Chapter 1
I was born on 14 March 1995 at Ba Mission Hospital in Ba, Fiji.
I was the youngest of three children.
I had an older sister and an older brother, and like every newborn child, I entered this world knowing nothing about money, broken families, loneliness or survival.
I didn’t know that my parents were poor.
Children don’t understand poverty at first.
They don’t look at the walls of their house and calculate how much money their parents have. They don’t understand bills or wonder what tomorrow’s expenses will be.
They simply know whether they are hungry.
And somehow, no matter how difficult things became, my parents made sure we had food.
We didn’t have everything.
But we ate.
Looking back now, I understand what I couldn’t understand then.
Sometimes providing a meal when you have very little is its own form of love.
For the first six years of my life, I had both my parents.
Then everything changed.
