now is the winter of our discontent

I have taken up a winter sport here in Fiji - swimming. I used to laugh when people told me that it gets cold here in winter but now I have actually been cold I am no longer laughing. It is still in the high twenties during the days but at night it gets as low as 22 degrees. It makes having cold showers hard work and I have been giving in and using the hot water system a bit more. I have also had to get up in the middle of the night to put on a pair of socks, then a long sleeved t-short which is the warmest thing I have, and then finally another cotton sheet on top of the one I already use.

It is so cold that I am often the only person in the pool swimming my laps. It makes it easy to be to be distracted by my imagination rather than other swimmers and I find myself having visions of Jaws coming up through a vent in the pool bottom and smashing the concrete as he does so. I think it increases the speed at which I swim which is a good thing I suppose. Swimming now is actually very pleasant. In the hotter months, the few times I went, I found that my body was overheating with the water as hot as a warm bath. I was sweating in the water.

There are two cellos in Fiji. One is owned by the University of the South Pacific and the other by an ex-patriot who is living here. The two cellos and some other strings are getting together for a concert at the university next week.

The university has a good bookshop. It is hard to find good bookshops and the hours I used to spend browsing bookshops in Australia have been drastically reduced. Bookshops in town will sell Barbara Cartland style romances or children’s coloring books and Lonely Planet guides. People say the library is quite good but it has a lot of airport novels, romance novels, very old books and a whole section on war. Not really my type. This bookshop at the university has the romance novels as well ( they are everywhere - are women all that desperate!) but you can tell that it is a university of the pacific. All the novels are mostly Indian writers like Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, or big name Australian writers like Tim Winton and Peter Carey. There are a few English classics and then a whole lot on issues of the pacific, books that I have never seen in Australia. I am looking forward to reading up on the pacific.

There has been talk of another coup in recent weeks. Fiji has had 3 coups, two in 1987 and then the last one in 2000. The government is trying to push through what is called (some say deceptively) the Reconciliation and Unity Bill. The aim is to give amnesty to those who were victims of the 2000 coup. At a reading of the Bill in parliament, the Opposition walked out. The military was also present with a number of officers at the reading. There has been much uproar about their presence and how psychologically unsettling it is to have them there in full uniform. The first coup was led by a Colonel (sp?) in the Army. It was reported in the paper that a permit to march in support of the Bill by a political party was rejected as was a permit to march in protest against the Bill by a local community group. While voices were raised about this restricting the right to freedom of expression, the Suva City Council said that at this unsettling time the need to maintain harmony was more important. The Bill was drafted without consultation with the citizens of Fiji. There has been so much noise about it that the government has given in to public pressure and organised sessions for the community to meet and talk with representatives about the Bill but this is happening only in the period of a month and will not be enough time to go to rural areas and hear the opinions of villagers in non-urban areas. Human Rights groups, various community groups and even diplomats from other countries have all voiced grave concern about the Bill being used to grant amnesty to people who have committed political crimes and should be tried through the legal system. The Bill could have the power to free these people and over-ride the legal system and processes. The ambassador for the US has come out and said that he feels strongly enough about the situation to breach diplomatic protocol by voicing an opinion that talk of coup-mongering is disgusting. The papers talk about Fiji having a culture of coup violence. Taxi drivers tell us that a coup will happen in a couple of months. The end of the road I live in faces the back of parliament house and was the scene of much action in the last coup.

On a more positive note: AustAid has given the Fiji Association of the Deaf $60,000 for the sign language project so it should be full steam ahead for developing a sign language dictionary and getting my work done.

Outsider moments

I don’t want to get into too much self pity but I had an ‘outsider’ day today. They happen from time to time and it is part of my life here. It’s a kind of loneliness but different from the regular ‘I’m alone’ type or the ‘I wish I had someone to love’ type.

I have just finished reading a book called ‘Kava in the blood’. It’s written by Peter Thomson a man of Scottish descent whose family for six generations had lived in Fiji. He spoke fluent Fijian and had local government jobs and had Fijians who were his bosses. He was the permanent secretary to the Governer General at the time of the first coup in 1987. It was not long after the coup and he was having a whisky with the GG, Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau. They were talking about the fear Fijians had about democracy with its ups and downs when Ganilau made a comment that in Thomson’s ‘country’ of Scotland which has had centuries of democracy people had no fear. Thomson writes about the shock he felt as he realised that although Ganilau had held him as a baby and watched him grow up over 38 years he did not see that Fiji was this man’s country. Thomson himself at that stage had never been to Scotland or had anything to do with it.

