This past weekend I seriously needed to get out of Suva. I haven’t seen the sun in ages because it has been raining, I had a ton of other volunteers at my house last week, and Peace Corps office was pissing me off. Plus, I only have 5 weekends left in Fiji, I want to make them count! So, two other volunteers and I decide to go to one of the outer islands for a night. Robinson Crusoe Island.

 

Robinson Crusoe Island

I have never had the desire to visit this island. It always seemed like such a tourist trap, they cater mostly to day trippers, there are crab races and nature walks, and then staff at the resort put on a whole show for the tourists- fire dancing and all that. Never really tickled my fancy. However, another volunteer had been there before and said it was a ton of fun.  So after some persuading from him and my roommate to go “play the tourist” for a few days….I gave in.

After a 45 minute boat ride we come up to this tiny little island right off the coast, small enough that you can walk around in less than an hour. We can hear the staff singing our welcoming song on the beach and just as we pull up a “native” comes running up to us in a grass skirt yelling some battle cry. All part of the show I thought as I rolled my eyes.

We had about an hour after we got off the boat to set up camp in the dorms, I immediately changed into my suit and went straight to the ocean.  There was an entire program of activities that the resort were putting on that day, most of which I had no interest in. I didn’t want to be treated like just another sucker tourist who comes to Fiji to be entertained. Sometimes I feel a little snotty towards tourists… I’m not sure why. So I passed on the snorkeling trip but was talked into the crab races and then fell for a prank the resort put on. After a while I realized that the staff was having just as much fun as the guests were! Like seriously having a ball. They didn’t resent us for being tourists, we weren’t exploiting them and their culture, it was them who were celebrating it and were happy to share it with us. So, I quickly got over myself and let myself start having some fun! And boy did I!! The rest of the afternoon consisted of lounging on the beach, floating in the ocean, playing on an inflatable obstacle course, and fun activities with the staff.

Carol and I drinking our coconut water

Crab Races!!!

 

Epic inflatable obstacle course

Watching a beautiful sunset while sitting on a trampoline on the ocean drinking a cocktail

After a spectacular sunset, we showered and got ready for the nights activities which included the famous fire walkers of Beqa and Pacific inspired dancing, all performed by the staff. There was a delicious lovo (earth oven) for dinner and then there was the show. It was AMAZING. The dancers are so talented. I was really mesmerized the whole time. They turned the lights off on the entire resort which really made the fire illuminate the dancers and the spectators.

Walking on the red hot coals

Fire dancing

 

Fire dancing

After the show, the day trippers took the boat back to the main land and there were a few scattered people staying the night on the island. Some Brazilian girls, some English guys, some Aussies, some Kiwis and then us Americans. We all sat together and drank grog with the staff and talked like we were all friends. Around midnight I made my way to the dorms to go to sleep, you could see every star in the sky.

Grog

We woke up early the next morning, ate some breakfast, and I immediately went to the ocean again. I really wanted to spend as much time in the ocean as I could. Maybe it was because the ocean was so cold and refreshing on my sunburned skin, or maybe because I had the beach all to myself, or maybe it was because I don’t know how many more times I will be able to float in the warm South Pacific Ocean.

Seriously….look at this beach

 

Could lay here allll day

There was another group of day trippers that day, coming in on the morning boat, eating lunch, watching the show, and then heading back on the afternoon boat. So the staff put up the activities board and did the same routine as the day before: snorkeling, crab races, nature walk, etc. It was amazing to me to see how natural they were with it, never bored with the same activities or entertaining the people. Acting like their jobs are the most fun thing in the world.

After a delicious lunch it was time for another fire dancing show. Only this show was different from the one the night before, different dances, more Polynesian dancing. Just as gorgeous though.

