The woman from Mana Island who decided that helping was the whole point

In Lautoka, on the western coast of Fiji's main island, Firomena Kitiana serves as health focal point for the local Red Cross branch. She came to the work in 2016, in the months after Cyclone Winston tore across Viti Levu. Her rule is four words long: if you can help, lend a hand.

Firomena Kitiana — everyone calls her Firo — grew up on Mana Island, a patch of land of about 1.4 square kilometres in the Mamanuca group, thirty kilometres off the coast. No roads. The mainland reached only by boat. She moved to Lautoka in Class Seven, to the town the locals still call Sugar City after the mill that has been grinding cane since 1903.

What she carried with her from those years, she has described plainly: domestic violence, abuse. She does not present it as a wound to be displayed. She presents it as the reason she refuses one particular habit of mind. People should never be judged by their life status — that is how she puts it, and she means it as an instruction rather than a sentiment.

Then came February 2016. Tropical Cyclone Winston crossed Viti Levu as a Category 5 system, the most powerful storm ever recorded at landfall in the Southern Hemisphere. It killed 44 people, damaged or destroyed roughly 40,000 homes, and touched the lives of some 540,000 Fijians — close to two-thirds of the country. The relief effort ran for months and pulled unprecedented numbers of ordinary people into the Fiji Red Cross Society's branch network for the first time.

Firo was one of them. She never left.

In the years since, she has worked through the branch's workshops, programmes and community activities, and taken on the health focal point role for Lautoka. The Fiji Red Cross has operated as an independent national society since 1971, the year after independence, running from Suva through branches scattered across Viti Levu, Vanua Levu and the outer islands. Each branch depends on volunteers who hold a particular brief — disaster response, first aid training, health. Firo holds one of them.

If you can help, lend a hand.

The tradition she has joined began with a Geneva businessman who arrived at Solferino in northern Italy in June 1859 and found a battlefield of wounded men. Henry Dunant had no medical training and no authority. He gathered the villagers and organised care for the soldiers of both armies, and three years later paid out of his own pocket to publish the account that led to the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

He was not a doctor either. He was simply someone who was there, and decided that being there was enough of a qualification. On an island of 1.4 square kilometres, a girl came to the same conclusion by a harder route.