Hot Ratz

Kuli, Jesse, and Bill; swimming in the bay

My bathroom has a leak in the ceiling directly above the toilet. When the toilet is sitting idle there could not be a better place for an overhead leak. Yet when it is in use there could not be a worse place.

I’m currently growing cabbage, radish, papaya, bananas, spinach, and some root crops. I’m eating healthy food but am losing a good bit of weight which I don’t want to do.

Some papayas beside my house, not yet ripe

Let me tell you about a funny thing the villagers do: They smoke a lot of cigarettes and the cigarettes, like the ones in the States, have big warning labels at the top of the pack. Some labels warn against heart failure, some against lung cancer, and some against harm to unborn babies. The cigarettes don’t have distinct flavors, but nonetheless the villagers refer to these cigarettes by these different labels, saying something like “I’ll give you .20 cents for two heart attacks” or “Can I borrow three unborn babies.”

I haven’t done much travelling the past couple of months. I’m trying to hang on to my money for after service-life. Prices in Fiji have been steadily increasing the past two years without an increase in our living allowance which means I travel less and less. I am making weekly trips to Suva however, which I didn’t used to do, so that I can research grad school and job opportunities.

I’m working a lot with the Dravuni Development Committee to help manage our agri-business activities; I’m spending most of my time in the tree nursery and trying to find some buyers for our seedlings. We are reforesting our watershed with some good fruit trees. I’m also doing a little more experimentation on the crab farm. The municipal government is really interested in this project and encouraging us to continue with it, but the unstable results are frustrating for the villagers, understandably. We might be getting a local guy to fund the project as a research opportunity – I’ll send updates on that later. While digging up on a hill a couple weeks ago some friends and I found a skull that still had hair on it. It was pretty weird. We put it back where we found it and just kept digging.

Cutting the village compound

Digging a grave. Seconds later we found a skull with hair on it.

Things the rats have eaten in my bure: my shampoo bottle, toothpaste, a drum, my antibiotic medicine, aspirin, my underwear, lids (and only lids) to bottles of vinegar, oil, and hot sauce, a book cover, and a shoe. I tried to catch them in a sticky glue trap. One got stuck but just dragged the trap all around the house getting glue on everything before he finally escaped with a gluey tail. I set the trap in a pile of trash outside and the next morning I found a bird stuck in the glue, flapping and gawking like a bird stuck in a glue trap. I tried to pry it off but that was only hurting him. The only solution was to delicately and peacefully cut the bird in half with a machete and throw it in the ocean.

A rat I killed. This has been one of the happiest moments of my service. I fucking hated this rat.

So as not to end on a gory note I will explain what I did yesterday: I sat on a log by the sea with an old man named Inia and talked about fish and the weather and the mangroves and school fees while he cut open coconut after coconut and we ate them all. All day.