Sote Village Trip Feb 12th-14th

AustraLearn had arranged for the entire group of us to all travel to a village and do a volunteer project and spend some time learning about what real Fijian village life is like. This was only the second time AustraLearn had done this with a group. They have some connection with a lady from the village that has been helping them plan these trips out. Last year the students had helped plant a garden for the school.

The bus ride there only took a little over an hour. The village is inland so we had to ride on a dirt road for most of the trip, but it took us through some pretty cool areas to get there. The village itself only has about 250-300 people in it, 90 of which are students that go to their primary school (basically K-8). So really and truly, the village is just a bunch of kids, and as soon as we pulled up, we could see the kids scrambling to be the first to see us and catch a glimpse of the new Americans that came.

The entire group of us was set up in the Chief's house. He has a big open room where he would normally do entertaining, and all of us were set up on blow-up mattresses throughout the room. First we had a traditional welcoming Kava ceremony, where at the end the girls from the school came in and put garlands on us. The girl that gave me mine, Levinia, smiled at me the whole rest of the trip and took care of me and danced with me. After the ceremony we went straight to painting inside the classrooms. The lady that was in charge had picked out some nice colors, and we had four different classrooms to paint. When we first started, the kids all lined up outside the windows to watch us, but shortly after they were scooted off to go clean up the other rooms.

After some painting, some of us went to go play games with the kids. I tried to play soccer for a bit, but I was having a hard time running in the mud and it wasn't really my best performance. Then some other little kids, named Akusita and Ruthie convinced me to go swimming in the river. It was very refreshing and the kids loved it. Then back to more painting, this time with some helps from the kids themselves, who probably got more paint on the ground than they actually did on the ceiling.

The women of the village cooked for us all weekend, and they cooked in excess, so all of the meals I tried to eat as much as I possibly could. Lots of curry, lots of fish, and lots of rice. It was all pretty good though. That night the kids of the village performed traditional Mekes for us (which I liked way better than the tourist village's mekes) and afterwards, there was much more Kava drinking and then lots of dancing. I think the village only had one CD, so I heard the same songs over and over and over.

I danced with a few different men/boys, which was funny. They don't really touch when they dance (at least in the village they don't, in the city it's different) unless they are standing by your side and doing this funny walk forward/backward thing. Otherwise they just face you and move their hips and their arms and make noises or say "shake it, shake it". It was fun, and we stayed up for quite a while just dancing. The next day was Sunday, the day of rest, so there was no painting that day. We went to church, which was nice, lots of singing, and then afterwards we ate some more food, and then we went bush trekking. Basically, we crossed the river three times, hiked through knee deep mud, walked over thorns, climbed waterfalls, and descended mountains in the jungle, day of rest my ass. It was awesome though, and basically all of the young people in the village accompanied us, and the really little kids carried everything we brought with us, flip flops, cameras, water. I had made friends with a girl Vere who is about my age and she held me hand the entire way, which was a nice thought, but probably made walking more difficult instead of less. When we came back our legs were scratched up, lots of us had to pull thorns out of our feet, we were sun burnt, and out of clean clothes.

All of the kids come to the chief's house and spent the next few hours braiding the girls' hair and taking pictures with our cameras. The entire town was waiting until midnight so we could start dancing again, but by that time I wasn't feeling too hot, and I had to call it quits, but I hear the dancing went on until 4 a.m..

The next day we finished up the painting, then ate lunch, then had a traditional farewell ceremony (more kava) and then about 2 hours of dancing, which was pretty gross considering how sweaty we all were. But pretty much everyone got into it, and even after the bus got to the village to pick us up, we danced for another 45 minutes hearing every time "one more song!". Once we finally climbed onto the bus all of the people crowded around and reached in through the windows to say goodbye to all of us. It was pretty amazing.

Most of us want to go back at some point, but we have to be careful because Fijians will be so generous that they give us food that they can't really afford to give us. So if we do go, we have been instructed to bring things like flour and cooking oil and of course the traditional gift of kava root.