So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

As you may be able to glean from the title if you are into comic sci-fi books, I am reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (The Trilogy of Four) right now for the first time, even though it has been recommended to me by just about everyone I know (and some I don’t). So I am reading it and it is wonderful. You also should read it.

Now on to things about which you have a greater chance of caring, namely the cat. I don’t remember what I wrote in the last blog cat-wise since I blog through an “agent.” You can ignore whatever I said before because that cat turned up dead. Yep, another one down. I know that I continue to joke about cats that keep dying and how when we got this last one, I was going to name it Snowball (I, II, III, etc) because it would die, ha, ha, ha. EXCEPT THE DAMN THING UP AND DIED! Sick jokes are not funny when they prove to be prophetic. Sally is not to be deterred however and is already on the prowl for kitten #4 that we can spend a bunch of money on until it dies. In the meantime, we have found it considerably easier to steal the kitten of our 3-year old neighbor. It is sort of like stealing candy from children only easier because the candy runs to you if you don’t abuse it and feed it fish bones and put a flea collar on it. Basically the cat now hangs out here all day until we kick it out at night so that the 3-year old thinks he has a cat. Thankfully, this cat already has a name (Ginger) so we don’t have to fret about that and since the cat isn’t technically ours, it won’t be any big deal when it dies.



So last week, Sally and I joined just about everyone else on the island at the Primary School Games—an Olympic-style track and field event on a much, much smaller scale and with shorter participants. That being said, this was a serious deal including all 7 of the Primary Schools on our island. There is an amazing amount of inefficiency in this country and basically any time that we try to do something, the way is blocked by countless things broken, or people missing, etc. Not at the Primary School Games. I am going to invite the NCAA next year to perhaps model their meets after this—there was a real track (on grass and the kids were barefoot), measured to Olympic specifications, relays with real batons, heats, lane assignments by qualifying time, simultaneous track and field events, timers for each lane, all for multiple age groups, and these kids had seriously trained. There was a starting gun for crying out loud!





Speaking of starting guns and crying out loud, there was a 50m event for the under 7 girls. At the end of one of the heats, there was a little girl crying her eyes out at the scoring table after her race, clearly disappointed with her race. It was pretty cute. But then in the next heat, more little girls were crying, and I thought that maybe it wasn’t so cute. Maybe it is kind of sick that at the age of 6, these girls are so driven to win that they cry if they don’t. I had thought that was a uniquely American thing to make your kids so driven to win that they can’t accept anything else as success. Then I got mad at the games and decided that maybe these little girls shouldn’t be pushed into this at all. That was about when one of the women behind me told me, laughing hysterically, that the little girls are afraid of the starting gun and cry the whole way down the 50m track because the gun scared them. That’s more like it, I thought! 6-year old girls should cry when they hear a gun. Sometimes I do.




Here is something else that I love about Fiji—you can laugh at anything and anyone. I first started noticing this when someone would simply trip, namely myself. In the US, the polite thing to do is to pretend that you didn’t see it. Here when someone trips, the appropriate thing to do is to laugh at them, preferably pointing. I thought, fair enough. Tripping is inherently funny, and since we all do it, we should all just go ahead and laugh when someone does it, including oneself. One day I was walking by a bunch if kids outside but in a class with some teachers and I heard uproarious laughter. I looked around and saw that the cause for this ruckus was an old, crippled man being carried by a younger man like a sack of potatoes. My first thought was that the teachers will be upbraiding these kids any second now, but when I saw the teachers, they were leading the laughing brigade. Too much, I thought. It is one thing to laugh at someone healthy who trips, but an old crippled man? Too far…until the young man reached the place to set the old man down. When he did so, the old man sat down and the young man turned and faced the kids and they both waved, clearly laughing themselves. Everyone was laughing. Then there was the time that a friend of mine tricked me into asking his uncle, “E vei nomu ta?” (How is your father?). His response, “Sa mate, fuck you!” (He’s dead. The rest is untranslatable). Then everyone erupted in uproarious laughter. His parents really are dead and everyone, including the man with the dead parents, thought it was the best joke they’d heard all day.

OK, so here was the lesson I learned. You don’t hide stuff here in Fiji, because it wouldn’t do you any good. Everyone knows everything about you so pretending that you did not trip or aren’t crippled would be stupid. In the US, you pretend that you don’t see things that people do and if you do think that they are funny you pretend you don’t. It was funny how the man was being carried and everyone had a good laugh over it, including the man being carried. No feelings were hurt. We should laugh more when people do things that are funny because pretending that they aren’t funny, doesn’t make them any less funny, it just makes us tactful, and I am starting to think that tact sometimes looks a lot like dishonesty. It is certainly less fun.

