Following the holiday...

Good times in Labasa

After the long four day Easter holiday, things are working back towards normalcy. The weekend was good though, and it was nice to have the time to settle into the house and get a few out-of-work things taken care of. A local friend of mine got married over the weekend, so most of my evenings were taken up by those ceremonies (Hindi weddings have three days/nights worth of ceremonies around the wedding day). I unfortunately missed the actual wedding ceremony, but the other three nights were a pretty good time.

It should be an interesting week. There are supposed to be several interested parties coming to see me at the office to go over some of the IGP projects I am working on, but we’ll see who actually shows up. This Friday and Saturday is also the big meet for the track team I have been helping to coach, which I am greatly looking forward to. One of the other volunteers works at a school up here, and he is coming with his school’s team, so there may have to be some under-the-table wagers on the outcome. Hopefully, some or all of the team will do well and qualify for the national meet in Suva at the end of April, which I would really like to make it out to. There are also several people up from the Peace Corps office in Suva doing some future site development visits for the incoming group (they arrive in May), so I should have a pretty full house of visitors this week.

Coming up I should be able to get some traveling in. My office is going to be visiting every village in the province over the first three weeks of April, and I am hoping to catch rides out with them to visit some of the villages I haven’t made it out to yet. So, hopefully I hear back from some of these communities this week so that I can use these visits to do some of my own work around the province here. Again, we’ll see how that goes.

Just as a reminder, this Saturday is Earth Hour sponsored by WWF. They are attempting to get as many people as possible around the world to turn off all their electricity between the hours of 8 and 9 on the 29^th. Unfortunately, the only city in the U.S. to sign up for the project was Chicago; but that doesn’t mean we can’t all do our part individually. Fiji did sign up for it and will be the first country to turn their electricity out on the 29^th (because of our time zone), so I’ll get her started here and I expect all of you back in the States to follow suit a few hours later.

Otherwise, everything is going pretty well, nothing more to report this week. Depending on possible village visits, I may not be able to make it back up here next week, but I’ll post again as soon as I am able. Hope all is well…