We drove the truck out to Salt Lake and floated down the river in black inner tubes, carried on the current of the incoming tide. Dilaisa drove the boat, trailing behind as her daughter Charlotte and her two friends floated alongside us, gently guiding us through the mangroves.
Charlotte really left an impression on me. She and I floated together, chatting the whole way. She is ten years old, super smart and curious. The youngest of three siblings, her older sister is twenty-six and her brother is twenty-one, both with a child of their own.
Charlotte began to tell me all about her life on Vanua Levu. I was honored to listen to her inner world. She told me how her father is sick and her mother works a lot, so Charlotte helps take care of him. I told Charlotte that her father must be very grateful to have her looking after him. “That’s how I’ll get my blessing,” she said sweetly and matter of factly, as if it’s already written in stone and she accepted her responsibility with humility.
“Have you read the Bible?” she asked me. I told her that I hadn’t read it since I was a little girl. She started recounting the story of Adam and Eve, and their two sons Cain and Abel. She told me that the Bible says Cain and Abel are supposed to be the start of our human lineage, our first ancestors.
But, she reasoned, “How could they give birth to us if they were both boys?” She told me that she had already questioned her uncle, who is a pastor, about this conundrum.
“Pastors don’t always have all the answers,” Charlotte told me wryly. She said that her uncle had wondered if perhaps Cain and Abel had a secret sister who wasn’t mentioned in the story. Well, that really perplexed Charlotte. “They had a baby with their sister?!” Her eyes were wide and skeptical.
I told her that I believe the stories in the Bible are symbols, not facts. They are examples that teach us how to live. Charlotte nodded, “It’s up to us to find the truth.”
Charlotte speaks with such confidence, like she has seen the whole world from her settlement in Fiji. “I know why we’re here,” she looked me straight in the eye, as if it was obvious. “God made Adam and Eve to see if they would be good or bad. They were sinners, so they were bad. But now we are here for the same reason – to find out whether we are good or bad.”
“I think that we all have the capacity to be both or either,” I explained. Everybody makes mistakes sometimes. Charlotte nodded, spinning me around in my inner tube. “We are here to be good in our hearts,” she concluded. I felt my eyes well up.
We floated up to the pontoon. Then Charlotte and Tessa entertained us by performing two Tahitian dance routines while we ate fresh coconut meat, carving it out of the shell with our thumbs.
It was the perfect day.