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!

Back so soon?

Despite my dire warnings of no internet access for a Peace Corps mandated two months of geographical isolation, here I am! Peace Corps requires you to stay in your community for your first two months to make sure that one is fully connected and integrated with the community before one starts gallivanting around the country. But, it turns out that when Peace Corps says two months, they mean about a week and a half. I have been called back to Suva for training on what is called the EAP (which I think stands for Emergency Action Plan. Hopefully, the training will clear that up for me). It turns out that the combination of an illegitimate government and a Methodist Conference is a scary mix. There are currently laws in place putting the smack-down on free speech and on freedom of assembly and one thing that the Methodists in Fiji are known for is getting together in large groups and doing a lot of talking. That has the government nervous and when the government gets nervous, so does Peace Corps.

Peace Corps is requiring that one person from each island attend the training and after primary elections, multiple debates, a caucus in the village of Mudu, various posturing and speechifying, it was decided that I would go to Suva instead of Sally. On some islands, they probably had to really think about who would be best to attend the training; on ours, I think that Peace Corps literally flipped a coin. So, I am going which is great because we really did forget some key things on our first attempt to buy everything that we will possibly need for the next two months. For example, how did we forget onions? And if we were going to be so cheap as to buy just one pot, why didn’t we buy one that would actually fit enough food for two people? It is like we have never bought a pot before!

But this boring—the real question I am sure that you would ask me if you could would go something like this, “How is your new home?” I would answer something like, “Paradise. Seriously, paradise.” From our porch, we look at the ocean. Because of where the island sits, it just happens to have the perfect weather, not hot like it is up north or out west or wet like it is in the southeast. It seems to be somewhere in the 80s every day with a gentle breeze off the water, which we can see quite plainly from our front porch. Once it rained for a couple of minutes, but otherwise, it is sort of partly cloudy every day. It can get hot in the sun, but our house stays nice and cool. Sally started work almost immediately. So far, she is teaching English and a couple of other things at the high school, but she will add health-related stuff a little later. I, on the other hand, have been left to my own devices for a little while. There is the matter of a grant that I am writing for my main work (more on that later) but by and large, I have been busying myself with making this place a home.

The first order of business has been the garden. As you may have heard (from me…repeatedly) there are no vegetables on the island that one can buy. Some folks grow “Chinese cabbage” (bok choy) and eggplant, but that is about it. That being said, papaya, bananas, and coconuts grow like weeds and every few days the school chaplain brings us some fruit that he finds around. There are papaya and lime trees right behind our house and right in front is a giant mango tree. Mangoes aren’t in season yet, but come October, I am going to eat mango until I vomit. Seriously, that is my plan. But I have spent the better part of a week clearing weeds and grass on the side of our house for the veggies: tomatoes, eggplant, onions, garlic, squash, cucumber, lettuce, bok choy, watermelon, bell peppers, carrots, strawberries, etc. They say that this island has the most fertile soil in Fiji. We’ll see about that. There are also a couple of local foods that we already have on our property—a root crop called tavioka (cassava in English) and a type of green called bele which are both delicious. I fried up some tavioka today and tasted like French Fries (I would call them Freedom Fries, but you never know how a dictatorial government might react to such incitement). Yummy.

And most importantly, we are now the proud parents of a kitten which has not quite been named, but we figure is OK since cats don’t give a damn what their name is. So far we have got Nala II, a name in reference to Sally’s original cat in Tumavia which mysteriously “disappeared” after Sally fed it flee and tick repellant, Snowball, assuming that this cat will also “disappear” at some point, then we can start burying the sequence of cats in the backyard with sequential names, and PG, which Sally might have decided on that stands for something like Pretty Girl, or was it Precious Girl. Either way, it will be met with radical indifference. It is all the same to me as the cat has two jobs in my book: 1. Be cute until you grow up and then 2. Kill rats. Item 1, she has nailed and as for item 2, she appears to be a bit of a natural. Just this morning, a baby gecko fell off the wall and landed right in front of her. She pounced on that moth-eater like it was carrying plague and was only momentarily distracted by the senescent tail wiggling around after the gecko dropped it. I was very proud, although I have noticed in increase in moths this evening.

Finally, I will try to wrap this up with some idea as to what I will be doing here. Koro has a lot of natural beauty and unspoiled natural areas coupled with some pretty devastating environmental practices. So, a branch of the University of the South Pacific called IAS (Institute of Applied Science) requested me to serve as an advisor to a newly formed committee called the Koro Island Yaubula Management Support Team, yaubula meaning “environment.” My job will be working with the 14 villages of the island to help manage their resources in a more sustainable way. The fist item of business will entail a whole lot of snorkeling. Each village theoretically has an off-limits area (tabu) to fishing, but there is little oversight and monitoring of it. So, I am going to be working with the fisherman of each village to teach them the importance of having a reserve to make sure that fish are reproducing to stock the areas where they can fish. The best way to do that is to put on a snorkel and go look at the differences between what happens when an area is left alone and what happens when it is over-fished. Then, we will put in place a structure for studying the effects of the tabu area to show how it improves fishing where they can fish. After this will come all of the ways that they are killing the reef by what they do on land, but that will come later and this is too long as it is.

