Another Fijian December

December is a fun time to be in the village. Visitors and villagers that have migrated to the big cities come back to spend the holidays in the bushes. The village is loud with children and wood chopping but its a welcoming change from the usual silence. All work stops and that's fine with me. Nobody wants to do anything but sit around, mingle, and drink grog. It rains everyday and its very humid, so I spend about an hour everyday just sitting in the stream that runs behind the village. We had a funeral recently and killed two cows and four pigs for the occasion. Also had baskets of fish and quite a few chickens to eat. All is well in Tailevu.

Girls feasting after the funeral

Men relaxing on a boat

Jone butchers a cow

Sunset in my village

Palm tree in the village

Halloween and Truckin On

Halloween was crazy just as I expected. About 20 of us volunteers got together at a backpackers resort for the weekend. Costumes included four Lady Gagas, a Catholic school girl, a girl scout selling cookies, Jesus, a beer bottle, Spider-Man, Santa Clause, a construction worker and others. At night we drank and danced and built a bonfire and at day we did beach stuff.

Halloween: Dancing at the Beach House

Halloween: Lydia, Christa, Lisa, and Natalie as Lady Gaga

Back in the village now. My first days back in the village after a weekend off involves nothing but cleaning. The ecosystem in my bure takes over and I spend 24 hours cleaning rat and gecko shit, knocking down spider webs, sweeping dust, and generally reclaiming the bure as my own.

My environmental class I teach for the 7th and 8th graders once a week is getting out of control because they have figured out that I am fake grading them. I "grade" them to motivate to do the work I ask, but because my lessons are not in the mandatory cirriculum the grades actually mean nothing. So now I have to come up with a reward system to encourage their work ethic that actually works better. I still really enjoy the teaching - I think the kids are learning a lot and they like me and the class. We do a lot of hands-on stuff outside and get dirty and that's where Fijians excel.

My 8th graders identify insect habitats

Life in general is still really good. It's no longer "fresh" and a lot of aspects have become very mundane, but that's the case wherever you are after a year of living - you just have to keep finding things new to try. And that's pretty easy to do when you live in the bush by the sea. I have approximately seven months left.

Bill and Kini, cousins and my neighbors, go spear fishing just outside my bure

Parent's Visit and Completed Water Project

Mom and Dad on Caqalai Island
Dad shows some village kids some pics
Mom chats with the women in my village

My parents just visited me for about eight days… it was a great vacation for them and me. They spent a few days in my village and were treated like royalty which was not the least bit surprising to myself. We did some hiking around my village and enjoyed a few rounds of grog with the locals. Everyone thought my dad was younger than I was. Then we had a little dance in the community hall where my parents’ dancing had the villagers on the floor laughing. When they left some villagers shed some tears, including my counterpart who was so saddened by their departure that he couldn’t eat for two days. My parents and I then travelled on some smaller islands off the east coast, and then headed back along the Coral Coast where they departed from Nadi – back to labels and airplanes. Thanks parents!

One sad reoccurring behavior on the part of villagers in Fiji is that they poison dogs. To them dogs can be pests that mess with livestock, steal food, and shit all around the village. So they set out little trays of poison mixed with some tasty fish rubbish, and next thing I know I am trying to sleep with the sounds of dry heaving outside my bure for four consecutive nights. Last week I watched a child crying while digging a grave for his dog, all the while watching his dog vomit himself to death. The issue will be brought up at the next village meeting.

Sorry, that was very depressing. On a lighter note – our water project has been funded! The project involves a borehole to be dug (which has been completed and we hit fresh water about 30 meters deep), reservoir tanks placed on top of a hill (see pics – I thought we would all be squashed by a rolling, out of control 10,000 liter water tank), and pipeline to be laid from the borehole to the tanks to the village. Most of the work has been completed. All that is left is to connect the piping. We have been working on this project since I got here so it is quite a relief to have it done with. Now the villagers will have drinking/bathing/cleaning water come directly inside the house.

Preparing to haul a one ton, 10,000 liter tank up a 300 foot hill, we contemplate whether its a good idea or not.

Etuate, Momo, Lase and I haul the tanks using a rigged up pulley system

The crab pond continues to struggle due mainly to the villager’s lack of interest. I’m not going to force it down their throat but I am going reorganize the management of it to stimulate the involvement. It really just needs some TLC and attention like the tree nursery has, which is generating a good bit of income and will be the foundation of improvements to be made to our watershed. We will start reforesting locally very soon.

I am traveling further and further in my boat. I have to really time it well with the tides and weather if I want to go anywhere outside of the mangrove forest that I live in. I also have to make another paddle because I flipped the boat recently and my paddle broke so I’ve been using a shovel.

