Monday, May 23, 2005

bollywood star in the making?

Just across the road from the old office, is my favorite curry place called “Curry King”. They make great chicken curry and a range of vegetarian curries. For lunch I would often get a curry and roti parcel which is curry wrapped up in a roti for $1. For a treat on Fridays I would go and eat there and have chicken curry for $5. Since we moved offices, I have not been there but my boss went there the other day and the staff asked where the part-Indian girl was!!! First time I have been taken for a part-Indian. Maybe I can break into Bollywood.

I have had a streak of luck and been watching some very watchable Bollywood films. Some of them so watchable that the love scenes have me bursting out loud laughing. I would like to do a PhD one day on the maneuvers used by actors to give the impression of kissing without actually touching lip to lip. The actors I have seen really have this made this into an art-form. In my PhD I would make a manual and give names to these maneuvers. Like the Karma Sutra has names for various sexual positions. So instead of ‘Congress of the cow’, we could have ‘congress of the cheek bones’ or ‘eyebrow mash’ or ‘migration from chin to nose’. It also looks like there is a formula used for the scenery of these love scenes which I would like to analyze in more detail. Nearly every scene has water (don’t you love the metaphor!) - either a river, beach, waterfall or rain. And in these particular scenes the actors will have the wet t-shirt look and the male actor will attempt to show as much chest hair as he has and there is also a lot of rubbing of bodies together. There is also invariably a mountain scene, some snow (wonder what the metaphor there is?), a flower scene and always the wind scene which blows away a part of the female actors’ dress. I would also like to interview the male actors about how they reconcile the extravagant demonstrative actions they use in these scenes with their otherwise very masculine identities. It is only in the love scenes that you see them flinging their arms out as if to embrace the world, gyrating their hips, rolling down green hills, chasing the scarf of their lover which has been blown away by the wind, playfully pinching their lovers’ nose, twirling around trees, jumping in the air and throwing their wet hair around.

I got a DVD out to watch the other night. The movie was a comedy but the subtitles were from another film - ‘Black Hawke Down’. I gave up watching. My local video shop is free to join and you only pay $2 to hire a film but the hazards of hiring pirated movies means that you will get half way through a film and it will suddenly stop with no reason, or a part of the menu will not work, or the captions are only in some Eastern European language or sometimes it looks like you can see silhouetted figures walking across the bottom of the screen. I only just found out that this is because people pirate movies by actually filming on their camera a screening of a movie in a cinema. Forgive me if this is common knowledge to you all. Now the signs in the cinema here about no cameras allowed to be taken in make sense! To hire proper movies, there are only two places in Suva that do this and one costs $50 to join, the other $20. It might be worth it in the long run as the number of returned unwatched movies is starting to add up for me.

It appears that Fiji does not have the worse potholes in the world. I was talking to a fellow Aussie here who has travelled in Cambodia and she related that the potholes over there are so big they actually generate income for families living close to them. What they do is put slabs of wood over these potholes and charge vehicles and pedestrians money to cross over them. How ingenious is that? I will never complain about Fiji potholes again.

I have a lot of respect for Fijian soles (of feet). Many Fijians actually prefer not to wear shoes, even in town and where there are concrete paths. Many people when inside buildings especially hallowed ones like churches and people’s houses will take their shoes off. I have even seen young men, who when wanting to escort a girl they like home, will take off their shoes to do so. It is as if it helps them to relax or gives them more confidence. When I play volleyball with the Deaf team, I try to go without like they do. I marvel when the ball goes speeding off the court down a gravel driveway and without a change in pace or speed, the boys will chase after it as if they were on a smooth concrete path. While when I do the same, I am hobbling and jerking my legs around as if I am getting an electric shock.

I have been giving some talks on Deaf culture lately to the sign language students and to the Deaf themselves who are not always aware of their own Deaf culture. In exchange, they have given me some examples of Fijian culture:

When walking past people who are already sitting down, because your head is higher than theirs you must say ‘excuse me’ as you pass and try and bend your head to lower your height. It is a sign of respect.
You must never touch the head of a Fijian as it is a sign of disrespect - the head is highly valued.

When you go to a village, women must never wear shorts but must cover up using what they call ‘sulus’ or otherwise known as ‘sarongs’. Likewise you don’t wear sunglasses (it is equivalent to the 3rd eye and can be used as a cover to invoke evil spirits).

