The Rain Came

Well, be careful what you wish for.  If you have been reading, you know that Fijian has been in the grip of a serious drought prompting a state of emergency, rationing, and the like.  After a decent stretch of being largely unaffected by the rain shortage, my village also ran out of water.  We had access to one tap not too far from our house where we could fill up buckets in the morning before that went dry.  Then the rains came.  For two glorious days, we had as much water as we wanted.  There was even enough water pressure to take a shower!  Then the floods came.  The floods washed out the pipe.  Then the water shut off entirely.  So, I started collecting rain water in buckets.  Then the rain stopped.  Thank the good folks in China who made my toilet seat cover.  You don’t want to know what is in there.

Otherwise, things are good.  The Giants have made it to round 2 of the playoffs, basically proving my theory that I need to be out of the country for the entirety of the baseball season for the Giants to succeed.  So, it was nice living near you all while it lasted, but I am sure that you understand.  I am a team player.  The next question is whether this effect on the Giants’ success is dependent on hemisphere or distance from the US.  I am thinking of Anchorage for my PhD, and am thinking that living off the continent may be enough of a distance to make the Giants at least competitive.  Oregon clearly was too close.

Back to the water, that is now one of my main projects.  I have been working with the government to try to secure funding to fix the water supply so that it doesn’t get washed out every time it rains.  Slow and steady on that front.  At the last village meeting, we were still in the drought and were out of water.  I gave my big speech about water conservation and how we need to fix all of the leaky taps in the village.  (“Leak” is a relative term.  Every tap leaks here.  It is only a problem when it is broken enough so that it can’t be turned off).  Naturally, it is pretty frustrating to me when there is no water at my house and up the pipe are 20 taps that can’t be turned off.  Amazingly, they community had not yet made that connection.  So, it was decided that in two days time, a group of us would do a survey of all of the taps in the village that needed repair.  Then we would have a fundraiser to make the funds to fix them and we would get to it.  Well, the next day the sky opened up.  That was the end of any talk of water conservation or fixing the taps.  One might be tempted to think that it will be a matter of time before there is another dry spell, but Fijians will be damned if they are going to think ahead.  So, there will be no fixing of taps until we are out of water.  We were so close.  I just needed that drought to continue for a couple of more days…

Sally is on a girls weekend in Taveuni so it is just me and the cat, only the cat hates people.  So, it is just me.  I don’t understand how the only cat that manages to live of our string of cats turns out to be the worst pet in the world.  I have never been so thoroughly used for food before.  Sure Stu bit someone every once in a while, but at least I knew that he liked me.  This damn cat (Kalima, Fijian for 5th)refuses to be touched and bites you if you try.  There is no cuddling, no sitting on laps, and certainly no purring.  He just comes in for food and then leaves.  His days as “our” cat I think are numbered as Sally has begun the kitten hunt again.

On the success note, the Regional Director for Peace Corps in the Pacific region is coming to visit Fiji and wants to see a successful site.  So, they are bringing him here!  Cool, huh?  The village is pretty excited and is planning to do a serious sevusevu (kava presentation) ceremony, do a meke dance, and make a bunch of food.  It should be a good time.  Since Sally really does all of the work around here, I will need to figure out a way to look busy while he is here.  Then I am going back to Suva with the director for a fancy-shmancy dinner at our Country Director’s house.  Thank you tax dollars!!  (By comparison, the US spent more per day in Iraq than it has spent on Peace Corps in all of the years combined in the entire Pacific region since 1968.)  I will enjoy my trip to Suva and my free dinner, thank you.

And as some of you who bother to write or email to me may know, the Grad school hunt has begun.  The long list now includes Montana, Montana St, Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, University of Alaska Anchorage, Colorado St, and Cornell (wrong coast, I know).  The short list looks more like Montana or Alaska but things can change.  I have been emailing with a number of folks at a number of schools and I am excited and encouraged and scared numb.  That means that if you have an opinion, you should speak up sooner than later.

I had planned to include some photos of our latest dive, especially because they would have included a video of a hammerhead shark that we saw.  WHOA!  Alas, Sally took that camera with her on her  trip so it will have to wait.  Plus, my internet connection is incredibly slow.  Next time.  I promise this blog will be more entertaining next time.  Does anyone even read this besides my sister?  Thanks Danielle for keepin’ it real.

Things I Used to Like

Here are some things that I used to really like that I now hate with unyielding passion:

1. Children: Yep, you heard me right. Go ahead and call me a monster. As my friends and family create a small army with their offspring in my absence, I have come to despise the little creatures. Some of you may remember that I once taught children and that I really enjoyed it. I really loved being around kids and shaping their minds. To be fair, I should probably be a little more specific about the kinds of children that I would choose to purge. They are 7-12 year old Fijian children. I won’t be able to explain this in a way that doesn’t make me out to be the worst person you know, so I won’t even try. Nothing is required of children in this country as far as following rules. It is a remarkably safe place so there are no reasons to put restrictions on your kids for the sake of safety. As such, children run free in the village, which is great. The problem is that they do whatever they want in these marauding bands just looking for trouble. This usually results in destruction to my garden.