Lunch time show

After the show, and getting in the ocean one more time it was time to go. We got on the boat with the returning day trippers and the staff sang isa lei while we were leaving. I had so much fun that weekend, I laughed harder than I had laughed in months, and came back to Suva feeling rejuvenated and excited to finish up my service here. It was so nice to go somewhere and play the tourist, not to take myself so seriously, kick back and have some fun. It totally got me ready to be the tourist in my upcoming travels!!

Dave and I on the way home

 

There is something to be said about public transport. Even though it is a pain in the ass- you get the chance to meet some pretty cool people if you let yourself. Just this past weekend I learned a valuable lesson: That by making myself open and available to talk to my neighbors I can connect with person in a special way that I may have never had the chance to otherwise. So this weekend I took a trip to the west side of the island to watch a chess tournament (yeah, I’m a geek, so what?) and I met some pretty cool people during transport.  Let me tell you a bit about them.

Cranky American Girl Learns her Lesson

It’s the luck of the draw, really. Your neighbor on the bus can either make your trip miserable or enjoyable. When you step on to the bus you have many choices: 2 seat side or three seat side, window or isle seat, front of the bus or back.  I always try to get there about 15 minutes early so I can get my favorite seat, the window seat on the two seat side, halfway back and far away from the speaker. This way I get sufficient leg room, I get to see the ocean from my window and I only have to sit next to one person instead of two, and most of the time I am the only foreigner on the bus and no one wants to sit next to me so I usually sit by myself for the majority of the trip! Score!

However, sometimes I get there with no time to spare and I am forced to sit wherever there is an open seat. This was the case this past weekend.  I’m already cranky because I’m late, and it’s raining and the taxi driver didn’t give me the right change, and the only available seat was the isle seat on the three person side. It’s like this seat was made specifically for short people….not long legged people like me.  so my knees are all crammed in, the guy next to me is completely crammed in as well; taking up half of my seat because the guy next to him is taking up half of his seat.  I’m halfway in the isle and i’m completely uncomfortable so I decided not  to be social at all: I put on my sunglasses and turn on my ipod and try to get my mind to zone out for the next 5 hours.  I find it hard to do when the guy next to me keeps trying to make small talk with me. Pointing out that I’m too tall for the seats, (yeah no shit Sherlock), then asking me how far I’m going, telling me how far he is going, talking about the weather, asking how I like Fiji. Questions I have answered 5000 times before. I’m in no mood to talk so I’m trying to make it clear to him that I don’t want to talk by taking out and putting back in my ear buds every time he asks me a question. I just wish he would leave me alone so I can listen to music and get this ride over with. Then, of course, he falls asleep…..on my shoulder. I try to politely shrug him off and he wakes up only to fall back to sleep 30 seconds later. This goes on for about 3 hours.  By this point I am cranky and uncomfortable and irritable and just want this guy off my shoulder to I literally push him off of me . He wakes up and seems to sense my mood and starts to make a real effort to give me some room.

After a while he taps me on the shoulder, yet again, but this time to tell me that he will move seats as soon as someone gets off because he can tell how uncomfortable I am.  GAH! I immediately feel like a horrible bitch and try to imagine how he must see me right now, as a mean cranky foreign girl who has no time or interest in talking to him. Not the kind of impression I want someone to have of me, ever. I only have about 30 minutes until my stop and decide to try and fix this before I get off. So I tell him it’s fine and that I’m getting off soon and then it is me trying to make small talk with him! And of course, he ends up being incredibly interesting! He is from Kiribas, and has just returned from a conference in Israel where he is some high leader for the Bahá’u'lláh faith. He then proceeded to tell me all about it until I got to my stop. He wasn’t preaching at me like some people here do, he seemed to genuinely want to educate me on his faith, not convert me. I always find it so interesting to listen to people talk about their religions and beliefs and how they see the world and the people in it and all the different religions. It turned into a pretty special conversation on that bus full of sleeping Fijians. I regretted that I had to get off when the time came and wished I would not have wasted those first few hours being grumpy at him. I wished him a safe trip home and promised I would check out his website to see what it was all about.  Which I did.

