Living the Island Life

It’s the end of the dry season in Fiji and hot as ever.  Next month will begin the rainy season and hopefully cooler temperatures!  I have been frantically busy planning and preparing for the Community Leadership Training workshop that will be held in our village next week.  

 Going to the beach in the afternoons is great fun; I get to see the myriad of colorful fish that the fishermen and women catch.  Everything from striped triggerfish to spotted groupers to speckled cod and streaked sweetlips.  I am amazed at the diversity of fish here.  

Living in the village you never get a break from being around people.  I live in a one-roomed  house with 4 other girls right in the middle of the village.  We have neighbors on all sides and people are constantly coming in to the house to visit with us.  The community is extremely close-knit and everyone knows everyone’s business, not to mention where they are at any given point in the day.  If you take a walk, people always ask you where you are going and why.  Every once in a while I manage to slip away and I hike over a big hill to the other side of the island to a beach sequestered in a little cove.  Whenever I need a break I grab my mask and my journal and spend a few hours writing and snorkeling.  Its peaceful there and I enjoy the solitude.  

 My private beach : )

Days are busy prepping for the workshop so my free time has been limited, but I have managed to find some free time for weaving and quite enjoy it.  I have learned to make a few different things and love experimenting.  The holidays are fast-approaching and the women in the village have been busy weaving new mats for Christmas.  We can hear them in the community hall from our house. They spend all day in there weaving and sharing the village gossip.  Every once in a while one of them says something of particular amusement and the hall will erupt with cackles and giggles.    

 My curious cowrie collection

 Went fishing and caught a grouper!

Some of the girls and I went fishing on the reef with the villagers and had a wonderful time.  The sea was a little rough and we got tossed around but had good fun slipping and sliding all over the boat.  I got to see blue-footed boobies on a nearby island, flying fish jumping and gliding over the water and some beautiful tropical fish in the waters below. 

Living on an island is a double-edged sword.  There are things I love about it…waking up to the ocean every morning, drinking from fresh coconuts on the beach, living in a village, beachcombing, and snorkeling, but I definitely get island fever and long for the conveniences and amenities of the mainland. 

Kia Chronicles

It's been a while since it has rained on the island and we are desperate for fresh water!  The water tanks are empty, the bore hole containing ground water is dry, and we are subsisting on the emergency tank that the village shares in tough times like these. We have resorted to bathing in the ocean, not doing laundry, and using water very sparingly.

Other than that life on Kia is swell.  I am deep into designing and planning a community leadership training workshop for the fishermen and women of the island.  The program will be aimed at teaching the fishermen about the scientific basis of marine resource management and give them the information and knowledge to equip them to sustainably manage the local qoli qoli's (traditional fishing grounds).  It is a huge undertaking and is a great challenge given the culture, customs and mentality of the people on the island.  They are very set in their ways, beliefs and behaviors.  Every day is a challenge and we are slowly trying to penetrate the people and get them to open their minds to new ideas and ways of doing things.  Its been a frustrating but exhilarating experience.

When I am not working on the workshop planning I occupy myself beach-combing, taking photos, learning to cook traditional Fijian dishes and socializing with the women of the village.  I have learned to weave some and have developed a knack for weaving rings out of palm leaves.  There's a huge influx of jellyfish in the water recently so I haven't been able to snorkel as much as I would like.  Last week we had a beach cleanup with all the children of the village.  It was fun and we picked up a lot of trash but there is still so much more to collect!

I've had some awesome experiences on Kia- everything from watching meke (traditional dance) to hiking the highest peak on the island, watching a colony of fruit bats emerge at dusk, and volunteering at the school.  Not to mention eating fresh, tropical fish for dinner almost every night, watching picture-perfect sunsets, and making wonderful friends.  Kia is a special place. 

Bula Vinaka from Fiji!

I have arrived safely and soundly on the tiny Island of Kia, off the northern coast of Vanua Levu, the second largest island in the island nation of Fiji.  I am living in the village of Yaro, a small beachside community of 122 members.  The people of Yaro are primarily fishermen and women, harvesting fish for both their sustenance and livelihood; they catch fish as a source of food and also as a product to sell in the local fish market. 

Life on Kia is a dichotomy between productivity and leisure.  Villagers work hard to sustain their lives and families.  Women spend their days cooking, washing, looking after children, weaving, fetching water, and other daily chores.  Men primarily fish and do other things around the village as needed- building/repairing houses, gathering firewood, tending crops etc.  Every family in the village has a small parcel of land and mostly grow root crops like taro and yucca.  Fruit trees are abundant on the island and there is usually a fresh supply of papaya, coconut, mango, breadfruit, and bananas.  When people are not busy working, they like to loaf around.  Most houses don’t have any furniture, less a cupboard for dishes, and everyone sits and lies on woven mats on the floor to do everything, eat, sleep, etc.  When all the chores are done people lie around, relax, talk, smoke, and lounge.

