meet the youth

Youth Day at church

small success

We got our small committee back! Our first meeting is December 6th. My counterpart and I went to a project design workshop put on by the Peace Corps and together we wrote a nice proposal for the ecotourism project we want to start. So we'll present it at the meeting and see if we can make this happen. My vision is to use this small committee, consisting of representatives from all groups in the village (each family group, the women, youth, Turaga ni Koro, etc.), to start and then manage the ecotourism business together as a team. The money that we make would then go towards helping parents pay their children's school fees and maybe some other education promotion projects. But that's just my vision, and I know some other people share it with me, but some have different visions so our challenge will be to put all the visions together. But I'm happy that we've made this important step. That is starting the committee and setting the date for the first meeting. We'll see how it goes...

Bringing the Peace Corps into the 21st Century

I actually wrote this on Friday, November 21, 2008

This blog entry is going to be somewhat critical so I think I'm supposed to say something like: The views expressed here are my own and don't necessarily reflect the views of the United States Government, the Peace Corps, or anyone else you might blame. Ok, now that's out of the way.

I just received the latest issue of Worldview magazine (worldviewmagazine.com) which is the National Peace Corps Association's quarterly magazine. This issue was focused on what is wrong with the Peace Corps as an organization and what it could do to improve and become more effective in the future. It's heartening and frustrating at the same time to read the articles written by past volunteers and staff that served in countries all around the world and to hear that they've faced the exact same problems as I have, not with their country of service or the members of their community, but with the Peace Corps management and resources available to them. Everyone that submitted critical articles to the magazine agrees that the mission and goals of the Peace Corps are sound and it could and should be the most effective development organization in the world. But it's not and there are many reasons. I agree with most of the writers that call for change in management structure, policies, and training. But I feel that most of those things are out of my control so I'll leave them to the next president and the returned PCVs in congress that are currently pushing for change. But there was one thing that was mentioned in the magazine that I can directly relate and particularly frustrates me. We live in the 21^st century and as difficult as it may be for some people to believe, there is high speed internet on this tiny little piece of land in the middle of the pacific ocean. I see no reason why we as Peace Corps Fiji aren't taking advantage of it. The biggest problem I've faced with the Peace Corps and trying to start projects is just a lack of information. One person in the magazine wrote that it's as if each new volunteer has to re-invent the wheel, because there is surprising little information available to us about what past volunteers have done in our area and how they did it. For example, the two projects that I've started to focus on are getting a school house built for our kindergarten and starting a small eco-tourism business on the island. You'd think there would be plenty of information out there about those two projects since every village in Fiji either has a kindergarten or wants one, and tourism is now the largest industry in Fiji and business advising and good environmental stewardship are two of Peace Corps Fiji's goals. But I have not been able to get any information on past volunteers that have successfully or unsuccessfully worked on these two projects. All of us volunteers are required to report trimesterly on all projects we've worked on include organizations we've collaborated with and gotten funding from. So the office has all the information. It would be extremely valuable if they would then put that information into an online database that all current volunteers could access. I see no reason why this hasn't already been done. If there's some privacy/security/bureaucratic reason why this can't be done, I'm starting to think that we should just do it ourselves. Start a Peace Corps Fiji wiki that volunteers can use to share their project information. We wouldn't even have to start a new wiki, we could just develop the Fiji page of peacecorpswiki.org. But this might too much extra work since we all already have to compile all this information on our trimester reports, it'd be even more time (=money) spent at internet cafes. That's why I wish the office would just do it for us, but the wiki might be worth trying. All of you tech-minded people out there that read this blog, I'd appreciate any advice.