Arkansas, eh?

The next day, another volunteer and I cram into a mini-van for a 45 minute trip to another town. About 10 minutes into the trip an Indian man taps me on the shoulder and asks me where I’m from in the States. I’m immediately self-conscious. What gave me away that I was American? Usually I am mistaken as an Australian. I don’t think I was being obnoxiously loud like most American tourists. (FYI, Americans are LOUD!) I wasn’t wearing a shirt that said anything about America. Maybe it’s my accent? So I told him I am from Arkansas and he immediately says “Oh yeah! I used to live in El Dorado, Arkansas!” What are the chances? Small world. Then he tells me that he used to work for the American Peace Corps here in Fiji back in the 1960’s! He worked with the first 4 groups that came to this country! Then, of course, I tell him that I’m part of the 88^th group!  Blew his mind! So crazy that we connected on these two things. For the rest of the trip he tells me all about his life and where he has lived in the US and what he does now for a living. He tells me what brought him to the US in the first place and what brought him back to Fiji. Once again the time went by too fast and I found myself wishing I had more time to talk to this man. However, we shook hands and wished each other luck in the future. Just imagine if I had been too busy to talk to this man I never would have heard about his life and his experiences. I would have missed the chance to feel a special sort of camaraderie with this man in this tiny minivan on this tiny island in the South Pacific who had lived in the same state as me 8000 miles away.

Surf boards and Korean Food

Alexander. Now this was an interesting guy. He gets on the bus at Sigatoka and sits beside me. At first I can’t tell what he is, Fijian? Some other South Pacific islander? Just a really tan Australian/Kiwi? We strike up a conversation that ends up lasting the entire 3 hours it takes it get to Suva. I find out his mom is Lauian (small island group to the east of Viti Levu) and his dad is Hawaiian! He is fluent in both English and Fijian. He spent his childhood living in one of the most remote islands groups in the world and in boarding schools in the US. Now he lives in Fiji and makes surf boards for a living. He tells me he gets hard rocks from Arkansas to help shape his surf boards….another random connection to a place that is so close to my heart here on this tiny rock in the South Pacific. He is an incredibly interesting guy, free-spirited, and spends his days doing what he loves, surfing. Of course he has traveled the world and has all kinds of advice for me for my upcoming travel adventures. By the time we roll into Suva bus stand he asks me if I want to go get some dinner. Uhh yeah….I never say no to dinner. So we go get some delicious Korean food and spent the next 3 hours talking about all sorts of things. At the end of the night we say good-bye, I get into a taxi and that was that.

I can’t imagine missing out on any three of these interactions with these guys. It would have been so easy to shut myself off and not talk to these guys on the bus, but look at what I would have missed out on. Makes me regret all the times in the past when I have been the grumpy girl on the bus who doesn’t want to talk. As annoying as it can be to answer the same questions over and over, sometimes you get lucky and meet some pretty interesting people.

This was a good lesson for me to learn, especially since I will be travelling alone through Australia and SE Asia in a couple of months. There are so many chances to meet people and make friends if you just make yourself available and approachable.

So it has been a while since I last did a spotlight on a fellow volunteer, you may remember me talking about Samantha, an environment volunteer living in a rural Fijian village. This time I am doing it on a city volunteer, my roommate in fact, Ms. Carol Fox.

Now let me tell you something about Carol, she rocks. She is one of the hardest working volunteers in the country and her presence here has literally changed people’s lives, although she would never admit that to you herself. Let me tell you a bit about her project…

Carol is an echo cardiographer. For those of you who aren’t familiar, an echo cardiogram is a 3 dimensional picture of the heart and it uses a Doppler ultrasound to create images of the activity of the heart.

So, this is Carol.

Carol is from Wisconsin where she has been an echo cardiographer for more than 20 years.

You can break up her Peace Corps service into two parts: the village & the city.