2. Dogs: This one is really sad for me. I really like(d) dogs. A lot. I now hate them. Passionately. Dogs here are treated like…well…dogs. I now know that when you treat dogs like really stupid children, showering them with attention and good food, they turn out to be pretty cool (Stu’s biting problems aside). However, if feral, starving dogs just sort of hang around the village they breed like rabbits and then start to resemble marauding packs of children (see above). They are emaciated, mangy mutts that are in no way cute or useful. They are scavengers that destroy compost bins and keep you up all night with their fighting, barking, and general mayhem.

3. Chickens: Many of you know that I generally like birds, spending inordinate amounts of time money on equipment to preserve their likenesses. I also love the idea of chickens, with their gifts of fresh eggs and amazing ability to turn kitchen scraps into fertilizer. But God help you if your neighbors decide that they always lacked a rooster and get one. In movies, roosters crowing in the distance to wake you up just after sunrise makes them seem quaint and useful (saving electricity on the alarm clock). This is a lie. Roosters have no idea what time it is; they just make unholy noise at all times. It is amazingly loud. That isn’t the worst of it. Chickens take garden destruction to a new level. In their single-minded determination to find each and every seed that ever fell from a plant, they dig, scratch, and peck at every square inch of ground in a half-mile radius. My neighbors’ new chickens are much closer than that to my garden. Destruction has ensued.

4. The sun: OK, it is easy to shoot holes in this one. This isn’t nearly as expendable as children to our survival. We need the sun, I get it. The problem is that we have seen way too much of it lately. I haven’t really been around for too many seasons in Fiji, but I am told that we are working on the driest year on record. That would make sense; it has rained something like 3 times in the last 3 months. After feeling pretty lucky that our water hadn’t run out in the village, the water ran out. Now we have no water for most of the day. There is a period right around the middle of the day when we do have water and then I fill up as many water-holding containers as I can. Showers are out—now I take bucket baths and daily I find new ways to decrease my water usage while washing dishes. Please sun, go away. Come again another day.

This was fun. A couple of weeks ago, Sally and I went over to the neighboring village to go to a wedding. It was pretty cool. Mostly, the clothes were cool. Thanks to Christianity, the actual ceremony was approximately as one would expect it. After church though, the party got started. Dancing isn’t allowed in many Fijian villages (like ours and this one) but sometimes exceptions are made. Weddings are a good excuse. I don’t know why dancing isn’t allowed. Everyone loves it and as far as I can tell, the gates of hell do not open when people partake, but someone told someone 150 years ago that Christ doesn’t like dancing and so it got banned (along with bare breasts, which was a loss of equal severity). Anyway, we got to dance and nothing gets the crowd going more than whitey dancing. It was a good time. Of course, there was a lot of food and plenty of kava but for my money, I’m going to weddings for the dancing.

And with every wedding, there of course has to be a funeral. There has been a fair amount of death in the village lately. Our neighbor died last week. She was an elderly diabetic so it was not a huge surprise, but I just came from a meeting to talk about the upcoming funeral of the father of a very good friend of mine, Mala. This was more of a surprise, and I am pretty floored by it. People just up and die here. Whenever someone gets sick or injured in the US, there is great tumult until a solution is found, death only coming when all possible efforts have been exhausted. Here, death just happens. People don’t rush off to the hospital; they die. I feel awful for my Mala and his family and am once again reminded of the fragility of creation’s walk on this world—excepting children, chickens, and dogs which seem indestructible.

GO GIANTS!!

It is another postcard day here in Fiji.  In fact, we have now had a few too many of those as the government just declared a state of emergency due to the persistent drought.  This is supposed to be the dry season but I am pretty sure that in the tropics, dry doesn’t mean no rain for three months.  We actually did just get a little rain but it wasn’t nearly enough.  The funny thing is that since this was called a “La Nina” year, we are supposed to get much higher than average rainfall.  We were promised buckets of rain by some high-ranking meteorologist.  He was wrong.

We are actually OK in the village as our water comes from a spring.  Our pressure is low so we don’t usually get showers—just bucket baths.  In other areas, there is no water at all.  Since much of the cities’ electricity comes from a hydroelectric dam, rolling blackouts have started there.  Our lack of electricity is nothing new and can’t be blamed on a water shortage.  We are holding steady at 3 hours a night!

