Warning: this post contains spleen venting

First thoughts on what it would be like to move to Fiji? Endless sun, sand and sea? Ha! Let me dispel you of this notion once and for all. True if you move to a resort and work as a divemaster your life will all of those things and more, I’m sure. But for most of us that have jobs that require sitting at a desk, living in Fiji means living and working in Suva, and at the moment, Suva is in my bad books.

Over the last few days, things have happened that have really tested my affection for this hot, sweaty place. First, I misplaced my passport. Now it would be churlish to blame this momentary lapse of being a responsible adult on where we live. However, I had stashed it away somewhere safe for the duration of Cyclone Evan and on going to retrieve it I could not find it. John and I have searched everywhere in the house at least twice and still no luck. It was about to expire anyway, but my main record of travel over the last ten years has disappeared in a post-storm, bereavement-fueled fug.

Of course you need to file a police report to replace a lost passport. Obtaining the police report required three trips by taxi to the police station. To be completely fair to the Fijian police, I never had to wait more than ten minute to be told to come back later and on the third trip, it took less than five minutes for the neatly typed, very boring police report to be placed in my hands.

Also, I have had two attempts to get my American passport photo taken. The place that takes them here specialises in taking the least attractive photos ever. For the next ten years, my glowering stare from beneath my perspiring brow in my passport photo will be a reminder of our time in Fiji. If you plan to move abroad, be sure to have a couple of different photo IDs besides your passport and some decent passport photos. It could save you a lot of bother.

Our beloved little Reg, the cutest, scruffiest kitten this side of the International Date Line, broke his leg on Friday. Over the weekend, he managed to progress it from a greenstick to an infected compound fracture. Problem is that the only vet in Suva left for her week-long holiday on Friday afternoon.  Yes, you heard me right - THE ONLY VET IN SUVA. Even the Society for the Protection of Animals in Suva does not have access to a vet until February. Here, animal life is cheap. If you’re seriously attached to your animals, I would suggest that you keep Fiji as an expat destination off your list and check the availability of veterinary care wherever you’re thinking about going.

We had a sleepless night nursing him. Thankfully, I’m married to a mad scientist who happened to have a bottle of powered ampicillin in his office left over from an experiment, so a slug of that mixed with goat’s milk in a syringe, cooling with damp towels and the occasional cuddle kept him alive until we got him to the vet’s this morning. He’s only receiving nursing care though, so we’re hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

Finally, after dropping Reg off at the vet’s this morning, I fell asleep for an hour and woke to no power. It was only after another hour or so that I realised that we were the only ones in this situation in our neighbourhood. In our house, that’s how you can tell that the electricity bill is overdue - they turn off your power. Of course it does help if you receive the bill. The timing of the bill arrival is completely random. I had suspected that this might happen so last week I tried to put some money towards our account but was told that they needed a copy of the bill or the amount due to pay it. It is like a Kafkaesque nightmare. Another trip into town to pay the bill, a six hour wait and the power is back on.

Maybe I’ll feel a little better now that the ceiling fans are on, I've eaten some delicious half-melted ice cream from the freezer and I've vented in this post.

Off with her head!

Yesterday, the Queen’s head disappeared from Fiji’s banknotes. The government has made a short commercial to be played in cinemas explaining the new banknotes, which John and I saw while waiting for The Hobbit to start yesterday. This move is completely understandable as Fiji was kicked out of the Commonwealth in 2009 after delaying elections after the 2008 coup (elections won’t be held until 2014). However, is feels little disrespectful to see a large insect crawling onto the space where Lizzie’s face peered out from moments earlier, even in the name of celebrating the biodiversity of these wonderful islands.

It wasn't the best picture of the Queen anyway.

It’s been a while since I last posted because I've been busy snorkelling or being in either a languid or a slightly inebriated state during our amazing trip to Vanua Levu over the Christmas holidays. Our power finally came on in the wee hours of the 23^rd, shortly before we took an early morning taxi to airport to await our flight to Savusavu. There were only two small Pacific Air prop planes at the airport that morning and one was not fit to fly, so we had to wait for the other one to fly wherever it was going, then come back (empty) before we could take off. We could see small islands and complex reef systems almost the entire way before making our descent through a small valley, the height of which made it seem like you could reach out and grab coconuts off of the trees.