Carol’s original assignment was as a rural health promotion volunteer in a beautiful little coastal village on the northern island.  She was the 3^rd Peace Corps volunteer this village has had, and sometimes found it hard to come up with new projects to do that hadn’t already been done. She volunteered in the local school and did some work for the library. She also worked with the women’s group and found 15 broken, rusted sewing machines and taught the women how to fix them and clean them up.

One day while she was in town she took a tour of the local hospital. She started talking with a doctor, telling him a little bit about her background in echo and turns out……they had an echo machine that was donated to them 2 years ago that NO ONE knew how to use! It has just been sitting in a room for years while one of the doctors was trying to teach herself how to use it. YEAH! PROJECT!!!

So then she started coming in from the village every other week for a few days to help train a few people on how to perform echo’s. After about 3 months of this, the Ministry of Health saw her potential and went to Peace Corps to ask if Carol could be transferred to the capitol to work with echo at the hospital. Peace Corps eventually agreed and she was moved in with me in Suva and immediately got to work developing an echo training program at Colonial War Memorial Hospital, the first of its kind. In addition to the training program she was charged with the task of creating an echo department within the hospital. She was faced with all of the policy making and procedures that go along with developing a new unit.

She started an intense 6 month fast track training program with 5 graduates of the Fiji School of Medicine radiology technology department. She was determined to conduct the training according to U.S. and international standards that included: echo theory, knowledge of machine operation and controls, basic understanding on sonographic waveforms, and identification of diseases.

If you have read any of my other blogs you might remember me telling you about how non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease are at a crisis level in the South Pacific. What many people also don’t realize is how prevalent Rheumatic Heart Disease is.

RHD is a type of heart disease; it is an auto-immune disease that is caused by the strep virus.  If you catch it early you can take medicine for the rest of your life to manage it, but if you catch it late, the prognosis is very poor if you aren’t able to get a valve replacement. Only visiting teams from overseas are capable of doing the valve replacement surgeries and they usually only come a few times a year and see limited cases of people.

Working with echo in America, Carol had seen less than 10 cases of RHD in the past 20+ years. In the last year alone, Carol has witnessed hundreds of cases. She sees the extreme cases here that are never seen in the US because it never gets that far.

Why is it more prevalent here than it is in America? No one knows, could be genetic, could be hygiene, and could be living conditions. But it is know that by detecting it early you can get treatment earlier and have a chance of living a higher quality of life.

And guess what? Echo is the only non-invasive test that can detect rheumatic heart disease.

Working in a hospital in a developing country presents challenges that we’re not used to in America.  She said at first she was shocked by the conditions of the facilities, and the utter lack of privacy given in the wards. As a westerner we think not having any privacy is a bad thing; but with the culture here people would see it as a bad thing if they were all alone in personal rooms. It’s all in the way you look at it.

Another big challenge is not having resources needed to get the job done such as books, printers, internet access, or something as simple as a desk with a chair.

Just recently the Fiji government said they want to start a new initiative that would include doing an echo on all the school children across Fiji to test for RHD by the year 2015; something that never would have been considered if she hadn’t started this training program. Because of her there are at least 5 trained echo techs that can perform the scans or train others to.  These 5 echo techs now have a skill that no one else in the country has, a skill that will be in huge demand in a few years…months even. They will be able to find a job that pays well, they now have options that were not available to them before.

Living with Carol I have learned more about echo that I ever thought I would. Learning about RHD has really made me aware of how behind Fiji and other developing countries are when it comes to diagnosis and preventative care.  I could tell you a dozen more cool aspects to Carols work here as a volunteer but I think her project speaks for itself. She was able to accomplish more in just one year as a volunteer than most people care to accomplish in 10. When most people hear ” Peace Corps Volunteer” they think grassroots community based bottom up small projects. However, Carol is proof enough that if you have a skill and the passion to teach it to others then you can work in any level and reach as many people as you want to really make a difference in their lives.

