I am Joining the Fijian Police

I am joining the Fijian Police. Not only are they in good with the latest coup supported dictator, but they have the best marching band that I have seen since Stanford. Here is how it all started. When Sally was in Suva, leaving me abandoned, I was forced to find innovative ways of entertaining myself. So, I went to the opening of the new Koro Island Police Post. This was pretty big news as it is the first police station on the island, and the post has two, count them TWO jail cells (which are currently being used for storage). All of the chiefs from each village came as did some big wigs from the Provincial capital. When it was reported that the Police Band would be coming as well, people flocked from all over island. I decided that it was worth checking out since I live down the street. I was also pretty sure that I would get fed while there. I was right.

As I was walking up, I could hear some music which, as I got closer turned out to be a recording of “I Did It My Way.” Or was it? No wait, it was live, big band, conductor, singer and all. Sinatra was immediately followed by an Elvis Presley medley and then to make sure the experience was absolutely surreal, White Christmas. What’s more, it was good—really good. They had French horns for crying out loud. Where did they even find those, much less learn to play them? (That being said, the guy playing the instrument I now call “clapping hands” is a little circumspect. Something tells me his brother has some hiring authority in the force.) I have been of the mind that Fijians do a lot of things well enough but I hadn’t seen much evidence of proficiency much less virtuosity. These people were pros, right down to the uniforms. Men often wear skirts here, only we call them sulu. So, it was no big deal that the men were wearing skirts in the outfit, the cool part is that the bottom of their sulu are cut in a jagged shape like a jester’s would be. All of the police wear these, even when on patrol; it is just another reason why I am joining the police.

Then there was the marching. This is where it really got off the hook. They could march. Oh boy, could they march. It was witty, charming, sexy, you name it. They brought out the traditional Fijian dress for a couple of numbers and followed it by having the trombone players thrusting around. It was great. The best part of any performance however is always the person who I will call the “joiner.” This person is invariably an old, fat woman. Here is how it goes. Someone will be performing something that they have spent a significant portion of their life perfecting before this moment. As they are showing off their dancing, singing, etc ability, the “joiner” will take it upon herself to take the stage along with the accomplished performer and proceed to shake her (large) hips more or less to the music but almost certainly in a lewd and hysterical manner, thereby ruining the performance at hand. For the marching band, the “joiner” decided that she was also the drum major when she found a stick on the ground. As the whole point is to make an ass of herself and spoil the show, she did a very nice job. That is only outdone by the male version of this game where instead of old, fat woman, you have young, well-sculpted man. We will call him “retard” because that is the dance that he does. Now, lest you get up in arms about my use of the term “retard,” I am merely reporting the facts. That is what they call the dance. He gets up, upstages the performers and proceeds to impersonate someone dancing with mental and/or physical disabilities. (If you have not read my entry on Fijians and laughter, I recommend doing so now.) I have seen this at just about every performance that is not guarded by security. Then the security guard has to do it.

Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head

I guess the rainy season started because it has been raining nonstop for 4 days. Seriously, it hasn’t stopped once as far as I can tell. It wasn’t raining on the way to Church on Sunday. It started during and hasn’t stopped since. The worst part is that tomatoes and bell peppers die when the soil gets too wet, and that will be happening when the wet season really kicks in. That isn’t supposed to be for another month though and yesterday we just ate our first home grown bell pepper and tomato from the garden. It turns out that it takes 3 months for tomatoes and bell peppers to mature. Well, we got one anyway. I can’t wait for next year! Back to the rain, this place sure does get muddy. There isn’t anything paved anywhere so all of the roads and footpaths have become a sloppy mess. It is supposed to stay that way from Dec-March. Sounds like Portland, no? Luckily for us, we just had some of our roof replaced where it leaked quite badly.

If you read my last blog, you will remember that we were in the process of stealing a kitten from a 3 year-old. Well, I am happy to report: Mission Accomplished. I am pretty sure that makes us the worst people in the world. Who steals a kitten from a small child? Well, we do. This kitten is going; historically, naming a cat has resulted in an untimely death. To be clear, he is my favorite cat so far because by and large, he does his business outside, and yesterday successfully killed and ate a mouse. I will gladly feed a mouse killer, outside pooper.

