The New Normal

I got this idea from one of the other Vanuadina trainees (thanks Carissa!) so I thought it would be fun to share with everyone some of the things that make up my new normal:

1.  Church

A good week for me consists of only going to church once for two hours.  A bad week could mean going to church three to four days out of the week.  A normal weekly church schedule goes like this: regular church is on Sundays followed by youth group church on Mondays and family church on Thursdays.  As someone who isn’t extremely religious back in America, this has been a huge adjustment.  The policy for Peace Corps volunteers and church is adapt but don’t adopt.  This means that we are encouraged to try to adapt to the new culture and if everyone in your village goes to church on Sundays then you should go to church on Sundays but it doesn’t mean you have to adopt the religion or the practices. 

2.  Men that wear skirts

Formal wear for men in Fiji is a button down shirt or sometimes a bula shirt (tommy bahama shirts on steroids) with a pocket sulu.  A pocket sulu is made out of the same material as slacks but it’s a skirt. 

3.  Bucket showers

I take a bucket shower everyday.  I fill up a bucket with cold water and use a small bowl to pour it over my head while I wash my hair and body.  Imagine doing the ice bucket challenge about 40 times in a row every morning at 6am. 

4.  T9

The phones that Peace Corps issues us are similar to the first phone I ever had in 8^th grade and I type using T9.  I’m very good at it and my family likes to sit and watch how fast I can text. 

5.  Wildlife in unexpected places

There are just bugs and animals everywhere.  We have birds in our kitchen, lizards all over the house, rats in the ceiling, and bugs everywhere.  There are flying cockroaches the size of a cell phone , spiders the size of an orange, and centipedes in cracks of the bathroom.  Last time I counted I had 81 bug bites on my body.

6.  Eating on the floor

Eating on the floor and sitting on the floor in general is very common in Fiji.  My house only has two chairs in it so when we have meals we all sit around a cloth on the floor.  It’s taken about two months for my back and my hips to get used to sitting criss-cross applesauce everyday but I’m almost there.

7.  No pants

I haven’t worn pants in two months.  Women aren’t allowed to wear pants in the village unless they are covered by a sulu so I find it easier to just wear skirts and dresses.

8.  Ilisapeci

My new name!  Ilisapeci is my Fijian name and the only people that call me Elizabeth are the other kai va lagi’s (white people). 

9.  “Smart in…”

This is the Fijian way of saying you are good at something.  For example ‘smart in volleyball,’ ‘smart in scraping coconuts,’ and ‘smart in speaking fijian’ are all things I’ve been told. 

10.  Coconut wireless

I’ve mentioned this in one of my posts before but it really has become so normal to me.  If I want the entire village to know something all I have to do is tell one person and wait about an hour.  Coconut wireless is not limited to village life though, if I go into Suva for the afternoon when I come home I will hear something like “my sister’s daughter’s husband saw you in Suva and said that you were buying green fabric at lunchtime.  What’s the fabric for? How long were you there? Did you forget to eat lunch?”

11.  Kava

Kava (yaqona) is pretty central in Fijian culture and community and it has become so normal for me to sit around the tonoa bowl a couple nights a week and just chat with my friends and throw back a couple bowls of kava. 

12.  Children

There are just children everywhere and they are always trying to climb all over you.

13.  Fijian language

For those of you wondering how my language training has been going, I am becoming more and more used to speaking and hearing Fijian.  I am at the point where I can understand the majority of what is said to me, but it takes me a while to respond.  Fijian is a very repetitive language, I always joke that it is actually only made up of about 5 words that you just put together to say different things.  For example one of the most entertaining sentences in Fijian is ‘vinaka vakalevu na vakasigalevu vinaka’ which means ‘thank you very much for the delicious lunch.’

October Events

Bula everyone!

Things have been getting really busy as I head towards the end of my stay in Vanuadina Village so here’s a recap on the last couple of weeks.

Fiji Day:

October 10^th was Fiji Day, which is the equivalent to the Fourth of July.  Vanuadina and five other villages near us had a big festival and rugby tournament at the local elementary school.   Rugby is a huge deal here in Fiji and it is the biggest national sport that people support so a village rugby tournament turned out to be a wild scene with screaming and shouting and banging on tin roofs.  The best part is that Vanuadina won the tournament!  This was a pretty big deal because Vanuadina is by far the smallest village that competed and other villages had two sometimes three teams.  This win obviously called for some massive partying in our village where the rugby boys were celebrated like kings with kava and seluselu’s (traditional celebratory lei/necklaces made out of plants). 