The men's toilets and the welcoming committee at Savusavu Airport

My first impression of Savusavu itself is that it was just what I thought Fiji would be like before we moved here. Savusavu Bay is unbelievably beautiful and we enjoyed the view from the balcony at our room at the Hot Springs Hotel. The name of the hotel is slightly misleading as they don’t really have hot water at the hotel. They installed a geothermal water heating system which meant that (in our room anyway) when you turned the hot water tap on there was only a 50/50 chance that hot water would come out.

The view over Savusavu Bay from the Hot Springs Hotel

Our ultimate destination, however, was the Pearl Shack on the south shore of the island. The owner picked us up from the hotel on Christmas Eve morning and kindly took us into town to do our grocery shopping. What a nightmare! Savusavu is not a big town (probably around 5000 people), but every single resident was squeezed into the narrow aisles of the supermarket that morning. The market was the same. I battled the feeling of claustrophobia to try to buy what I could off of my list, but in the end I kind of gave up so we ended up with a selection of weird stuff to eat. John had been in charge of going to the liquor store, and with steely determination did an admirable job. Fortunately the previous occupants of “the shack” had left a good supply of condiments or the food might have become rather boring.

I could have written an entire post just about the shack. In fact I did, but it was so tedious in its lyrical waxing that I thought that I’d make everyone hate me if I published it. It was a completely relaxing, healing place. The snorkeling was unbelievable. Parts of the back reef were really interesting with enormous heads of coral and a good diversity of fish, but the fore reef was stunning. A walk across the reef pavement in low tide, followed by a short snorkel in about half a metre of water led to a drop off to around 20-30 meters. The wall was covered in healthy coral. John took loads of video, most of which came out kind of rubbish because his camera started to fog up. The reef went on for a long way, but we didn't need to venture too far to stay amused. Besides, once you got out too far, the drop off was too pelagic to be comfortable without eyes in the back of your head. It’s funny how the Jaws theme tune just pops into your head at the most inopportune times.

Besides snorkeling  we kayaked, cooked (we didn't eat out once we got to the shack), drank and did silly things like attempt a romantic canoodle in the two person hammock after some champagne. This ended badly with both of us stuck with our feet up in the air and our heads pile-driven into the sand. John worked on teaching himself the corals of Fiji and I wasted an embarrassing number of hours reading the Game of Throne series.

We came back to Suva to see in the New Year. Our “celebration” consisted of Thai beef salad and champagne on the patio with the kittens and enough episodes of Rome to see us to midnight. Bliss. 

Sleepless in Suva

The tale of our encounter with Cyclone Evan starts with Mummy Cat pooing and meowing outside of our bedroom door in the wee hours of Monday morning. I guess that her agitated behaviour was due to the drop in barometric pressure or some such animal-ESP type thing. Anyway, once the hallway was cleaned, she continued to mewl. John put a pillow over his head to drown her out. Eventually I dropped off and woke a little while later to no noise except the growing wind and driving rain. I got up to check on Mummy Cat and couldn't find either her or the kittens in the house, but assumed that they must have found somewhere clever to hide. As I turned to go back up stairs, I was horrified to hear a kitten squeaking outside.

There was poor little Reg, wet and shivering, sitting outside on the front lawn all on his own. Mummy Cat, I assume, was trying to show the kittens how to survive in the bush during a storm. Reg, having shimmied through a torn window screen, had thought better of it once outside. After calling for them for a minute of two, Mummy Cat and Khali raced back out of the bush into the house. They did not try to get outside again for the duration.

So there I was, up at the crack of dawn, the weather worsening. There was nothing for it but to make scones for breakfast. We Skyped with the children and family in the UK, taking the iPad outside to show them the wind rattled trees which at the time didn’t look very impressive. Coming back into the house, we discovered the first casualty of the storm – the kittens had eaten my scones.

For most of the day, it was blowing a gale rather than hurricane force winds. We took garden chairs out to our covered garage and watched two trees nearly come down (from a safe distance). One was absolutely fascinating. First the ground heaved around the base during each gust, then a crack appeared in the lawn, then eventually you could see long strands of thick roots being pulled out of the ground as the gusts got stronger. The tree still stands, but rests at an angle against the fence. I guess it will have to be chopped down. Pity after such a tenacious struggle. The other was a lovely Royal Palm, which now rests askew on the tree next to it.