By the way, though actually somewhat relate to everything I've discussed, we just had the first volunteer in our group (FRE-6, remember the acronyms?) decide to go home or ET (early termination) and we're all very sad to see her leave though we all understand her reasons. So our group is down now to 30 I think. We lost one a few weeks ago to medical reasons (not lost as in he died but as in Washington headquarters told him he had to leave though he really wanted to stay). This is the longest any Peace Corps Fiji group as gone without someone ET-ing (actually, no group before even made it all the way to swearing-in). Even though this is quite an accomplishment (the staff credits themselves for the good training, we credit ourselves with just being too stubborn), it's still sad to see our friend leave and we'll all miss her.

Obama wins!

I'm pretty sure that every Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji is celebrating Barack Obama's win tonight. A group of us watched CNN on the satellite TV at one of the resorts. Someone should call him and let him know that Peace Corps Fiji voted for him.

chickens are racist

All the white hens in my village follow the white rooster. And all the brown hens follow the brown rooster. Or maybe the white rooster only lets white hens follow him. Or the brown rooster only wants to mate with brown hens. Maybe this is common knowledge, but I've never lived in a place that had chickens roaming around freely so I've never noticed this segregation before. Now I'm pretty sure that ancestral chickens weren't white, so where did the preference for white roosters (or white hens) come from? Maybe there's something else going on that I haven't noticed. Maybe the people that own the chickens have somehow convinced them to stay segregated, so in that case it's not really the chickens' choice. I'll let you all know if I find out more.

frustration setting in

The frustration that's apparently common amongst all Peace Corps volunteers is starting to set in. I've been at my sight now for three months, which means I should start working on projects. We just had a week of training in Nadi where I got more ideas about projects from other volunteers and learned how to write grants and look for money. I came back my village really excited to start working on some of the ideas I've been discussing with people in my village. A few weeks ago I was invited to join a new committee in our village, the Fundraising Committee, which is a subcommittee of the development committee. The Development Committee is run by the elders and they've never invited me to their meetings, but this new committee seemed like to perfect way for me to get some work done. It was made up of mostly youth (remember "youth" in Fiji means anyone over 18 that isn't married yet) living in the village. There was one person representing each of the nine bito (group of families, each mataqali is divided into several bito), two people representing people from the village that now live and work in other places in Fiji, one person representing the church, and one person representing the Peace Corps (that was me). They set up a bank account and made it so that there was one person from each mataqali that could deposit and withdraw money. We elected a chairman, treasurer, and secretary. We met every two weeks. The notes from the last meeting were typed, printed, and distributed at the next meeting. All this might not seem like a big deal, but this is not usually how meetings are held and decisions made in the village. The committee was well organized and everyone from the village was fairly represented. The only problem was that I was the only woman. But one of our goals was to include more women in the future. Our meetings went really well. They always explained to me what they were talking about since my Fijian is still coming along (in other meetings I've been to it's usually a struggle to get someone to explain to me what's going on.) They always wanted to hear what I had to say, and they let me lead them in brainstorming future project ideas. Then I helped us to prioritize the project ideas and write a summary of the projects to show the rest of the village on Serua Day. Serua Day is the annual fundraiser in the village, and this year it was organized by the new Fundraising Committee. This year every woman from the village had to raise $50 (last year each of the men had to raise $100).

So all of this was great. All of us on the committee were really looking forward to Serua Day, and I was happy to have a good group of people to work with for my two years here. Then Serua Day came, and as the money started coming in, something happened. Two women (who don't live in the village) who were the old committee that used to organize Serua Day just took over. They started collecting the money, and didn't want to have anything to do with the new committee. And for reasons that I don't fully understand (something about age, and respect, and those parts of Fijian culture that I'm still getting used to), our committee couldn't do anything about it. So after all the hard work, the Fundraising Committee is over, and all the money is with the two women in Suva and nobody knows what's going to happen to it.

Now I wasn't around when the new committee was started so maybe they didn't communicate well enough with the old committee, but I don't really know. I know that some people in the village were really excited about our new committee and were looking forward to new ideas and a new way of doing things. But there were also people that didn't like the idea of the youth being involved wanted to keep the old committee (the two older women living in Suva). It' s not my place to say who was right and who was wrong, but I can say that for me the new committee was perfect. And now that it's over, I have no idea how I'm going to get any work done in this village. Because I'm not here to do projects for the village, I'm here to work WITH people on projects, especially people that actually live in the village. I just don't know where to go from here.