On the home front, there are some pretty serious improvements going on. No longer content to live like the heathen, we have made some significant purchases, namely a refrigerator, an oven, a hot water heater, a washing machine, and a couch. Now before you get too excited, you should be aware that these items cost less than $100 between them, and that only because coolers are really, really expensive here. Fridge: We found out the health clinic has a freezer and so we bought a tiny, lunch-box-ish cooler to throw some cheese in with an ice pack. Of course, we can only buy cheese once every two months. More importantly, where there is ice, there is martinis (yes, “is martinis”—sort of like I Am Who Am). Oh yeah. You can do the math. Oven: I made a solar oven out of 2 cardboard boxes and some aluminum foil. It works like crap. Actually, it works fine as long as the sun is doing its job, which is rarely here. Then one day, Sally left it out in the rain. Turns out that cardboard is a poor choice in the tropics. Hot water heater: I just ran about 20m of black pipe on my roof and will be taking my first warm (dare I say, hot?) shower today. This system however has the same absurd sunshine requirements as the solar oven. Washing machine: Nope, this is still just Sally. Couch: This is a piece of foam padding that will be our bed upon your visit. In the meantime, it is folded up against a wall making a very nice couch indeed. Probably the most important upgrade to the house has to do with the toilet. After three months of our toilet leaking from places that a properly sanitary system would not, I managed to track down some parts to fix it. No longer is there a cesspool behind our toilet! Were the Coffmans not such discerning folks and if they didn’t already have their plane tickets for early December, I am not sure that the toilet would be so functional. It still just drains into a hole on the side of the house. You can’t win them all, but you can plant flowers on top of it!

Here are some sun dried tomatoes, home-growed and drying nicely in the solar oven.


Solar hot water doing its thing.


Solar cooker, version 2.0


Washing machine "taking a break."

A Day at the Beach

In looking at the photos that have been posted, I noticed a significant lack of anything that looks remotely nice. Sorry about that. This place is really beautiful. So, I will now start my campaign to show how beatiful Koro is and I will start underwater. Here are some shots from a reef in front of Dere Bay, where you will stay for at least a bit when you come and visit. The Coffmans can tell you all about it since they are due in a few weeks. I can't tell you how excited I am to show off this place to some friends. Who's next?

Things I am Pretty Sure About

This is post from early September that never made its way onto the page. I am not pointing any fingers about who is to blame for that (Andy and Bobby, I repeat, I am not pointing my finger at you), but here it is. If you are confused about the timeline, put this post before the one below it in your brain. Good luck.

I am pretty sure that frogs have a secret passageway into our house. I have now spent considerable energy and resources in frog abatement only to be continually overrun. These are not your ordinary, cute, endangered tree frogs with those cool eyes. These are cane toads, unfortunate imports from somewhere from where they should never have been brought. They are the scourge of the tropics in the South Pacific and I remember them being a problem when I lived in Australia. Luckily here, no one has imported anything even nastier to try to kill them that end up being a bigger problem like they did in Australia. Since they are nonnative, there is nothing to kill them so they run rampant. What’s worse is that they are somewhat poisonous so nothing will ever learn to start eating them (and live to tell the tale, anyway). When walking at night, it is par for the course to step on 2-3 and have at least that many jump onto your leg. Tonight, when I was I walking around, a cane toad jumped immediately into the upswing of my leg as I stepped forward, resulting in my accidentally kicking the toad up as it was jumping up as well. That thing went flying. It was really funny to see. Anyway, I digress. When we first stayed in this house, there were regularly 5-10 toads that found themselves trapped in the house. I have since spent a lot of time putting screen over pipes, filling in missing concrete, and blocking cracks under doors. The stupid part is that they don’t want to be in here. They get inside and realize that it was a huge mistake, resulting in their frantically hopping around looking for their escape. I used to usher them out with whatever was handy, which took a lot of swatting and swearing. Now I just pick them up and throw them out. It is easier. I was hoping that the cat would help out on this front but he just seems perplexed by them, recognizing (in a rare bout of intelligence) that they can’t be eaten.

I am pretty sure that this kitten is sticking around. If you remember, this is our third kitten, the first two having met their untimely demise…or so we thought. It turns out that kitten 2 wasn’t dead at all, just lost. After giving her up for dead, we moved on and procured another cat, a black and white thing that what he lacks in intelligence, he more than makes up for in cuteness. We have been teaching him to eat lizards and bugs and the like so that he doesn’t die when we leave the island. Since people don’t so much feed pets as much as throw scraps outside and let the throngs of starving, quasi-domesticated dogs and cats sort it out, we realized that we will need to toughen Pierre up a little before our first trip at the end of September. Pierre, you ask? He got the name Pierre based on his pretentious look about him and he also has black markings that look like a moustache and goatee. Well, I am calling him Pierre 1 for two reasons. The first is that I am sure he will meet an untimely end, and the second is that it sounds like Pier 1 and since I absolutely hate Pier 1 (thanks to my wedding registry experiences there), I figure that it will soften the blow when he “disappears.” Anyway, back to the cat that didn’t die, turns out that one night when we left her out and went to some friends’, she got spooked and hid under someone’s porch for something like 2 weeks. Some kids found her and brought her back here, only by that time, we had Pier 1, and man did he not like her. I have some great footage of the two of them working out whose house this is. Pier 1 won and so we gave the previously dead cat to someone else.