One of the victims of the storm (the tree on the right, not me on the left)

Eventually, when we were actually a little chilly, we came inside, had hot showers, got comfy on the sofa and started to watch an episode of Rome (which is excellent, by the way). Halfway through it we lost power, so we resorted to playing games (Yahtzee and cribbage) and made pizza. In the evening it began to calm down so we relaxed a little, thinking that the worst of it was over. Then BAM - the wind picked up to what appeared to be hurricane force winds, the rain being blasted into the windows in a weird high-power mist.

Cyclone pizza - note that I am not drinking so that I can keeps my wits about me. No comment about John.

One of the nice things about being married for such a long time is that we often think the same thing at the same time. We didn’t waste any time discussing it, we just went downstairs and began to get the linen cupboard ready for occupation. Think Harry Potter’s room under the stairs but with an eye-watering aroma of mothballs. We provisioned it with the cat carrier (without cats) and a bottle of water and sat around for a bit, wondering if it was bad enough to take cover. Again, the wind started to calm down a bit and exhausted, we went to bed. John was snoring instantly (he put in earplugs), but I was up and down most of the night dreaming strange dreams when I did sleep.

We woke up to strong wind and some rain, but the worst of it was over. We had banana pancakes and wandered about the campus taking pictures of what little damage had occurred. Our side of the island got off lightly compared to other side, though amazingly there have been no reported casualties so far. Around lunch time the power came on (we never lost water) and we spend the rest of the day laying about in a languid state watching Rome (we nearly jumped out of our skin when we turned the telly on – we’d had it so loud the day before in the storm), napping and finally drinking a bottle of post-Evan champagne outside with the sky turning the most amazing colours.

The university bure with fetchingly placed downed palm tree.

It appeared we’d got off lightly. Then on Wednesday lunchtime we lost water and power and it is Friday lunchtime and the power company is still not giving us any indication of when things will be back to normal. Living in the tropics with all modern accouterments is exhausting. Living in the tropics without so much as a refrigerator or a ceiling fan during the night is hell. Last night (2^nd power-free night) I struggled to rouse myself when I realised I was sleeping with my eyes open. It’s so still that the occasional drip of water off of the roof and onto the barbeque sounds like cymbals being clashed.

And the really bizarre thing is that it’s nearly Christmas! It has never seemed less like Christmas in my entire life. I am so sad, thinking about the children being so far away, with some pretender renting our house, sitting in front of our fire, gazing at our views across the River Tyne. John, however, seems more sanguine as demonstrated by this exchange last night at a waterside bar while having a beer:

Me: I miss the children.

Him: (Silence)

Me: The kittens just aren't a satisfactory substitute.

Him: Oh, I thought you were referring to the kittens in the first place.

So despite the mental solidarity honed by over twenty years of marriage, sometimes we are planets apart.

Annus Horribilis

2012. What a rubbish year. I lost my lovely sister, my wonderful mother and my mother in law. I said goodbye to my friends and family in the UK with great sadness to move to Fiji. I said farewell to my work colleagues at the Regional Maternity Survey Office leaving them to the vagaries of the UK coalition government who have systematically destroyed an internationally enviable public health system. Goodbye 2012 and good riddance.

Except 2012 isn’t finished with me yet. Cyclone Evan is slowly making a u-turn whilst sitting on top of Samoa and is setting its sights on Fiji.

Evan on Friday afternoon (Fiji time).

Those of you that have known me for a long time know that John and I have been here before. In 1989 on the island of St Croix in the US Virgin Islands, Hurricane Hugo nearly destroyed us. We lost our jobs, our home and all of our wedding presents (except the horrible ones that we’d put in the closet). What we like to say is that we (barely) survived Hurricane Hugo. A storm is not just the actual rain and wind, though those are scary and destructive enough, but the aftermath. No power, no telephone, mosquitoes breeding in stagnant water carrying dengue fever, evacuation chaos, looting, etc...

