Back in Action

Well, it has been a little while.  Sorry about that, but the computer Gods decided to call our laptop on home.  Never fear—my birthday, a visit by the Moyce kids, and my parents generosity all lined up to get a new laptop to us.  Thank you to all involved, especially my folks.  This thing is like a supercomputer—so sleek and fast.  I feel like I could find prime numbers with this thing.

It is now July of 2010, one year after being sworn in and heading off to site.  The actual day is July 23rd, but we will go ahead and call it one year.  That means one to go.  (We got here in May, but Peace Crops doesn’t count the training period as service and we signed on for 2 years of service.)  It has also been almost 4 months since we have moved to our “new” site, which certainly isn’t new anymore; it feels like we have always been here.  It’s strange how quickly one’s new reality just becomes reality.

We have had a pretty good couple of months, getting around a fair amount.  First we went up to another Volunteer’s site on an island off the north coast of Vanua Levu to do a gardening workshop with the school on the island.  It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed the energy of the kids, which is weird because I basically hate kids now (relatives excepted, of course).  I know that you are supposed to go to developing countries and think that the kids are so cute that you just want to take them all home.  Suffice it say, that is not happening with me.  Don’t get me wrong, Fijian kids are just kids, but they have a tendency to mob anything cool and destroy it as fast as they can.  That bugs me.

Anyway, after that, we headed down to Suva for our mid-service training and then to meet up with Bobby, Katie, and Madeline (Sally’s brother, sister, and cousin) in Nadi.  We had a really great trip, even though they left after drinking more of our alcohol than they brought, an absolute no-no around here.  Let that be a lesson to would-be visitors (I hope that you are reading this, Pamela and Melissa, especially Melissa.)  First we spent a couple of days on the Coral Coast at a place we did not like (Mango Bay) and then a place we really liked (The Beach House).

From there, we spent far longer in Savusavu than we had planned, but we found a great deal at Daku Resort for a house right on the water with a pool and we could cook our own food.  They even had a grill, which was they first of its kind that I have seen in Fiji.  You name it, we grilled it.  After  a couple of days in the village where the only memorable was Bobby getting a bad case of Cook’s revenge (James Cook “conquered” Fiji), if you know what I mean.  So, we headed back to Daku to round out the stay.  Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, no what I mean.

I do work around here too, but this posting is long enough.  We are coming up on a visitor drought so there will be plenty of time to hear about what I do for a living!

Here I Am

I am currently stuck in Labasa, a town on the north coast of the north island, Vanua Levu. It isn't much to speak of. You see, you can't expect the buses to follow the Sunday schedule on a Sunday when it is followed by a Monday which is a holiday. Silly us. We waited for a long time at the bus "station" to find that out. Of course, there is no way to check on these things besides waiting for a bus and seeing what happens.

Sally and I had gone up to a small island called Mali, off of the north coast of Vanua Levu, to a do a work exchange. That means that another volunteer asks for you to come to their site because they want your "expertise." Sometimes that expertise is that you make them laugh. That being said, we were invited by our friend Christian for me to help him start a vegetable garden at the primary school on the island and for Sally to do a workshop on nutrition. It was a smashing success actually. We pounded out a few plots with 12 kids--food that will be used to feed them since most of the students stay in a dorm at the school. We also had a pretty good time.

Anyway, the plan was to come to Labasa Saturday night, stay with these 2 volunteers there, and then catch the morning bus to Savusavu to make our bus back the village. Well, that didn't happen because for some reason, Fiji doesn't have to go to work on the day that the Queen was born. That gives us another night here, the upshot being that I have access to a computer! On the computer front, my parents have been generous enough to offer the purchase of a new one which will be brought by Katie, Bobby and Madeline (sister, brother, and cousin of Sally) when they come to visit in a few short weeks. Needless to say, we are pretty excited for them to get here for both computational reasons and otherwise.

Life has been pretty good here since we last spoke. I just spent a few weeks in Suva training the incoming crop of volunteers the ins and outs of backyard gardening. Peace Corps Fiji has decided to make that a priority this year, and every volunteer is going to start a garden at his her site in the first few months. I also wrote a book (Organic Gardening in Fiji: Lessons in Absurd Fecundity) which the Library of Congress doesn't quite know about yet, but Peace Corps is using it as its manual. We are still tidying it up to see what we will ultimately try to do with it. ("We" includes another volunteer, Matt Roy, who did the illustrations.)

