Mana

My camera fails to caption it, but I can hardly make the distinction between the sky and the sea, both are sky blue or sea blue, whichever you prefer. These are my last hours on Mana Island at a backpackers resort. It was fun, nothing like rural Fiji but a lot like television and internet Fiji. The majority of the people on the island is an European white tourist (Australian and New Zealanders are regarded European too) and the locals speak English well.

I did some cool stuff, caught and ate my own fish by handline fishing (and caught a piece of coral of which everyone thought it would be a huge fish) and did some nice snorkeling. The Fijian lovo, a feast that is cooked underground, was nothing like the Naivicula lovo, but at least this one had plenty of cutlery and chairs. Furthermore, the kava/grog session continually had people standing in the circle, wearing hats and walking in front of each other, all complete 'don'ts' of a grog session. But hey, at least everyone could speak English to me, something that the Naivicula grog sessions did not have.

I am waiting for the boat to take me to the main island again and will spent the rest of the weekend in Suva with Kim to wait for the boat to Taveuni, which is supposed to be really beautiful and where I really want to go diving for the first time.

Nadi

So yesterday was cool, James, one of the volunteers from the organisation that Kim is with celebrated his birthday in Suva. Nightlife in Suva is a bit weird but also kind of what you would expect of it: a mixture of white people, Fijians and Indians everywhere, with the music stopping when Fiji had to play in the Seven's Rugby Cup in Russia.

Furthermore, I said goodbye to my host families, which was a bit stupid because they were nice people I spent quite some time with the last three weeks. I travelled to Nadi from Suva and won't come back to Naivicula. I am now in a backpackers hostel in Nadi and it's beautifully awkward. All the people arriving are mostly tired from their flights (the international airport is in Nadi) and the hostel's staff is doing an extreme effort to act like fun and spontaneous Fijians, memorizing your name and making bad jokes all the time.

I'll be heading to Mana tomorrow and am now going to check out if this hostel has any food.

Nadi

So yesterday was cool, James, one of the volunteers from the organisation that Kim is with celebrated his birthday in Suva. Nightlife in Suva is a bit weird but also kind of what you would expect of it: a mixture of white people, Fijians and Indians everywhere, with the music stopping when Fiji had to play in the Seven's Rugby Cup in Russia.

Furthermore, I said goodbye to my host families, which was a bit stupid because they were nice people I spent quite some time with the last three weeks. I travelled to Nadi from Suva and won't come back to Naivicula. I am now in a backpackers hostel in Nadi and it's beautifully awkward. All the people arriving are mostly tired from their flights (the international airport is in Nadi) and the hostel's staff is doing an extreme effort to act like fun and spontaneous Fijians, memorizing your name and making bad jokes all the time.

I'll be heading to Mana tomorrow and am now going to check out if this hostel has any food.

Drug Week

This last week in which I will be staying in Naivicula is Drug Week, a week with activities and guest speakers to raise awareness on drug and violence against women and children. Yesterday a high ranked local female police officer talked about drugs. Today, the children held a march through the village (which was pretty cool) someone from the Fijian Women’s Crisis Centre came to speak. During the march, in which everyone had posters and ribbons with slogans against drugs and violence, some children had found a Bob Marley poster (including Marley with a big joint) that they proudly waved around in the march.

On Thursday, Kim’s host families will host a small farewell party for the both of us, of which I hope it will be mostly for Kim. It is pretty weird sometimes when I also get (unjustly) credited/thanked for cool stuff Kim has done for the school, while she spent 5 months here and I come around for a few weeks. I think it mostly happens because I am still new and different for most people here, while everyone is already pretty used to Kim around.

On Friday, the school will hold a bazaar event to raise money, for which they are currently building nice sheltered stalls. According to Fijian custom, the villagers that build those drink kava afterwards with the head teachers and another teacher, which allowed me to finally try some (it had a pretty weird taste). The whole experience was a bit ironic as it was drug week and the ceremony was held inside a classroom decorated with anti-drugs slogans.