So, we are pretty excited about where we ended up and feel like we hit a bit of jackpot. We are excited for anyone to come and visit, but you really have to mean it if you want to see our house. It would be a 12-hour plane ride from LA, followed by a 5-hour bus ride and then an 8-hour boat ride, getting you here at 2am. Perhaps we can meet you somewhere. We’ll figure that out once you get your plane ticket to Fiji!

Here are some photos for your edification. This is our kitchen now! Compare that with the photos below and we have really come a long ways, no? The next one is Sally in our living room AT A TABLE! Awesome right? Then there is Sally using our new broom. It is made out of coconut fronds and a stick, but that thing really works. Then there is what will become our source of food that I fought to reclaim from the "grass." You have never seen how fast a weed can grow until you have tried to weed in the tropics. No wonder no one grows tomatoes here. Check out the fence that I made from sticks. Finally, there is the second cat that we have now lost. We are going to start naming them Snowball (I-V) since we keep losing them.

The Last One...for awhile

Today Sally and I will storm the beaches of our island. Well, by today, I actually mean tomorrow since the boat drops us off at midnight, and when I mean storm, I actually mean drag since we are bringing with us everything that is required to make a home and feed ourselves for two months. And when I say beach, I mean…well you get the idea.

Sally and I have been in Suva for the last 5 days since swearing in as Volunteers only because our first boat wasn’t until today. If Peace Corps had their way, we would have gone directly to our site from swearing in, as some did. We had the fine luck of infrequent transportation so we got to stay in a fairly nice hotel (nice is relative term here, but it is certainly comfortable—hot water and everything!) and spend some time thinking shopping for a home that has absolutely nothing in it save a bed frame, a table, and 2 chairs. Since there is no store on the island, we also had to buy all of the non-perishable food for two months until we can get back to the mainland. That’s right, I just called the larger island of Vitilevu the “mainland.” Interestingly enough, that is what folks around here call it. Anyway, it won’t do us any good to buy perishable food since we won’t have refrigeration. For that, we bought plenty of gardening materials and seeds. We will have at creating a garden immediately upon landing since those will be our only vegetables for the next year. Until those come in, it will be a lot of seafood and dried goods (beans, rice, lentils, etc). Of course, there is always plenty of taro, cassava, yams (root crops), and coconut around the island in addition to the fruit trees that seem to be no one’s and everyone’s (look up the Tragedy of the Commons for why this is always a recipe for eating unripe fruit). So, it is starting to feel like our food worries about not having a store at which to shop are going to be assuaged by the abundance of free food on the island and the absurd fertility of the soil there.

On the job front, I just had a meeting with the group that actually requested an environmental Peace Corps Volunteers (heretofore PCV) and it answered a whole lot of questions for me. When I went to the island for my site visit, it didn’t seem like anyone knew why I was there, outside of my “Initial Community Contact Person” and even he didn’t seem to have a very firm grasp of what was going on. So, it turns out that I am there because the University of the South Pacific requested me. Actually, it is a branch of the University called IAS (Integrated Applied Science) that wants me there to spearhead a committee called the KIYMST (Koro Island Yaubula Management Support Team—Yaubula means Environment, roughly). The island has rampant environmental and ecological problems that are affecting the health of the people on the island, such as deforestation, free-roaming feral pigs (which crap everywhere), overfishing, poor waste management, and sewage leaching into the water. All of these things have the effect of polluting the reef immediately offshore of the villages, which damages the reef and lowers fish counts (already lowered by overfishing) on which the island relies for food. The fish counts have gone way down in the last 5-10 years and there seems to be an understanding by the people there that something needs to be done. So, the 14 villages of the island (along with the help from IAS and me) are forming this committee to educate communities through workshops about the issues and to help them find solutions to the problems.

It is lofty. At this point, it doesn’t exist, and my first item for business is to land some money for it. We have identified a possible funder, and I will spend my first week in my new home writing part of a grant proposal. Theoretically, Peace Corps asks that we don’t try to do these big projects right away, but I don’t want to miss this money and it would just be good to have so that I can just hit the ground running once I am settled enough to get moving on this stuff. After this meeting that I had with the IAS folks, I am really, really excited about this placement. Seriously, from this vantage point, this appears to be what I have wanted to do for a long time.

So, that is the boring stuff for you. If you have made it this far, congratulations. This will most likely be the last entry for a while, because there is no internet connection there. That being said, the high school had just gotten a grant for computers when we were there last and they were talking about getting internet on them. The infrastructure is there to have a very slow connection, so it is possible that they have done it. How things work around here is that people talk a lot about something well before anyone does anything about making it happen, if it happens at all. So, since they were just starting to talk about it, I am guessing that it is nowhere near fruition. It may be Sally’s job to get that moving. In fact, Sally may be responsible for bringing the 6th largest island in Fiji to the digital age. That’s a riot, huh? It appears to be the case that if you know how to do anything here, that qualifies you to be an expert. Fiji invited Peace Corps here to meet their needs for trained individuals and they meant it.