The first two weeks of every month yaqona (kava, grog) is not allowed to be drunk in any village anywhere in the Lomaiviti Province. This is a big deal. Yaqona is an integral part of the culture and left to their own devices, Fijians will drink grog every night. The ban on grog is in place so that people will spend more time with their families and clear their heads a little. But, there are a few loopholes to this ban and after some study, I have come to understand the rules surrounding this ban. In the Lomaiviti Province, in the first 2 weeks of every month, the drinking of yaqona is strictly forbidden in all circumstances and without exception, except:

• When you are outside of the village compound, someone is visiting from out of town, there is a fundraiser, someone is born, someone dies, there is a formal function, it is the month of December or
• You really want to.

We just had our first visitors and it was amazing. The Coffmans had plans to visit laid before we even left for Fiji and last month made good on those plans. It was really great to have them here, share a bit of our life, hear about their lives, and travel around a little. Mostly it was great to have them here because they brought us booze. Turns out that you can bring 2.25L per person! Please keep this in mind for your visits. Anyway, they were here for a good chunk of December and managed to time their arrival just right to get stuck on Koro Island for our first cyclone (what you call a hurricane in Fiji). That didn’t exactly play into their hands for their dream vacation, but it meant that we had lots of entertainment (remember, they brought booze), so we were thrilled to have them here for that. We split time on Koro with them between our house in the village and the resort on the other side for some diving. Then we headed up to Taveuni for a couple of days before they flew out. That place is amazing: crazy diving, waterfalls, hiking, AND S
STORES!!


Here is Sally and Brian C diving together. They are dive buddies. My dive buddy is my camera!

We played dress up and took Brian and Heather to village. Brian is wearing a skirt. You don't have to wear them, but we didn't tell Brian that. He seemed a little too eager to give it a try and now Sally is missing some clothes. (Seriously, we want the black skirt back.)

We also introduced Brian and Heather to the finer points of Fijian life, namely husking and scraping coconuts. They got pretty good at it and more importantly, we ate well.



One night we got drunk. Heather is pouting because she was too pregnant to get her drink on. Brian is also telling a story which may be another reason she is pouting.

A real puffer fish! And all puffed up!

We took them to church which is a strange experience even if you know what is going on. You can't see it but Brian is wearing a skirt again. He just wouldn't take the thing off.

Mmmmm, yaqona. Brian, in his skirt, looks justifiably fearful.

Look at this cute little guy. Can you believe this is real?





Holidays without family suck. Let’s be clear about that. The Coffmans left on the 20th and we headed back to our house a couple of days before Christmas. Luckily for us, Christmas is a pretty low key affair here. Basically you just build these outdoor bamboo huts and hang out in them for a couple of weeks, eating as much as you can and drinking yaqona when you are not eating. Lot’s of folks came from out of town to be with their families here so there were lots of new faces, but there are no isolated family units and no exchanging of gifts. So, we didn’t feel lonely or isolated at all. Sally and I just pretended that it wasn’t Christmas. We are working under the assumption that Christmas has been canceled until 2011. If you would all comply with this, we would be grateful.

Now it is January and there is no work. Everyone is still traveling for the holidays and people who are here are committing themselves to drinking yaqona full-time. It is also pretty dang hot so hunkering down in the afternoon is pretty much de rigeur. That being said, I think that we are both ready for school to start back up so people remember that we are going about the business of making Koro Island a better place to live. Until then, we will be working on making naps better.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

As you may be able to glean from the title if you are into comic sci-fi books, I am reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (The Trilogy of Four) right now for the first time, even though it has been recommended to me by just about everyone I know (and some I don’t). So I am reading it and it is wonderful. You also should read it.

