Merry Christmas

It is just after midnight making it Christmas and since I can see the international dateline from my house, and since we even moved our clocks ahead an hour last month, I am pretty sure that I am one of the first people to see Christmas.  Plus, since the family of the deceased paid for the diesel to run the generator all night, we even have electricity!

That being said, here is a curveball that no one saw coming.  If you read my last blog about the great Christmas controversy, you know that we are having problems deciding whether Christmas is on Dec 25th or 27th this year.  The decision has been made.  We will celebrate Christmas on Sunday, Dec 26th.  That way, we make exactly no one happy.

Anyway, Merry Christmas whenever you celebrate it.  Next year in Israel!  (Wait, I think that is what Jews say at the end of Yom Kippur.  I’ll settle for California.)

The Great Christmas Day Question

We have had some trying times this year in Fiji: a devastating cyclone and a crippling drought, followed by an epic flood. But none of those calamities compares to what has befallen Fiji now. These natural disasters have been bad, terrible for those most affected, but as we know, Rome was destroyed not by disasters from without but by its own internal divisions.* What now threatens to undo the fabric of Fiji is this question: What day is Christmas?

Here is the problem. Christmas falls on a Saturday this year, and Boxing Day on a Sunday, both of which are National Holidays. But since those are days off anyway, the government gave Monday and Tuesday the 27^th and 28^th as paid holidays. A little back story here—there aren’t many employees at all in this country so most of the people who get an actual paycheck get it from Uncle Samu. The other issue is that when a military dictator tells you to jump, if you wait to ask how high, you will probably get arrested—at least they don’t do much in the way of shooting here. So, Christmas is on the 27^th…or is it?

The issue of on what day we celebrate Christmas was sort of an academic one in the village. There are no jobs so there are no paid vacations. One does what one likes, which means that no one does much of anything for the two weeks before and after Christmas anyway. Who cares what day you call Christmas? That was until someone died, and since funerals on usually on Saturday, it was scheduled for this Saturday—the day formerly known as Christmas Day. And that is where the debate started.

You see, if Christmas is on Saturday, you can’t have a funeral, but if Christmas is on Monday, Saturday is a perfect day for a funeral. The two sides lined up and the debate was on. At one point in the meeting, the pope was invoked as being in favor of Christmas on Monday the 27^th. Never mind the fact that these people are not Catholic and that I am pretty sure Benedict did not weigh in on the Fiji Christmas Question; evidently, the pope has changed Christmas to Monday. Cooler heads** spoke of the fact that everyone else in the world celebrates Christmas on the 25^th, regardless of the day of the week. That didn’t matter according to some since the government had decided the day. Ultimately, it was agreed that there would be both the celebration of the birth of the Lord and Savior and the burial of an old man on the same day (Christmas) and that the Minister would just have to be creative. Monday the 27^th will be devoted to drinking kava and thanking God that no one has a job from which to be taking a holiday.

Times like these make miss rampant materialism, gaudy, wasteful decorations, and the glorification of gluttony. Please, please give me back my American Christmas. And can it be on Saturday, December 25^th without a funeral?

_________________________

*Unless of course, it really was the result of lead-pipe induced insanity leading to an outbreak of homosexuality that invoked God’s wrathful dismantling of the Roman Empire. Seriously, that has been opined. I am pretty sure it was the two-party system and skyrocketing, war-induced debt.

**Me

Water, Water Everywhere

Well, we asked for it. Ask you ye shall receive and whatnot. After one of the worst droughts the country has ever seen, our village just had the worst flood that it has ever seen. It all started innocently enough. It was Thanksgiving and Sally and I planned a lovely couple of days in Sauvusavu town with all 20 of the Peace Corps Volunteers on our island, Vanua Levu. (It means “big land,” which would explain the 20 volunteers. Don’t worry, it is way smaller than Rhode Island, I am sure.) So, we rented two houses, made all of the Thanksgiving food that we could create out of local ingredients—sorry, no turkey—and had a great time. Really, it was fun and we managed to have some pretty authentic T-Day food.

On Thursday night, it started raining and I mean RAINING. One can only see rain like this in the tropics. Maybe they have it in the southeast US, but we certainly don’t have it on the west coast. Wow. Rain. Lots of it, like someone just dumped out the sky and the sky was a giant bucket. By morning, town was a lake, which is hard to do because being right on the ocean, you would think that it would make its way to the sea. Somehow by sheer volume, that rain found ways to pool up and make reservoirs. Luckily, we were all staying until Saturday to give this some time to clear up. It didn’t. It rained all day Friday and then all night Friday like that. Seriously, that is one big bucket.

By the time Saturday came it was clear that we wouldn’t be going back to our villages which after a couple of days of fun didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Plus, when you get stuck somewhere like this, then Peace Corps has to pay for it. Thank you taxpayers! We had a lovely time. The rain let up by Sunday and we all started making our way back to our villages. We had heard some stories that our road and our village had been particularly hard-hit, but we had no idea. We got there on Sunday to find that the village was underwater, although it had been really underwater, 5-6 feet deep in some spots. It flooded a whole bunch of houses, flooded the community hall, the dispensary, all of the electrical junction boxes, and washed a few houses away entirely. The coastline moved in about 100 yards. You know everyone makes the joke that once global warming happens, they will have beachfront property and how great that will be? Well, I won’t go blaming this flood (and then erosion) on anything, but now we have it. Where our neighbors house was is now an arm of the sea and a new tidal river 25 feet from our house. Once they finish knocking down the house, we will have a perfect view. Sorry neighbor.

Anyway, we got to the village to find mayhem, a whole lot of standing water still and the water shut off. That was a problem because in all of this, Sally and I managed to get some bug that would have required us to use a lot of water, if you know what I mean. So, back to town we went where we stayed for a couple of more days while the bug went away. We got back home on Tuesday and later that day we got our water back. Today is Wednesday and the electricity is even back on. A landslide took out a section of our water supply but they were able to replace it pretty quickly.

So here we are. It is Wednesday and we are back to normal, sort of. Our house was spared water going inside, but let’s just say that my complaints about children, pigs, and chickens in my garden were misplaced. A flood sets a new standard. I now have a clean slate. Actually it is not clean at all but buried by debris. I will dig through the debris then have a clean slate. I haven’t seen it but I heard that farm outside the village is trashed. It is one thing for me since it is just sort of a hobby, but farming is peoples’ livelihoods and I don’t know what many of them are going to do having lost their second crop in one year (the cyclone finished off the first one last March).

A good chunk of the village is underwater still and we are trying to figure out a way to drain it. I know how to do it but then this guy in the village died, which means everything stops so that we can have the funeral. Once that is over, then we will get to digging channels. I am hoping to put three sumps into the ground in the lowest parts of the village, connecting them with pipe and then draining it to the river. It won’t stop a flood but it will drain the village after it. Of course, after a day of sunshine, we just had another heavy rain and while the river doesn’t look like it will flood again, the new rain just keeps filling up the village like a bathtub. I am remembering the drought fondly.

So, there you have it. It’s funny—I found myself working on farming because that was where the need was. So, that is where I put all of my energy. Just like that, my job has changed completely. My farming days are over. I am now a flood engineer and an erosion expert. Life as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Sorry I don’t have any photos of this. Somehow documentation didn’t seem that important at the time.