So that's one frustrating experience I wanted to share. Now for the next one. My village started a kindergarten just a couple weeks after I arrived. One of the mothers volunteered to be the teacher, and I worked with her to figure out what to teach and to make posters and decorate the community hall and things like that. Then, a couple weeks after the kindergarten started, the elders decided that we couldn't use the community hall anymore (there are various reasons and theories for why they made that decision but I'm still baffled.) But everything was okay because a woman that has a house in the village but doesn't live in it anymore said it was okay to use it for the kindergarten.

So things were going great. Before the kids to young to go to primary school would spend all day running around the village. Now they spend half the day in kindergarten and the other half running around the village singing the ABCs. Then yesterday, the woman who owns the house came to the village and said she heard a rumor that we were going to change her house (expand it, add a toilet, etc.) and she wasn't happy. So she made us move everything out and doesn't want the kindergarten there anymore. Nobody knows who started that rumor, and it's definately not true, but she wants to lock her house anyway. So now the kindergarten is over. There's no other house that we could have it in, and the elders said we can't use the community hall. So for now we're going to wait for the next community meeting and ask for hall again and hope the elders change their mind. But everyone knows that the real solution is to build a new house just for the kindergarten. But of course that would involve more fundraising and our fundraising committee is gone. All the mothers are really upset, I saw some crying yesterday, and once again, I'm feeling frustrated. So today here I am, sitting at the nearby resort, using the free wireless internet surrounded by a bunch of tourists that just got off a cruise ship. Two of them just came up to me and asked me why my computer isn't an Apple. I didn't know what to say.

levulevu

After laying in bed until 10 am because for some unknown reason I just couldn't make myself get up, I decided that I needed to rearrange my bedroom. Not only because I wanted a change, but also to make space for me to do my “Yoga for Weight Loss” routine. I just picked up the DVD from the post office yesterday, along with a “natural rubber yoga mat,” a “sustainably harvested cork block,” and a “natural hemp strap.” You might be asking yourself, why does she need to lose weight? And if so, why yoga instead of just walking? And if she's going to do yoga, why do it in her small bedroom instead of in the spacious living room of her big house? All good questions, and here are the answers: In the village, I spend the majority of my time in my house or in someone else's house, sitting on the floor. I try not to eat too much, but with no physical activity, I think I've started to gain weight. So why not start walking instead of sitting around? Because as you've seen now from the pictures, I live on tiny little island! Sure, it's not that hard to get to the mainland, but try explaining to my Turaga ni koro that I want to go to the mainland and walk down the road by myself. “Not safe,” he would say, and he'd tell me I'd have to take someone with me. And who would go with me? Not any of the boys, because there would be way too much gossip if any of them were seen alone with me. And what about the women? None of them are interested in any kind of physical activity. So my dad sent me the “Yoga for weight loss” dvd, but why do I have to do yoga in the bedroom? Because in the bedroom I can close all the windows and nobody will see me. If I do it in the living room, people will see me through the door, which stays open all day because it's rude to close your door cause it means you don't want people to visit (not that they would visit because most are still afraid to come into my house). Why don't I want anyone to see me? Because nobody does yoga in the village! I would get so many questions, everyone would talk about it. And in the village, gaining weight isn't seen as a bad thing. People tell me all the time “Sai, o iko levulevu,” which means “Monica, your getting fat.” That's not an insult here. It would actually be an insult if I was losing weight because it would mean that they're not feeding me enough. It's one of those hospitality things. So here I am, rearranging the furniture in my bedroom so that I can secretly do yoga and lose weight. I actually really like the new arrangement:

The new way

The old way