Dolphins in the channel between Moturiki and Caqalai Islands

Northern Islands and My New Blue Bucket

Yalewa on Kia Island

Another boil - I really hate these things

Yesterday I bought myself a blue bucket. I will use this bucket for bathing and carrying water. My old bucket got a hole in it and I found myself racing against gravity’ pull on water to bathe myself before the water flowed out and into the banana trees. You wouldn’t believe the outcry when I strolled into the village from town with a brand new shiny blue bucket… “Oi! Veremo tiko dua na bukete vou!” (Graham has a new bucket!) “Rai rai vinaka nomu bukete!” (Your bucket looks great!) “Na cava kena yaga na bukete qori?” (What are you going to do with that bucket?) “E vica kena sau nomu bukete?” (How much did you pay for that bucket?). You would have thought I brought the circus into town.

Unsettling ride at a festival in Labasa

Water is scarce this time of year. I’ve had to do a lot of recycling. For example, rain falls from the roof into my bucket, where I use it to wash my dishes. Then I take that water to “flush” my pit toilet, where it flows into my banana trees which breaks it down and drinks it up. I haven’t bathed in a few days because our stream bed is dry.

My work still revolves around the crab farm and tree nursery and 8^th grade teaching. My efforts for the next year will be focused on having the villagers take ownership of these to keep them sustainable.

Samu, Nei, Mere, and Na Levu working in the tree nursery

Drinking at the campgrounds in Savusavu, Kia at sunset, and view from the top of Kia Island

Recently I returned from some northern islands- Kia and Labasa and Savusavu on Vanua Levu. Kia is very isolated and beautiful. The people subsist on pretty much fishing only. We slept on a floor with rats and ate fish and drank kava. The island jets out of the water and climbs maybe 800 feet, is very green, and surrounded by fringing reefs. We did some hiking and snorkelling. The people of Kia are being pressured to open their island for commercial activity which will redirect the lifestyle of the people, for better or worse, forever. Salt factories, hotels, and diving and surfing ventures are among the prospectors. Some fellow PC’s and myself discussed at length with some elders the pros and cons (mainly cons) these businesses would bring and the impacts it would have. I think they appreciated our two cents. In Labasa we marched in the Friendly North Parade, representing Peace Corps well, and camped and snorkelled and talked to white people in Savusavu.

Marching in the Festival of the Friendly North Parade

Go Dawgs!

Incapacitated

I have been in the PC infirmary for three weeks now and will be here for one more before the PC doctors let me leave. I am fine, but I had to have surgery and have to have the big hole in my back taken care of twice daily by the friendly nurses at Suva Private Hospital until it heals enough.

My room is a white box with a twin bed, chair, electric kettle and a tv that picks up two stations - Al Jazeera and FijiOne (Fiji's local station that airs dubbed Korean soap operas).

I try to get work done while here. I meet with Government agencies - Ministry of Environment, Land and Water Resource Division, Department of Tourism - to get assistance with projects. But for the most part I'm useless because the real, meaningful work is done in the village, working with the villagers. I just can't wait to go back.

But I fill my time and try to enjoy myself as best as I can. I swim, go for walks, meet friends for happy hour drinks.

Suva is a really nice city for being a major international port. Its got about 80,000 people of very mixed ethnic backgrounds; predominately Fijian and Indo-Fijian, but heavy influences of Polynesians, Asians (Chinese and Korean), and European descent (Austrailian and New Zealand, with some British and American expats.) This stew creates a lot of good looking people. Very pretty women. USP, the largest University in the South Pacific, is here, and so are plenty of jobs (relatively speaking) so the area attracts a lot of young people who flee the villages in droves in hopes of adapting the western way of living they see on the picture screens. So its a young vibrant city that is a paradox to the village life - its difficult to shuffle back and forth between the two. I'm really looking forward to getting back to the village and staying there.

Boils and Language

My schedule has been pretty regular for the past couple months: wake up, have tea, wait for high tide to take my boat out (there are two nearby rivers and I sometimes paddle upstream to nearby villages to storytell – sometimes I fish, sometimes I don’t), then I bring the boat in, eat lunch, read, nap, then go to the farm a couple of hours, then tend to the crab pond or nursery, whichever is needed. Then I eat dinner and am in bed by 9:00. I go to town once a week for food, meetings, computer, beer, whatever. And that’s life.
But this past week I’ve been in Suva because of an infected boil. It sounds gross. It is very gross and very painful. (See photo below). So on the 1st the Peace Corps doctors sent me to Suva Private Hospital for surgery. They put me under the gas and the scalpel and a few hours later I had a huge hole in my back. Somehow the problem is solved, but I’m still in Suva for a week recovering and getting the wound dressed twice a day.

