Monday, August 10, 2009

Back so soon?

Despite my dire warnings of no internet access for a Peace Corps mandated two months of geographical isolation, here I am! Peace Corps requires you to stay in your community for your first two months to make sure that one is fully connected and integrated with the community before one starts gallivanting around the country. But, it turns out that when Peace Corps says two months, they mean about a week and a half. I have been called back to Suva for training on what is called the EAP (which I think stands for Emergency Action Plan. Hopefully, the training will clear that up for me). It turns out that the combination of an illegitimate government and a Methodist Conference is a scary mix. There are currently laws in place putting the smack-down on free speech and on freedom of assembly and one thing that the Methodists in Fiji are known for is getting together in large groups and doing a lot of talking. That has the government nervous and when the government gets nervous, so does Peace Corps.

Peace Corps is requiring that one person from each island attend the training and after primary elections, multiple debates, a caucus in the village of Mudu, various posturing and speechifying, it was decided that I would go to Suva instead of Sally. On some islands, they probably had to really think about who would be best to attend the training; on ours, I think that Peace Corps literally flipped a coin. So, I am going which is great because we really did forget some key things on our first attempt to buy everything that we will possibly need for the next two months. For example, how did we forget onions? And if we were going to be so cheap as to buy just one pot, why didn’t we buy one that would actually fit enough food for two people? It is like we have never bought a pot before!

But this boring—the real question I am sure that you would ask me if you could would go something like this, “How is your new home?” I would answer something like, “Paradise. Seriously, paradise.” From our porch, we look at the ocean. Because of where the island sits, it just happens to have the perfect weather, not hot like it is up north or out west or wet like it is in the southeast. It seems to be somewhere in the 80s every day with a gentle breeze off the water, which we can see quite plainly from our front porch. Once it rained for a couple of minutes, but otherwise, it is sort of partly cloudy every day. It can get hot in the sun, but our house stays nice and cool. Sally started work almost immediately. So far, she is teaching English and a couple of other things at the high school, but she will add health-related stuff a little later. I, on the other hand, have been left to my own devices for a little while. There is the matter of a grant that I am writing for my main work (more on that later) but by and large, I have been busying myself with making this place a home.

The first order of business has been the garden. As you may have heard (from me…repeatedly) there are no vegetables on the island that one can buy. Some folks grow “Chinese cabbage” (bok choy) and eggplant, but that is about it. That being said, papaya, bananas, and coconuts grow like weeds and every few days the school chaplain brings us some fruit that he finds around. There are papaya and lime trees right behind our house and right in front is a giant mango tree. Mangoes aren’t in season yet, but come October, I am going to eat mango until I vomit. Seriously, that is my plan. But I have spent the better part of a week clearing weeds and grass on the side of our house for the veggies: tomatoes, eggplant, onions, garlic, squash, cucumber, lettuce, bok choy, watermelon, bell peppers, carrots, strawberries, etc. They say that this island has the most fertile soil in Fiji. We’ll see about that. There are also a couple of local foods that we already have on our property—a root crop called tavioka (cassava in English) and a type of green called bele which are both delicious. I fried up some tavioka today and tasted like French Fries (I would call them Freedom Fries, but you never know how a dictatorial government might react to such incitement). Yummy.

And most importantly, we are now the proud parents of a kitten which has not quite been named, but we figure is OK since cats don’t give a damn what their name is. So far we have got Nala II, a name in reference to Sally’s original cat in Tumavia which mysteriously “disappeared” after Sally fed it flee and tick repellant, Snowball, assuming that this cat will also “disappear” at some point, then we can start burying the sequence of cats in the backyard with sequential names, and PG, which Sally might have decided on that stands for something like Pretty Girl, or was it Precious Girl. Either way, it will be met with radical indifference. It is all the same to me as the cat has two jobs in my book: 1. Be cute until you grow up and then 2. Kill rats. Item 1, she has nailed and as for item 2, she appears to be a bit of a natural. Just this morning, a baby gecko fell off the wall and landed right in front of her. She pounced on that moth-eater like it was carrying plague and was only momentarily distracted by the senescent tail wiggling around after the gecko dropped it. I was very proud, although I have noticed in increase in moths this evening.

Finally, I will try to wrap this up with some idea as to what I will be doing here. Koro has a lot of natural beauty and unspoiled natural areas coupled with some pretty devastating environmental practices. So, a branch of the University of the South Pacific called IAS (Institute of Applied Science) requested me to serve as an advisor to a newly formed committee called the Koro Island Yaubula Management Support Team, yaubula meaning “environment.” My job will be working with the 14 villages of the island to help manage their resources in a more sustainable way. The fist item of business will entail a whole lot of snorkeling. Each village theoretically has an off-limits area (tabu) to fishing, but there is little oversight and monitoring of it. So, I am going to be working with the fisherman of each village to teach them the importance of having a reserve to make sure that fish are reproducing to stock the areas where they can fish. The best way to do that is to put on a snorkel and go look at the differences between what happens when an area is left alone and what happens when it is over-fished. Then, we will put in place a structure for studying the effects of the tabu area to show how it improves fishing where they can fish. After this will come all of the ways that they are killing the reef by what they do on land, but that will come later and this is too long as it is.

So, we are pretty excited about where we ended up and feel like we hit a bit of jackpot. We are excited for anyone to come and visit, but you really have to mean it if you want to see our house. It would be a 12-hour plane ride from LA, followed by a 5-hour bus ride and then an 8-hour boat ride, getting you here at 2am. Perhaps we can meet you somewhere. We’ll figure that out once you get your plane ticket to Fiji!
Here are some photos for your edification. This is our kitchen now! Compare that with the photos below and we have really come a long ways, no? The next one is Sally in our living room AT A TABLE! Awesome right? Then there is Sally using our new broom. It is made out of coconut fronds and a stick, but that thing really works. Then there is what will become our source of food that I fought to reclaim from the "grass." You have never seen how fast a weed can grow until you have tried to weed in the tropics. No wonder no one grows tomatoes here. Check out the fence that I made from sticks. Finally, there is the second cat that we have now lost. We are going to start naming them Snowball (I-V) since we keep losing them.