Make you Laugh, Make you Cry

Well, I feel like until now I have put a pretty brave face on life here, describing with rapturous humor and wit our joys of living here in Fiji and on Koro Island. Typically, that has had a positive spin as I regale you with tales of gardening and snorkeling, flowers and sunshine. However, since my aim here is journalistic accuracy, and since my motto has always been, “Providing a fair, balanced and egocentric account of Fiji since 2009” I am afraid that this posting will not have its usual flair and buoyancy. “How could that be?!” I can hear you asking. Well, here is how.

We are being kicked out of our house. We may have to leave the island and go to a new placement. That is the short story and except for the first sentence, I may be exaggerating. Here is what happened. Our house is on the high school compound along with all of the other teacher’s houses. Since most of the teachers come from other places in Fiji, the high school is responsible for housing them. Usually there are more houses than there are teachers so the standard practice is to hire teachers then count houses. That method appears to have backfired. The reason for the usual excess of houses is that Fijians typically don’t like to live alone. So, if a teacher is single, they will often choose to live with other single people. Thus there would be a house with maybe three teachers sharing and houses to spare, as was the case last year. This year, just about every teacher is married with kids so need their own house. That includes ours. To solve the problem, the high school took Sally’s classes from her and then said we weren’t contributing to the school. (Never mind all of the other work we have done for the school.) Hence our house should be given to a teacher…who comes on Wednesday…on the same boat as my parents. Nice timing.

Rest assured, they promised that they won’t kick us out that day, but we don’t have much time. So the scramble has begun. We are really hoping that the village where we do most of our work will pony up and provide us a house, but if they can’t get that together, I think that we will be pulled off of Koro and placed somewhere else. That would be a huge bummer after 6 months of work here—not that all of it was productive, but at least we are on some sort of trajectory. Really, I just can’t stand the thought of losing my garden. It feels like someone is taking my child from me, I have put so much of myself into it. We have friends here and we are just about to get going on some major projects—a bread oven for the women’s group and a hydroelectric project to replace the diesel generator in addition to our “day jobs” (Sally at the high school and the clinic, me doing Marine Protected Area work). The thing is that it is pretty clear that Peace Corps is less than thrilled with how this site is working out. When we came here, there were 2 boats per week and 1 plane per week. That went down to 1 boat per week and then a couple of months ago, the plane stopped coming, leaving just 1 boat per week. That has made it very expensive for Peace Corps to have us here because any time that we leave, we are often gone for 2-3 weeks, like our last trip to Suva in which Peace Corps had to put us up in a (crappy) hotel for 2 weeks for a 3-day workshop. Communication has also proved to be fairly difficult. So, they may be looking for a reason to get us off the island and this may be it.

The sad thing is that we may be looking for a way off as well. I say that because we have had some pretty significant problems with our respective “jobs.” Sally has essentially been removed from the equation, through no fault of her own, from the high school, even though that is who invited her here in the first place. I finally got my very large grant to manage the natural resources on the island which has started a money and power grab and it has gotten ugly. I now absolutely regret getting this money and I feel like this is going to cause more problems than it will solve. There were already fairly insurmountable political issues happening between individuals before I got here and now the money has compounded those problems. Whether we stay or go, I am actively retreating from this project anyway and depending on how bad it gets, may be asking the grant agency to stop payments.

But it is not all doom and gloom. The New Year has brought a new outlook in village work. There is quite a bit of motivation and we are in the middle of it. We just went to a pretty great workshop on alternative livelihoods and we are excited to put that into practice. The weather is hot but the rains finally arrived meaning that we get a shower or two per day to cool us off. The tomatoes are going gangbusters and we just entered avocado season! And my parents are coming to visit this week, which is really exciting. Our last friends came and helped us ride out a cyclone and my parents can come and help us pack. You see what wonders await you when you come to visit?! Anyway, my parents are coming here for a week and barring another cyclone, we are all going to the Yasawas for a week. If you don’t know about the Yasawas, it is the Fiji that everyone writes home about—literally because that is where most of the tourists go for good reason. We are going to the last island that the boat goes to so we will be going to the least touristy of the touristy area. We are homeless, but we are homeless in Fiji. We could be homeless in Mongolia or Latvia (actual Peace Corps posts). When I am sitting on my porch in January with shorts on, breathing in the ocean breeze with a book in my lap, I often like to say, “I hear that Kazakhstan is lovely this time of year.”