Now on to things about which you have a greater chance of caring, namely the cat. I don’t remember what I wrote in the last blog cat-wise since I blog through an “agent.” You can ignore whatever I said before because that cat turned up dead. Yep, another one down. I know that I continue to joke about cats that keep dying and how when we got this last one, I was going to name it Snowball (I, II, III, etc) because it would die, ha, ha, ha. EXCEPT THE DAMN THING UP AND DIED! Sick jokes are not funny when they prove to be prophetic. Sally is not to be deterred however and is already on the prowl for kitten #4 that we can spend a bunch of money on until it dies. In the meantime, we have found it considerably easier to steal the kitten of our 3-year old neighbor. It is sort of like stealing candy from children only easier because the candy runs to you if you don’t abuse it and feed it fish bones and put a flea collar on it. Basically the cat now hangs out here all day until we kick it out at night so that the 3-year old thinks he has a cat. Thankfully, this cat already has a name (Ginger) so we don’t have to fret about that and since the cat isn’t technically ours, it won’t be any big deal when it dies.



So last week, Sally and I joined just about everyone else on the island at the Primary School Games—an Olympic-style track and field event on a much, much smaller scale and with shorter participants. That being said, this was a serious deal including all 7 of the Primary Schools on our island. There is an amazing amount of inefficiency in this country and basically any time that we try to do something, the way is blocked by countless things broken, or people missing, etc. Not at the Primary School Games. I am going to invite the NCAA next year to perhaps model their meets after this—there was a real track (on grass and the kids were barefoot), measured to Olympic specifications, relays with real batons, heats, lane assignments by qualifying time, simultaneous track and field events, timers for each lane, all for multiple age groups, and these kids had seriously trained. There was a starting gun for crying out loud!





Speaking of starting guns and crying out loud, there was a 50m event for the under 7 girls. At the end of one of the heats, there was a little girl crying her eyes out at the scoring table after her race, clearly disappointed with her race. It was pretty cute. But then in the next heat, more little girls were crying, and I thought that maybe it wasn’t so cute. Maybe it is kind of sick that at the age of 6, these girls are so driven to win that they cry if they don’t. I had thought that was a uniquely American thing to make your kids so driven to win that they can’t accept anything else as success. Then I got mad at the games and decided that maybe these little girls shouldn’t be pushed into this at all. That was about when one of the women behind me told me, laughing hysterically, that the little girls are afraid of the starting gun and cry the whole way down the 50m track because the gun scared them. That’s more like it, I thought! 6-year old girls should cry when they hear a gun. Sometimes I do.




Here is something else that I love about Fiji—you can laugh at anything and anyone. I first started noticing this when someone would simply trip, namely myself. In the US, the polite thing to do is to pretend that you didn’t see it. Here when someone trips, the appropriate thing to do is to laugh at them, preferably pointing. I thought, fair enough. Tripping is inherently funny, and since we all do it, we should all just go ahead and laugh when someone does it, including oneself. One day I was walking by a bunch if kids outside but in a class with some teachers and I heard uproarious laughter. I looked around and saw that the cause for this ruckus was an old, crippled man being carried by a younger man like a sack of potatoes. My first thought was that the teachers will be upbraiding these kids any second now, but when I saw the teachers, they were leading the laughing brigade. Too much, I thought. It is one thing to laugh at someone healthy who trips, but an old crippled man? Too far…until the young man reached the place to set the old man down. When he did so, the old man sat down and the young man turned and faced the kids and they both waved, clearly laughing themselves. Everyone was laughing. Then there was the time that a friend of mine tricked me into asking his uncle, “E vei nomu ta?” (How is your father?). His response, “Sa mate, fuck you!” (He’s dead. The rest is untranslatable). Then everyone erupted in uproarious laughter. His parents really are dead and everyone, including the man with the dead parents, thought it was the best joke they’d heard all day.

OK, so here was the lesson I learned. You don’t hide stuff here in Fiji, because it wouldn’t do you any good. Everyone knows everything about you so pretending that you did not trip or aren’t crippled would be stupid. In the US, you pretend that you don’t see things that people do and if you do think that they are funny you pretend you don’t. It was funny how the man was being carried and everyone had a good laugh over it, including the man being carried. No feelings were hurt. We should laugh more when people do things that are funny because pretending that they aren’t funny, doesn’t make them any less funny, it just makes us tactful, and I am starting to think that tact sometimes looks a lot like dishonesty. It is certainly less fun.