It has been dismaying to see how unconcerned people are here about this storm. Some of our friends and neighbours in St Croix were also blasé about Hugo. The last hurricane that had made a serious impact on the island was in the late 1920s so as far as most people were concerned, a hurricane was something that everyone got vaguely worked up about for very little.  As of early this morning, I appeared to be the only one stocking up on provisions – water, batteries, insect repellent, cat food (for the cats), first aid stuff, etc... Let’s just hope that Cyclone Evan passes us by and I’m stuck with a lot of dried pasta.

Fortunately Anna is away in the UK for Christmas, so they’ll be enough room in the linen cupboard for me, John and the cats if things get too wild. I was so sad that she wasn't going to be here for Christmas, now I’m just relieved. In my experience, in the battle between man versus nature, man always loses when Mother Nature is serious enough.

It is difficult to tie in the discussion about the approaching storm with the death of my mother, Marianna Wieder van Erp earlier this week, so I’m just going to jump straight to it. My lovely mother died a gentle death with very good hospice care (by Pathways) in the company of my surviving sisters. They, my brother, sister in law and his grown up girls have worked so hard since she fell ill in November – her prognosis was a moving target so what everyone was supposed to be doing or feeling kept changing. When I left her at the end of November, she was in rehab, planning to go into assisted living. I was convinced that I’d see her again in the spring. I’m very glad that I got to spend those ten days together, massaging her feet with Fijian coconut oil and filling her in on the minutia of my existence when she was too tired to talk. Precious moments that I treasured while they were happening, the memories of my sister’s passing being so fresh.

At a winery during one of the family reunions my mother was generous enough to host in 2009. She and my dad cemented our family together with these gatherings.

One of my favourite quotes is by Gore Vidal – “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies”. Call me a cynic, but I think this is true for everyone except in the case of parents (particularly mothers) who rejoice in their children’s successes without reservation.  I was really happy that my sisters were able to tell my mother that I have a job now, because I’m certain that besides John (who has his eye on the bank balance) my mother would have been the happiest person on the planet about it.

I look forward to posting again soon to tell you about how all of our preparations for the storm were for nought. Maybe I’ll throw a party next week and serve pasta and cat food.

These are a few of my favourite Fijian things

A friend emailed me the other day and asked me what appeared to be a simple question – “Do you want to be in Fiji?” This is different to the other obvious questions people ask (like “does it feel like you’re on one long holiday?”) because it doesn’t have an easy answer.

To put my quandary into perspective I received this email while in California seeing my mother, whose health is rapidly failing. Of course, my immediate reaction was I don’t want to be in Fiji, I want to be here with my mother. As the days passed, I started to wonder, do I really want to be in Fiji or would I hop on the plane back to the UK, given half a chance? Back to our son, our good friends and family, the cold and wet, the hell that is working in the UK public sector. Back to supermarkets, excellent healthcare, rampant consumerism and gross excess. When it was time to leave California, I did want to come back – to Anna and John and the cats and the quirkiness that is our life in Fiji. (Thank goodness for the kittens or else it would have been a close run thing).

I love living on the university campus. John can manage the odd lunch or coffee at home and evening work dos are varied and close by. Last night it was a cocktail reception for an English language conference that included wine and poetry reading. The landscaping is fantastic and the neighbours friendly. There is a wonderful Chinese restaurant on campus, the Southern Cross, which serves huge plates of delicious food for next to nothing. And because it is a university campus, there is always something interesting going on, like the carving of a totem by a team of Pacific Islanders and First Nation Canadians which you can drop in on when you walk past for a chat and to see how they’re progressing.

Ernest and Jeke working on the totem. I bought an ink drawing by Jeke which I'll post a photo of once the exhibition it's in is over.

I love that things we took for granted in the UK, like transport, can be adventures in themselves. Now, many expats here drive around in big black SUV type vehicles that come with their jobs. Not so families of humble academics. We travel by bus or taxi. The buses range from brand new air conditioned ones to vintage ones with no glass in the windows. Taxis are all of a certain age, but range from clean with functioning seatbelts to bone-rattlers that stink of petrol. The worst taxi ride I had was when I was driven home from the grocery store by a man that was probably legally blind. I was so terrified that I forgot to get his taxi number to report him to the authorities. There is a dearth of bespectacled middle-aged people here; including taxi drivers which leads me to believe that travelling by taxi is rather more dangerous than it appears.

