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.