The Life of Brian: A Fiji Peace Corps Volunteer Blog: 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.