Back in the village, I came home to find out the chiefs had followed my advice and told the Chinese fishing company where they could stick their 99-year lease. That as some really great news. And we finally got started on a large-scale organic vegetable farming operation with the young men of the village. We got the land squared away and have fenced it off (with bamboo that we hauled out of the forests ourselves--not nearly as much fun as it might sound) to keep out the horses. They are in the process of clearing out the grass and when/if I get back we are going to get some seeds in the ground. The farm is initially going to be used to get enough money together to build a 10-pig piggery. Then, between the farm and the piggery, the group should be able to turn a tidy profit, feeding the pigs healthy stuff and feeding the waste back into the farm. I didn't really understand how like alchemy composting was until I got here. Do it.

So, next week Sally and I head down to Suva for our Mid-Service Training, which means that we are halfway there (Bryan Adams songs regularly enter my mind lately). In one year, we will be packing bags at this time. Crazy, huh? Time does a-fly. We go from Mid-Service Training to meeting Bobby, Katie, Madeline, and computer in Nadi at the Westin, this ridiculously posh place that I went with my parents that keeps throwing out these crazy deals to locals. So, why not hang out by the infinity pool for a couple of days? Well, I can tell by your attention span that you are bored now so I will wrap it up, but hopefully with the arrival of a new computer, the blog droughts will yet again come to an end. Don't forget to write, and when you do write, don't forget to put some chocolate in there with the envelope!

One last thing. I got to follow the USA's first World Cup match against England on the computer this morning. Oh man, I love the World Cup. Go USA!

Uh-oh

I am sad to report that the motherboard has gone out on our laptop. We are working on a solution but it does mean that blogs will have to be severely curtailed until we have a working computer. For the brief version: life is good, we had a great trip with Sally's parents, our cat is still alive, I just did a great series of home gardening workshops for incoming volunteers, and we are going diving at the world-famous Namena Reef on Friday. Yahoo!

After having spent a couple of weeks in the new village, I have come to the resolution that this was the best move that I have ever made.


One time I moved to Portland to convince Sally to marry me, so that move turned out to be a pretty good move, but this move has been revolutionary. I eat cheese again. Sally is great, but she is no cheese. Sometimes, I just eat cheese all by itself. You can do that when you will be able to buy cheese again in a week or so. Already in a few short weeks, I feel more a part of this village than I ever did on Koro. I don’t quite know why that is. Part of it is that our house is in the village here and in Koro, it was above. There is also a different attitude in this village that is much more aligned with what the stereotype of Fijians are: amazing hospitality, giving, hard-working (when they want to be), and crazy nice. Koro had a reputation for the people being a little less than this and now in comparison to our new village, they were right.

Point being, we have been welcomed here with open arms. People bring us fish 3-4 times per week, cassava most days, and are constantly inviting us to come eat with them. Sometimes we oblige. Our house has turned from a dirty fixer-upper to a clean fixer-upper. Since we don’t plan to make this permanent, I am afraid that much of the fixing up will not be done be me (given the Peace Corps financial constraints as well), but it is certainly comfortable. It is a large, concrete block house with 2 bedrooms, a dining area, a large sitting area, a porch and an indoor kitchen and bathroom.





The bathroom and kitchen being in doors is pretty sweet since that is a rarity in Fiji. That being said, the bathroom is tiny and a bit weird. The shower head and toilet are in one small room so you basically have to clean the toilet in order to shower. The good news is that there is rarely enough water pressure to shower so bucket baths are more common. The kitchen has a range and an oven (that only gets up to about 200F) and, get this, a kerosene fridge, as yet inoperable. Who knew those existed? Not me. I had seen propane fridges, but not kerosene. I am currently hunting down parts to get that working. Turns out those parts aren’t particularly easy to find. (If anyone knows anything about kerosene fridge parts, now would be a good time to send me that e-mail you have been meaning to.)




True to form, the first thing that I did was to get a garden going and after a week of intensive digging, the usual veggies are on their way. Gardening is a bit more difficult here than it was on ultra-fertile Koro. Since my house is right on the beach, it is pretty sandy. So, I wheel-barreled in load after load of soil from higher up. (A wheel-barrel?!?! There probably wasn’t one of those on the entirety of Koro. There are 2 in my village!) I also helped out the soil with a bunch of cut grass and ashes from the many copra driers in the area. What? You don’t know what a copra drier is? Silly Americans. Copra is the dried meat of the coconut that is dried and then sold on the open market where it is used mostly to make various grades of oil for higher end uses like cosmetics through cooking oil, depending on which layer of oil. Since there bajillions of coconuts here, the villagers just collect them up and then dry them on these large, wood-fired driers. Point being, they create a lot of ashes, which I then haul off to my house. So, the garden is up and running, and once again, most people are confused at just what in the hell I am doing. Oh, they will see.

