Roughly 2200 volunteers have come to Fiji since the inception of the Peace Corps mission here in 1968. On October 10, 1970 Fiji became an independent nation, ending 96 years of British rule. For 28 years, volunteers helped the nascent state to develop. [Side note: The political development of Fiji has been anything but straightforward. I'm not going to go into detail, as that would take the rest of this post, but if you're interested just go to the Wikipedia page for Fiji. There's a link under 'links', up there ^. ]The early volunteers in Fiji worked in a wide range of sectors including, but not limited to, Education, Business Development, Health, and Agriculture. In 1998 operations in Fiji were suspended. The Peace Corps is only in Fiji with the consent of the Fijian government, and at that point the powers that be deemed the Peace Corps mission in Fiji completed. Or unnecessary. I'm not quite clear on the facts, and the information I can access is limited to what is in my volunteer handbook or things I've been able to glean from administrators. Regardless of the causes, the Peace Corps left Fiji for 5 years, from 1998-2003.
In 2002, the Fijian government asked for the Peace Corps to come back. An assessment team came to the country and decided that there was work that the Peace Corps could do, leading to our return in 2003. The volunteer groups that have been in Fiji since then have been deemed FRE (Fiji Re-Entry), and I'm in the FRE-9 group (the -9 designation indicated that I'm in the 9th group to come to Fiji since operations were resumed). There are two primary projects designated to my group: Integrated Environmental Resource Management (IERM) and Community Health Promotion (CHP). The Peace Corps, like most government agencies, seems to be overly fond of acronyms. I am too though, so I'm not complaining. Lol. Anyway, I'm going to be an IERM promoter when I'm done with PST (Pre-Service Training). I don't really know what my service will entail, but according to the COTE (Calendar Of Training Events) we're getting our permanent site assignments on Friday along with our VAD (Volunteer Assignment Description). I really wasn't kidding about the acronyms. More details about my posting to come soon.
This Friday we're hosting the cultural afternoon in my settlement. Or evening rather. We're having it at night because most of the people in my settlement work during the day, so if we had it in the afternoon we would have a noticeable lack of locals in attendance. Yesterday we set up a big awning for the event in the grassy area in the middle of the settlement. It was a lot of work and it was pretty hot, juice breaks every 20 minutes helped us to cope though. The design is pretty basic but seems to be pretty effective, and I was kind of surprised at how the final product turned out. It consists of 4 rows of 5 poles, each of which was set into a hole dug into the ground and stabilized by packing dirt into the hole. Fishing line was strung from the tops of the poles around the perimeter to act as a guide, ensuring that the poles were in a line and that they were the same height. Poles were also put horizontally along the tops of the support poles, upon which corrugated tin sheets were laid. The entire structure slopes to one side, making for good runoff in the likely chance of rain.
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