Part of Beqa Adventure Divers’ Fiji Shark Project involves a commitment to the traditional owners of Shark Reef to give back to the community. This is accomplished in various ways, and one is through Village Education.
Each year, the villages of Galoa & Wainiyabia put forward a selection of school leavers for our yearly Divemaster Internship. Beqa Adventure Divers selects one candidate from each of the villages and takes them from PADI Open Water Diver through the ranks up to PADI Divemaster.
Upon completion of the 1-year Internship, there is potential full-time employment at Beqa Adventure Divers or the interns are free to take their new skills to seek work in the diving industry elsewhere in Fiji.
So far, the company continues to grow and we have been able to hire all of our graduates, the more as employing staff that we have trained and thus know our procedures is very much in our own interest. We also consider it a moral obligation as we could otherwise be accused of simply taking on cheap labour, only do get rid of them once we would have to pay them proper wages.
In fact, Tumbee, Sivo, Vili, Silio and Arthur have all been trained by us and have joined our first graduate Wati, one of the graduates from our 2005 Internship, whom we hired in 2006.
They are a great bunch and we are extremely happy, and grateful to have been given this opportunity, the more as they very much represent the future of our company.
As of July, 2010, our latest trainee Fabi is progressing rapidly and we are very confident that he will eventually become yet another one of our B.A.D boys and girls.