As for work, I just went from having a very well-defined, fairly important job through the University of the South Pacific on Koro. Of course, there were lots of problems, but I knew what my goal was and more or less how to do it. Here, I am starting from scratch. Basically, my job is to find out what the environmental needs of the community are and to help them to meet them. So far, that is looking like farming practices as there is a lot of talk about all of the pesticides that the farmers are using (which are then washing into the rivers and then the ocean killing coral, reducing fish populations after the give cancer to the sprayer who was never told that he had to wear head to toe covering and a facemask). So, I’ll start there. I am also hoping to start an organic veggie enterprise with the young men of the village to sell to the local resorts that are always begging for fresh veggies, and there is always biofuel. There is a ton of oil in coconuts and if I can convince the village to make their own oil instead of selling the resource cheaply so someone else can, they can make a lot more money. We’ll see. Anyway, that is it for now. Since clearly all of the letters that should be coming our way (but aren’t!) must have gotten lost in the mail, I will give you our new address one more time:

Brian Smithers (or Sally Moyce)
PO Box 904
Savusavu
Fiji Islands

I hope that you are all well. I miss you all and am eagerly awaiting the Sally’s parents who are coming in May and the Moyce kids (not Bobby) who are coming in June…or July. I forget.

Win Some, Lose Some

In the spirit of you-win-some-you-lose-some, we have arrived at our new site. It was not an easy journey. After the cyclone, the ferry broke basically stranding the island without incoming food, which would not have been that big of a deal had not most of the crops been destroyed by the cyclone. It also stranded us. We were told on Thursday that we were being pulled from the island and that Peace Corps would be coming on Friday night to pick us up and move us. So we packed. Then the boat broke so we unpacked. (The best part is that it broke in the ocean so had to turn around and go back. We didn’t find out that the boat hadn’t made it for awhile.) Then they said it was coming so we packed. We continued that routine for the better part of a week. Finally it was decided that Peace Corps was unwilling to risk getting off the boat to pick us up fearing that another boat may never come. If a boat ever made it to Koro, we were to get ourselves and our belongings on it and never look back lest we turn into a pillar of salt.

So, on the day that the boat was to finally and truly leave, we packed (as per our usual). The boat was to leave at 1:00pm getting to Koro at around 9:00pm. Since food was scarce on the island at this point, every meal was becoming an experiment in scrounging. We were also trying to minimize unpacking at this point. So, we planned to eat lunch and then skip dinner. The boat didn’t leave at 1:00…or 2:00…or 3:00. It left at 6:00. Then it had to turn around again. Evidently, they put the cars on wrong so the whole thing was listing. They had to return to port to put arrange them correctly. The boat really and truly left at 8:00 so we headed down there nice and early to make sure that we could get all of our stuff there. We got there at around 2:00am for a 3:00am arrival. Guess what time the boat didn’t come and what time it started raining. The boat finally limped in to Koro after sunrise at around 7 or 8. I stopped keeping track in there somewhere due to delirium. One of the engines had failed, the water pump had failed, and the lights on the lower deck had failed, but the boat made it and nothing short of the boat being on fire or actively sinking would have preventing me from getting on it.

So, we did. Just a short 4-hour trip to Savusavu and we would be free from the burdens of travel to Koro forever. Then we got to Savusavu. Well, one of the winches to pull the boat into port broke so they couldn’t pull us in. We sat in the harbor for 3 hours while they tried to fix it. Finally, they tied a rope to a truck on land and the truck pulled us ashore. And thus ends the last time that I plan to ever ride the SOFI ferry again. All in all, it took us 14 hours to get from Koro to Savusavu, two dots on a map that on any map you probably have are indecipherable from each other.

Anyway, we are here in our new village—a large-ish village about 2 hours by bus outside of the town of Savusavu. Savusavu itself is known as the “Hidden Paradise,” and while I wouldn’t go that far, it is nice. Most importantly, it has stores and in those stores are cheese, and jam, and peanut butter, and VEGETABLES! It is a 4-hour round trip to get there so you have to mean it to go there, but the fact that we can is revolutionary to us. We got off Koro once every couple of months and only then if we had a conference or something. We just got to the village but so far, it seems great. The biggest difference is that they have had a Peace Corps Volunteer before. That means that in the Fijian way, we are always being compared to him (and evidently, he was super-PCV here. The man did amazing things from what I can tell), but it means that they really want us here. They know what Peace Corps is and is not and had been begging for another volunteer for some time.

