras, linen, and guitars, all destined for the schools, hospitals, villages, churches and squatter settlements that Golden Oldies would be visiting.

Strictly restricted to 30kg checked-in weight, the team donated some of their allocated weight to allow a pre-packed box of these donated goods to be assigned to them to max out at 30kg/person.

Team members arrived at the airport with variable weighted suitcases and were matched up with variable weighted boxes to meet the 30kg allowance. The result?

Miraculously, every suitcase somehow had a matching box to make 30kg and the entire 300kg was checked-in with 0kg to spare.

We had a divine dispatcher overseeing our on-boarding freight nightmare!

Strictly restricted to 30kg checked-in weight, the team donated some of their allocated weight to allow a pre-packed box of these donated goods to be assigned to them to max out at 30kg/person.

Team members arrived at the airport with variable weighted suitcases and were matched up with variable weighted boxes to meet the 30kg allowance. The result?

Miraculously, every suitcase somehow had a matching box to make 30kg and the entire 300kg was checked-in with 0kg to spare.

We had a divine dispatcher overseeing our on-boarding freight nightmare!

82-year old on Mission

Alison our ‘Golden-Golden’ Oldie returned for her 4^th Golden Oldies Mission.
“82 is only a number” she says,
and she never missed a beat throughout the 11-day mission!

Our first mission since covid lockdown, we had 20 Golden Oldies from around NZ with the average age of 71-years.

Oh yes, our ‘Junior’ Golden Oldie was a 25-year-old school teacher coming on her first overseas mission too!