Season's Greetings

Merry Christmas!
Marau na siga ni sucu!


Happy New Year from Fiji!
Marau na yabaki vou mai Viti!

word jumble

An example of how easy it is to mix up Fijian words/phrases:
Amy: Wananavu.
Mike: Au na wavu.

Translation:
Amy: Fantastic.
Mike: I'm a bridge.

as promised:

My favorite kid ever. This is Mo. He's deaf, but still taught and led the meke of about 30 kids from my village at Kids Games (explained in the next pic). He was so much fun to watch because he was so serious and intense about the dance. He's also incredibly smart. He's fluent in English, Fijian, American Sign Language, and Fijian Sign Language. He became deaf a couple years after birth so he can still speak really well and can read lips so well, you wouldn't know he was deaf if no one told you. A couple months ago he came home for a school break from the deaf school he attends in Suva. He taught me a bunch of signs and gave me a sign name so now we show that off to anyone who will watch.


THE ugliest picture of me and Sarah ever so it must be shared with the world. We were painting faces at an Aussie-led, Jesus-inspired full day of games with kids from 8 villages, KIDS GAMES it's called. Many taboos happening that day. Fijians don't like their heads or faces touched. It's taboo. So here we are rubbing red paint all over their faces, they're wincing like crazy (the equivalent of putting eye liner on a 5-year old), so that there are eventually about 25 spidermen running around this village. Then we played duck-duck-goose, another incredibly inappropriate game for a culture who doesn't touch heads. Alas, it was fun and the kids enjoyed it so chalk it up to another life experience and a random time with other white faces in PCFiji.


I found Sarah here in front of the cupboard looking for some grub and I cracked up because I assume this position at least once a day wondering "what should I eat next..."


Buna collecting lots of mangrove seedlings during our workshops last week! She really did her part. We planted over 400 seedlings in our mangrove nursery.


Lutu gloating over his dead, dried frog from the road. (What Ashley so appropriately deemed "toad jerky".) He brings home all sorts of disgusting treasures, gnaws for a bit, then leaves on the mat for me to discover and clean up later. It's always an adventure, I tell you.


My village rugby team, Team Paisoni (Poison), won the rugby sevens match and $1500. We're totally partying the 22nd of December! Grog and guitars and songs and a gift exchange. It really is christmas!


The kindergarten graduation ceremony. They call it prize giving because the kids who scored highest on their exams get prizes and public recognition for the subjects they led. Each class also performs a meke or song or drama.


I ate chicken feet. Only 2 though because they look too much like hands and I started feeling like a cannibal. I also ate bat the other day, but have no proof. It tastes like really gamey, greasy, pulled pork.


My favorite girls working on some environmental posters.


A crazy hair pic and the epitomy of how crazy I feel sometimes living in a village.

yes, i paint my nails in peace corps.

I held my first workshops in the village! They were for 2 hours (but usually ended up being 3) from 10am - noon, Monday - Friday. They were a bit of a mess, but not everything is a raging success in PC, right? The workshops were for the kids since they are on school break now. We talked about water, trash and the mangroves. Those may seem like random topics to put together, but those are all the projects for the adults that are happening here. So I wanted to include the kids.

I'm not sure how effective they were, but we had fun. I did have about 10 kids over to my house every night talking about these issues and preparing flipcharts for the next day, though. That was a lot of fun--making up activities, and one of the girls had some incredible ideas like making a drama about pollution in the river.

Each morning we sang a new song to get us pumped and excited. We learned lots of mekes and american action songs like the hokey pokey and this song I learned in PC called "making melody in my heart". Let's just say the kids love making melody. They make it all day long. I no longer have melody in my heart for this song.

But it's a fun one. You sing Making Melody in my Heart (x3)/Melody in my Heart. Then you put your thumbs up and have your arms straight out. Then sing again. Eventually you end up with your thumbs up, elbows out, feet apart, knees together, chin up and tongue out. You look and sound ridiculous! Just the kind of thing kids dig.

Speaking of digging, the best part of the week was Friday. We trudged through the mangroves to find seedlings to plant in the nursery. We got dirty. One of the little boys tripped and fell face first in the mud! He looked like he just had a $400 mud bath. Lucky him, it was free.

It was a pretty stressful week, but it was fun. I'm definitely closer to all the kids and even the other members of the village. It's taken me awhile (4 months or so...) but I'm warming up. And there are some people here that I would call friends. I've also got some more ideas like starting a reading club to help the kids learn English. English is a compulsory subject in school and school is taught mostly in English. Many kids don't learn the language as quickly and therefore do poorly in school--one of the major reasons for dropouts. I also want to start a girl's night where all the girls come over and just chat about life and boys and paint our nails and do crafts. But we would also talk about puberty and HIV/AIDS and sex and how to get a job and all the tough stuff that girls should be talking about but aren't.

My PCV friend, Sarah aka Swaz is coming to visit for a couple days and I'm totally stoked. She's one of my fave volunteers and my village is excited to host her too. They've already got the grog bowl out! Once she leaves, Mike will be here for 16 dayz! I can't believe it. It's been 7 months since I've seen (excluding skype) any of my loved ones. I also sort of need a vacation. I love my village, but it'll be good to have some time away.

P.S. I'll try to post pictures soon. These verbose blogs are getting on my nerves.

For those of you who were worried...

I ate an entire pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving.

There's no equivalent for Thanksgiving here and the food could not even compare to the banging-ness of the feast the PCV's prepared. We started with wine and cheese and danish sausage (ingredients included pork, beef, dextrin?) around 330pm. I finally stopped eating around 1230am. I am a marathon eater apparently. I had been saving room for days. We had cornbread, broccoli casserole, fruit salad, fish, chicken, stuffing, cookies, brownies, pumpkin pie, guacamole, and lots of other goodies that I can't remember I ate.

So don't worry, friends and family, I still am eating right at the holidays.

I also got to talk to the family on Skype! Amazing! It was just like old times. The women chatting with me about Fiji and all the absent family members, while my uncles and dad argued in the background about who was helping pick up the furniture for the new house. Things like that. It was basically the best phone call ever.

Mike comes in 17 days, so I'll be spending Christmas with him! These holidays will still be special even though they are very different from all the ones I've had in the past...

Happy Holidays!