Anela Liwaki: An Aspiring Youth Leader

By Elesi Tupou Veikoso

“You only live once, so do your best” is the motto that drives a young lady such as Anela Liwaki to be the aspiring leader she has become today. In addition to personal charisma she is also imbued with high moral values that has been transmitted to her by her supportive family. Anela feels passionately that she is blessed to have loving parents she regards as role models. They have impacted her life positively.

Hailing from the same island as the late President Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, Tubou Lakeba, Lau with maternal links to Tarukua, Cicia, Anela has pure Lauan blood with the strong and confident Island sustainable spirit to match.

Being a 21 year old, USP student, Anela strongly believes that in order to have a better Fiji there should be the presence of good governance and also having a corruption free country. She reckons on rephrasing the term “practice what you preach” into “preach what you practice” meaning in order to advocate on integrity and transparency to youths, we need to live a life of integrity and transparency. This is the reason why she decided to become part of the Youths For Integrity Network to learn more about integrity to help “youths not to be easily tempted by worldly behaviour.”

Interestingly with hobbies such as nature walking, hiking, reading and swimming it is not a surprise to see a young lady like Anela being a volunteer for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) whereby they work in the field of the wilderness preservation and the reduction of human impact on the environment. Since WWF is the first NGO she has ever volunteered for, amazingly it is also where she first encountered the best experience of her life and that is going to workshops, meeting new people and learning new things.

Surprisingly, the first answer which I was very much interested in when I first asked her about her best experience was being on a platform organized by the WWF, in which they advocated on the importance of planting mangrove seedlings with regards to climate change. At first I gave a surprising look and then she was like “mangroves are very important!”

With strong confidence in herself, Anela’s goal is to graduate and get a job and also get to travel all over the world.

Fortunately, with no doubt at all, she sees herself in the next 5 years working with an NGO by giving back to the community and helping others the way she has been helped. Even though seeing herself as having a weakness of being lazy (at times) and considering herself as a procrastinated person, which I totally disagree on, Kele and Angela, who are also volunteers for the WWF, describe her as a person who is very sociable, friendly, easy to understand, someone whom we can seek advice from and very much open. But as for me, being with her for just a few days, I strongly believe that she is more than that, in which she is very talented, outspoken, confident, and weird in a good and funny way, overall Ms. Anela Liwaki is someone who has a great personality.