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.