Party Like Time is Relative

Well, here it is, January 11th and New Years celebrations appear to be here to stay. Evidently, New Years Eve lasts 2 weeks. It all starts with Church, as most things do here, for three hours leading up to the actual New Year. Oh, by the way, due to an experiment with Daylight Savings Time this year, we celebrated the New Year before it was even theoretically possible. You see, Fiji is 12 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time which is the maximum. There is no 13 hours ahead because that would put you over the International Date Line and into yesterday (take that Tonga!!). Fiji is the first country to see each new day and hence each New Year. However, this year Fiji is giving Daylight Savings a try, putting us 13 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. Impossible you say! Agreed. We are the same time as Tonga now but it is tomorrow from Tonga. I believe that makes the nation of Fiji the first documented case of time travel into the future and I am proud to say that I was/am/will be here.

Anyway, back to our theoretically impossibly early New Year, once the New Year comes in and church is over, it is time for the water to start. They say that there is some connection between the cleansing powers of water and bringing in the New Year right, but what that ultimately looks like is people throwing each other in the river and if you happen to have some sort of vessel, bringing the river to each other by surprise. It is really fun and lasts for two weeks. That means at any time, someone can grab you and haul you into the river or just surprise attack you with a bucket of water, be you on your way to church, in a meeting, whatever. The good news is that it is really hot out so this is not a bad thing.

To accompany the two weeks of water fights, there is incessant drumming. Each village in Fiji has what is called a lali which is a drum made from a hollowed out trunk that, when played with sticks, is very loud and carries for miles. Historically, it was used to communicate between villages, call villagers in the case of an attack, or call people to work or meetings. Now, it is still used as the village timepiece, letting you know when meetings and church are starting. Well, during the 2 weeks of mayhem, anyone is allowed to play the lali day or night. That usually involves kids beating on it from sunup until, well, sunup. Nonstop. Then there are the cannons. These are hollowed out lengths of bamboo that when are heated up (with fire) and then aerated a certain way with vaporized kerosene, then lit on fire make an unholy boom that really carries. Right now there appear to be dueling cannons on either side of the village going. The point of this seems to be to point this at someone and scare the living bejesus out of them. It really is fun, especially because you are already living with the fear of being thrown in the river at any time while being shot at. The rest of the time you just party.

Now, let’s talk about teeth. In America, you can tell a person’s socioeconomic strata purely by their teeth. Anyone with any expectations of lower middle class through high class has all of their teeth. If one happens to have lost a tooth along the way, from a chainsaw accident perhaps, one finds a way to pay for something that fools people into believing that one has all of their teeth. Missing one tooth puts you somewhere in the realm of lower middle class but might bring with a sort of cache representing a “countercultural” past wherein one got into a barfight or two but now is a contributing member of society…just with a hard core past. It is sort of a badge of honor, but must be accompanied by faded tattoos of lurid scenes. Missing more than one tooth puts one squarely in the lower classes because one either does not care what people think or does not have the means to care what people think. Either case is often the result of addiction.

In Fiji, all bets are off regarding teeth. There are people with full sets of healthy teeth and others who look like they won a rock chewing contest. Neither scenario is correlated with social station. There are people who run the country who don’t have any teeth to speak of. It is a real problem for me, conditioned as I am to judge based on dental metrics. If I sit down in a meeting and the person sitting opposite of me has no teeth, I am inclined to kindly ask them to leave as I have a very important meeting with someone or other. That person often is that someone or other. The island head man, missing all kinds of teeth; our village chief, barely a tooth to be found; one of my good friends, missing half of his top teeth. When one can’t judge a man by his teeth, it becomes very difficult to effectively look down on people with any accuracy.