6_

At the same conference mentioned in the previous post, we gathered that Monday night [this current post is being written over a week later] for our site announcements. It was a really nice evening... the 7's were in town also and everyone met at the home of the training director where a huge map of Fiji was laid out on the floor. After getting our site locations, we stood on the map so that our team mates could see where we were placed.

Everyone will be happy to know (especially any AMRG'ers reading this blog) that after approximately three years of wilderness search and rescue training, I will be exceptionally prepared for living and working in Suva, yes Suva, the largest city in the South Pacific, where I will be spending the next two years.

I was expecting a city for my placement and I had weighed the pros and cons early deciding that and urban placement definitely has its advantages and could be pretty cool. This thought process was built around rural cities however... smaller places like Lobassa or Nausori where I would have access to creature comforts and resources that utilize my background skills while still allowing me to keep touch with the rural communities. Suva is a metropolis compared to these places and very westernized.

This is not to say that I'm not excited... Having some time to think about my placement before writing this blog entry, I can say that I am very excited. I have been assigned to replace a volunteer who will be leaving after extending her PC tour for a third year. My position will be with with the Fijian Ministry of Health [MOH] working in their Oral Health Unit. That's the MOH building in the photo... and that's me jumping for joy.

Working at this position will be unique as I won't necessarily be working every day at the grass roots level. I'll have the opportunity to learn from and work with the health workers and policy makers at the government level as they understand and synthesize health issues at the macro level.

Since Peace Corps encourages its volunteers to have multiple projects, I will be uniquely placed to work with a variety of MOH departments. I have already inquired about Environmental Health [waste management, sanitation infrastructure etc.] opportunities and the signs look good. On top of that, my supervisor will be the director for the Central East [Cent/East] portion of the nation. If you look at a map of Fiji, "the nation" is all the area covered by the various islands... meaning that Cent/east is a big eff-ing region. There could also be opportunities for work related travel to the various islands in the eastern region.

My fears stem from lessons learned from design: I don't want to lose touch with the communities I'm supposed to be working on behalf of. In other words, while I'm in the city, I don't really know what's going on in the villages... or the settlements etc. I feel that the issue is even more important because of the obvious fact that I am not of the land and people.

With a week and half left of training before I move to my permanent site, I feel excited about the opportunities and experiences that lay ahead of me in Suva.

5_

Last week the FRE-7's [7's] and the FRE-8 [8's] attended a three day conference in the capital city Suva. Suva is the largest city in Fiji and, to my knowledge, one of the largest cities in the South Pacific. It's a hub city where business, politics, and trade occurs for the entire region.

The conference was a lovely break from our training communities and the sometimes smothering attention of our host families. We covered a host of topics, including technical training for volunteers and informational sessions on Peace Corps policy.

Our technical training was on HIV/AIDS education and pretty interesting. Often time, our trainers are PC volunteers who have already been in-country for a year. I really enjoy this kind of education as it reminds me of design school where so much of the knowledge was passed down from one class to the next.

Part of HIV/AIDS training is the inevitable "how to use a condom" demonstration. These demos can be a bit arresting: most everyone has a condom story, how it broke, how they left them on the nightstand, how they don't use them because they feel like snow-pants etc...given the fact that the actions around condom use are rather personal it was understandable that there was a bit discomfort by some people in the group when it came time to do the demo.

After the class room training we formed teams, loaded into vans and went off to different areas to actually conduct a training. I was interested in my group, a boys only vocational school, and how they would respond to the subject matter. Everyone was attentive though and had a good foundation of knowledge regarding safe sex, STI transmission, etc. We did some additional activities followed by my award winning performance of "Rubber Meets Banana."

The demo went smoothly, I was surprised by my maturity addressing the subject matter and really enjoyed working with the youth... as some of you know, my sense of humor can easily veer off the road of good taste, cartwheeling through the guard rails of decorum only to burst into flames...

I think what grounded me was a thought that popped into my head as we were finishing up training. It was a very clear thought, the kind that emerges in your mind completely intact and crystal clear. As some people were showing apprehension at demonstrating proper condom use to a group of 40-some boys, I thought about some of the privileged experiences I had had riding on ambulances. When I considered that I had watched a person die, that I had seen death, the idea of talking about life... healthy, safe, responsible life became laughably easy. The baggage surrounding the topic just wasn't an issue anymore.