Interestingly enough, I am now working on a water project to fix the water system here so that there is running water in the village, even when it rains!  I bet you didn’t think that was possible.  A couple of years ago, a flood took out part of the village’s water supply and it was fixed "”Fiji-style.”  That means that every time it rains, the pipe gets clogged and/or a section of pipe that now runs through another river comes apart and washes downstream.  Usually when it happens, it takes a few days to get it repaired and for the tank to fill back up.  So, I am hunting up money to get that fixed.  I am hoping that the government is game.

Otherwise, the farming continues!  I have just figured version 2 of my Backyard Gardening book and Peace Corps has now sported the money to publish it.  Version 1 was done in-house as a manual.  It has been a pretty big success (by Fijian standards) so Peace Corps is going to actually publish it now.  I am pretty excited.  Sadly, the illustrator for the book had to return to the US due to knocking up his wife.  I just heard from him—in a couple of weeks time, he got a job, bought a house, and two cars.  I realize that sounds an awful lot like normal life to most of you, but it sounds like some fantasy land to me.  I haven’t driven a car in well over a year now and I can’t imagine setting an alarm clock to get to a job on time.

The last time I lived abroad was in 2002 in Australia.  Of course, you immediately recognize that year as they year that the San Francisco Giants went to the World Series, getting within three outs in game 6 of winning it.  You all remember it, I am sure.  Well, here I am living abroad again and here go the Giants again making a run at the playoffs.  If they go to the World Series again, there is a good chance that my years of living stateside are over.  If I have to live in tropical paradises to ensure that my beloved Giants go the the big show, I will gladly accept my role.  I have enjoyed my time in the US, but you understand I am sure.

Man, this is some nice weather

Seriously, it is like paradise, the weather here right now. Funny thing is that it is winter. Now, I haven’t written in a little while, it’s true. I now have a computer again and even have figured out internet access at the house. After we fixed the electrical system in the village and then the village fixed the problem of figuring out how to pay for the fuel for the generator, we even have pretty steady electricity now (3 hours every evening, more or less). Point being, I have no excuses for not blogging other than that life here has sort of turned out like life, you know dull for the one who lives it.

When I got here and started living this life, everything was so new and entertaining, disgusting, sad, etc. Now it just feels like life. It is just what I do and I don’t think that there is anything to write about. Hootenanny, I know. There are actually all kinds of cool things going on.

First, we are getting some work done…or at least started. Getting started on something seems like a decent accomplishment here. First, water. The cyclone in March washed out a section of pipe for the main water supply that comes from a small catchment in the hills behind the village. Well, the village fixed that with some silly putty and spit so now every time that it rains, the river washes out that section and the village goes without water for a few days while we try to find the pipes and put them back together (with new spit). Now we are going to get some cyclone relief money to fix it right.

Farming: as always, I am keeping my hands in the soil. Evidently, there is something of a green revolution happening in the village now. They had no idea that one could just up and grow food by your house, or so they tell me. Either way, after laughing at me for a few months for trying to grow veggies in the village, I am now swimming in delicious veggies. WHO’S LAUGHIN’ NOW!! Me, that’s who and now everyone is planting like crazy. Now, I sort of make the rounds, checking on folks’ gardens, answering questions, and working with them. It is really fun, because a lot of these veggies, Fijians have never seen grown and didn’t know that they could be. A number of the new gardeners are poised to start making some mad coin from the veggies in the near future. That will be fun to watch.

I am also working on a larger scale vegetable farm with a family and we are going to get some funds from the Ministry of Agriculture to get serious: plowing, irrigation, nursery, etc. We are well on our way and have planted a large area but are sort of stuck at this point as it is becoming unwieldy to try to water it by hand hauling buckets from the swamp. The nursery will also allow them to cover an area to grow some things during the wet season when the market price is the highest. I can’t wait for that because it will also mean that I won’t have to go without tomatoes and bell peppers next Jan-March!

Down the road, I am looking to try to figure out a hydro-power setup for the village’s electricity, but I have run into a series of roadblocks there. Namely, no one want to pay for it. So, I have put it on the backburner and we will continue literally burning money to run the generator.

On a fun note, Sally’s aunt Pamela and her cousin Melissa came for a short but sweet visit. Actually, they hung out with us for five days as part of a larger trip including two other countries: New Zealand and expensive Fiji. It was great having them here since it is always great to have family and friends here. It is basically the only time that we travel so we get to take a little break. And of course, with our gentle prodding, they usually arrive with appropriate amounts of alcohol and chocolate. We went up to Taveuni, hung out on the beach, did some snorkeling, and went on some waterfall hikes. It was great. I sure do live in a beautiful country.

Oh, and I have picked up the ukulele. It is a really fun little instrument and it makes me famous, being white and all.

Here is me impersonating superman!

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!