Fiji Part One

Malo!

I'm sorry this blog post is so late; it was finals week! We finished our classes on Wednesday with a final in the morning and now it's Independent Study Project (ISP) time. It took me until this morning, however, to decide on a topic, which I now am pretty sure will be (drum roll, please) Samoan youth-specific issues raised in and youth reactions to Pacific literature. I will hopefully interview and survey students and professors at the National University of Samoa along with authors such as Lani Wendt Young (Telesa) and Sia Figiel (The Girl in the Moon Circle, Where We Once Belonged, They Who Do Not Grieve). I'll keep you guys updated on my progress!

So, anyway, last week: In which Leah and friends travel to Fiji

For the first time in five flights, I disembarked a plane not directly onto the runway, but onto one of those hallway-type contraptions that comes to meet passengers at the plane's doorway. And not only that, but after going through customs, I found myself on an escalator down to the baggage claim! All the airport's stores  sold mountains of Cadbury chocolate and solely Fiji water. This country definitely seemed much fancier than Samoa.

Although I lost some vi when my bags went through the we-don't-want-your-produce-in-our-country machines, we arrived at our first hotel safely and soundly. Sandalwood Lodge, located just outside Nadi (pronounced nandy, rhyming with candy) proved to be much more than we expected: a real swimming pool, air conditioning, and (here's the kicker) hot water! But as I took my first hot shower since January, I realized how quickly one's preferences can change. As someone accustomed at home to turning the faucet as hot as it goes until I emerge beet-red from a fogged-mirror bathroom, you can imagine how surprised I was by the fact that I was so uncomfortable under the now foreign temperature spray that I turned it cold after just 30 seconds. We went to the only restaurant open for dinner (due to flooding), but the Indian-Thai cuisine proved to be just the right break from my fried Samoan diet (in fact, not one fried morsel touched my lips the entire week!).

The next morning, we packed our overnight bags and piled onto a bus with Prem, our best friend and bus driver for the the next seven days. We drove through Nadi and saw all the wreckage from the floods; many of the buildings downtown had been in water up to 30 ft high. Most lost vast amounts of their inventory and almost all the windows and flooring in the city had to be replaced. People were working hard to get things going on rebuilding, but you could tell it would be months before the city was up and running again. As heartbreaking as it was to see, the fact that there were so many people helping out beautifully reflected the kindness of the Fijian people.

We then left the town and met up with three pick-up trucks. Just as soon as the group scrambled into their tarp-covered beds, the cars began to wind their way up a dirt path mountainside. We bumped along, driving through rivers and skimming over the mud. The drivers went fast, for fear of getting stuck, but it didn't help my nerves when we hydroplaned around corners within feet of a sheer cliff edge. As we neared the village of Abaca (Ahm-bah-tha), we suddenly jolted to a stop and realized the flooding had washed away a bridge. So, in the rain, we jumped out of the trucks and carrying our bags and sandals (so they wouldn't come off), trudged through mud up to my shins for a mile-long walk to our homestays. I must say that I never thought I'd be sliding down a riverbed in the pouring rain, carrying my sandals, a backpack, and a bag of gifts, wearing a lavalava, and holding the hand of an adorable five-year-old Fijian girl (who turned out to be my homestay sister, Kelisi!) against a backdrop of lush tropical forests and giant waterfalls in the distance.

When, covered in mud and sweat, my friend Lindsay and I settled into our new home for the next two nights, we couldn't be happier to have a home-cooked meal and the best family in the village (although I might me biased). My mother, her mother, my seven-month-old brother, and my five-year-old sister made up the family. Tevita cried every time I touched him for the first day, but soon enough he got used to me (and even smiled at me once or twice!). My mother made sure Lindsay and I stuffed ourselves at every meal, saying, "Lis, Leah, kana vaka levu!" (which means "Lindsay, Leah, eat it all!"). My sister, Kelisi, decided this was the best sentence she'd ever encountered and ran through the village singing it at the top of her lungs until we left.

After dinner we had a welcoming kava ceremony in the chief's house. Since the village only has a population of 87, more than a quarter of the village showed up to the party, mostly to see what happened when the palagi drank kava (nothing, as it turns out. The rumors that Fijian kava is so much stronger than Samoan kava are just rumors, apparently.). When we returned home, our family was already in bed and when my mom told us to go to sleep, we obliged immediately. Unfortunately, this meant that a few minutes later I had to sneak out of the house to run down the hill and take a shower (since it was an Eco-tourism village, there was a shower with running water and a flushing toilet at the bottom of the hill).

The next day, guided by some of the men of the village, we all hiked to a waterfall in the mountains. The hike was more of a game of following the leader-- the leader being a villager with a machete chopping down trees and swimming through mud, and the following being more of a scrambling to keep up with the leader while avoiding the poisonous centipedes hidden under bushes. But when we got to the waterfall, the fact that it was slightly hard to reach was completely worth it-- it was a hidden gem.

We spent the rest of the afternoon eating, resting, and hanging out with our families. We went to the closing kava ceremony that night, but this time there was live music and half the village came. The next morning we said our goodbyes and hopped back into the trucks to go meet Prem.

Stay tuned for a description of the rest of the week! (My roommate is making me leave the computer lab to go eat dinner).

Alofa from Samoa!
-Leah