After someone dies you observe 100 days of mourning. On the hundredth day, you have a celebration and ceremony to mark the lifting of the mourning period. Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara has now been dead 100 days this week. Lots of ceremony in his province as he was a paramount chief as well as Prime Minister.

Due to kinship rules, first cousins often are not allowed to talk to each other directly. There are other kinship rules where certain people cannot talk to each other - I have not worked them out yet.

Eye contact - this is one I am struggling with. You don’t look too directly at people when you talk to them or you don’t sustain eye contact as much as we do in Australia and the West. If you do, it indicates that you are in love with that person or desire them very much. This is something I find hard to do as someone who lip-reads all the time, and as someone who loves staring at people’s physicality and facial features. I have been warned here to be careful. Wailei! Even the Deaf don’t seem to have as much sustained eye contact as we do in Australia. It’s similar to the smiling feature of our culture. For us in the West it is acceptable to smile at a stranger in passing or in greeting but here that can be interpreted as a come on. So now to be on the safe side, I do an eyebrow lift instead of smiling.

Our office is located next the Blind organization. In Australia, the Deaf mix with the Deaf and we rarely have anything to do with other disabilities and in fact we might even object to being lumped in with other disability groups. It is the opposite here. So I am constantly having to be reminded about how to communicate with blind people. For example when I enter a room with a blind person, I must say something to let them know I am there. Often I forget because I have been signing all day with Deaf people and am used to having my voice off. I often to my shame, think I can sneak past and maybe they won’t know I am there or will work it out from my body odor. I just found out today that many of the blind people here became blind through various accidents so their gaze often looks off-centre. So while they might look like they are looking out to the side, they are actually looking straight at me. For weeks, I have been thinking to myself “these blind people, just don’t know how to communicate with Deaf people. Don’t they know how rude it is not to look at us directly instead of looking out the window? I am going to have to have a word about this’!! They probably thought I was very rude scrutinizing their faces and moving around trying to get them to ‘look’ at me.

It’s raining outside. Maybe I can go and practice the wet shirt look with the toads. They can do the jumping and I will do the hobbling over the gravel.

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Monday, May 02, 2005

soul shuddering

Today I went to town to get the mail. Getting mail is kind of an important event. I try not to let it gain too much importance lest I start relying on it for a boost when I feel low.

In the kerb of one of the main roads in town was a lady squatting doing a wee. I had full view of her bottom. It was hard to take, hard not to grimace and hard to not want to walk over to the other side of the road. This is not the first time I have seen it happen. Invariably it is women and probably with a mental illness. I think the rates of mental illness would be quite high here. People who are admitted to the one and only psychiatric hospital often come out worse than when they went in and there is a group called The Psychiatric Survivers Group which is more about surviving being in hospital rather than surviving living with a mental illness. One woman was disowned by her family after being admitted. She was actually well enough to leave but ended up staying because no family would come and get her. She then had to leave and is now homeless. She certainly has her problems but she is also highly intelligent and has her wits about her which is probably why she has survived as a prostitute.

Another lady at work is a relative of the late Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara. He was Fiji’s Prime Minister for at least 17 years and a high chief. He was hugely respected and a great leader in Fiji for many years. He died last year and the whole of Fiji mourned him, dressing in black and lining the streets to see his coffin process by. This woman, because she was a family member was responsible for feeding the group of warriors that guarded Ratu Mara’s house till his body left to be buried. With the stress of feeding this group of men for days, her grief and stress, she had a psychotic episode. She spent two weeks in the psychiatric hospital and is now quite well. It might be the only episode she has. While her husband and children were supportive, her extended family have disowned her and say that she has an evil spirit inside of her. This abandonment from her family which is also chiefly I gather causes her great sadness.

The power of family here is a bit of a shock to me. While I have strong ties to my family I also have a great amount of liberty and independence. I hear stories of Deaf women who are told to stay at home, not to go out with deaf men, and to marry hearing men with whom they can’t communicate with. It is acceptable in the family for the women not to work and to stay at home till they marry. These women could be 30 years old. You also hear stories of women running away from home or drinking kerosene to cope with these pressures or frustrations. I know there are families in Australia who put similar pressures or expectations on their children and this can lead to other forms of ‘running away’. Maybe my reactions are more about me and what I expect from families.