The public bus. A trip to town costs FJ$0.70. Notice the well behaved, well groomed school child in front of me.

I’m not going to lie, I love not working (for now) and having a housekeeper who comes and executes her housekeeping magic twice a week. The contents of the dirty clothes baskets are found hanging freshly pressed in our closets, our beds made to hotel standard. Not only that, she also finds lost kittens in the dense bush, much to the relief of Anna and John, who lost one of the kittens twice while I was away.

I love the fact that while temporarily deprived of the internet and other human contact besides her parents, Anna taught herself how to play the ukulele. Yesterday, she had her first gig at the Home of Compassion care facility on her last day of work experience, when she took her ukulele and her electronic keyboard and performed a recital for the residents. They gave her a lovely card and one of the residents cried when she said goodbye – so sweet and poignant.

I love going to the fruit and vegetable market and getting unbelievably fresh fish from the small shop in Toorak then coming home to barbeque on our small patio with our newly planted lime and frangipane trees, surrounded by cheap tiki lanterns drinking Fiji Gold and watching the fruit bats.

So much good stuff, it's hard to stick to the shopping list when at the market 

I love the fact that when you’re flying here the plane is full of excited people heading for adventurous holidays. It’s like travelling to Europe 25 years ago, before people got jaded and long haul air travel became like cramped, overlong bus journeys.

I could dedicate a post to the things that I don’t love here, but instead I’ll give you a short list, in no particular order:

1. Being sweaty. I have an aversion to perspiring that has kept me from going to the gym my entire life. Now I glow profusely just sitting at my computer. Yuck.
2. Mosquitoes. Anna’s legs are covered in scars. I’ve got bites on the bottom of my foot right now. Torture. 
3. Distance. This place really is in the middle of nowhere. There’s almost no point in sitting in a window seat when flying anywhere as for 99.9% of the time, you’re just looking at endless sea.
4. Tile floors. This is related to the first point. Tile floors probably seem like a good idea. However, in high heat and humidity, water condenses from the air onto the tiles, so your feet feel damp all of the time. I’m sure that fungal infection is inevitable.

These lists are not exhaustive and will be added to in further posts. Things I love now I might grow to hate or the other way around. Such is life.

Warm Fuzzies

I was going to entitle this post "Proud to be 'Merkin" as in American, of course. However, I now realise that a merkin is a a toupee for the pubic area/genitals.The new title now refers to kittens and the warm feeling that I have about the election and has nothing at all to do with hair pieces used by 18th century syphilitics.

So much has been happening lately it’s hard to know where to start.

A couple of weeks ago our pregnant cat appeared not to be pregnant anymore. We’d assumed that she’d lost her kittens until we discovered two in one of the packing boxes stacked in the garden. I moved them all inside when I heard mama cat trying to scare away a large tom who was trying to get into their box. John grumbled the way that dads do when they’re pretending not to be big softies, but we know that he thinks that they are as cute as we do. The plan is that we’ll get them all neutered and vaccinated in December. We’ll then have to decide what to do with them. No prizes for guessing which way Anna will be voting.

Mama Kitty (aka Goldie or Roxy) with Regulus Arcturus Black (aka Reggie, Squirt, Runty, etc...) and  Daenerys Stormborn Targaryen (aka Fatty pants, Khaleesi, Daeny, etc...)

Speaking of voting – WELL DONE AMERICA! It’s easy to be an American abroad when we've got a great president. When George Bush was elected for a second term I spent the entire four years being quizzed about how it possible could have happened, like it was my own damned fault.

I was very lucky to get to go to the election party at the US embassy, as a plus one to one of John’s colleagues. They’d done a ballot at the party.  I don’t know what the exact numbers were, but it was something like Obama 110, Romney 8. I’m not sure how to interpret that without angering my Republican friends. Actually, I’m not sure I have any (friends that vote Republican, not friends in general). I hope someone emails me the photo of me with my arm around a cardboard cut out of the president. I wonder what they did with the one of Romney.

One interesting factoid that I learned during the election was that I have never been in a Republican stronghold state, except to pass through an airport. Maybe we should move to Tennessee next. I’m sure that, to me, it would be as foreign as Fiji.

