So much going on...

So it is official, John and I are village volunteers. We moved into a village in Ra (the name we cannot disclose to the public) on Saturday, March 14th. We live in a small tin house. It is one room with a curtain room divider that separates our "bedroom" from our "living/dinning" room. We have an outdoor area for the kitchen, toilet and shower. The water pressure is very low in our village so we take bucket showers. In order to really feel clean, I lather up the soap and let it sit for a while before I dump water on myself. It is a very different life than the one we were living in Rakiraki town. Our house is dead-center in the village and is right next to the church. Hooray, we get to hear 5 a.m. prayer every day! Our new family is really wonderful and have made us feel very welcome. The children in the village are relatively well-behaved, though exhausting. They are just so many of them! I have befriended most of the pre-teen and teenage girls and they come to the house most nights for help with homework. The packs of half-naked 4-5 year-olds are the only children that scare me.....they truly run wild and do whatever they want. As Amy (another volunteer) warned us recently, they seem to throw rocks for no apparent reason. You can just tell, as they pass by, sticky and covered in sand, that they are up to no good. The village has been wonderful at respecting our space and giving us "alone time". This is something that many of the other volunteers have struggled with. I don't know if it is because John and I are married, but our village seems to understand our need for privacy.....to some extent......there are a few exceptions.

On a different note, I am finding myself very busy with work lately. I have started teaching a business class once a week at the Penang Sangam Vocational School. I am teaching a class of 14-19 year-old Fijian and Indo-Fijian boys. I am so thankful for my experience with Young Audiences of North Texas.....thanks to the Creative Solutions program I know how to work with adolescent boys. I really enjoy teaching. I have aligned myself with the BIC (Business Incubation Center) and NECSMED (National Center for Small and Micro Enterprise Development) so that at the end of the year each of the boys will receive a recognized certificate of "Business Training Completion". This is significant because with the certificate and the business plan I will help them write, some of the boys may be eligible for a small business loan. Aside from my teaching, I am also gearing up for my water projects in Volivoli and Nanuku. They will start in April. Additionally, in June I will be teaching Financial Management skills in various villages around Ra with honey farms. This is a program that I am doing with the BIC. I have been attending technical beekeeping trainings in the villages to get to know the people. The Financial Management portion of the training will coincide with the first honey harvest of the season. The idea is to strengthen Ra beekeepers so that their honey farms can perform as successful businesses.

John is working with FLMA (Fiji Locally Managed Marie Areas) to set up a Marine Protected area around our new village. Right now the struggle has been to get everyone involved and in favor of the idea.....this is very difficult to do in Fiji! John is also working on fixing the water pressure in the village and getting ready to organize a village trash pick-up and recycling program.

That the update for now. We will post house pictures as soon as possible. We are waiting for a sunny day (it has been dumping rain lately).

Here is Taveuni....

Okay, here are our pictures from the Garden Island of Fiji. Hopefully we will have pictures from the reef monitoring workshop soon.

This is a killer reef off of the coast of Vanua Levu. I wanna get up in that!

John walking through volcanic rocks on the Costal Walk from Lavena.

Swimming to the falls outside of Lavena Village.

In the upper right-hand corner of this picture you can see me jumping off of this HUGE waterfall. It must have been at least 50 ft. high. To the left are John and Natalie.

The clouds over Viti Levu....amazing!

The Update

This is going to be short.....pressed for time. John and I are back from our trip to Taviuni Island for the Reef Monitoring workshop we participated in. We had a great time with Grace, Rachel, Natalie, Nic and the local volunteers. In total we spent four days in the water practicing various reef monitoring techniques. We spent an additional day at Nic's village checking out the village-based tourism project he working on. We jumped off of a 50 ft waterfall. In fact, I was the first FRE-6 Peace Corps volunteer to take the plunge :) I still hurt from the jump. I am pretty sure Natalie will never be the same. Expect pictures and maybe even a video soon.

The big news is that we are moving to a new site. I will not go into the details of why; it is a long story. The village we are moving to is in the same province we are in now so our address will remain the same. We are still Ra Volunteers. We expect to move by the end of the month. We are excited for the move to the new village but plan to still work with our original communities until our commitments are fulfilled. John plans to complete a compost piggery for his previous village and I will complete my two water projects in the settlements.

More recent pictures

These pictures are much more recent than the last batch. They range from mid November to December. This first picture was taken right before my birthday.

Woo hoo, I am now scuba certified! Not my best look, but hey, it was a good day. I finished my certification on this final dive. No sharks but still a ton of fun!

These two pictures are from two of the Indo-Fijian communities that I work with. I worked with the Social Welfare office in Rakiraki to organize a workshop for the International Day for the Prevention of Child Abuse. These pictures are from the workshop.

Our Thanksgiving feast. From front: dark-chocolate brownies, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and fried fish. Ahndree and Nuper celebrated with us.

This picture is just funny. John is grating onions for our salsa (we don't have a blender) and his solution to watery eyes was to wear his scuba mask. This IS a good look for him :)

Picture Time!

Okay, first of all, sorry for taking so long to get these up. It is practically impossible to upload pictures in Rakiraki, the connection is just too slow. These pictures go all the way back to October!