I have to constantly remind Carol that she is just a volunteer, not an employee. She doesn’t have to work 10-12 hour days or work on the weekends.  We should probably just go hang out on the beach instead. You can see how having a project like hers would make it difficult for her to get away and enjoy living in Fiji, which is where I come in and force her to go spend the weekend at the beach with me instead!

 

     Seasons. Something I took for granted back home but something I am desperately missing here in Fiji. Fiji is great because it is always summer, always beach weather, always sandal and tank top weather. You never need a coat and you always have sunscreen and bug spray in your bag. Any weekend out of the year you can up and decide to spend it at a backpackers place on the coast and soak up the sun and the sea. Gardens and flowers never die (except when I plant them…) because it’s never too cold and there’s never a drought. You need your grass cut year round. Packing is made easier because summer clothes take up less room then winter clothes, your hair is always a shade or two lighter and you always have a tan.

     Seems to me seasons go by pretty quick back home (from what I see on friends and families Facebook status’s). Feels like just last week I was emailing people back home about how hot the summer was there and how there was a bad drought and all the crops were failing. Then I start seeing pictures of people happily playing in the snow….then pictures of people being miserable because it’s still snowing, And now Facebook tells me it’s already spring break! Next week they will probably be complaining that it’s too hot again! All the while I’ve been sweating my ass off in this island country of endless summer.

     I took for granted how the seasons kept things exciting! Always changing. Always catching you off guard.

     I’ve missed two “first” snowfalls of winter, two college football seasons (you know where your burning up at the start of the season and freezing towards the end), two spring breaks, two burning hot summers, two seasons of watching the leaves change color, two seasons of that feeling you get when you’re in your car and its warm up enough to roll down your windows, two seasons of getting excited when it’s just getting cold enough to start wearing cute scarves and hats, two seasons of having school/work cancelled due to snow/ice storms, two seasons of shopping at The Home Depot garden center to start a flower garden in your backyard (mom!!), two seasons of getting excited to go to the lake/river, two tornado seasons when your eye is always on the sky, and two holiday seasons where you make pumpkin pie and apple cider and wear big comfy sweaters and sit in front of fireplaces. 

As much as I love living in Fiji and having access to the warm South Pacific Ocean and sunny skies (most of the time), I still can’t wait to wear jeans again and turn the heater on in my car! I should be getting back to America in mid-September. Just in time for it to start cooling down!  

Seems like every time I get on Facebook another one of my friends from home is getting engaged, or is about to get married, or pregnant with their first, second or even third child! At first I get excited for them, then I get sad that I’m not there to share it with them, then I panic because, shit- I’m 26 and I’m still living on own with no plans on settling down anytime soon. By the time my mother was my age…she already had me and my three siblings before me. I feel as though I am behind in life with no hope of catching up.

I’ve always wanted to be a young mom and to have a house full of kids. But now, I am realizing that while I still want a house full of kids, I also want to be able to pick up everything at a drop of a hat and go do something crazy like WWOOF in another country for a few months or (hopefully) have a job that will send me to work all over the world. I know it sounds silly that I am saying I can’t have one without the other….but I don’t think I can do one well with the other.

I feel a bit selfish because I am having too much fun being on my own. I like doing things that I want to do and not worry about anyone else. I don’t want to settle down anytime soon, when I think about getting married and buying a house and having a mortgage and sitting at a desk for the rest of my life I get a little panicky and depressed.  This was one of the many reasons why I applied to the Peace Corps in the first place, I felt like that was the path that my life was on and it freaked me out.

So instead of worrying about how old I am, I’ve decided to categorize my life into decades. My 20s will be for being young and selfish, for travelling and sleeping on peoples floors, for being ridiculously poor, for going on adventures and meeting new people and having fun, and for finally going back to school to study what I’m passionate about. My 30s will be for having my shit together, getting a good job, paying off student loans, settling down, and being a bit more responsible.

Thoughts?