In my garden I’m growing French beans, carrots, taro, and spinach. The crab pond is having problems – mainly a result of poor water exchange with the tides. This is because our drain isn’t deep enough and the pipe isn’t big enough. There is an easy solution; dig deeper and buy a bigger pipe. But getting these little tasks done here are what makes my job difficult. They don’t get done. I could do it myself, but the whole point in me being here is to build their capacity to manage and sustain projects like this and a quick fix by me gives them the illusion that foreigners will continue to come in and improve their simple little lives. At the last village meeting I expressed all this and they agreed to fix the drainage issue. But they didn’t. All that being said we do have healthy crabs.
The Fijian language is great because it, like most indigenous languages, is based and revolve around the natural environment. Siga means both sun and day and vula means both moon and month There’s about eight translations of the word break, depending on whether you break a stick, a vine, a bone, etc. Same for the words cut, carry, pull, and other verbs. They are all related to things you find in nature.
They use animal names as sexual references. Without going into details (partly because some are too dirty but mainly because I still don’t understand them all), examples are crabs, clams, different types of fish, goats, and eels. So if I ask a girl from Nadroga (a southern province), Vakacava tiko no mē? (How’s the goat?) this is a way of flirting. It confuses me and sometimes when I just want to ask someone if there are lots of oysters in their bay they just laugh and give me a high five. Whatever.
All in all things are really good. I’ve been in the village a little over a year and have another to go. Someone come visit.

Questions

Here are some common questions I get that I will answer here in one spot...

What do you eat?
Typically, Breakfast includes crackers with jam, fruit (usually papaya or some citrus), and tea. For lunch I'll eat a can of tuna with salt and fresh chili peppers and lemon juice along with some root crops. And for dinner some type of fish with a local spinach and root crops is pretty typical.

How do you bathe?
I fill a bucket with water that is piped in from the nearby creek. Or if I'm really dirty I just lay in the creek.

How do you know how to build a crab farm?
I don't. I just tried it and so far its working.

Do you miss home?
Family and friends.

Do you live on the beach?
No. I live on the coast and it is beautiful, but surrounded by mangroves and no sandy beach.

What do you do at night?
Read, write, help kids with homework, drink grog.

Do you get paid?
Enough to live at the local level.


What are your most valued possessions?
My boat, my hammock, and my ipod.

Do you have to wipe gecko poop off your bed every night before you crawl into it?
Yes.

Hotels, New Boat, Tree Planting, Bylaws

I just spent an entire week at Tradewinds Hotel courtesy of U.S. Peace Corps. The first few days was the Connect Conference in which we basically just get to know the fresh-off-the-boat-PCV's. The second half of the week was mid-service training: We discuss successes, failures, projects, language, and all things PC. It was beneficial. Almost as beneficial as the $4 Austrailian wines I consumed each evening at the happy hour of a nearby cafe. We also danced a lot. Also watched U.S.A heartbreakingly lose to Ghana (with beer in our hands at 6 am). It was really great to see some friends from other islands that I haven't seen in some time. It was a grand old time.
I just became the proud owner of a new boat! My worlds has literally doubled. It is a handmade 12 ft. outrigger canoe, painted blue and called the Dadakulaci ("seasnake"). An older PCV made it and gave it to me. I spend my mornings rowing out, exploring the mangroves, fishing, whatever. There are about 4 islands I can paddle to from my village, one of which has a Peace Corps Volunteer on it, so I look forward to visiting those.
I am proud to say I have two projects not only implemented but successfully operating: the crab farm and the tree nursery. After weeks of trying to figure out how to coordinate the depth of the crab pond with the rise/fall of the tides, we got it down and the water now changes daily which gives the crabs an environment they can live in.
We currently have 2,000 trees growing in our tree nursery. Fiji is aggressively pursuing a 1,000,000 Tree campaign, in which Fiji will plant 1,000,000 trees by the end of the year (there are 900,000 people in Fiji). This is great for the environment, and for the economy (assuming at least half will be cut for timber, food, medicine, etc. But the problem is that there are not 1,000,000 seedlings of which to plant. Enter my village. We started a nursery to meet the demands of this campaign. We spend mornings looking for seeds in the bush, and afternoons mixing soil with compost and potting them. Its dirty and fun and takes a long time.
At the recent village meeting the villagers brought out a 22 page document of bylaws that were written and put into effect in 1967. The purpose of this was to reinforce these bylaws and revert back to the traditional codes of conduct and rules. The villagers felt modernity was encroaching too fast and needed to go back in time. This means girls won't be able to wear shorts and shoulders must be covered, no cursing, no playing on sundays, old-timy things like that. We just set ourselves back 50 years, for better or for worse.

