Sunday, July 17, 2005

amble, meander, stroll and saunter

I am still walking too fast. The pace of my walk is my indicator to whether I have adjusted to Fiji life. I still have a way to go by the looks of it. I am still sweating too much and still overtaking too many people on the streets. I am walking like I am on a mission but I am only going to buy lunch. I walk like I am late or in a rush but even if you really are late or in a rush, you still don’t walk fast here. It is the same with the buses. You can hail buses from anywhere on the road not just bus-stops. If a bus is roaring past and you hail it down, it might stop 10 metres away up the road. People just saunter up to the bus, while I break into a run to get on board. The same for when I get off a bus, I get ready to jump off when my stop comes up, while others wait till the bus comes to a complete stop, slowly gather their things and then amble off. Sometimes I actually wonder why the bus driver has stopped as it looks like no one is getting off and then sure enough someone ambles down the aisle. Words like “amble”, “stroll”, “wander” and even perhaps “saunter” need to become new mantras for me.

Retail therapy - I actually do a bit of it here. I love the Indian clothes shops, buying fresh fruit and veg at the markets and being on the look out for anything that is different. You can buy metres of material here for 75 cents a metre, get a shirt made for $10, do all your fruit and veg shopping for $30, a bunch of flowers is $2, a box of 200 band-aids is $1.75. But the service here is very different. It mostly consists of raised eyebrows for a greeting, followed by throwing the change down on the counter and then wrapping your purchase in at least 2 plastic bags - all silently, with a minimum of eye contact and no smiling. Ronald McDonald would turn in his grave. In the clothes shops, as you start to meander (another walking word) around the shop an assistant will hover with you and follow you around. They don’t usually say anything or ask if you want help, just silently hover just over your shoulder. Sometimes it feels like they are making sure you don’t make off with anything. Then if you go to the handicraft markets, some of the vendors are more assertive and they will call “come and look in my shop” and if you ignore them or wave they might call more loudly “just come and look in my shop”. On the streets you get people selling various items. People will just set up a stall anywhere. In front of the hospital people pile mandarins in a pyramid and sell them for $1 a heap. Along a busy street in town are a few men selling packets of asprin and razor blades. In the bus stand, men sell packets of what they call “bean” which is fried peas salted and flavoured with chilli. They cost 30 cents a packet and they fill the gaps between their fingers with as many packets as they can cram making a huge fan out of their hand. As they sell, they refill the fan with more packets from a woven basket on their arm. This is a full time job for these men. Standing around a bus stand all day, with buses belching out their diesel fumes reaching up into bus windows to hand over bean and take coins. Buying and selling happens all the time and you don’t need a shop to do it from. If you do go to a shop, you might not be allowed in. The door is barred and you have to state your request and when they bring it to you, you hand over your money through a grill in the door. This could be a result of the looting that happened after the coup in 2000 or from regular robbing of shops. I am not sure. There are not many billboards here. They use whole shops instead. All around town and the country are corner stores completely painted as one whole advertisement. The popular ones are for Milo and Maggi Noodles. Nescafe gets done as well as Twisties. It’s quite a jolt to be zooming along some country road and then all of a sudden up looms a bright red and yellow store with the Twisties logo all over it writ large.

I feel like the divide between the rich and the poor is even greater here than in Australia but it might just be more visible here as it is a smaller place. You read in the paper that Mel Gibson has bought an island for so many millions of dollars. I never thought of buying an island before! There is a suburb of Suva that has massive houses with massive gates and security guards posted at them, situated right next to a village and government housing complex. This area is well known for burglaries. Gee I wonder why! Some people live as squatters building their houses from pieces of corrugated iron and odd bits of building materials while others live in mansions only 2 kilometres away. I am a “volunteer” with an allowance of $250 a week and rent free while a qualified school teacher at a government school earns $150 a week and this is considered to be a good salary. Many of the ambulances here have been donated by Japan. The police force received a fleet of police cars from New Zealand. Services that you take for granted in Australia have to be provided with aid here. While most private companies will have email, as far as I know, no government offices have it. Child labour exists here and some children have to leave primary school to work to earn money for their families to survive. Many children only do 2 years of high school and then many of course go to university and become lawyers, doctors etc. Lots of disparity.