When I originally experienced these events I wondered how they would inform my future actions. In this case, I consider myself lucky to have those experiences to fall back on.

4_

I have been learning a little bit here and there about indigenous Fijian customs while living with my Indo-Fijian host family. One of the more interesting customs is known as kerekere (approximately pronounced as "kerry-kerry").

More will be written about this custom as I either A. experience it first hand, or B. my friends here in Fiji relate their own stories to me. Essentially, anyone within one's Fijian community can, at any time, request one of your personal items.
Fijian culture being traditionally communal, it is not considered odd to ask your neighbor for a piece of their personal property (shoes, clothes, money, food, etc.)... the expectation is that eventually it will be THAT persons turn to ask for something and thus everything stays balanced.

What isn't stated about the kerekere custom is that there is no explicit onus for the borrower to return the property of the borrowee. In other words- if someone wants to kerekere my wristwatch and I let that person, I have essentially given my wristwatch away (I can however kerekere it back). This seemed to work out fine before drastic disparities in wealth began to beset the nation (i.e. people with toys).

There is no responsibility to the borrowee to actually give their property over when asked- and many volunteers forgo participation in this custom from the beginning so as not to be asked once for some sugar, twice for an iPod. One story was told of a volunteer whose sandals were constantly kerekere'd by someone in the village. At first the volunteer was pissed, but eventually became comfortable finding the person and requesting their footwear back (and no longer leaving them outside his hut).

The Indo-Fijian culture here in Fiji has no kerekere custom because their communities are not explicitly communal. It's too early for me to have an opinion about this practice- for now I've just been entertained by stories of kerekere'd items.

My favorite so far? The volunteer who returned to her site from vacation to see that the village had attempted to follow her lead and dig some nice, deep trash pits. How? They'd kerekere'd a front end loader from the road construction crew outside the village.

3_ It was a great honeymoon...

Fortunately for me, the ebullience of arriving in country has worn off... and I can begin sharing the stories I secretly believe are responsible for the scant draw of friends and family to this blog- good 'ol stories of hardship.

Actually, nothing I've experienced thus far counts as hardship- if anything, it reminds me once again of how wildly disproportionate our level of security is in the United States and the West compared with the rest of the world.

I did get sick recently though; FRE-8 is in the training phase of our service (for the next five weeks) and we meet once a week to watch a traditional cultural performance from the Fijian or Indo-Fijian community. Half way through the performance I started to get a case of raw throat and I knew a full blown sore throat was only a night away.

Exacerbating the issue was my inability to quickly adapt to my host families living situation. My host father is a dairy farmer who wakes up at 4:30am every morning to milk the cows. His wife wakes up at 5:00 to begin breakfast prep for the children who need to meet the bus by 6:45. Even with my ear plugs, my room still fills with light because the walls of my room (which is an addition to the corrugated shed-like structure of the house) don't quite connect with the ceiling.

On top of that- the dogs in the settlement are in heat which attracts all the dogs from the neighboring villages. They've been fighting and howling outside my window (which normally begins around 3:00am (doesn't everything?!). The dog issue will resolve itself but the roosters also need to chip in (the coop is caddy corner to the house) and they fire up anywhere between 2:30am (normally just an errant cock-a-doodle-f-you) to a full blown repeat after me between 4:30 and 6:00am.

Much like anywhere else, the radio gets cranking with Hindi pop music (a mix of the sugary top 40's singing set to techno beats) as soon as maataajii is up. So to make a long story short, I had been rocking a pretty gnarly sleep deficit. Then I got the sore throat.

I woke up with chills and went to training day looking like it was an Erie autumn. I tried to snag an hours rest over lunch and talked to our medical officer who was absolutely awesome. She confirmed my sore throat and was ready with the antibiotics if the situation got worse. She also got me a gift- industrial strength ear-plugs.

That night I went to bed around 8:00am and slept straight on till 6:30am. I had completely bundled up and just sweated the bug out. I'm feeling great now and looking forward to a good night's sleep with my new ear plugs.

2_ The Indo Fijians...

After our orientation process each FRE-7 was designated to learn Hindi or Fijian. Save for myself and what should have been five others, the rest of the group was tasked with learning Fijian, the indigenous language here. Unfortunately, two of our members were moved to the Fijian language group as something hadn’t worked out with their future site placements. This left the Hindi group with three members including myself.