Team Vanuadina at the rugby tournament. 

Team Vanuadina + Vanuadina.

Some of my family and I with the trophy!

Fiji Day!

World Food Day:

Last Thursday we celebrated World Food Day at one of the nearby schools.  Each village group of trainees prepared a booth on a specific health topic.  Some of the topics were dental health, healthy plate, exercise, and the Vanuadina group did Diabetes (Mate ni Suka in Fijian).  The kids then all came around to each booth to listen to our talks and participate in some activities.  At our booth we had two people talking about the facts and statistics of Diabetes in Fiji, two people doing a sugar demonstration where we measured out the amount of sugar in some common snacks and drinks, and finally my partner and I coordinated a physical activity.  We had the kids do a one-legged race where we also blindfolded one of their eyes.  This was supposed to simulate some of the worst effects of Diabetes, which are loss of vision and amputation.  All in all it was an awesome day where I finally got to get a feel for what it might be like to do some health education while working here in Fiji. 

All the Vanuadina trainees ready to teach some kids about Diabetes!

Trainees in Action!

Jungle-based Learning:

So last Monday we finally took our LPI (Language I don’t know what the P stands for Interview).  This is kind of like the equivalent to a Pre-Service Training final exam where you have a conversation in Fijian and the interviewer determines your language competency level.  Once this was over we could relax on the language training a little bit and we got to do what our village calls ‘Jungle-based learning’.  Our families thought it was important for us to learn some basic Fijian survival skills so twice this week they’ve taken us out into the bush for “school.”  The first day was based in the jungle where we collected coconuts, husked them, opened them, and scraped them.  We also learned how to open green coconuts to get water, which is an extremely useful skill.  We had to collect foods around us and make lunch from it so we made rourou (dalo leaves in coconut cream) and ota (a fern plant).  The second day was river based so our families took us down to the river took us fishing and prawn-catching.  The two jungle-based learning sessions have easily been some of my favorite classes during training and were probably the most useful thing we’ve learned in Fiji so far. 

Just hanging out in the Jungle.

Diwali:

Last Thursday was Diwali, which is the Hindu festival of lights.  I had never celebrated Diwali before in America, but since there is such a significant Indo-Fijian Hindu population in Fiji it’s a pretty big holiday here.  Diwali for those of us who don’t participate in the religious part consists of walking around being invited into houses of all the Indian families and getting sweets while hundreds and hundreds of fireworks are being set off in every direction. 

Family:

So this isn’t really an event or anything but I just want to talk a little bit about what I’ve been doing at home and how family works in Fiji.  Every weekend we have these village social nights where we all go to the community hall and sit around the kava bowl, listen to music, dance, and sing some songs.  Last weekends social night was a fundraiser for our winning rugby team which meant it was a bigger celebration than some of the others and we all got baby-powdered and seluselu-ed.  I’m not entirely sure what the meaning of the baby powder is but whenever celebrations like this happen people come up to you and put it on your face and dump some on your head… hence the picture below where I look like Santa Claus.  I’ve also started playing volleyball with a bunch of people from my village almost every afternoon.  This is one of my new favorite things to do in the village, we have so much fun just hitting the ball around and it’s become one of the things that really keeps me grounded while here in Vanuadina. 

Baby Powdered and Seluselu-ed. 

Last night our families all threw us a HUGE going away dinner that had at least 40 people there.  We all said some thank you’s to our families and the village in general for welcoming us and being so kind to us.  We all cried including a lot of our families and it’s been making me think about how hard it is going to be to actually move out of Vanuadina on November 3^rd. 

This is Tuni, he is my 2 year old nephew and we have become really good friends.  He calls me Na (mom) and I can't even think about how sad I'm going to be when I have to say goodbye to him.  

Bugs of Fiji

Rocking my shades.

Here he is riding one of our dogs

Wearing my life jacket. Also this is my living room!

Ok now I want to talk a little about family dynamics here in Fiji.  First of all, in Fijian there are no specific words for sister or brother, instead there are only words for sibling of the same sex (tuakaqu for me) and sibling of the opposite sex (ganequ for me).  This has been very confusing for me because for me the word sister is the same as the word for a brother to the boys.  One of the most interesting things about Fijian family in my opinion is that there are people who are called your brothers and sisters who are actually what we would call cousins in America.  My dad’s brother’s children are called my siblings the same way that my mom’s sister’s children are my siblings.  BUT my dad’s sister’s children are my cousins (tavale), same with my mom’s brother’s children.  So for those at home reading this that means that Lydia and Nancy, all your kids are my siblings, and on my dad’s side Pat, Kevin, and John all your kids are my siblings according to Fijian culture.  To add some strange-ness, the tavale, or cousin, relationship is supposed to be one where you’re always poking fun at each other so cousins here are always being mean to each other.  Also, tavale can marry each other here in Fiji… so that’s different.

