Leah Seru is turning her love of basketball into an opportunity to teach the importance of nutrition and exercise to young Fijians.
Leah Seru had no choice but to grow up strong and healthy.
Strong, because she is one of eight daughters of a successful and respected mother. And healthy, because that mother made sure only good food went into her children’s mouths when they sat at her table.
“Vegetables, sometimes all we ever eat is vegetables,” Leah says with a bitter-sweet grin.
She might now thank her Mum for the dinnertime discipline, because it's meant this 24-year-old is not only healthy enough to pursue her basketball dreams, but informed enough to know why good food and regular exercise matter.
Leah is a volunteer for Hoops for Health, an Australian Government sport aid program delivered with the help of FIBA in Oceania, which uses basketball to teach Fijian children the importance of exercise and nutrition in the fight against disease. She understands the appeal of fizzy drinks and 'snacks'.
“All the little kids here in Fiji, including myself when I was little, we love snacks,” she says.
“We would love to eat junk food all the time if we could. We wouldn’t eat healthy food or the food you should eat.
“So now, when I go into the schools, I try to get them to understand it is okay to eat it but you need to try to eat other stuff as well, or at least try and be more active to get rid of your sugar intake throughout the day.”
When she first became involved, Leah was attracted more by the “hoop” than the “health”. The promising shooting guard loves basketball and still dreams of becoming good enough to play overseas. She saw the program as the chance to live her love.
It is perhaps an omen that she played for a team called the “Chosen Generation”, because she has become one of Fiji’s leading young female role models, and an example of the new ambition shown by her generation.
“According to tradition, women are meant to be in kitchens and looking after families, raising kids and stuff,” she explains.
“They don’t expect us to be holding a leadership role or managing people.
"I don’t feel like I belong all the time in the kitchen or raising kids. I wouldn’t mind doing that but I want to do something to help people, to do something more with my life."
She concedes her feminist attitudes may have been inevitable coming from a family with nine women.
“We have friends who can look down on us in life but I feel like we can do so much,” she says.
“People telling us what we can and cannot do just makes me mad”.
Convincing men, though, isn’t always so easy.
“With time, that is slowly changing in the Pacific,” says Fiji Basketball’s Chief Operating Officer, Laisiasa Puamau.
“This is a wonderful opportunity for a sport like basketball to change with the current times and current culture”.
Leah agrees.
“A lot of the younger men are growing thinking the same way as the young women,” she says.
“They’ve come to understand that you can’t keep a woman behind the stove.
“They are also opening up to the idea of providing for their family if their wife has to work and they have to stay home”.
Education might be one thing, but getting ‘schooled’ on the court is something else.
“Competition-wise, a few of the men are shocked that girls can beat them or ‘school’ them, in other words,” Leah laughs.
Around the schools and playgrounds of Fiji though, Hoops for Health doesn’t look like a health or social revolution. It masquerades as a young woman simply loving her sport and sharing it with all comers.
“I just want to see the kids playing and enjoying it,” Leah says.
"Basketball has taught me a lot of lifelong lessons and goals. I love this sport so much, I want others to love it too."
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