One year down...one (or two) more to go!

The past month has been super busy. I was in the capital, Suva, for a few days helping with training for the new volunteers and then I flew back to the US for a surprise visit to my sister and brother in law’s graduation from medial residency. I got to spend 11 lovely days with my family (meeting the newest addition, the loud but beautiful Phoebe) mostly hanging around the house, swimming and eating my year quota of nectarines in a week. When I got back to Fiji, Suva trapped me with its big city charm and ability to get a months’ worth of work done in 5 days. Teri, a volunteer in the capital did a very good job of entertaining me…we went zip lining and sailing for the weekend. During the week, I finalized our budget for the UN grant and made up a timeline with a rep from WWF. We should be started with the 37,300FJD project by the time this is posted. Getting this done lifted a big uncertainty weight off my shoulders but placed a new “I hope this project goes well” weight, which is considerably heavier, back on. The first thing on the agenda is a workshop explaining how to manage and evaluate a project of this size. Next will be a 3-day workshop on waste management, facilitated by myself. I am really nervous about this one since my technical Fijian needs improvement.

After an extended time away from the village, I really wanted to get back. Luckily Air Fiji, one of the domestic carriers, is about as reliable as, well, anything else in Fiji. After missing one flight, I had to wait another 24 hours to catch the next one. Once on the plane I was so excited to go home, I could barely look out the window to see how much longer we had to go. Problem was it felt like we were flying in circles…I forced myself to look out and in fact we were circling the Labasa airport. I could recognize the mountains that lay just before my village, I was so close! But the airline failed to clear the flight before leaving the main island so no one was at the airport to clear us for landing. Just like that, 10 unhappy passengers were on their way back to the main island to spend the night wishing they had caught the ferry instead. The next morning we all got to the airport at 4:30am to try our luck with the first flight. Thirty minutes after we were supposed to take off, we boarded the plane only to be told to get off because they couldn’t find the switch to turn on the runway lights. The next time we boarded there wasn’t anyone there to sign off the plane…finally the third time we boarded we took off and landed 36 minutes later at our destination, a full 15 hours later than we were supposed to.

It was great to get back to the village. After a long kava session, I knew I was back when I had to force down the sheep neck stew that was placed in front of me for dinner. If that didn’t tell me I was back home, the shock of my first cold shower in 3 weeks brought me back to the village lifestyle. Since then, I have been having meetings with the leaders of the community to get ready to start this project. But as always, its more play than work and I was able to go out fishing and test out my new water proof camera. So I’ll leave you with a selection of photos and I’ll be back soon with more Fiji adventures to report on.