Quick shot of the view from the steps of my house. 

So there’s a recap on some of the stuff that’s been going on in here in Fiji.  This next week is my last week in the village and then I’ll be heading to Suva (the capital) for our swearing in ceremony.  Unfortunately, I know I’ve been saying that I’ll find out my placement on Halloween but it got moved back and site announcements won’t be until the 3^rd now.  Can’t wait to find out!

One Month Down, 25 To Go

It is a common Peace Corps saying that during your service the days will feel like months and the months will feel like days.  In my last post I said that I felt like I had already been in Fiji for months, but now after one month has officially passed, it seems like it has flown by. 

Last week we had Host Volunteer Visits.  This means that all the trainees got to travel around Fiji to go stay with a volunteer and get a glimpse into their daily lives.  I traveled to Tau Village, which is a pretty big (about 500 people) koro in the west.  One other trainee and I took four buses to get our host’s village.  Vanuadina Village to Nausori town, Nausori town to Suva, Suva to Sigatoka, and then a two hour bus into the interior to get to Tau.  When we got there we had to do sevusevu, which is the traditional welcoming ceremony that visitors must do when entering a new village.  This ceremony involves presenting the kava plant to the elders of the village and asking to be welcomed and permitted to stay.  Then we spent all of Tuesday checking out the village, getting to know some of the people, and seeing how our host’s nursing station works.  Wednseday we spent the day in Nadi.  We went to the Hindu temple in Nadi that is famous for its murals and unbelievable colors. 

These are pictures of the Hindu temple in Nadi.  Unfortunately it was cloudy and rainy the day we went, but it is beautiful!

After the visit, we had to come back to Vanuadina village to continue with our training.  When I got back home, my entire family was really excited to tell me about the ‘kai va laqi’ (European/white) tourists that came to the village while we were gone.  Let me try to break down how random this is… there are hundreds and hundreds of villages in Fiji, and Vanuadina is an exceptionally small one that isn’t particularly well known, so for this to become a “tourist destination” is very odd.  The new presence of tourists in Vanuadina has prompted some interesting conversations about what makes Peace Corps volunteers different from the average foreigner coming to see Fiji.  The other five trainees and I in the village immediately became very defensive when our families started gushing over these new tourists, so we tried to explain to our families why we didn’t like it.  This village and the people in it have become our family, our friends, and community so it’s upsetting to us to see buses of tourists come for a couple hours to experience village life without paying attention to the customs, culture, or rules of the village.  The difference is that Peace Corps volunteers work really hard to adapt to a community; to learn the language, understand the customs, respect any rules, and get to know the people. 

Speaking of village rules, I'm sure some of you are wondering what I mean by that.  Fijian culture is steeped in tradition, ritual, and to a certain extent superstition and one place that you can really see it is in the rules of the village.  Some of them make sense, and some of them seem to be completely random made up out of nowhere.  All villages have different rules but a lot of them are the same throughout Fiji.  Here are some examples of the rules we follow in Vanuadina:

1.     Women must wear skirts that are knee length or below.  If you are wearing pants or shorts you must wear a sulu (cloth) wrapped around to cover it. 

2.     No yelling across the village.

3.     No eating or drinking as you walk through the village.

4.     No hats.

5.     No wearing sunglasses on your head.

6.     No wearing bags that hang on your shoulder.

This is just a taste of the types of rules that different villages have.  Even beyond the rules of the village, Fijian culture is full of taboos.  There are tons and tons of things that are strange or impolite to do according to Fijians that make absolutely no sense to me, I’ll discuss some of these in my next post.  In addition to taboos, there are lots of superstitions that Fijians stick to, which is why I’ve started the ‘Fiji-isms’ section of the blog where you can check out some of the interesting (and sometimes funny) explanations for things. 

All in all, things are going great here in Fiji.  I’m getting very anxious to find out my site placement (with happens on Halloween), but other than that my family is awesome, training is going well, and only three weeks of home stay left.  Now enjoy some pictures!

This is what Vanuadina looks like from the main road.  

Three of my fellow Vanuadina trainees walking to class in a nearby village. 