I’ve also finished another book by Satendra Nandan who was a 3rd generation Indo-Fijian. He was a government minister of the deposed government in the first coup. He writes of the exclusion from an Indian point of view which he feels was established by the colonials who ruled Fiji and brought the indentured labourers over from India. He says that Indians were encouraged to have their own schools, their own villages and there was never any policy that they should learn Fijian, intermarriage was and still is rare although now Indian schools often have more Fijians attending them than Indians but that might be because many of the Indians have left the country and they now make up 40% of the population whereas once they made up over 50%. Peter Thomson does not blame the colonial government for the lack of integration between Indians and Fijians but says that both races are too different to have mixed well and both made no effort to integrate.

Both men had generations of their families living in Fiji, had a strong attachment and love for Fiji, served the government of Fiji and then were held as prisoners illegally during the coup. They both decided to leave feeling unwanted by what they thought was their home and country. Even they were outsiders it seems. I think that must be another type of lonliness again. I can’t imagine how lonely a person must feel being an outsider in their own country.

I can understand my outsider status as I have not lived here for 20 years and never spoke the language fluently. I am only back temporarily and I have no family left here and nothing really to keep me here once my job is finished. I also expected that I would have these outsider moments and so was prepared for them. But that feeling of being unable to break in because no matter what I do, I cannot change the fact that I am white and that I feel is the biggest barrier and the one that will always remain and cannot be overcome.

It must have been a shock to these men because their status in the country would been something they took for granted and then it was taken away from them. When in Australia I took it for granted that I am Australian and that I understand and know my culture, society and language intimately. I would like to think that this can never be taken away from me. When I have an ‘outsider’ day it is when I am reminded that I don’t belong and if I do have the sense of belonging now and again which I do, I cannot take the warmth this gives me for granted.

I look back now at my behaviour when I first arrived and I see that I was trying to fit in and belong in a superficial way by reducing my Australian accent, buying Fijian hibiscus shirts, gold hooped Indian earrings and bangles, Indian Salwar Kameez, wearing swimmers that cover up more of my body, eating curries, husking and grating coconuts. I got fleeting tinges of warmth from people when they commented positively on these superficial things which were then turned upside down by fleeting feelings of being a poser or imposter. I smile inwardly when I see trendy young Fijian girls walking down the street in the latest Aussie fashions and see them trying really hard to look like a cool Westerner, flattening and straightening their wiry hair, growing out the ‘afro’ and pinning it back so that it might be long enough to wear in a pony tail.

I am so grateful that for the two things that help me feel a tinge of belonging - being born here and being deaf. These give me tickets of entry into the communities I am working in. Not sure when the tickets will expire or what kind of entry I get, VIP or in the stands!

Rubbish is very visible here. It gets collected three times a week and I often have to walk behind the rubbish truck on my morning walk to work and watch the poor men having to pick up all sorts of plastic bags dripping with muck which often explode on the road before making it into the truck. There have been half page notices in the newspaper telling us all that putting our rubbish in plastic bags is now illegal. We all have to go and buy rubbish bins and use these instead. In the outer suburbs of Suva I finally worked out what these wooden platforms about 4 feet off the ground are for: putting your rubbish on them so the dogs don’t rubbish through it all. On the drive into Suva there is a huge rubbish dump which was there 20 years ago and which smelt bad back then. There are constantly letters in the paper complaining about the smell. A new dump has been built (funny to think they have to be built) and the current one will be reclaimed and made into a park which will take 10 years for the earth to settle. The new dump has been put off being used because Fiji does not have the technical expertise to deal with the rubbish and the earthmoving equipment etc. A grant of about 10 million dollars is also paying for this new dump. It makes me realise that disposing of rubbish is big business and not as simple as just dumping it somewhere.

At first I found it very easy to turn up my nose at the rubbish I saw. I recalled the huge advertising campaign Australia had in the early 80’s with the catchy jingle of ‘do the right thing’ and I find myself chanting it to myself. It must have been a very effective campaign as it socialised me to always throw things in the bin. I wonder in times past if rubbish would have been so visible as here in Fiji you ate and drank natural foods. The clothes you wore would once have been disposable, grass skirts and leaves. The only remnant I see of this now is when I go to the markets and the baskets of dalo, lemons and fish are made of woven coconut leaves. The parties I have been to, balloons and streamers are not used to decorate but again woven coconut leaves with flowers are used - all very biodegradable in a humid climate and with no advertising in bright garish colours to make it stand out like the McDonalds and KFC packets littering the ground.

I read somewhere that Australia produces the 3rd largest volume of household rubbish in the world. We obviously do a very very good job of hiding it. I think that is the difference between Fiji and Australia - the rubbish is there but one country does a better job of hiding it and can afford to do so. Local councils in Fiji can’t afford to buy each household nice big strong dog-resistant rubbish bins and individual people can’t afford them either probably.

Do the right thing.