The New Home

My new village consists of 20 houses and approximately 80 people. Half of those people are children. Except for my college years, I have never not lived in a city.

On the day I arrived, a formal ceremony called a sevusevu is performed. This allows me to enter the village, be welcomed and counted as a member (family) of the community. The ceremony includes presenting to the village elder (sort of the mayor) some yoqona which is a root plant from which kava or grog is produced. Now, grog is legendary in this part of the world. The yoqona is pounded into a powder form which is then wrapped in a cloth, submerged in a big (usually wooden) bowl of water, and squeezed like a giant tea bag until the water is a murky brown. Yes, it looks like dirty water. Grog is served out of a half coconut shell called a bilo (the Fijian word for cup). Like everything in the Fijian village, this is a communal experience. The bilo is filled and presented one by one to each participant who imbibes the mixture in one long gulp. In the formal ceremony, there is a pecking order that is recognized in each round. Guests are served early in each round.

I have participated in many grog sessions, both formal and informal, since arriving on these islands. Grog is called the national drink of Fiji and is featured at every ceremony, meeting, and general social gathering. It’s the Fijian equivalent of “drinking.”  Grog sessions last for hours. They have to. The narcotic effect does not kick in until one has consumed many (20-30) bilos of the stuff. Until then, all you are going to experience is a slight numbness or tingling of the lips and tongue. Yoqona is a sort of pepper root plant. If you hang in there, you may get to the point of feeling extremely mellow and sleepy (aka stoned).

I have yet to experience the full quality of this exercise. For several reasons: like most gatherings in Fiji (and most Pacific Islands) everyone sits on the floor, legs crossed “Indian Style,” and that posture for me has its limits; all that liquid, along with all the water we’re supposed to be drinking to stay hydrated, makes me have to pee all night; most of the conversations that occur around the grog bowl are in Fijian and I get bored and self-conscious sitting there quietly; it doesn’t taste good. I’ve developed the habit of staying for a bilo or two out of respect and then finding a reason to excuse myself.

Honestly, I don’t get the whole grog thing. I keep thinking, “let’s all just have a beer or two and get to the point.”

(I could write gobs more about grog but I run the risk of this blog becoming cliché. I trust many others have written far better descriptions of the experience and suggest googling it to get a more complete peep into this part of the culture. It’s ubiquitous, essential to Fijian culture, and sure to be an ongoing subject in this journey).

After the sevusevu, I was escorted to another home where the women had prepared lunch for me. I sat (on the floor, natch), filled up my plate with the various dishes – typical Fijian fare: fish, kasava, bele. Without realizing, I had taken the fork or spoon from one of the serving bowls and began using that to eat what was on my plate. One of the women said, “Tevita, in Nadroga we eat with our hands.” Maybe that’s why I had pilfered the serving spoon: there were no other utensils in sight.  Good enough for me. I dug in with my fingers, fish and all! In my training village, I had a fairly well-to-do host family and all my meals were served at a kitchen table with utensils. This first meal in my new village signaled a new phase of my Fijian life. I felt oddly liberated.

Another aspect of Fijian meals is that very often, guests will be served along with the men of the household and they will eat and finish their meals before the women join in. I had never quite gotten comfortable with this, even if I did get a bit used to it during training. Many times I would ask my host mom to eat with us. Sometimes she would say, “after.” Sometimes she would look to her husband for confirmation before getting a plate and joining us. Otherwise, she would just sit there while we ate joining in only on the conversation. When we finished, my host father and I would excuse ourselves from the table, my host mom would clear our dishes then call her daughter and mother in to eat what was left. Thankfully, she always prepared plenty and I never felt guilty about eating more than my share. Some of my fellow trainees had remarked that they often felt that they were leaving scraps for the women of their families if food was scarce. If I haven’t written it outright at this point, it probably goes without saying that women’s roles in Fiji are extremely traditional.

Now on this first day at my new village, as I moved from the sevusevu to the lunch, the men stayed behind at the grog bowl while the women sat with me at lunch. And I do mean sat with me. They did not eat with me but watched and talked with me while I ate. Since then, I have shared many meals with a couple of the families and I’m happy to report that everyone eats at the same time: men, women, children, me. I guess at that first lunch I was an honored guest but now I am a member of the community. Family.

My house is a traditional Fijian Bure. Although the floor is a concrete base (with linoleum tile laid on top), the walls consist of a wood frame with bamboo and the roof is bamboo leaves. My bure is one room (with an attached bathroom). Imagine living in a cabin in the woods and that’s my life for the next two years. The bure is a living organism. I share my home with a variety of critters and creatures: the usual spiders, ants, moths and mosquitoes but also some other Pacific Island stalwarts like geckos, rats, and roaches. And frogs! Lots of frogs – which begin arriving at dusk and usually stay for a few hours hopping around my floor until they get tired and head back out into the dark. I routinely scan my floor every evening for the evidence they leave behind: little mushy poops and tiny puddles of pee. I try to detect them with my eye before I catch them under my feet.

During the day it’s pretty calm. Most of the “visitors” come at night. Thankfully, my kitchen is another structure about 20 yards from my bure so I keep very little food in my little one-roomer. What I do have, I keep in a little fridge or string up on a line so it hangs out of reach. I have yet to see or hear any rats or roaches (so far so good). Another volunteer nearby says she plays a game while she lies in bed at night waiting for sleep to come. She calls it “what creature is making that sound?”

I remember overhearing several weeks back when we were merely trainees, one of my cohorts was asking a current volunteer about the bure. Not everyone gets to live in one – depends on the village – and it’s considered a privilege – a truly unique Fijian experience – if one is up for it. The trainee was asking about the presence of said critters and creatures. The volunteer hesitated a half second and answered, “well… it IS a bure, so… it’s alive.” A very apt description. On several occasions, I’ve been lying in bed and noted, if there happens to be a gracious breeze, how the walls billow as the air passes through. It looks as if the bure is literally breathing.