On the home front, there are some pretty serious improvements going on. No longer content to live like the heathen, we have made some significant purchases, namely a refrigerator, an oven, a hot water heater, a washing machine, and a couch. Now before you get too excited, you should be aware that these items cost less than $100 between them, and that only because coolers are really, really expensive here. Fridge: We found out the health clinic has a freezer and so we bought a tiny, lunch-box-ish cooler to throw some cheese in with an ice pack. Of course, we can only buy cheese once every two months. More importantly, where there is ice, there is martinis (yes, “is martinis”—sort of like I Am Who Am). Oh yeah. You can do the math. Oven: I made a solar oven out of 2 cardboard boxes and some aluminum foil. It works like crap. Actually, it works fine as long as the sun is doing its job, which is rarely here. Then one day, Sally left it out in the rain. Turns out that cardboard is a poor choice in the tropics. Hot water heater: I just ran about 20m of black pipe on my roof and will be taking my first warm (dare I say, hot?) shower today. This system however has the same absurd sunshine requirements as the solar oven. Washing machine: Nope, this is still just Sally. Couch: This is a piece of foam padding that will be our bed upon your visit. In the meantime, it is folded up against a wall making a very nice couch indeed. Probably the most important upgrade to the house has to do with the toilet. After three months of our toilet leaking from places that a properly sanitary system would not, I managed to track down some parts to fix it. No longer is there a cesspool behind our toilet! Were the Coffmans not such discerning folks and if they didn’t already have their plane tickets for early December, I am not sure that the toilet would be so functional. It still just drains into a hole on the side of the house. You can’t win them all, but you can plant flowers on top of it!

Here are some sun dried tomatoes, home-growed and drying nicely in the solar oven.


Solar hot water doing its thing.


Solar cooker, version 2.0


Washing machine "taking a break."

A Day at the Beach

In looking at the photos that have been posted, I noticed a significant lack of anything that looks remotely nice. Sorry about that. This place is really beautiful. So, I will now start my campaign to show how beatiful Koro is and I will start underwater. Here are some shots from a reef in front of Dere Bay, where you will stay for at least a bit when you come and visit. The Coffmans can tell you all about it since they are due in a few weeks. I can't tell you how excited I am to show off this place to some friends. Who's next?

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.

Cat Update

I know many have you have been wondering, since I didn’t mention it in my last e-mail, what is the state of our cat. Well, I apologize for omitting it in the last blog, and will more than make up for it here. Cats as pets are certainly not the same thing here as they are in Merika (you can figure out what that means, right?). It turns out that if you see a kitten or puppy or pony that you really like, you can just take it, play with it for a few days, torture it if you like, maybe feed it, maybe not. Well, that is precisely what happened to our current cat, Pierre, and I am guessing that is what happened to our last two cats (one of which was prodigal, but you will have to go back to that story). So when Pierre went missing again, we didn’t find him for days, and when we did, someone had taken him to the neighboring village. He’s back now and we outfitted him with a flea collar with the word “kaivulagi” (whitey) on it to ward off potential feline heisters. Last night he came without it, making it obvious that someone had taken off this strange cat choker. I think that we might try yarn next. As long as people know he is the kaivulagi cat, they will hopefully leave him alone. The problem is that since we don’t torture him, he hasn’t learned a healthy fear of human like every other cat that sprints away upon first sight of a person, specifically the smaller versions of people.

Well, we have no just hit the 4 month mark in Fiji and the 2 month mark at our site and the place is really starting to grow on me. Oh wait, IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN PARADISE!! I recognize that I have had some pretty sweet jobs in my life: lifeguard, ski instructor, bird chaser, diver, school custodian (not that one so much, although the people were wonderful), but this one ranks among the best. Seriously, I snorkel for a living. Well, it is more than that. I also eat lunch and take a nap. Here is how it works. I and my counterpart go to a village on the island and we give a workshop on coral reef health, fishing practices, farming practices, and discuss individual needs of the village. Then we teach them how to do monitor a reef doing a simple transect. Of course, I have already taught them how to do the transect on dry land so once we hit the water, they get to work and I play around in the most diverse coral I have ever seen. And the fish are pretty cool too. These areas that we monitor are tabu areas, areas that are permanently closed to fishing to serve as a breeding ground for their fishing areas. This has the entirely desirable effect of creating underwater parks teeming with life and beauty. I saw the healthiest coral reef that I have ever seen in my life yesterday and it is immediately in front of our neighboring village. After all of this, we eat lunch and take naps—all of us together. That is how we roll in the villages.