This is a picture of John's friend Sikeli. During most of the year Sikeli is in the Lau group but he returned to Vitawa for the holidays! He, his wife Una and two of their sons lead us on a climb of Ulu ni' Vatu, the peak that separates Narewa and Vitawa. The hike was a lot of fun and was more like rock-scrambling than walking. In this picture Sikeli is marking our accent to the top with a nice red sulu! Vinaka Sikeli! In the distance you can see Milake Island.

This is the view of Vitawa from the top of Ulu ni' Vatu. In the distance you can see the Nakovadra range. We hope to tackle those peaks next :)

The day of Diwali Nuper, John and I went to the beach. I got super sun burned, as you can see in the picture! We spent the evening of Diwali in Nagoro, a neighborhood near Rakiraki town. My friend Sandiya invited us over for fireworks and yummy Indian treats!

To walk off all of the Fiji Gold we consumed the previous night, a group of us decided to check out Colo i' Suva Park. It was great and we would recommend that anyone passing through Suva make time for a quick hike through the park. There are multiple water-holes, waterfalls and trails to explore. There is also a rope swing somewhere.....we never found it....isa! Pictured (from the left): Amy, Nuper, Sarah, Heath, Grace and me.

This is the previous night :) Before Heath left us for the States we took him out to karaoke and dancing in Suva. I have no idea what we were singing but I can tell from this picture that it must have sounded AWESOME! Pictured (from left): Heath, Nuper, me, Sarah, and Ashley (aka Gashley)

A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall

Rain, rain go away.......no wait.....come back we still don't have water! Ahh! This was our mantra during the four days we were without water or electricity in Rakiraki. A big-fat tropical depression hit Fiji on Thursday and did not let up until Sunday. I have not seen or heard rain like that in my whole life and I am from one the the rainiest states in the US. John, Natalie (aka Nuper) and I were stuck in the house during the storm. We did not even step outside the house unless we needed to take the daily rain bath. It was raining too hard to leave cover in anything other than a bathing suit. For now the rain, wind, thunder and lightening have stopped and we are in town stocking up. Another system is expected to hit on Wednesday. Peace Corps has issued a "Stand Fast" for all volunteers in Fiji. This means, stay where you are until notified that is again safe to travel. We have heard from the locals in town that this is the worst weather in over 30 years. It seems like record breaking weather is following me around the world. In Oregon we were hit with the worst snow storm since 1938.

Christmas and New Years

First of all, sorry everyone for not posting in over a month. A lot of things have been going on lately, and it has been a while since we've made it to the internet cafe.
Leslie had to travel back to the states for Christmas because her grandmother recently passed away. She is sad, but told me she was happy to see her family and friends in Oregon. I am looking forward to her returning to Fiji tomorrow. As you can imagine I miss her a lot.
Since Leslie was in the U.S. for Christmas, I ended up traveling with Peace Corps volunteer Nuper, our adopted daughter in Fiji. We left on Dec. 24th on a ship called the Westerland, sailing overnight from Lautoka to Savusavu. Remembering the Peace Corps motto "Be Prepared" (or is that the boy scouts?), we smuggled a 5th of Bounty Rum onboard with us. The boat ride was 12 hours long, getting into Savusavu at 5am Christmas Day. We did not have anywhere to sleep on the boat, so we found a nice spot on the deck, poured the Bounty into a Gatorade bottle, and did our best to make the journey fun. We did a pretty good job having a good time until about midnight when we were just too damn tired. We made friends with some locals (not at all hard to do in this country), drank some kava, played a guy's guitar, and made a drinking game out of a video game on our cellphones called "snake". In the end, fatigue got us and we had to pass out on the deck along with everybody else. We probably got about 2 hours of sleep.
When we arrived in Savusavu we headed to the house of some other Peace Corps friends who agreed to put us up for a couple of nights. We spent two days in Savusavu, snorkeling at least 5 hours both days, and then headed to Taveuni. The nearshore snorkeling in Savusavu was impressive. I saw a lot of fish species that I only see on offshore reefs in Rakiraki. Savusavu itself is a very nice and tidy town. A lot of yachties come here and never leave.
Savusavu was nice but Taveuni was amazing. The first place we headed was a small village on the eastern side of Taveuni whose name I probably can't mention on this blog because of Peace Corps' policy. The village name literally means "forbidden water" (look it up if you have a fijian dictionary) and they have one of the oldest and best managed marine protected areas in Fiji. The difference we saw when snorkeling between the village fishing grounds and the Marine Protected Area was stark. The fish inside the protected area were enormous! We saw massive schools of harlequin sweetlips, giant sweetlips, bluefin trevally, peacock grouper etc. We also saw several sea snakes and two hawksbill sea turtles. The villagers were very welcoming and did not charge us to use the MPA since we were staying with a volunteer and therefore entered the village as guests rather than tourists.
From the village we also did the Tavoro waterfalls hike, taking time to swim in each of the three waterfalls. The water was cool and clean. I spend so much time swimming in the ocean that I was surprised at how much less bouyant my body was in fresh water. I had to tread water to stay afloat.
After three nights in the unnamed village we headed to a camp ground in the touristy northern part of Taveuni to celebrate the New Years with a bunch of other Peace Corps volunteers. We had a very wild, but safe, time. There must have been about 20 volunteers staying in the camp ground. It really was a lot of fun, and the only thing that could have made it better would be if Leslie had been there.
I am now back in Savusavu and will be heading back to Viti Levu on Sunday. Leslie will be back in Fiji at that point. Well, that pretty much sums it up. I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year.