 

The people of Kia are warm and welcoming and we have been well-received.  Women invite us to come have afternoon tea with them and men are always eager to talk to us and invite us to sit with them.  All the women have very short hair and they are enamored at my long, curly hair. The children are endearing; some are still quite shy while others have transcended the ‘new white girl in the village’ notion.  Several times they have observed me on the beach collecting shells and coral and they periodically bring me the prettier ones they encounter.  I have spent time teaching them to play duck-duck-goose, braiding hair and playing in the ocean.  Three evenings a week we help the children with their homework; they need special attention in the areas of math and science and we have been organizing lessons to supplement their classroom assignments. 

Yaro is a very religious village.  The villagers have church almost every day.  Sunday at 7am, 10am and 6pm, Monday is men’s group, Tuesday is women’s, Wednesday is cell group, Friday is youth.  The villagers are especially fond of singing and have regular choir practice.  Fijian is not a particularly easy language to learn, but I am trying.  The words sound similar to Spanish so they are not difficult to pronounce, but they are very foreign and hard to remember. 

I spent my first 2 weeks transitioning to island/village life and have begun planning and preparing for the work that lies ahead.  My task is to design and implement a series of workshops for the fishermen and women to raise awareness about marine conservation.  I will be formulating workshops to discuss and explain important issues relating to the harvesting of marine resources such as the importance and conservation of biodiversity, the role and importance of preserving endangered species, the biological consequences or poor fishing practices, and the importance of gathering traditional knowledge of the local fishery to establish a baseline for future fishery monitoring and management.  The task is great, but I am looking forward to the challenge!

Tursiops Tales

On my last assignment in Mississippi, I was assigned a rather interesting boat captain.  The most adorable little, old man- a veteran shrimp trawler and retired dolphin trainer!  Turns out he trained the dolphin who starred in the original movie 'Flipper.'  No joke.  He brought in his scrap book of old photos to prove it.  SO awesome!

I want to turn this into a postcard! Mr. Robert Corbin was the first dolphin trainer in the world to achieve a tripple-dolphin jump!

Marsh Marvels

I've spent the spring and summer months of 2011 tromping the marshes and beaches of the Gulf Coast, from Venice, Louisiana all the way to Destin, Florida.  This year's projects included the Coastal Wetland Vegetation/Marsh Assessment, Submerged Oil Characterization, and Marsh Edge Sandy Shoreline/Biota Monitoring.  Its been a long, hot, fun summer and things are finally winding down for this field season.  Below are pics and tid bits from the summer's adventures....

Sunrise at the state dock in Bayou La Batre, AL

A shrimp trawler coming in after a night of shrimping hungry birds waiting for freebies

This guy landed on my backpack one afternoon; I suspect he was attacked by a bird because he had a chunk of one of his wings missing and 2 broken legs, not to mention he was lethargic and did not move for quite a while.  Needless to say, he became a specimen in my personal naural history collection.

A sandbar bird hot spot on Dauphin Island, AL

Great Blue Heron

Mud flats in Venice, LA

We snuck up on this guy!

Sunset in Bayview, LA

There is a huge amount of diversity in Odontonates in the marsh lands!

My first time seeing a water spout (a tornado on the water)

Black-necked stilts, one of my favorite marsh birds

Chrinum lillies

Feathered house guests

A friend of mine works at a raptor rehabilitation center caring for orphaned and injured birds of prey.  Recently, someone brought her a pair of fledgling wood thrushes and, not being able to to turn them away, has been raising them herself.  She came over for a movie night on my break back home and I entertained these little guys for an evening....precious!

Oil on the Marsh

Even though its been over a year since the tragedy of Deep Water Horizon, evidence of the environment-degrading contamination is still present in the wetlands of Louisiana.  Some of our sites that were hard hit with oil bare a very tangible reminder of the fossorial fossil fuel gone surface.  

 This photo shows a thick, grey sludge of weathered oil blanketing the soil.  At first, the oil seems nothing more than the anoxic, primordial paste that anchors the beds of marsh grass, but upon closer inspection, the sticky texture and chemical pungency are a dead giveaway that its oil. 

Harshly-impacted sites bare the erosion scars of oil toxification.  In some areas, large swaths of dead vegetation are present, in others matted beds of root matter, and in the worst, nothing but open water, with all the vegetation gone completely. 

So far no one truly knows the role that the spill has played in the erosion of the marsh.  Empirical evidence suggests that damage could be attributed to oil contamination, but we are not entirely sure of the natural erosion that takes place, so it’s hard to compare and make a definitive conclusion.  It’s going to take years upon years of collecting data and samples to document and analyze the aftermath of what has so far been the largest oil spill in the history of our planet.