Year 1

June 4th, 2010

At nighttime, about three or four days per week, the men in the village get together just to “talanoa” – storytelling. They sit around the grog bowl and tell elongated stories of what happened in the bush that day, rumors about their neighbors, or the size of the fish they caught that day (I can’t count how many times per week they hold their hands out and say “ka levu vaqo” – it was this big). They drink grog the whole time, usually until “they can’t feel feelings anymore,” as Homer Simpson once put it. I enjoy these talanoa sessions but have to limit myself to four or five hours because their sometimes is no end.
We have completed the construction of the crab pond! It is the first crab fattening pond in Fiji, as far as the Ministry of Fisheries knows. I have worked with them, aquaculture professors at University of South Pacific, and local community members to design and implement this experiment. Many people are very excited about this project; if we have good results it could open a whole new sector of income generation for coastal communities in Fiji. This is a sustainable approach to the current near-sighted mining of marine fish along Fiji’s coasts. Work wise - also starting a tree nursery in cooperation with Conservation International. We gather seedlings of native tree species from the forest, grow them and sell them to villagers. But I just started that so I'm not going to go into that because it may fail like 80% of projects in Fiji do.
I’ve done a good bit of travelling recently. Took a trip to the northeast coast of Viti Levu with six other volunteers to celebrate our one year anniversary of being in Fiji. We did some great hiking which involved crawling vertically on all fours to the peak of Mt. Tova. In evenings we did what we do best – build a bonfire on the beach, drink beer, and talk about how hard/easy, fun/boring our lives are. I do say that after a year we are all in generally good spirits. Of the 32 of us that came, only three have left. A new crop of PCV’s arrived – (they are called FRE-8’s, we are FRE-7’s which stands for Fiji Re-Entry Class #7) – so they will replace the FRE-6’s that go home next month. As part of their training they came to my site to learn about my way of life, my work, hardships, easyships, etc… It was refreshing to have new Americans around me. Americans are great.
Last weekend I went to a wedding. A girl Peace Corps Volunteer married a local Fijian. 24 of us PCVs were there to celebrate. After a traditional Fijian ceremony (grog, church service, gigantic lunch, grog, guitar/ukulele playing) we went to Uprising Resort to celebrate in the traditional American way (beer, bonfire, ipods, dancing to the B-52’s).
Now I’m back in the village – beginning year two of my service. Went fishing yesterday, caught a delicious bass “It was this big!” and ate it with ivi’s, a gigantic nut that falls from the trees in May.

April 14th, 2010
I’ve recently returned from Merika; my second trip home since I’ve been here which is a lot for being so far away. Yet both trips were very important to me – the most recent being my brother’s wedding. Neil married Miss Margaret at her beautiful farm near Jackson, Georgia. It was the most beautiful ceremony I’ve ever been to and was followed by an equally awesome reception. I had a stomach bug and was vomiting every half hour and danced more than I ever have in my life while sober. Getting back on the plane was difficult; not just because I was saying goodbye to loved ones again, or because of the 23 hours of flight time that loomed ahead, but because the emotional transition between the world I was leaving and the one I was re-entering was quite overwhelming. That being said, once I was situated in my bure, reclined in my hammock, looking over the bay at dawn, I was perfectly content. But between the wedding and my hammock I spent Easter on Taveuni Island with my good Peace Corps buds that I rarely see.
Taveuni is widely regarded as the most scenic of the Fijian Islands. It rises 3,200 feet direct from sea level, completely blanketed in tropical forest, and is home to a large array of endemic species (found nowhere in the world except this island). The first day we played on some natural rock slides and slept at a beach that was no longer a beach because Cyclone Tomas swept it away two weeks prior. The second day we climbed Des Veoux peak, at about 3,100 ft. the 2nd highest on the island (this is really hard when starting at 3 feet.) It was about a three hour climb up a 40 degree slope. We got to the top and were greeted by a cloud cover eliminated any chance of us seeing what must be the most gorgeous vista in Fiji. The next three days we spent at Lavena Lodge (where another PCV works) and hiked and kayaked and jumped off multiple waterfalls. An eight-seater prop took me back to my island so I could resume being a PCV again.
Work wise – we have been awarded a grant to begin work on a crab aquaculture project in the village. It’s a pilot project for the Ministry of Fisheries in that there are currently no successful crabbing programs in Fiji, that I nor the Ministry is aware of. Basically we catch crabs in the mangroves, put them in a pen, feed them fish scraps to fatten them up, then sell them to resorts and markets to bring some income to the village. We are really excited.
Every Wednesday I take a 45 min. stroll up a hilly dirt road to the Tai District School where I teach an environmental awareness class to 7th and 8th graders. I enjoy it but prefer the village work. But the kids are very responsive and much more capable of adapting to environmental practices than the elder, more stubborn villagers. So that is good.
Aside from that I am reading, writing, drinking grog, fishing, farming and watching frogs and geckos slurp up bugs in my bure at night time.


February 9th

My village is so small. The old people and young people that have nothing to do during the day just watch me all day. They know everything I am doing - whether I am at the farm, fetching water, using the bathroom, or reading. I can't lie or hide anything here. It's all in the open; fish in a fishbowl.
Dancing is "taboo" in my village. If the village wants to have a dance we must get permission from the "Vakatawa" who is like the ethical/religious advisor in the village. Permission was asked on New Year's for a dance and he said no. It's like living in Footloose. (However he did grant permission the evening Neil and Margaret visited.)
The village went about a month without rain which is extremely odd for a tropical climate in the wet season. As a result, we drank up all our rain catchment water and our creek bed ran dry for the first time in anybody's memory in the village (we have 80 year olds that have never seen the village creek dried up.) Some people claimed the devil was in our village; they say this whenever something unfortunate happens. So for about a week it got scary. There was a lot of water recyclying going on which is fine up to a point. That point was crossed and I told everyone to stop because it was becoming a health hazard. Some listened, some didn't. We then decided to search for a well. Some of the old-timers in the village knew of some old water depots that they used back in the day. It was deep in the bush. During the trek we waded to our armpits in mucky swamp and ran into three-too many hornets nests. They stung the piss out of me. But we hacked our way to the the spot which was also the head of our stream. We realized there was water just under the stream bed. We dredged the stream bed and weeded the grass out of it which created a flow of sub-surface water that eventually reached our village dam. Now we have water dripping into the village.
I counted: I ate eight whole watermelons this week. About 120 of my projected 900 watermelons could be harvested. Most parrished in the cyclone a month ago. Still have carrots and cucumber growing and my okra is coming up fast.
Work is slow because of some political issues within the village. The villagers say they want to leave the traditional system they have going on for a more modern, democratic system. But they don't really want to change, otherwise they would. So I just have to be patient when it comes to getting things done. I started teaching in the district middle school. I teach environmental awareness to 7th and 8th graders every Wednesday. Its good, tangible work - the kids are a lot more influential and are very responsive which is a nice change.