I am pretty sure that I will actually do some work while in the Peace Corps. Work has started to pick up around here. We met with the community in a bose vakoro, which is like a town hall meeting, only you wear skirts and sit on the floor, and we explained what our purpose is here. They talked a little about how we may be of use and away we go. There is some significant drama surrounding who is in charge of this island-wide environmental management support team that I am really here for, so I am staying clear of that until it clears itself. If it doesn’t, my time here will be a little less structured than I originally thought. I did just finish a pretty large grant application for this team to run environmental workshops and work on marine protected areas throughout the island. It looks like we will probably get it (around FJ$80k) but depending on who ends up on top of this power struggle, I may regret having written the grant. Otherwise, the village where we live has decided that they are tired of running their generators (the only electricity, which they only run a couple of hours a day in the evening) on diesel that has to be barged in and costs an arm and a leg. They don’t like the fumes and want to do their part in global warming abatement. So, they asked me if I know anything about biofuel?! It just so happens I do. If there is anything on this island, there are coconuts, so I am going to look into the financial viability of pressing coconuts for oil and building a processor for biodiesel. It may not be worth it financially to make biodiesel out of the oil, because the oil is worth a fair amount in cosmetics and food, so it may be a pipe dream. That being said, it is pretty cool that abjectly poor people living on a tiny, disconnected island in the middle of nowhere in a country in the middle of nowhere are looking at alternative energy options. What’s your excuse?

We also met with the recently formed women’s group in our village and they are really excited to get going on beautifying the village, starting with picking up some of the trash. Like any good third world country village, no one ever really decided on a plan for solid waste. So, for many years it has just been thrown where one was when they were done using it. The current plan is for each household to have their own pit for non-burnable rubbish (metal and glass) and to burn the rest (plastic included). What that has really meant is that a lot of people throw it in the ocean. The problem with throwing something in the ocean is that the ocean often likes to give it back. So, there is an amazing amount of trash kind of all over place and the women have decided that it is time to do something about it. We are going to start with cleaning up the trash on the river on Monday and I am pretty excited about this. This place is extremely beautiful and with a little TLC, it could easily be the paradise that it was before the boats arrived with the plastic. I will also start working with the village on a more sustainable plan for the village’s rubbish but that issue will not be an easy one.

I am pretty sure that we have the best house of all the PCVs in Fiji. Maybe the world? The domestic life continues to improve. I ‘borrowed’ half a bag of concrete from where they are building two new classrooms for the primary school to fill some gaps on the toad highway and also to put a tilt on the shower floor towards the drain. Until last week, the floor sloped away from the drain, leaving Lake Fiji every time one took a shower. No more! Now the soapy water flows out, directly into the ground like God intended it to. The garden is also coming along nicely. In fact, just a couple of days ago, we had our first salad! We now have lettuce, bok choy, arugula, basil, cilantro, and radish ready for eating. I even found a somewhat feral cherry tomato plant that belongs to our neighbors, but they have been away for a week, so we have had tomatoes even. Oh man, do I miss tomatoes. Our tomatoes are growing like weeds and should be flowering soon. The squash is flowering now, but we just found out that since there are no pollinators for squash, you have to pollinate it yourself. I still haven’t figured out which of my plants are male and which are female but I need to figure it out soon because they are hot to trot. The celery, carrots, bell peppers, okra, beans, and broccoli are coming along at a much more moderate pace, but everything grows really fast here compared to Portland. Then there is the added bonus of near-constant papaya, bananas, and citrus and the mango tree in front of our house that is just starting to fruit now. We haven’t really had electricity for the last few weeks because the school is on a two-week holiday and with the students gone and many of the teachers gone as well, they didn’t bother to buy any more diesel for the generator. So, the few of us left here have been rationing it to last until the term starts back up. We are at about an hour of electricity per night now, just enough to charge things and have some light for cooking. I kind of like that amount, so it is going to feel like crazy excess when we have electricity for four hours every day again. That seems like such a luxury—like warm-water showers or beer. That being said, all of the teachers just came back from the school holiday so we are back to no water every morning and evening. It sure was nice having unlimited water for a while.

Some of you have been asking what you can send and I have usually said something like, “Geez, I think that we have pretty much everything that we need.” Well, I was wrong, stupid, or both. After receiving some care packages, I am now realizing what we are missing. So, here is the list of exactly what I am missing:

Magazines, specifically Newsweek-ish ones, Sports Illustrated, etc (Mary, you are still on Popular Science, right?)
Chocolate would be a dream come true. I like the dark stuff myself, but a Reese’s Peanut
Butter Cup would change my life.
While I was never really an energy-bar guy before, those Cliff bars were really good. I
guess that any kind of snack like that would be great.
Crossword puzzles.

You get this idea. If you do send a little care package, it is best to send it in a large envelope, padded if need be. Use a box as a last resort as boxes get searched and typically don’t arrive with everything that was sent. I am also more likely to have to pay large duties on it if it is in a box but not in an envelope.