Yesterday at training we had cooking class!

All the Peace Corps Fiji trainees eating the delicious food we made. 

This is what our feet looked like after trekking through the bush on a "shortcut" to our village.  

This is my house! (And my host mom!)

A shot down the main strip of Vanuadina.

My cousin Matada being sassy out the window. Matada is like my shadow, always right next to me!

The First Two Weeks

Greetings from Vanuadina Village! I have been living in Fiji for two weeks now but I feel like I’ve already been here for months. My group of 35 trainees arrived in Nadi and immediately went to our welcome ceremony, which involved the whole Peace Corps Fiji staff around the kava bowl. After a quick two-day orientation in Nadi, we finally got to head to our host villages! These are the villages we will be living in with a host family for the next 8 weeks. All 35 of us were split into six villages, and I was placed in Vanuadina with 5 other trainees. The village is about 30 minutes outside of the town of Nasouri.  

Welcome Ceremony in Nadi... around the Kava Bowl

Fiji Selfies

Some of my fellow Peace Corps Trainees and I along the Coral Coast

My host family is totally amazing; they are overwhelmingly warm and welcoming. I live in a two story, lime green, concrete house with anywhere from 13-18 other people, three dogs, two cats, and five puppies. It’s been so much fun having so many people around all the time. My very first weekend here it was my little cousin’s 2nd birthday party. It reminded me so much of birthdays at home; we sang ‘Happy Birthday’ at least three times, had a ton of food and cake, and spent the day with family.

My Host Parents!  I'm holding a chicken wrapped in leaves from the banana trees, that's how they cook all the meat in the Lovo (earth oven)

 
Everyone in Fiji is unbelievably welcoming. One of the main ways Fijians know how to welcome someone s by feeding them. The amount of food that is served at one event is truly shocking; sometimes my family will put a plate of 15 scones in front of me and expect me to eat them all. I am constantly being offered food, when I walk through the village to go to school every morning at least three people will yell “Ilisabeci mai gunu ti” which means “Elizabeth, come have tea!”… it’s one of the perks of living in a small village. Another good (and sometimes bad) part of living in a small village is that word travels really fast. We call it the ‘Coconut Wireless’ and it’s faster than any Wi-Fi you could imagine. If I tell one of the kids in the village that I’m going to the community hall, within minutes all the other volunteers will know and will come meet me.

One of my fellow PCT's in Vanuadina (Carissa)

.... Had To....

All in all, everything is going great so far. I love my host village and training has been hectic but it’s been really helpful for learning to speak Fijian and Hindi. In a couple weeks we will go stay with a current Peace Corps Volunteer in Fiji for a few days and I’m looking forward to that. In terms of next steps, I will be living in Vanuadina for 6 more weeks and then I find out my permanent site placement on Halloween!

3 Day Countdown

So here I am, one year after I submitted my application to the Peace Corps, finally counting down my last three days at home. I remember when the countdown started and I had four months on the clock before the big move; I can't believe that in three short days I will begin one of the biggest adventures of my life.  I will be updating this blog during my experience as a way to keep in touch with my friends and family back home and answer any questions you might be having!  Just so you know, I am fairly new to this whole blogging thing so bear with me while I figure it out.

So here's how this works for now:

• This weekend I will be heading to Los Angeles for what they call 'Staging'.  It's basically a quick one day orientation to introduce us to the Peace Corps.  This is where I will meet everyone in my training class, I think there's about 30 of us who are all headed to Fiji.  Late the following night we all fly to Fiji together.
• The first two months in country I will be doing a home-stay with a Fijian host family.  I will be doing a lot of language and cultural training during this time while trying to get used to my new home.  This period is called Pre-Service Training (PST).  
• At the end of PST I will be sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer and I will receive my my permanent location!

I've been telling people for months now that I would be moving to Fiji in September and even though I've said it out loud countless times it didn't feel like it was actually happening until I started packing.  Let me tell you, trying to pack for two years with very little information about where you will be living or what kind of job you will be doing is a difficult task but after packing and re-packing at least three times I am finally done!  

This is what I'm bringing with me to Fiji, doesn't feel like that much for two years but I'm sure I still overpacked 

All that's left to do now is eat some good food and enjoy my last weekend at home with my family, friends, and my puppy!  

This is Bruno, I am adding a picture of him for reference because I'm sure I'll be mentioning him a lot 

I am beyond excited to begin this exciting new chapter and build a life in Fiji and I hope that you all enjoy this adventure with me through this blog!