Here are some interesting customs that one finds in my village and most of Fiji:
- When people greet or say goodbye they don't kiss on the cheek. They sniff each other's cheek. Yes. That's right. They sniff each other's cheek.
- The head is considered sacred and no one can touch or even reach near another person's head without verbally excusing oneself (by saying "tulou") before doing so.
- Villages are headed by a chief. Each village is then broken down into tribes and then clans and then families.
- If you receive a gift you must clap - before and after receiving it.
- In a crowded room, the sexes are segregated and if a woman wants to come to the men's side for any reason she must scoot there on her knees or on all fours.
- Married couples don't touch each other, kiss, or tell each other they love each other in public. The world "love" does not have a direct translation so therefore it is seldomly used.
- Every morning our village headman walks through the village and shouts the daily news. This is how everyone is informed of what's going on. My language is still developing so I usually don't exactly know whats going on.
- Meetings are called with a conch shell. Like Lord of the Flies, without the fat kid in glasses.
- Doors are never shut during daytime. There is no such thing as privacy. This one is difficult for me.
- Cannibalism is still practiced by the elders in the village... just kidding.

January 9th
I just found some waterfalls and swimming holes about a thirty minute hike from my village. Also I just got some quality rope to string up my hammock inside my bure. So my quality of life has just tripled.
On Dec. 8th I went to my sister's wedding in the States (Charleston, SC). Although I only had five full days and couldn't truly taste the "fruits" of America, the wedding was awesome and it was great to see my family for the first time in seven months. I had a fantastic time, ate lots of good Southern food and drank a lot of good beer.
I got home jet lagged and hungover and just in time for a Fijian Christmas. The holidays bring all extended family (those who have moved out and away to "bigger better things") back to the village from about mid Dec. to mid Jan. So my village has swollen in size with people that I don't really know. Its refreshing/frustrating to have so many new faces. But Christmas in Fiji is very simple; lots of grog, lots of church, and lots of food. No gift giving. No Santa Clause. So its actually a pretty legit deal they got going on and something Christians should take notes on. Yet it is overbearing if you're an outsider and right in the thick of it.
Also, with holidays at every corner, my work just stopped completely. Still taking care of little things on a day to day basis; like trash management, farming, and water testing, but our big projects (the new dam project and organic farm project) has halted for the timebeing. Fine with me. I'll just swing in my hammock for a month.
New Year's was incredible and a good escape from all that I mentioned above. About 12 of us volunteers met up on a small island called Caqalai, just south of the larger island of Ovalau (for you cartographers). I actually live quite near it (20 min. walk, 20 min. bus ride, and a 30 min. boat ride and I am there.) It is a very rustic getaway with great soft coral reefs. So I hiked around the island about 10 times, snorkelled the incredible reefs, saw two small sharks and two banded sea snakes (the sixth most venomous animal on the planet), built a lot of bonfires, drank a lot of beer, listened to music and camped under the stars. We brought in the New Year at midnight by running into the ocean with too many clothes on.
The word kavalaqi is the Fijian word for a white person. It refers to all Europeans, Americans, Austrailians, etc. The word comes from the Polynesian word palaqi which literally means "Sky Burster." This is because when natives first saw white man hundreds of years ago, they assumed it was impossible for them to have arrived by sea. It would have been more probable had they come out of the sky. So sometimes I like to go to a new village, with my whiteness and gadgets, and play "Graham Gaines, Sky Burster."


