Bula Vinaka!

Bula vinaka! Greetings from Fiji! Chris and I found ourselves with a free hour so we wanted to update you with the happenings of our first 2 weeks on country. So much has happened, it's hard to begin...

Staging in L.A.
We spent about 24 hrs in L.A. preparing to leave the country with our fellow 30 trainees. It was an exciting time as we met all of the people in our training group (FRE-7). Each trainee brings so much to the table we’re having a great time getting to know them! Peace Corps staff was in L.A. to collect final paperwork, screen us for Swine Flu, hand out Peace Corps passports and international plane tickets. The two staff members gave us a list of phone numbers in case of emergency and sent us on our way…

…and two days later we arrived in Nadi. We took a 6 hour bus ride across Viti Levu, the main island, to the Tailevu province were we will be for the remaining 7 weeks of training. By the time we got to our training site we were completely exhausted from the jetlag and near 30 hours of travel! We ate dinner and headed to bed at 7:30pm.

Training Center
The next morning we had our first yaqona ceremony welcoming us to the village and Fiji. It is Fijian village protocol that anyone who wishes to enter a village must request permission from the village chief and present an isevusevu, a root that can be ground and then mixed with water to make a drink called yaqona (Kava, in English). Fortunately, while we are still learning, someone else does that for us every time we enter a new village. After 5 days of language and culture training our 32 trainees were split into groups of 5-8 trainees and assigned villages in which to live for the remainder of training.

Home-Stay Families and Living in the Village
Chris and I had been expecting to be split up during training, but were actually assigned to live with the same host-family! We live in a large village with more than 500 people. We’re staying there with 6 other trainees and 2 host-country national LCFs (Language and Culture Facilitators). Our family is fantastic! We live with our host parents (Nau and Ratu) and a 23-year-old brother (Junior). During the week, our host-sister and her adorable 7-month-old stay with us.

Our host family has been a huge help with language and culture. They all speak fluent English, but do their best to speak in primarily Fijian so as not to hinder our learning.

Food
I am including a section on food in this blog as food is a rather large part of Fijian culture. For example, when we return from a day of training our host-family will ask “Kana cava?” (“what did you eat?”) instead of “how was the day?”. As many of you know, Chris and I were worried about the food in Fiji as we weren’t sure what to expect. No need to worry about our nutritional intake. Our diet consists of fresh fruits and vegetables ( most of which are from our village’s plantation), fish, chicken, tinned meats, and a lot of starches- root veggies, ramen noodles, rice, bread. The cooking methods in Fiji tend to include a high amount of oil and butter, but our host family has been really flexible with this so we’re not always eating fried eggs and fried meats.

There is much going on, but that will have to do for an update as our hour is almost up. We miss you all! Please feel free to write (address in previous blog)! Also, check out the pictures in the blog posted right before this one. We’ll try to post more soon, but our access to Internet is very limited!

Nan (and Chris)