Our house is pretty awesome. We had a great house on Koro, but this makes our old house look like a hovel. It is owned by a woman who spent enough time in Australia to have upped her standards a bit. It is a 2 bedroom concrete block house with lots of space. It is right in the village with our front porch (yep) overlooking the Methodist church and the sea behind it. It isn’t quite the view that we had on Koro, but anytime that your porch looks at the water, complaining is moot. The only issues have to do with dirt. The last volunteer here was a single, young, and clearly dirty male. If the rumors hold true, he didn’t pick up a broom or rag in 2 years. I believe it. Then after he left, the filth had 9 months of time to marinate while the house was unoccupied. So, we walked into that mess. It is still a work in progress but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Since the cyclone, there is no electricity in this part of the village. That is a bit of a bummer and will make computer access a little more difficult and less frequent. So, if you are used to reading my wit on this blog on a regular basis, it will be much less frequent in the near future. E-mail will be similarly disrupted. As for phones, the phones that we have been using (mine: 7413233 and Sally’s: 7413231) don’t work here. We have a number for now that does, sort of, work here. It is 9346384. If you are calling, use that one for now. We will keep the other phone numbers for use around town and the rest of Fiji, but if you are trying to call in the near future, use 9346384. We also have our new address. So, here is the summary of information:

Address:

Brian Smithers/Sally Moyce
Box 904
PO Savusavu
Fiji Islands

Phone: 9346384

One really great thing about this move is how easy it just became to come and visit us. We are pretty well booked out through August but after that, we are looking for visitors!

Family Vacation

My parents visited a couple of weeks ago and it was some pretty good timing for us. We had just found out that we were being moved from our house and since it was a house at the high school compound, they were also taking away Sally’s job there to justify removing us from the house. We were having a rough time, so my parents coming and us taking a little vacation was just what the doctor ordered, but it didn’t start particularly well because our ferry broke.

The original plan was for my parents to fly from LA to Nadi and then take a short flight from Nadi to Savusavu, where they would catch the ferry to come to Koro. Well, the ferry broke and was grounded in Suva stranding my parents in Savusavu where they stayed for a couple of days while we figured out how to get together. We decided the only option was to hire a small boat from Koro to go and pick them up. It was pricey. Then the winds picked up. Koro and Savusavu are not especially close. You can’t see one from the other on the horizon for example. Well, my parents rode in about a 10 foot boat over the open Koro Sea in 25 knot winds…on my Mother’s birthday. It was awful, I am told, but they made it. We would not subject anyone else to that trip.

Once they made it to Koro, we had a wonderful time. We stayed one day in Dere Bay, the rich, white side, before heading over to our village for some culture. And they got it. We dressed them up in Fiji clothes, drank kava, presented the isevusevu to the chief and hung around Fiji-style. It was great. From there we hit the road and that is where our vacation really starts in my eyes.






After the overnight ferry from Koro to Viti Levu, we hung out in Suva for just a bit and then hopped a bus to the Coral Coast where we stayed at a little place called Tambua Sands Beach Resort. It was pretty cool—nice white, sandy beach and comfy bures (little houses for sleeping), but the food wasn’t great. This was our first taste of tourist-traveling. Where we live, you can’t buy any food out so either you make something yourself or someone makes it for you, but either way it is free. Even when we go to Suva, I know that I can grab lunch for $1. So, when I saw that drinks were $10 and dinners were $15-$20, I couldn’t believe it. I realize that isn’t that big of a deal on the US market, but here it is highway robbery. Anyway, it took me a bit to get over the feeling of being robbed on this trip.







Finally, we shoved off to the Yasawas (with another case of those 40’s) to Nacula Island where we stayed at a place called the Oarsman’s Bay Lodge. We chose it because it was as far into the Yasawas as the ferry boat goes, figuring there would be less tourists (there were) and because it sits on what is referred to in Lonely Planet as the best beach in Fiji (it was). I can’t begin to tell you how beautiful this place is. Photos will have to do, but it was certainly everything you might think of when you say the words “Tropical Paradise.” We also chose the Oarsman’s Bay Lodge because it is owned and operated but a Fijian village and we want to support those ventures whenever we can. That usually means you suffer on some of the food and amenities, but this place was still pretty cool. I would go back in a heartbeat. (In fact, when we figured that we were going to be moved from our site, Sally and I tried to get placed in that village to help them run and update their lodge in addition to some other projects.)












Then there was the diving. It is a bummer that I can't upload video here (really slow connection) because I have some good stuff of some sharks. Anyway:











Like all good things, this one ended. My parents flew out on a Tuesday, we hopped a bus back to Suva, had a power meeting with Peace Corps about our future (or lack thereof) on Koro and were back to Koro the next day. It was a great trip; we loved having my parents here who, even now in the their 60’s, are some of my favorite people to travel with. Who else would have ridden the open seas on a row boat to see us? They amaze me with their adventurous spirit and willingness to roll with the flow on a trip to Fiji, where the flow never rolls in a straight line. Plus they pay for stuff. So, Mom and Dad, I hope that you are planning your trip here for next year because we are counting on you. I thought that we might try foregoing the skiff entirely and try swimming from Vanua Levu to Taveuni!