Some photos...finally

Drinking grog after youth day

New Years Day, 10am, drinking since midnight

Me and my friend Dji Eta on New Years Day, everyone gets covered in baby powder, I don't know why

Yaqona

It's time I finally explained this. It's most widely known as kava, though I'm not sure where that word came from. Here in Fiji it's called yaqona. I had it once when I was in Hawai'i and they call it 'awa. The English slang word for it is grog. What is it exactly? It's the roots of Piper methysticum, a plant in the pepper family. Traditionally it was only drank by chiefs and only on specially occasions. It was traditionally prepared by a young boy who chewed the roots into a pulp then strained them with water through cloth made from coconut husks. Nowadays, anyone can drink grog anytime. The roots are pounded into a powder then strained through a cloth to make a thick liquid that looks like muddy water. Grog is an important part of any special occasion. Baby namings, first birthday, first menstration, 21^st birthdays, engagements, weddings, and funerals all take place around the grog bowl. Meetings are also held around the grog bowl. The dried roots are presented as an offering for visiting someone's house, talking to the chief, for apologies and thank yous, really just about anything. We also just drink grog just for fun, and indeed we do almost every evening in the village. It's a social thing, like having coffee or a beer with a friend. Even when just drinking for fun, there's a proper procedure that must always be followed when drinking grog and it varies by region and I'll spare you the details. Now what does it do? It's always been interesting to me that grog is used for meetings and for social gatherings because after you've had few bowls, you can't really talk much anymore. One bowl makes you mouth numb and dry (that's why we always eat sweets when we drink grog, and maybe part of the reason why Fijians tend to have bad teeth). After a few more bowls, the numbness spreads (not complete numbness, just a kind of dull feeling), your muscles relax, your mind relaxes, and it becomes difficult to talk in anything more than simple sentences. I've never reached the point where walking becomes impossible, but I've seen it happen to others. What are the side effects? There was as study done once that showed that in causes liver damage, which is why you don't find much kava in the US or Europe. But it was later discovered that that study wasn't done very well, and it was funded by the rival of a pharmaceutical company that was using kava to develop anxiety medication. So there probably aren't any serious permanent side effects. It does make you lose your appetite temporarily, and if you drink it regularly, it makes your skin scaly and peel. But that goes if away if you take a break from drinking for a while. It makes you sleep really well, and some say it makes you lazy the next day. I guess that just depends on how much you drink. Some say it negatively effects sexual performance and sperm count. I'm not sure if there have been any clinical studies on that. So why do we drink it? I don't know. I guess every culture has it's intoxicants and social lubricants. In the US we're addicted to coffee and beer. In South America it was yerba mata. In other pacific islands it's betel nut (also in the pepper family). Here it's yaqona, and I really like it.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

In Fiji Christmas really starts when the schools get out for their two month holiday at the end of November and lasts untill they start again at the end of January. This is when people that have moved away from the village, or never actually lived in it, come back to visit family and relax. I say relax because everything slows down during these two months (as if things weren't slow enough). Then as Christmas gets closer, the parties and marathon grog sessions begin. For Christmas Day I spent the morning in my village, then I left after church and went to another volunteer's house in a town nearby. There were four of us that spent the afternoon together cooking and eating and drinking and talking. The next morning we went to the beach and then I returned to my village. The week between Christmas and New Years was pretty much non-stop grog drinking, occasionally washed down by some rum. Now it's normal for me to drink grog everyday when I'm in my village. But usually just for a couple hours in the evenings. But around this time of year, the grog starts flowing first thing in the morning and doesn't stop. Then comes New Years Eve. After drinking grog all day, everyone goes to church from 11 - midnight. Then the water fights start. It's the village kids' responsiblity to fill plastic bags with water and throw them at anyone who walks by. This lasts for about the first week of the new year. Besides that, after church everyone starts drinking grog...again. There's singing, guitars, dancing, baby powder on everyone's faces (I'm not sure what it means, it just always happens), and small groups of people sneaking off to drink rum in the bushes before returning to the grog session. Yes I took part in all this, until about 4:30 in the morning when I couldn't take anymore and fell asleep. 2 hours later I woke up and they were still drinking grog at my neighbor's house. So I went back and we finished at about 10am. Since then the grog drinking has started to slow down, but only a little. It'll still be a holiday in the village until school starts again. It's been a lot of fun, especially since I still enjoy drinking grog unlike most volunteers, but I'm about ready for things to go back to normal. Working on any projects during this time of year is out of the question, so I'm really hoping to get something started as soon as things settledown. I've been in my village about half a year now and I feel like I don't have much to show for it. I hoping that 2009 will bring a little progress. I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays.

hurry up and wait

So that meeting I was really excited about didn't happen. Our new committee (the one that includes youth and is motivated to start new projects in the village like our ecotourism project) was supposed to meet with the chief and the old development committee last Saturday. Our chief was going to ask the old committee to step aside and let our new committee run the development projects in the village. This is really important because the last time our committee tried to do something (the Serua Day fundraiser), the old committee came and took over. So now we're afraid to start any new projects because they might shut us down. That's why it's good that the chief supports us because he has the final say in everything so the old committee should listen to him. But the old committee didn't show up for the meeting on Saturday. So I guess we just have to wait until they decide to come. What I really want is to have the support of the old committee. I hate to think that I'm part of something that will divide the village into two sides. But this process was started before I even came to the village so I'll just have to wait and hope everything ends up ok. Wait, wait, wait. That's what I spend most of my time doing...waiting.

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.