December 1st

I am lucky because when times get tough there is a little joint about a thirty minute bus ride away where I can drink all the beer I want, courtesy of American taxpayers. Very nice. But things aren't tough too often, so my Peace Corps experience has been quite a sober one. That's probably for the better.
I've been trying to get a community farm together. It would be organic and we would grow pinapple, papaya, cabbage, and bell peppers and target nearby hotels and the toursim industry in general. All revenue would go towards environmental projects in the village, such as foreshore restoration and a new seawall, with some going towards the construction of a new community hall. The farm won't begin operating until next year because Fiji (and the southern hemisphere) completely shuts down this time of year. School is out, holidays are abound, and it is really just too damn hot to do anything. So we will comatose ourselves for the season and drink lots of grog and lay on the ground.
I went to Peace Corp's Project Design and Management Workshop a few weeks ago. It was much better than it sounds. There were eleven of us volunteers, each with a work counterpart from our respective villages. Basically we were teaching our village counterparts how to implement, manage, and sustain a project. Very good. And lots of fun too. During the day, after the workshop, we played volleyball or went to fancy resorts and posed as tourists and lounged poolside. A couple of nights we built bonfires on the beach and swam in the ocean. Very Peace Corps.
Also, because there are Indians here, Fijians believe in Thanksgiving. So we celebrated that. About 27ish of us volunteers met in Suva at a volunteers house with 27ish dishes of food. Very yummy. Then we went out daincin' in Suva.
Last weekend I held the Trash Olympics in my village. The objective was to get the kids to clean up the village, but of course I had to make it fun for that to happen. So of course I combined picking up trash with relay races and it was very successful! We also had a learning activity where I taught them how long different items take to decompose, and we played elbow tag, and we painted the village trash cans. Very clean.
I'm probably just gonna chill in my hut for a week before going to my sister's wedding in America - so a shout out and congratulations to Kelley and Courtney! I'm gonna miss my village; starting to form good relationships and my language skills are going pretty good and work is moving along. But I sure am looking forward to seeing my dog. And my family.

November 11th
The time is going very fast - I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing. My health is good. I've been eating a lot of bananas, carrots, and oysters. I went to a Halloween party in Northern Viti Levu and that was pretty crazy. While there me and my friends Lydia and Sean took a couple kayaks to a nearby reef to do some snorkeling. On the return trip Lydia and I (in a two-person kayak) were blindsided by a wave and flipped. We immediately grabbed the kayaks and paddles because nobody wants to be afloat in the Pacific without a boat. But snorkels, masks, my sunglasses and my camera were all swallowed by the deep blue. My camera is waterproof so its not broken. Its just gone.
A lot of people have written me about the recent tsunamis. The first ones hit while I was doing a training workshop up in the highlands area. It devestated parts of Samoa but Fiji was left unscathed. Then only a few weeks later, an earthquake of 8.2 magnitude alerted the tsunami whistle blowers in Fiji. Announcements were made on the radio and phone calls were made and coastal towns shut down as people made mad dashes up hill. I was called by my supervisor at 10:23 am and was told the tsunami ETA was 10:40 am. I had 17 minutes to gather a backpack of provisions, spread word all over my village, and get everyone on top of the hill behind the village. I put two water bottles, $36, a radio, and a sack of tomatoes in my backpack and ran around the village telling everyone to get uphill. We climbed up and were sitting on a tombstone overlooking the village and bay by 10:36 am. A few elders and some lazy and/or proud villagers stayed by their homes, continuing to weave mats and pound grog, not at all threatened by "a few big waves." With excitement and fear we listened to the radio and waited for the big ripple to come. I shared all my tomatoes. Nothing came. They renounced the warning over the radio at 11:45 am, and we climbed down the hill as the ones that stayed behind laughed at us and asked us if we were hungry.
Workwise, we are waiting for Fiji Water to review our proposal. In the meantime we are starting an organic papaya farm. Should be good eatin' and good Benjamins for the villagers. Might start teaching in the middle school up the road. Might not.
My bithday came and went; it was a quiet birthday in the village. I only told my neighbor and the chief. My neighbor gave me 6 bags of grog and the chief gave me an eel. I must say I enjoyed the day thoroughly in this way. Bookwise - just finished Cadillac Desert (great) and Tropic of Cancer (terrible) and now enjoying a great Paul Theroux book called The Happy Isles of Oceania.
'Bout to go buy an ice cream.
October 16th
I have been quite busy the past month - We had Early Service Training the last days of September and All-Volunteer Day October 1st. EST is a chance for all us FRE-7's to get together and see each other's new hippie beards and congratulate each other on sickly weight losses. Actually everybody looks pretty good - we have a very healthy and happy group. EST is really a chance for us to learn project specifics; like how to plant mangroves, reforestation techniques, conducting money-management workshops, etc. We spent three days there before going to Suva for All-Vol. All Fiji volunteers (60ish) go to All-Vol. We had an American-style cookout at the County Director's house then went out that evening for pole dancing purposes. Then we woke up feeling great and had a Resource Fair at our hotel. The fair was very helpful; representatives from many different environmental and health organizations around Fiji come and set up booths and we went to them seeking advise and to collect little info booklets. I stayed in Suva another couple days - went to parks, a museum, and bypassed a rugby match to sit on the seawall and drink beer and I stand by that decision.
Back in the village I am trying to finish the grant proposal for our water project. Basically that means coming up with a plan, detailing that plan, attaching a dollar sign to that plan, and laying it all out on paper for some NGO to read and agree to pay that dollar amount. Its taken about two months now but we should submit it this week. We recently tested our water; the water in our stream (where we bathe and clean) is cleaner than our rain water tanks (used for drinking.) That's pretty gross so we'll do something about that this week.
I have a healthy supply of cabbage and beans in my garden, and an absurd amount of carrotts should be ready soon. What does one man do with 1,400 carrotts? I'll let you know. I had lettuce but birds ate it all so I had to build a scarecrow - dressing the scarecrow was odd because he doesn't need to look good yet I spent too much time deciding what he should wear.
What's up with the Dawgs, man?
September 15th
Life continues to rock softly and sweetly in my corner of the world. Today I came back from the farm and sat by the bay reading books and listening to the BBC for about 3 hours and assimilated the immediate surroundings. It really is absolutely beautiful out here. And the people compliment the place perfectly.
Work is gathering steam. Concerning the water project, I have had the village surveyed by an engineer to determine the logistical requirements of getting water piped into each house and have also had the Health Department come and do tests on our drinking sources (still waiting on those results). Now we are in the oh so important phase of putting together a proposal for funding. Around the village we have cleaned the rain catchment roofs and have set up three compost pits. So things are happening and that is good.
A funny thing happened on the way to the farm: I stepped outside my bure into a puddle of water. I looked around and noticed the foreshore of the village was flooded. The odd thing was that it hadn't rained in a week (nobody has ANY drinking water and we are going to have to truck some in but that is another issue). I then realized it was the "once-a-month mega-hightide" they had warned me about that caused the water. The sea level was higher than anyone in the village had ever seen it. It was like Katrina divided by 2 million. And it keeps rising every month. Assuming climate change doesn't suddenly halt, the sea will drown the village in a few years... just take it out to sea. We will be taking measures to delay the inevitable for as long as possible, like building a sea wall and lessening upstream soil erosion, but the local government is asking the village to go ahead and relocate to higher ground. Easier said than done when 85% of the village population are subsistence farmers and don't have however much it costs to move an entire village. Anyways we'll worry about that later - right America?
This place and this job is a reader's paradise. I just finished three books in three weeks: 1. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (pretty good) 2. Cod, by Mark Kurlansky (possibly the finest account on codfish I've ever picked up and an excellent lesson on natural resource management), and Annapurna, an awesome narrative by Maurice Herzog of the first ascent of a 8,000 meter mountain. Now working on some Ayn Rand.
Go Dawgs!?

