In Fiji

In Fiji it is perfectly normal to…

1. Go swimming fully clothed

2. Take a rain bath or bath in the river… wearing clothes 

3. Have teatime a half-hour before your lunch break…

4.  … And then again a couple hours after lunch break

5. Inform your co-worker/friend/family how fat they are getting

6. Walk around town without any shoes

7. Drink kava/washdown through the night into the next morning

8. Take naps in the middle of the day during a workweek

9. Take naps after any meal

10. Lie down while eating

11. Scrape the inner eyelid with a blade of grass to “cleanse the eye”

12. Offer to share your food to anyone whenever you are eating

13. Ask anyone where he or she is going

14. Yell out to people in passing vehicles

15. Have a silent conversation across the street with someone involving a lot of pointing

16. Call a gay or feminine man a “poofta” and a black person (not Fijian) the “N” word.

17. Bundle an infant in layers of clothing, booties, cap, and large blanket when it is boiling hot outside.

18. Cure any pain with a coconut oil massage

19. Drink beer with a group of people out of a single shot glass

20. Offer the shirt off your back to help someone in need… or if they just like your shirt

Cyclone & Xmas

I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while; it’s been pretty crazy over here between Cyclone Evan and then the holidays. I have never experienced a cyclone before, so that was interesting. Now that I have done it, I feel no need to do it again. It hit the west pretty hard and lasted an entire day for us…  I might have been just a bit scared to be honest ;) Evan claimed our door (still waiting to have that repaired) and did some damages to the rain gutter, roof, and our ceiling needs to be re-nailed in the dining area, but our house was very stable. The house did get quite a lot of water in it because of the crazy winds, so we had to do plenty of clean up the next day. We lost water for a little bit and power for a week or so… not too bad.

After the cyclone I headed back to my village Tailevu to spend Christmas with my host family. I had such a great time and did not want to come back to my home! I love my host family so much; I’m always laughing and smiling when I’m with them. I have missed seeing the kids L I spent the trip swimming in the river, helping my brother’s wife Selai with the household chores like collecting firewood and laundry, and drinking grog/washdown with fiji friends. It might possibly have been the best Christmas I have ever had… stripped of the materialism of an American Christmas. I was with a family, a village, so welcoming and loving, whose only concern was having a good time with one another. America definitely has a thing or two to learn from Fiji. After Christmas I went back to my town for the New Year… celebrating with (yup, you guessed it) more grog, washdown, and dancing. We also did the traditional water and baby powder fight, which was a first for me.

Now it’s back to life as usual, work and hanging out with family and friends. We had a Typhoid outbreak in my town after the cyclone, so I’ve been working with the disaster response team for the past week. I am also going to start some Fijian language lessons this week … let’s see how that goes!