I don’t want to write at length yet about the Indo-Fijians living in Fiji as I don’t know enough yet. The basic information is that the Indo-Fijian community makes up around 40% of the population. They are the descendents of indentured laborers brought to Fiji by the British to serve as farmers and laborers in the sugar cane plantations.

Because laborers came from a variety of regions and castes, the Indo-Fijian language and culture adapted to accommodate all the differences- the caste system (as near as I can tell) was eliminated and the language “Fiji-Hindi” became an amalgam of several Hindu dialects plus additional Fijian words.

So, to anyone wondering if I would be able to plop myself down in Delhi and start working immediately after Peace Corps, the answer is… maybe, but it would be challenging. I have been told that a person fluent in Fiji-Hindi can “get by” in most areas of India, but the language is different enough that it would still be difficult since the vocabulary and conjugation reflects the smashing together of different Hindi dialects, adoption of some Fijian language vocabulary, and modified English words.

At this point, it’s all moot as I can’t even talk about eating dinner in the past, present, or future tense.

Historically, there has been tension between the Indo-Fijian and Fijian communities. Because the IF’s came to Fiji as indentured labor, very few of them have been able to actually purchase land (which was communally owned by villages and chiefs).

I don’t want to get into the minutia of lifestyle and education practices between the two groups as I know so little at this point and to attempt to summarize would be insulting- I will say however that land ownership is a big issue in the IF community as they have worked hard to “make it” here and find themselves with power and capital but no land, while some Fijians find themselves to be impoverished but with plenty of communal land. The history of this dynamic has been written about in a variety of sources and is very interesting.

In my IF settlement, we live close to two Fijian villages and our community have several friends in each of them. School children are in mixed Fijian/IF classes and many Fijians learn Hindi as they work with IF. In short- the dynamic between the ethnicities is complex and textured and not as black and white as I first though when researching the country prior to my trip.

1_Arrival

[note: due to my current location, I cannot routinely update my blog. I write the entries as I have time and then copy and paste them into new blog entries- this means that the frequency at which I update is not directly tied to when I actually wrote the original post.... thanks]


I am already getting the impression that the phrase “many things have happened since I last wrote” will become a re-occurring theme in this blog; at least for the next seven weeks or so while I am in the Pre-Service Training (PST- we love our acronyms here…) phase prior to site assignment.

My time in LA was rather tense, as I think it was for most of the team. All of us were coming from different points in life but we all left something or someone behind. For me, LA was difficult as I found myself in an in-between point between life as I knew it and the addition I was about to add to it.

FRE-8 (Fiji Re-Entry Group 8- or, the eigthPeace Corps group to come to the country since the post re-opened in 2003) is awesome. I had been expecting to be one of the older people in the group but was surprised to find that the average age of my group is around 27. We have a very diverse make up, with a bunch of people older than me bringing some pretty unique experiences to the table.

As a cross sample, consider the following: Former land developer, a woman that was in the process of getting her dive rescue credentials, a woman who wrote her capstone on toilets and sanitation, a former LA County lifeguard, a Yoga instructor, a white-water rafting guide, social workers, a mental health councilor, an aquatic ecology specialist, a public health worker, another wilderness first responder… the list goes on.

Needless to say, I’m excited about my team.

We arrived in Nadi (pronounced Nawn-Dee) around 5:30am and after a lengthy luggage collection process made our way to a bus which took us to our orientation location on the other side of the island. The first smell when I stepped out of the airport was a smell I’ve come to enjoy- it’s a heavy smell of exhaust wrapped in a warm, humid blanket. It instantly took me back to other places where I’ve experienced these smells- Tanzania, Ethiopia, Haiti- and the personal growth these locations and experiences brought.

As I considered this, the tense feelings I had in LA immediately disappeared- they fell away and were replaced by a feeling of calm that surprisingly has not left me yet. I learned early on that I basically have received everything I could have hoped for: I will be learning Fijian Hindustani (what some Indo-Fijians refer to as “broken Hindi” as it is not the proper Hindi taught in schools but more of a street language) and working in a public health capacity- likely attached to the Fijian Ministry of Health or some NGO working with this entity.