diwali and a bit of work

Diwali was the best cultural experience I have been to thus far. I was invited to spend the day with a gardener that I work with at the Ministry of Health. It was raj, his wife and two daughters, david and I just spending the day visiting his extended family and then relaxing at his home, sharing stories and eating delicious Indian food.  This day was unlike any experience I’ve had in Fiji because his family was warm, open and extremely happy and grateful for everything they had to offer. 

Diwali is a celebration of lights.  It started as a celebration to welcome the Hindu God Ram back from exile. The best way I can describe the excitement around the holiday in Labasa was like a mixture of Christmas and Easter.  Christmas because of the lights and massive sales beforehand, and Easter because they’re celebrating the return/appearance, no gifts just good food and a day with family.

Here are some pictures

Project: Labasa Hospital Garden

I know in one of my previous blogs I talked about how I will be spending a lot/most of my time with  school gardens and canteens, well that didn’t really happen as predicted.  One really unique thing about being a peace corps volunteer is that you are given the most broad job ever and have to determine how you are going to tackle it with as little money/resources as possible.  After being at sight since july, I’ve only recently figured out how I’m going to get anything meaningful done here.  Its been a lot of ‘I want to do work so badly, but everything ends up at a dead end’.  I’ve learned that if I truly want to help, the effort must be two sided and has to be initiated by someone who is looking for help.  That might sound strange, but it’s the truth.   I recently had the most promising conversation about my work and I’ve started working on the Labasa Hospital Garden. 

The Labasa Hospital is the largest hospital on my island and has the most number of patients at any given time.  The Administrative Office and Dieticians approached me asking if I could give them advice and help them start a large scale garden on some of their open property.  They received $20,000 from AUSAID to create a large green house that can support their kitchen’s vegetable needs year round. 

Why does Labasa Hospital need a garden?  Simple, to provide patients with local, fresh, and healthy food and also cut down on rations cost.  I did a sample budget for the hospital and they spend over $70,000 yearly on vegetables that they could easily grow.   That money could be spent on better facilities, more wards, increased training, better technology, ect.  Im excited because I think all hospitals should feed their patients with foods from farms, but they’re really excited for budget reasons. If I were them I might feel the same considering I’m scared to death to have to be treated in any of these hospitals and more money to improve the hospital would be amazing.

Here is a picture where we are building the green house. I’ll take pictures every few weeks to show the progress.  The specific things I’ve done so far is designed a 20m x 20m plot of land to plant all vegetables that would be in the green house.  Since the land is rocky and the soil is horrible, we are going to make raised vegetable bed boxes and only place dirt inside of each box.  I’ve also started working on designing a schedule of when to plant, how often we need to plant, how much we need to plant, transplanting times, and harvest times.  I’m really excited because I know how to do this, but not really on a large scale (they don’t know this).  its going to be a great learning process and give me really wonderful work experience so someday I can have my own farm or something like that.

Other random things:

The hot/wet season has started. The days usually go from the sun being so hot that I feel like I burn instantly to torrential downpours almost every afternoon.  Its only been a few weeks and I’ve already told myself that I’m not allowed to say its hot.  At the beginning I asked people, “does it get hotter than this” and they all just laugh while nodding their head up and down. 

Its also mango season and I’ve been having to eat at least 2 mangos everyday to keep up with them falling in my backyard. I need mango recipes!

Life without a refrigerator has been great so far.  

art...

music in my ears!
gotan project
erykah badu
jay-z
ray lamontagne (always)

so much love to you all!