August 19th
It has been a while since I have updated this. I have been busy the past month for various reasons, which is a good thing when living on an island. The moving in process is complete and my little home is now complete with the recent additions of kitchen shelves and a cabbage farm. My home is also home to other uninvited guests such as two wild dogs, a rooster, three ginormous 1/2 pound spiders that live in my bathroom (usually under the toilet and I verbally say "please go away spider" everytime I enter the bathroom and I think it works), and about 12 - 18 cane toads (they only come out at night). I feel like either the toad or spider should eat the other and that would at least take care of one species, but I can't figure out which would be prey and which would be predator in that situation. We have been very busy with guests in the last week - most excitingly Neil and my brand new sister-in-law Margaret came. They travelled around Australia for a week then got engaged in Nadi before visiting my village and hanging out for a couple days. We had a traditional Sevusevu ceremony in which Neil and my sister-in-law presented a kava plant to the village as a gift and then we drink from the grog bowl. We then feasted on crabs, prawns, and various fish before dancing the night away tralala style. Villagers from nearby came for this party as well as a couple Peace Corps friends. The next day Neil, Margaret, myself, and my good friend Kuli walked around the countryside and talked with farmers and drank some coconuts. We then proceeded to Colo-i-Suva, a forest park just outside of Suva, and did triple cannonballs from a rope swing. We really had a great few days...
On a gloomier note a man in the village died last week. It was weird for me because I loaded him into a car to go to the hospital on Wednesday night - the doctors said there was nothing they could do for him (he had a very severe stomach ulcer) so he came back home and he was dead the next day. However, being a very religious country, passing away is a celebrated event so for four days we ate lots of food (we killed three cows and two pigs), drank lots of grog and mingled with relatives.
Workwise I am working on funding for the water project. We are trying to get water piped into each house (24 houses in all) from a stream that runs off a hill behind the village. Also, we started a couple of compost pits for food rubbish that the village can eventually use as fertilizer.
Aside from that I am spending a good bit of time in my dalo plantation - trying to grow some root crops the village can eat or sell. I really don't know what I'm doing though. And that goes for everything.
July 31st
I am officially a Peace Corps Volunteer. Approximately 2 years after I sent in my application, I am a PCV. So, a note to those even considering joining the Peace Corps, apply now because maybe not now but in two years you will want to join. We had the swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Ambassador's house which was a pretty cool event. It was televised here in Fiji and in the newspapers. Then we had to say good-bye to our host family villages which was a pretty tearful event. We had a farewell party on Tuesday night and invited the volunteers from other villages and some of the Peace Corps staff was there. At these parties we basically sit around drinking grog while someone plays the guitar. Everybody sings and all the women dance the tralala with us. Its this really awkward dance where you just stand beside a partner and walk 3 steps forward and 3 steps back for about 5 minutes. But everybody laughs because I am white and white people are funny no matter what they do in this country. Anyways, we then had our own personal goodbyes with our families and headed off.
Most volunteers stayed in Suva for the night at a hotel because they had to take boats the following day to get to their site but I just hopped in a van with all my luggage and went to my village where I will situate myself for two years. My village is really cool but my house is even cooler. It is a pimped out hut made of palm tree leaves. The women in the village gave me blankets and mats and cooking stuff, but I am in town today to buy some essentials including food.
The plan from here is to spend some time getting situated and socially involved until I get a good grasp on how things run in the village. Then I will slowly immerse myself into work.