I went to a concert at the university - the first ever local string orchestra at the university - the one where the two cellos in Fiji played. They started off a bit shakey with some well known hymns and then after the break got into the groove with various pacific island melodies accompanied by a huge conch shell played by the conductor. Conch shells are often played at various ceremonies like traditional welcomes and weddings. It has a lovely deep bass sound - perfect for deaf people! I never thought it would sound well with a bunch of strings but it did. I love this mixing of different modes and mediums. Like the music festival I went to where they had various live bands playing. They had a group of drool-inducing young men with oiled bodies and only wearing sulus doing traditional style dance moves but to fast rock music. Fijian rock bands tend to be all male, they all wear the same bula shirts (bright coloured floral designs) and they will dance vigorously while they sing. No black, no leather, no long hairstyles, no posing, hardly an acknowledgment of the applause and very little attitude from what I can see.

I went to a local nightclub this weekend. There are few nightclubs to choose from. One is called Traps which is full of techno type music, very loud and very trendy and full of university students. Then there is a Chinese one called Sirens which caters to the Chinese sailors and is sprinkled with Chinese prostitutes waiting to do business. There is Purple Haze which does Hindi-Bollywood music and is full of young Indian men trying out their dance moves. There is O’Reilly’s which is like a pub in Australia with a huge TV screen permanently screening rugby with a disco ball next to it so you can dance and watch rugby at the same time. I went to The Barn which is where they have live indigenous bands and they also play alot of reggae which is pretty popular here. It tends to have an older crowd and mostly Fijian. The band was great and once the place warmed up, the older men started to ask me for a dance, followed by the younger men. They very politely come up to you and formally ask you to dance. Then you hit the floor and just dance, when the number is over, he will put his arm around your back and guide you to where you came from and then disappear. All very civilised! And man! Can these boys dance! Again doing lots of traditional dance moves (hand movements like the Haka but not as war-like and with lots of gyrating hips) to the beat of reggae music. I’m thinking to try out Purple Haze next time. You all know how much I want to be a Bollywood queen.

There is still talk of coup in the papers and other media. The government has told the Chief of Police who is Australian not to make any political comments about the new Reconciliation and Unity Bill. Also all ex-pat business people and investors who are on work visas are not allowed to make public political comments as this is a condition of having a work visa. We are now hearing of the Australian and US and NZ ambassadors getting involved all making comments about how another coup just cannot happen and also that the Head of the Fiji Military Forces who is making public comments about the Bill is stepping outside of his role in doing so and is undermining the role of the government. Everyone is saying that another coup just cannot happen but that this Bill threatens stability. NZ has pledged military support meanwhile the leader of the first coup, Rabuka is making the rounds with the Prime Minister to talk, explain and support this Bill (although guardedly).

Fiji seems to have a wise Vice President who is a chief and lawyer. He has made some good comments about how Fijians tend to put indigenous rights ahead of human rights. He has said that this is something that is very hard to stop doing “because it flies in the face of of everything they have been brought up to believe and conditioned to accept”. He says that while articles in the Convention concerning Indigenous and Tribal peoples in Independent countries refers to a self-contained system of governance for indigenous peoples that preserves traditions, culture and customs; this does not legitimise or authorise indigenous supremacy. It appears that some people have argued that when Fiji became independent from the British Crown in 1970, power should have been handed to the Fijian chiefs. But that this is legally untenable as once Fiji was ceded unreservedly to Britain in 1874, the British government established a colonial administration with a Governor for its head and it was under this system that self-government was established to prepare Fiji for independence. Any government elected thereafter is the legal heir to the power the Fijian high chiefs first ceded to Queen Victoria. He says that “universal rules required Fijians to temper their indigenous rights with the fundamental human rights that other communities had in Fiji”.

For those of you who are pregnant and having babies, I thought I’d give you some inspiration with a couple of Samoan names I came across recently - they are only for females:

1) Rosaivitilesaulofaoleola
or

2) Lolomamaivitilevuilepenina

Think about it!