Furthermore, my library project is nearly coming to an end. The library is pretty neat already and Kim and I gave away loads of unused work books that were just collecting dust and attracting wasps. The library appears to be a pretty good environment for a kind of wasp that builds pretty gross and big nests with earth, and it did not take me very long to find a whole nest of live wasps when removing books from the upper shelves, but I am still alive and they are not.

Library

In the three weeks that I am staying at the teacher’s compound of the school, I am helping out and working in the school’s library. Don’t let the name library fool you too much, as it is more of a library/tool shed /computer lab/office, but the school received quite some books from an Australian organization that collects old primary school books and donates them to Fijian schools, so it has a bit more potential than just being a tool shed with books. The donation of old books is pretty generous and kind, but it also leads to pretty funny situations where there is a complete mismatch of book and location. For example, Skiing Techniques for Beginners, Golf Tactics for Pro’s and the golden discovery: The Day My Bum Went Psycho & Space Bums From Uranus. Pretty cool children’s books with childish humour to get children to pick up books and read. However, maybe not perfectly fit for a pretty conservative Christian village school. The teachers I showed these two books to could enjoy it and laugh about it, but insisted that we should not put them on the shelves but burn them. This is not as extreme as it sounds (but I like the idea of holding book-burning ceremonies for the sake of it, ever got a chance to burn books in a socially acceptable manner?), as everything that is thrown away here is burned because there is nobody who collects the trash in remote villages.

Well, furthermore I have been placing library cards in the books and cleaning the whole mess that we want to become a library and computer lab up, of which I am pretty sure I can keep myself busy with until next week. I will be staying here in Naivicula until next week Saturday, after which I will probably go to the small backpacker island of Mana for 4 nights, and then Kim and I will go to Taveuni (another, you guess it, island. They seem to like those around here). 

Things

So the church service we attended the first night was pretty interesting, completely in Fijian, but still very interesting. Most Fijians in the village are Methodists, but I think this service was a joined service with different preachers. Most of them spoke rather angrily; one of them tried his best to resemble Martin Luther King with a sulu (skirt), but I am not sure what ‘I have a dream’ is in Fijian.  For me, it was mostly interesting to meet some people from the village, even though I spend most of the time trying to explain to one incomprehensibly English speaking old man that my parents were still in the Netherlands. This kind of shows how some of the Fijians from the village have a bit of a harder time to understand me (and Kim), which is reasonable as I am also trying to understand them. The people living on the teacher’s compound are more understanding and very kind, but the children in the school are still too confused by my presence to speak English to me, which is of course kind of scary. That does not really matter as I am working in the library (well, office with some books, more on that later!) most of the time.   

Furthermore, I kind of made friends with the school manager and am trying to teach him Microsoft Word. He is 60 years old and wants to learn how computers work, and tries really hard, even though we had to start from scratch and teach him the basics of the mouse cursor etc.  He typed a basic document for me (try typing when you have never used a keyboard in your life) and that was pretty cool. I don’t really expect to make a change in the village, the biggest influence I had was bringing an old laptop from my mom’s work to the school, they were very happy and I they mentioned me for it in church (thanks mom!), but the 60 year old guy that never touched a computer made me happy with his courageous Microsoft Word skills.

Fiji

Heya!

While wearing a surprisingly comfortable sulu (a very formal skirt), I am currently staying in Naivicula, (pronounced Navydullah for those that are very interested in Fijian pronunciation) the village where Kim has been staying for the last few months. She lives on the compound of the school where she works, and I can now stay at the head teacher’s house.

The last few days have been very cool and interesting, seeing how Kim has lived the last few months and meeting the people she lived with. Fijian villages are traditional places when it comes to community and religion, and I was warmly welcomed into the houses of the people living on the compound.  All the kids in the school seem to know my name and are extremely interesting in this weird, white and tall Dutchmen, after they had just gotten used to Kim.

Before going into the village for a church service, I had to do a sevusevu, a ritual that all outsiders have to do before entering the village. It involves introduction to the chief of the village and the drinking of kava, a traditional drink that has some kind of light narcotic effect. However, most of the villagers were in the middle of a fasting period of three weeks, so I still have to wait to try it.

Now I got to the moment where I have way more to write but no time to do so, so that will have to wait until later!