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.