So, let me wrap up this very long entry and say that Sally and I miss home very much and mostly miss our families (close friends, feel free to include yourself in the previous statement). It is hard to be so far away from growing nieces and nephews, especially when new ones appear in our absence (Katie and Bob, I am definitely not talking about you guys here). That being said, we are really happy here and excited to get started our site. Please remember to write us as it will be our only communication from you all once we are there, excepting the occasional phone call. Here are some important topics on which to hit on when you do, in case you are dry on ideas: relationship news, news on houses or businesses, quotes from nieces and nephews, the weather, what you had for dinner (seriously), any sort of news, and of course regular updates on my beloved Giants. Also, if anyone can go online and find out what in the hell is happening with our government, please look that up and send it to us. All of that is censored here and as far as we know, everything is rainbows and kittens, which is weird because it definitely was not before we left. Signing off for now. We love and miss you and will check in a few months.

Our new house

OK, so the next items for consideration are our new house. So, here is what it looks like from the outside, although we were promised a new paint job by the time that we get back. From what I know about this culture, saying that you will do something, does not have any bearing on whether you will do that thing. We have also been promised a bed.

That being said, what our house lacks in paint, it more than makes up for in view. This is the sunrise over the Pacific from my porch. You read that right FROM MY PORCH! Awesome.

But then this is the kitchen...

...and this is the bathroom. This is Sally and me on our first night in the house. As you can see, we are not long on furniture. The solution to that problem is not yet obvious. But we look pretty happy in our matching clothes! Also note the jock-short hair on the guy on the left.

Hooray for photos!

So, I am finally at a computer that has fast enough internet to load some photos. So, here are a couple. These are some from training that are now past tense, but still cool. For example, here is a photo of my family that I lived with for 2 months. They were really great. Here is my mom Bua, my dad Samu, and my brother Mosese. (The short one is Sally). My brother was 23 years old and I really like him. We are planning a visit by him to Koro.

Here is a photo of my house that I lived in for 2 months. While it didn't look like a gem from the outside, my mom was really great and she kept a pretty clean house. I'll take small and clean any day. .

The shot of the buckets and chair is my shower. There wasn't actually a shower so we used the buckets. It works pretty well and I am starting to enjoy the bucket method of bathing. The mosquitos in the shower I never got used to. I am not very good at this blog thing so I can't figure out how to add more photos to this post. So, I am going to start another one. Be right back.

A Real Volunteer!..almost

Well, I am just two days away from officially swearing that I will uphold the constitution and that I won't bomb anything that looks American. That being said, I will be in the ambassadors house on Thursday so I will have my chance before actually swearing in. As of today, I have been in Fiji exactly 2 months and am 2 days away from the end of training. We just had our language proficiency exam, which I passed by colors (as opposed to flying colors). Sally, on the other hand, set a new standard in how fast one can physically learn a language. The best part is that she is supposed to wait to talk until after her husband has which means that she is often standing next to me translating and feeding me lines. It seems to work.

Anyway, training is over which means that we will be heading to our site soon. Because there are very few boats to our little island in the middle of nowhere, we can't go straight to our site after swearing in. We will be in Suva for almost a week giving us some time to buy everything that we will need to eat and live without electricity for 2 months. That will be the next time that we will be able to leave our island. This move means that we have a new address. It goes like this:

Brian Smithers/Sally Moyce
PO Nasau
Koro Island
Lomaiviti Group, Fiji
South Pacific

The mail comes once a week on the boat and then we will go to the Post Office (a guy) and ask him if we got anything. He then looks in the sack and says yes or no. If it is no, I walk away very sad knowing that my next chance to be disappointed will be 7 days away. Please do your part to minimize that disappointment. There is still some debate as to whether the internet will make it to our island, but as of now, there is no internet there. That means that letters will be it for a while. That being said, the island has the infrastructure to allow internet and there is talk of us (Sally, really. In a strange twist of fate, Sally is going to be teaching computers at the high school) ushering in the digital age to Koro Island. Scary thought. So, I will post next week when I will finally be able to get some photos up here, and then that may be it for a while. Tune in next week!

Thoughts on Illness

Here are some things that I have learned about illness from living in Fiji that I didn't know before:

1. All sickness is caused by cold getting into your body. It is not important how hot the weather is because cold can still get in there even if it is 90 degrees out.
2. There is no such thing as a fever as all illness comes from being cold. (This is self-evident from #1 above.)
3. Any illness that cannot be traced to the cold can easily blamed on eating non-Fijian food, such as that made by the Indo-Fijians. Who knows what they put in their food.
4. All illness should be treated with heat--putting on as much clothes as you can and refusing cool liquids, such as water. The only fluids that you should take are hot teas. Socks are very important in this regard.
5. You cannot catch illnesses from other people, excepting in the case that the cold got into all of you together. While viruses and bacteria may exist, their role in illness is questionable at best.

Some crazy virus just swept through the Peace Corps folks (in addition to a whole lot of Fijians). it was less than pleasant. On the other hand, I just went snorkeling and it was amazing. Two weeks until I head off to Koro Island. That is when this blog should really start getting interesting.