This week I met the Prime Minister. He came to open the new buildings we have moved into at work and to accept the honor of the building being named after him - the first so far. Maybe if he is elected again in November, there will be other buildings to follow. So Qarase House is now in operation. We have lovely new toilets that have soap in the sinks. We have a kitchen and a staff room. We even have a muddy carpark and emerging garden but for now we have red dust till the greens grow. The Deaf Association has its OWN office and we no longer have to share a tiny room with the Spinal Injuries Association. No more people in wheelchairs struggling to get past me at my desk to their desk. We even have a verandah where the people in wheelchairs can have races or try out an electric wheelchair for fun. I get a huge laugh here out of the number of able-bodied people who visit our offices who like to pretend they have a disability by zipping around in a wheelchair. So far we have not had anyone pretend to be deaf or blind. Spinal injuries are more popular it seems!
So our office now has TWO desks and I don’t have to sit at a desk 50 cms wide and share it with the printer perched on the edge trying to write or read.

The opening with the Prime Minister was mostly in Fijian and luckily we were able to find an Interpreter who knew both Fijian and English. Lots of presentations to the Prime Minister were made starting off with the whale’s tooth, then kava, flower garlands, many woven mats, song and dance by the to-drool-for men from the army, then a round of kava to all the VIPS, a whole roasted pig and then the speeches. Wailai! A big ceremony.

I tried to enjoy the day and not fume too much. But I found it hard that people with disabilities are constantly referred to as ‘special’, that while the head of the parent body we are part of is a blind man, he was barely seen on the day and the one time he was able to say something was because the MC for the day brushed aside protocol and asked him to say something. This lady is the Minister for Education and the sister of Ratu Mara’s wife who was also a high chief so she had the power to do this. Protocol however demanded that the Interpreter not stand up the front and had to be relegated to the back of the hall along with all the other Deaf there. So none of the disability groups had any real presence. I found that hard especially when the building was for people with disabilities!

Being here it’s easy to make judgements about the way things should be done as you tend to think that your way is the best way. It’s funny to get the other perspective. One of the other volunteers related a story of this: an office girl who is Fijian turned up to work at 2pm instead of 9am with no reason. When she arrived, she sat down to watch some TV with another staff member. The athletics finals of all the secondary schools was on and it is very popular here. Another staff member who is an Australian volunteer, observed this and said to herself “I’ll give her 5 mins and then I will have to say something”. 15, 30 and then 40 mins had passed and this girl was still watching TV. Suddenly another Fijian staff member rushed in and started berating her, “in Fijian culture it is ok for you to come in late to work because we always forgive but European people don’t understand that and you can’t just sit there and not give a reason. If you don’t give a reason they will tell you off on your face”. This man did not necessarily know why ‘Europeans’ might think this behaviour unacceptable, he just knew it was. Funny to think that to them they think it strange that being on time is so important and equally strange that when someone has done something wrong you let them know it by telling them directly.

I have been allowed to drive the parent organisation’s vehicle mainly because I am the only staff member who can drive now that the last volunteer has returned home. It’s funny because when I get in the car and drive, everyone stops what they are doing to have a look and whistle or shake their hands like I am doing something very skilled. This week I have been driving it a bit as we moved offices. I have been a bit tentative driving as there are lots of potholes to avoid, as well as mad taxi-drivers and buses with plumes of smoke. I had to back into a driveway that was basically just mud with a few rocks thrown in for traction. I ummed and ahhhed while the young guys I was with motioned for me to get into it and stop being a wooz. As I backed into the mud and the car started sliding and the wheels whirring, they all got out of the car and proceeded to push the car as if this was an everyday part of going somewhere in a car. No reaction, no huffing and puffing and no comment afterwards. A suburban Suva driveway eh?

So off to the new office tomorrow. Just have to sweep the floor of the red dust and hunt down a mug for tea and then it’s off to being the productive little Westerner that I am. We got a grant accepted by the Australian government this week. So we now have money to get an internet connection, and buy a video camera so we can start recording Fiji Sign Language and maybe we will have some money left over to buy some blue tack to stick up a few posters!