July 10th
One day pictures will be on this site. I just don't know what day that will be. Until then... some are on facebook. But all is well on the island. Classwork and training still occupies most of the day. Two days ago a lot of volunteers and trainers, about 10 of us total, got really sick from some mal-prepared coconut desert called "lolo." I threw up all night and was sick for about 24 hours and missed class but actually got off easier than some. A few went to the hospital but I think more for precautionary reasons and dehydration than anything else. Everybody is fine now. It is not swine flu. Just bad coconut desert.
Yesterday we did some reef monitoring off Viwa Island. Basically we snorkel in sectioned off areas of a reef with ropes and quadrants to count certain species. These are indicator species which, when tallied, tell how healthy a reef is. So we counted surgeon fish, parrot fish, and giant clams. It was cool to finally do some work in the water. And Viwa Island is in sight of my permanent village so I hope to do some work exchanges out that way. Other than that, I am going to an Indian high school dance tonight that should be fun. It is for a fundraiser. Not prom. A bit of history: Fiji is 40% Indian. They were brought here as indentured servants in the 19th and early 20th centuries and now make up a large part of the population and a majority of the economic prosperity (being more business minded than the average Fijian). However, there is still some discrimination towards them as they are not "native".
Hope all is well in the States - drop me a line. Moce Vinaka...

July 3rd
I recently got back from a 5 day visit to my permanent site. It is a cool little village on the east coast of Viti Levu Island. Small village - population about 88. Its tucked away by itself and pretty isolated in its own corner of the bay - but a 20 min. walk will take you to the main road where I can catch a 1.5 hour bus ride to Suva for office work / shopping / superclubbing. Everybody in the village seems really ambitious which is encouraging. The problem is they don't have any running water so I am going to help them with a new dam project. Until then it is rain water for bathing/cleaning/drinking. As long as the catchment systems are maintained the water is fine. The town built a house for me which is cool - its a bure, which is a traditional Fijian home. It is made of palm tree leaves and bamboo. The house cost a total of about $6 which went to buying a few boxes of nails. Other than that it is all raw material found around the bush in the village. Its small but really awesome. And I have purple bathroom put up beside it which those of you who know me well know about my childhood dream of having my own purple bathroom. The two main environmental projects I will be working on are 1. fresh water supply and 2. foreshore restoration. The village has lost about 2 sq. km. of land in the past year due to climate change and deforestation. That is more than a square mile of land just swept out to sea. To fund these projects we are going to do a few different things: develop eco-tourism on the hillside behind my village that is aimed at Austrailian cruise boats wanting a "traditional Fijian experience". We also want to construct a talapia farm and maybe a prawn farm. All of these projects are subject to change, as I am in a 3rd world country, but I have already started making some contacts around Nausori Town to help facilitate the projects. I will keep yall posted as work develops - but until then I have 3 weeks of training left. That's my momma!

June 24th
Hey everybody - well this is my blog that I hope to update as much aspossible. As of now I am in week 4 of a 9 week training program to serve as Environmental Resource Manager in Fiji for the next two
years. I will be moving to my permanent site in 5 weeks on the east coast of the main island, Viti Levu. My specific job will be to manage their marine area and resources. This means reef monitoring, mangrove and foreshore rehabilitation, and proper waste management along the coast. Currently there are 32 volunteers here to work in environment, health and business sectors. All in all its a pretty sweet job in a pretty sweet place so I'm lucky and happy. During training I live in a village on the east coast with a cool Fijian family. In my house I have a mom and dad, 5 yr. old brother Jope, 3 nieces, an aunt and an uncle, and a grandmother. Most speak at least some English. My dad is a farmer, with 6 cows, 19 pigs, a handful of chickens and some root crop farms. But his specialty is crab farming. My day consists of some cow milking at 6, Fijian language class from 8-12, technical training from 1-5 (this includes everything from grant writing to water catchment practices to beekeeping to how to open a coconut), then dinner which is either fish, crab, or chicken with some kind of root crop and coffee,
followed by a bucket bath at 8 and some reading/writing/ipod till 9-10. So these days i'm megabusy but that all slows down exponentially once i get to site. Please write and let me know whats going on with youens. I'll also work on getting good pictures up but facebook is probably the best bet for those. Keep it real.