Blogging by Proxy

So it turns out that you don’t actually need electricity or an internet connection to blog; you just need a solar panel, a laptop, one of those micro-SD cards, a post office and a willing partner (who presumably has internet and electricity. So, here is the deal. I am writing this on my laptop and will save it to a micro-SD card which I will then mail (along with a very nice as-yet un-composed letter) to the in-laws. My own parents, upon reading this, might wonder why I didn’t choose them for the updating task, but then again they chose my sister as the executor of their will. There are some things that folks are good at and some that folks are not good at.

Anyway, Sally and I have no been here at our site for just about a month and things are more or less running along swimmingly (as a matter of speech only—amazingly enough, Sally has yet to get into the water). Here are some topical updates upon which I would like to elaborate:

1. Hair: After messing around with short-ish hair for the last couple of months, in my last encounter with clippers, I decided that it would be a while before I saw them again and just shaved it all off. This has led me to a couple of realizations. The first that is that I have no one in my life who truly cares for me, because if I did, one of them would surely have just shaved my head while I slept. For 15 years, I toiled with long hair, dreadlocks, and various cuts with a clear Dutch bent. This was allowed with only the occasional comment in jest about my long hair. Never again. The liberation that comes with not having any hair has revolutionized my life. Drying off after a shower has become basically non-existent, not to mention swimming. I can’t believe that I even enjoyed swimming until now. I won’t even get into my realizations of hairlessness with a snorkel mask. Thanks for 15 years of hell, jerks.
2. Refrigeration: There sure a lot of things that we (and by we, I mean) put in fridges that have no business there. For example, did you know that eggs last weeks, WEEKS, without refrigeration? Coat them with a little oil and they last for well over a month. Here are a couple of other items that you will be shocked to hear either suffer from or are unaffected by the fridge: cucumbers, carrots, peanut butter, honey, eggplant, toothpaste, tomatoes, mustard, ice, margarine, potatoes, and jam. Were you paying attention? If so, you would have realized that at least one of those things is a dirty lie (and one is just useless). Ice is the glaring exception. Oh martini, how I miss you. They say if you love something let it go…etc. Fiji Bitter is bad enough of a beer that it isn’t worth refrigerating anyway.
3. I Love Cats: Some of you may remember that one of us (not me) once had a club called the ‘I Love Cats Club’ that I think had approximately 1 member, give or take. Well, that club has been re-chartered but with a new name: ‘I Kill Cats Club.’ You may remember from my last blog that we were 0-2 on cat raising in Fiji, but have not had our spirits dampened in the least. In fact, that last cat (Snowball II) had a weird rat-like tail. Good riddance, I say. Out with the old, in with the new. Our latest attempt is a black and white male kitten that is now going by Pierre due to his moustache and little spot of goatee. We have had him for well over a week, breaking all previous records and it appears that he may stick around. He has caught 2 mice and some large number of skinks, earning his keep as far as I am concerned. Then again, if he pees on the mosquito net again, we may be lamenting the unfortunate ‘disappearance’ of yet another cat.
4. Jobs?: Well, Sally sort of teaches but now the school is on ‘holiday’ for the next two weeks. One would be hard pressed to find what in the hell I am doing. I have some pretty good excuses as to why I am not doing much in the way of work on which I may or may not elaborate later. Suffice it say that Sally’s skills in nursing and mine in…well…beer-making are going largely underutilized. Always ready for a good fight, I spend the majority of my day beating back the relentless tropical weeds that are hell-bent on taking over my radishes. They will not win this fight for I have time on my hands. Really, I spend a lot of my time in the raising of food. It is amazing how basic this is and how much I love it. I have always loved gardening but when the hobby becomes the difference between having food and not, I think that is when it becomes farming, in which case I can finally start calling myself a farmer, a life-long dream of mine. So far, after about a month, we aren’t quite having gazpacho or anything, but there is lettuce, eggplant, basil, cilantro, cassava, and lots of bok choy, broccoli, tomatoes, celery, and carrots on the way. As expected, these things (with the exception of cassava, eggplant, and bok choy called kaveti [cabbage] here) are absent from the island. No one grows them and hence no one sells them. Given that this is the most fertile soil in Fiji, that seems a little strange to me. The issue may be the weeds. They are really amazing. Fijian ideas of agriculture include cutting off the top of what you are eating (in the case of dalo [taro] or tavioka [cassava]), throwing them towards the ground, and in 6 weeks, pulling them out and eating them. They beat the weeds. Any sort of intensive agriculture was recently brought here and just hasn’t made it mainstream yet. So, my vegetable garden is the source of much consternation and conversation. They know about most of these vegetables, but I don’t many have never seen someone actually growing them, much less a kaivulagi (whitey).
5. Wine: When Sally and I left Suva for our placement, we could afford 6 bottles of very cheap wine that we then carted this far to last us for 2 months. That would be a bottle approximately every week and a half. Well, a couple of days ago, we decided that rationing be damned, we were eating pasta and would be moving up our bottle #3 a few days. It was a great idea, right up until I spilled my glass. Grief is the only word that can be used for what I felt that night. I guess despair would work as well. Fine, there are a lot of words, but you get the idea. It will be weeks before bottle #4. There are two cases of hand-selected fine wine along with 3 gallons of oak-aging whiskey in my basement in Portland, I thought as I was cleaning up my ration. It was the first time I thought that I don’t have what it takes to be a Peace Corps Volunteers.
6. Grog: Kava is a very poor excuse for a drug, in my opinion. Here, it goes by the name of yaqona or simply, grog. It tastes like muddy water with a hint of something like cinnamon or mint—just a hint, mind you. The first few are pleasant enough; I even sort of like it. But the deal with grog is that you keep drinking bowl after bowl of it. Its effects are pretty mild: some numbing in the mouth and if you really drink a ton of it, you feel a little groggy. Drinking yaqona is what you do here, all the time. It is a part of every meeting, drunk every time you visit someplace, during weddings, funerals, or any celebration, or just what you do at night with a guitar. My problem isn’t so much the grog as much as the sitting cross-legged on the floor for hours at a time. Seriously, if you think this is no big deal, try watching a movie sitting cross-legged on the floor. Now imagine that the floor is not carpeted. Luckily for me, I have some practice in that my language classes were taught 4 hours at a time with us sitting cross-legged on the floor, but at least then you can move around and lie down if you want. No dice with the yaqona. It must be drunk sitting cross-legged. This is my life 3-4 nights per week.

So, that is a bit of a snapshot of my life here. I never wrote about the work but you must be tired of reading this. I certainly am tired of writing it. Stay tuned for the next installment where I discuss the following: pigs, Pierre II, bread-making without an oven, and your visit!