After I hit every village (14 total), I will be working with each village on its individual needs. So far, that looks like mangrove planting to restore habitat and control erosion, seaweed farming for a source of income, terrestrial reserve creation, alternative energy (maybe even micro-hydro power!), and feral pig eradication. Two years already seems like a very short time.

Let’s talk about food. At this point, I would have to say that Sally and I are officially subsistence farmers. I love the feeling of standing next to the garden in the evening, asking myself, “What looks good?” You name it, we got it: carrots, radish, lettuce, garlic, onions, scallions, beans, cilantro, basil, and all kinds of tropical fruit with tomatoes, zucchini, watermelon, ginger, pinto beans, broccoli, pumpkin, etc, etc all flowering and ready to fruit. We knew that first period before the garden came in would be the hardest and I am happy to report that we have arrived!

And some business--for those who have been accostmed to our phone calls, I'm sorry to say, that gravy train is over. Our phone company ended the promotion and it is now very expensive for us to call the US. So, it looks like the phone conversations have come to an end. It is back to letter writing, so get to it! That being said, we may be getting closer to having internet on the island, in which case we can just rejoin the masses communicating with a screen.

Blogging by Proxy

So it turns out that you don’t actually need electricity or an internet connection to blog; you just need a solar panel, a laptop, one of those micro-SD cards, a post office and a willing partner (who presumably has internet and electricity. So, here is the deal. I am writing this on my laptop and will save it to a micro-SD card which I will then mail (along with a very nice as-yet un-composed letter) to the in-laws. My own parents, upon reading this, might wonder why I didn’t choose them for the updating task, but then again they chose my sister as the executor of their will. There are some things that folks are good at and some that folks are not good at.

Anyway, Sally and I have no been here at our site for just about a month and things are more or less running along swimmingly (as a matter of speech only—amazingly enough, Sally has yet to get into the water). Here are some topical updates upon which I would like to elaborate:

