At Site

Well, training is officially over! Our group swore in on July 24 and quickly loaded up into buses to be shuttled to the far corners of Fiji. The day before swearing in we had about 8 hours to kill in Suva. I went to meet with Helen Sykes, an environmental consultant based in Suva. After that, I met up with some fellow trainees at a bar. After having completed 8 weeks of training we were all in need of a drink. Some of the wilder volunteers had 2 drinks! After that, we were shuttled back to the campus at Nadave where we went to bed early in order to be well rested the next day. Despite this precaution, we all seemed to be particularly groggy on the 24th.

Leslie and I spent the first night at site with another volunteer in the area named Tara. The next day we moved into our new home, and began furiously cleaning. There was a dead rat in one of the cupboards, but before either of us could clean it up a cat raced into the house and munched it down. Both Leslie's host agency and my host village have been very generous in donating furniture for our house. We still have a list of things we need to buy, but are not in too much of a hurry. The house has electricity and running water, and you can just barely see the ocean from the front patio. We don't have a refrigerator at the moment, so we have been doing our shopping day to day. It is actually not as hard as it sounds.

My village has been very understanding of our need to spend a few days getting the house ready before we start work. They actually suggested that I not go to church with them on Sunday but instead take the day off. With that in mind, Leslie and I rode our bikes (oh yeah, we bought bikes in Suva) to Volivoli beach (mentioned in another posting). My bike broke down several times on the ride, but we made it. At the beach Leslie and I happened to meet the group leader for some sort of high school group doing a study abroad in Fiji. She invited us to go out snorkeling with them. The guys at Ra Divers, the dive shop on Volivoli beach, were really cool and had no problem letting us tag along for no charge. They took us out about 6km to a small seamount with spectacular coral cover. I took a ton of pictures with our underwater camera which I will be sure to post at some point. We saw a white-tip reef shark!

We should be able to post regularly as our house is fairly near an internet cafe. Keep in touch, everyone!