We appear to be in a drought. The thing is that when there is an El Niño in your part of the world, that rain water is coming from somewhere. That somewhere is my garden and I want my rain back. From what I hear, you all would be more than willing to give it back but since no one knows who is in charge of these things, we appear to be at a loss for blame. (The obvious would be of course to blame God, but from what I can tell, people only like to assign the good parts of life to God. The bad parts are still as-yet unexplained to me. Perhaps God takes weekends and 2 weeks per year off. That would explain the spike in drunk driving homicides on Saturday nights and the periodic natural disaster.) But I digress. FROM WHAT?!? This whole blog is a digression, so I will continue.
A few weeks ago, I got a call from a neighboring village that there is a problem with a sea creature attacking the women as they fish. So my counterpart and I headed down there to dig up the dirt on this sea creature. It turned out to be a small sea jelly that was amassing in the thousands and stinging the women as they fished. The problem is that they didn’t feel anything while they were in the water so they just carried on. When they got out of the water, the trouble started. It was a head-to-toe itch, pain, and fever for a few days. Bummer, right? Not much to be done but stay out of the water when they are around, I say.
But upon further review, that wasn’t the extent of the story. You see, these sea jelly attacks were happening only in the tabu (marine protected area), an area closed to fishing, that had been opened up temporarily over the holidays. It also turned out that the tabu area was not opened up correctly. When you open a tabu, you are supposed to first clear it with the Komiti ni Qoliqoli (Fishing Committee) then have a sevusevu ceremony where you offer up some kava, then pray over the whole thing. That didn’t happen. It was just opened up, so the blame for the sea jelly attack fell squarely on the shoulders of those who opened the tabu area. Evidently, nature gets pissed when you don’t do things the right way. I started to open my mouth to bring some logic to the matter, but I didn’t. Really, whatever keeps that tabu area closed is fine with me, and if it is fear of packs of sea jellies that stalk the seas looking for poorly executed protocol to strike, fine by me.
Then I thought about this a little more. What the hell do I know? My counterpart explained it quite well at the meeting. The Fijian word for the environment is yaubula, but the word environment doesn’t quite do it justice. The word bula means just about anything you want it to mean in Fijian but really it means “life” or living. Yau, in this context, means “wealth” or “riches.” Yaubula is all of the stuff that is alive: forests, people, and seas jellies. And more importantly, God is in charge of all of this. You mess with one and you mess with them all. If you don’t do things the way that they are supposed to be done, marauding sea jellies may be the least of your problems. We often don’t have any idea what the consequences of not doing things the right way are, thinking that we do. Little white lies we don’t think will amount to much end up amounting to a lot. We used to think that damming rivers was a great idea. If the sentence starts with, “Nobody gets hurt if I…” chances are someone is getting hurt, or will eventually. Do I really think that keeping sea jellies out of the bay teeters on the wording of a ceremony? No, but I do think that things are a lot more connected than our western brains and way of life allow for.
It is now February, which puts us at the 8 month mark, 6 months at site. The school year just started and there has been a pretty big turnover of teachers. That means that we have a bunch of new neighbors, and after having no neighbors for 2 months, the place feels weirdly crowded. That being said, it does mean the return of 4 hours of electricity every day! After having 0-2 hours for the last two months, 4 hours feels like an absurdity of riches. Who needs 4 hours? We can’t even use that much? I keep looking for things to charge, but they are all charged! We even watched a 3-hour movie last night (The Great Escape, a pretty good classic). Next week, Sally and I head to Suva for 2 weeks for a training, but we are really going to the training because it is a chance to get off the island for a little bit. The training is only 3 days, but the way that the boat schedule works, we have to be gone for two weeks. I am going to eat cheese. We were sitting on our porch one evening and I turned to Sally and asked, “Do you remember appetizers? Those are awesome.” I think that I will have some of those too.
Then my parents come. We are really excited about this because they will get a chance to see Koro and then we are heading off to veg out in the island paradise of the Yasawas for a week. I mean, we live in an island paradise, but when you live there it doesn’t feel so much like paradise. You know too much about it. In order for it to be paradise, you need to go to another island and that is what we are doing.
Here we are at this crazy waterfall that you have to swim up to in Taveuni. There's a cool waterslide too!
Then there was this waterfall, straight out of some cheesy set. Only, it's real.
Just give me a reason to jump off a waterfall.
Home ain't so bad either. This is from the roof the day we got back.
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