1. Hair: After messing around with short-ish hair for the last couple of months, in my last encounter with clippers, I decided that it would be a while before I saw them again and just shaved it all off. This has led me to a couple of realizations. The first that is that I have no one in my life who truly cares for me, because if I did, one of them would surely have just shaved my head while I slept. For 15 years, I toiled with long hair, dreadlocks, and various cuts with a clear Dutch bent. This was allowed with only the occasional comment in jest about my long hair. Never again. The liberation that comes with not having any hair has revolutionized my life. Drying off after a shower has become basically non-existent, not to mention swimming. I can’t believe that I even enjoyed swimming until now. I won’t even get into my realizations of hairlessness with a snorkel mask. Thanks for 15 years of hell, jerks.
2. Refrigeration: There sure a lot of things that we (and by we, I mean) put in fridges that have no business there. For example, did you know that eggs last weeks, WEEKS, without refrigeration? Coat them with a little oil and they last for well over a month. Here are a couple of other items that you will be shocked to hear either suffer from or are unaffected by the fridge: cucumbers, carrots, peanut butter, honey, eggplant, toothpaste, tomatoes, mustard, ice, margarine, potatoes, and jam. Were you paying attention? If so, you would have realized that at least one of those things is a dirty lie (and one is just useless). Ice is the glaring exception. Oh martini, how I miss you. They say if you love something let it go…etc. Fiji Bitter is bad enough of a beer that it isn’t worth refrigerating anyway.
3. I Love Cats: Some of you may remember that one of us (not me) once had a club called the ‘I Love Cats Club’ that I think had approximately 1 member, give or take. Well, that club has been re-chartered but with a new name: ‘I Kill Cats Club.’ You may remember from my last blog that we were 0-2 on cat raising in Fiji, but have not had our spirits dampened in the least. In fact, that last cat (Snowball II) had a weird rat-like tail. Good riddance, I say. Out with the old, in with the new. Our latest attempt is a black and white male kitten that is now going by Pierre due to his moustache and little spot of goatee. We have had him for well over a week, breaking all previous records and it appears that he may stick around. He has caught 2 mice and some large number of skinks, earning his keep as far as I am concerned. Then again, if he pees on the mosquito net again, we may be lamenting the unfortunate ‘disappearance’ of yet another cat.
4. Jobs?: Well, Sally sort of teaches but now the school is on ‘holiday’ for the next two weeks. One would be hard pressed to find what in the hell I am doing. I have some pretty good excuses as to why I am not doing much in the way of work on which I may or may not elaborate later. Suffice it say that Sally’s skills in nursing and mine in…well…beer-making are going largely underutilized. Always ready for a good fight, I spend the majority of my day beating back the relentless tropical weeds that are hell-bent on taking over my radishes. They will not win this fight for I have time on my hands. Really, I spend a lot of my time in the raising of food. It is amazing how basic this is and how much I love it. I have always loved gardening but when the hobby becomes the difference between having food and not, I think that is when it becomes farming, in which case I can finally start calling myself a farmer, a life-long dream of mine. So far, after about a month, we aren’t quite having gazpacho or anything, but there is lettuce, eggplant, basil, cilantro, cassava, and lots of bok choy, broccoli, tomatoes, celery, and carrots on the way. As expected, these things (with the exception of cassava, eggplant, and bok choy called kaveti [cabbage] here) are absent from the island. No one grows them and hence no one sells them. Given that this is the most fertile soil in Fiji, that seems a little strange to me. The issue may be the weeds. They are really amazing. Fijian ideas of agriculture include cutting off the top of what you are eating (in the case of dalo [taro] or tavioka [cassava]), throwing them towards the ground, and in 6 weeks, pulling them out and eating them. They beat the weeds. Any sort of intensive agriculture was recently brought here and just hasn’t made it mainstream yet. So, my vegetable garden is the source of much consternation and conversation. They know about most of these vegetables, but I don’t many have never seen someone actually growing them, much less a kaivulagi (whitey).
5. Wine: When Sally and I left Suva for our placement, we could afford 6 bottles of very cheap wine that we then carted this far to last us for 2 months. That would be a bottle approximately every week and a half. Well, a couple of days ago, we decided that rationing be damned, we were eating pasta and would be moving up our bottle #3 a few days. It was a great idea, right up until I spilled my glass. Grief is the only word that can be used for what I felt that night. I guess despair would work as well. Fine, there are a lot of words, but you get the idea. It will be weeks before bottle #4. There are two cases of hand-selected fine wine along with 3 gallons of oak-aging whiskey in my basement in Portland, I thought as I was cleaning up my ration. It was the first time I thought that I don’t have what it takes to be a Peace Corps Volunteers.
6. Grog: Kava is a very poor excuse for a drug, in my opinion. Here, it goes by the name of yaqona or simply, grog. It tastes like muddy water with a hint of something like cinnamon or mint—just a hint, mind you. The first few are pleasant enough; I even sort of like it. But the deal with grog is that you keep drinking bowl after bowl of it. Its effects are pretty mild: some numbing in the mouth and if you really drink a ton of it, you feel a little groggy. Drinking yaqona is what you do here, all the time. It is a part of every meeting, drunk every time you visit someplace, during weddings, funerals, or any celebration, or just what you do at night with a guitar. My problem isn’t so much the grog as much as the sitting cross-legged on the floor for hours at a time. Seriously, if you think this is no big deal, try watching a movie sitting cross-legged on the floor. Now imagine that the floor is not carpeted. Luckily for me, I have some practice in that my language classes were taught 4 hours at a time with us sitting cross-legged on the floor, but at least then you can move around and lie down if you want. No dice with the yaqona. It must be drunk sitting cross-legged. This is my life 3-4 nights per week.

So, that is a bit of a snapshot of my life here. I never wrote about the work but you must be tired of reading this. I certainly am tired of writing it. Stay tuned for the next installment where I discuss the following: pigs, Pierre II, bread-making without an oven, and your visit!