From the embassy, we moved on to Oceania Art Gallery for the opening of an exhibit, briefly stopping at home to pick up our mobile phones (no point in taking them to the embassy as you have to check them in). Anna proudly showed us the remains of a scorpion that she’d squashed with a wooden spatula (it was Anna...in the kitchen...with the spatula). This place is seriously hardening her up. At the art gallery I bought a lovely pen and ink drawing by a local artist which I will share with you once the exhibition is over in December. Now I know why they serve wine at exhibitions – to loosen the purse strings.

I was invited to go for a walk with a friend that I made at the fundraiser at the Fijian Museum a couple of weeks ago. Noriko is a very interesting woman who has recently lived in both Afghanistan and East Timor. Her emails to her friends during her four years in Afghanistan were published as a book (see here for a blog post about it).  I think that I needed to hear from someone that knows a thing or two about these things about the need for patience in moving forward with my life here. Meeting people like her is definitely one of the benefits of living someplace like this.

While I’m waiting to get a job I’ve signed up to do an intensive Fijian language course with Alliance Français. I’m looking forward to it for many reasons, but am particularly glad of the timing – it coincides with Anna travelling to the UK for five weeks over Christmas. I’m going to miss her so much - she’s such good company for her dear old parents. Maybe once I've cracked Fijian, I’ll have a go at French, which, despite numerous holidays to France over the years when we lived in the UK, remains mystery to me.

For those of you that may have missed it, last week our housekeeper, Mela, showed me how to make roti with potato curry. Next week we’re going to make Fijian donuts. I may shortly have to buy an entire new wardrobe consisting of trousers with elasticated waistbands and smocks.

Suva, Can I Learn to Love You?

It’s a funny thing, not working in paid employment. When I was slogging through the bureaucratic quagmire of the UK NHS I could go home at the end of every day and say that I had been at work, even if I hadn’t really accomplished anything (and believe me, that is how it felt sometimes). Now my days are completely task driven but what I am able to achieve doesn’t sound very impressive. (“Hello honey, how was running the university’s research & international office? Today I paid the phone and electricity bills and found a place that sells cat litter!”)

It’s unbelievable how exhausting carrying out these tasks is. It’s also kind of embarrassing. It hardly seems right to complain about being tired after a day of internet banking, doing a few laps in the pool and avoiding the housekeeper. It must be the combination of the heat and my brain losing functionality.

I totally relate to this clip from the Mitchell and Webb Look. It's a little rude at the end, so if you're easily offended stop watching after you get the gist.

Speaking of exhaustion, Anna had Friday off school again for the sole reason that neither of us could face getting up at 6am for a fifth day running. Before you all go off and judge my parenting decisions, can I just remind you that Anna is retaking the last term that she already finished in the UK? Most of her Suva classmates are taking their GCSE exams which she absolutely aced in May/June (clever girl). Things will get serious come January 2013 when she starts the International Baccalaureate, but until then...

A little mangrove stand on the walk into town. Note the brown water.

We had a wonderful day off. I introduced Anna to Bulaccino’s, a coffee shop that I’d stopped into the day before while running the aforementioned errands. It really is an excruciatingly ridiculous name (Bula + cappuccino = Bulaccino = Helloccino in English), but the service and food are of an international standard that we haven’t really found very many other places here. They also have smoked salmon, which is Anna’s all time favourite food. I know that we’re supposed to eat local produce and most of the time we do, but sometimes what you need is a little bit of home on top of a delicious homemade bagel smeared with cream cheese.

The Vessel of Honour and the view across Suva Bay.

It was a lovely evening so we set off on a walk. We ran into one of Anna’s classmates and her mother (it’s that small town thing again) and before we knew it, we’d walked the coastal route all the way into the city centre. While discussing whether we should eat out twice in one day, we found ourselves in front of the Bad Dog Cafe which pretty much decided it. This is the place where the waiter (Nat) greets us with “Hello John. Hello John’s family”. John was not with us (he was in Noumea), so we just got “Hello John’s family”. Nat took the opportunity to quiz Anna about our names while I went to the toilet.  Two Shirley Temples and two glasses of sauvignon blanc later, Anna and I decided that we could get to like this place.