For the past 3 weeks, I've been living out of my bag and calling the Capricorn hotel my home. The housing issue has become a major problem, The ministry of health hasn't been able to find Jamie and I a house, so we have stayed put, displaced, but waiting...
There have been times when I've wanted to say, oh, the hell with it, I'm going home... If nothing good happens before the end of the day, I'm outta here. But then something good happens, like the day I forgot my umbrella and I was getting soaked walking from the bus station to the hotel, and a man held up his umbrella for me. Or just this past weekend, when my good aussie friend Tim and I took off for the weekend and camped on the Coral Coast... our toes in the sand, and laying in hammocks watching the sun set deep into the horizon. We walked along the shore and collected shells in my sun hat and then threaded them into Tim's dreads... And swimming... Believe it or not, this was the first time I had been to the beach in Fiji, (besides our water safety day during training). There is something about the ocean, swimming in crystal clear, turquoise water washes everything away... Vitamin D also helped with my spirits, not to mention my brown skin. Although we were only gone for a weekend, we came back to the chaos of Suva refreshed and renewed and tanned.
OK, so things aren't that bad, they could be worse, i guess. It was just being in limbo, for three weeks there was so much uncertainty. It was felt thick. Feeling powerless and not able to grasp control of where i was, where i wanted to be or where i was going was driving me insane!
So PC gave me a choice... I could stay in Suva, and live in the Nurses Quarters (ummmm... for those of you who know me well, KNOW that this is just not an option, I hate feeling caged in) OR I could move to a village, about 4-5 hours away from Suva, way up in the interior Highlands. I don't know anything about this village, except that there are 9 families that live there, there is no main road access, and the closest village is an hour and a half away. It's supposed to be beautiful up there, and cold.
So i was thinking a lot, maybe i was thinking too much... It got to the point where I could remember the reasons why I left San Francisco, i just couldnt remember the reasons why i came to Fiji, or Peace Corps for that matter....
But how does one come to make the right choice? what is right?
I felt like i had to make the decission of joining the Peace Corps all over again. Do I stay in Suva, where all my basic comforts can be met? Do I stay at NCHP, where I am working in my field, and there is room for growth and advancement in terms of my own carreer?
Slowly but surely, I started experiencing the same feelings and inner struggles I was faced with before leaving San Francisco. I remember a huge part of the decission in coming here was because I wanted to live humbly. I wanted to be able to remove myslef from the environment that I know and live with the idea of separating my "needs" from my "wants". I wanted to feel the rawness of a foreign culture, get to know the people, live with them, eat with them, become part of them...
This is my struggle in Suva, while it provides a different culture from what i knew back home, it is still an urban setting, Internet access and telefones and coffee shops and red wine available whenever I want... It is harder to find authenticity in the city because there is so much diversity, and people are on a faster pace. Most of the kids here are westernized, mimicking hip hop styles and mtv starlets.... How is this different from home? How did I end up here?

For those of you who havent heard....
Our house in Suva was burgled! I'll try not to go into full details, as it still makes my stomach turn and I've had to re-tell and re-live this story for everyone and their mothers during the past week or so.
Basically, a burglar came into my house, through the kitchen window, cut through the burglar bars and helped himslef to wander our house while we were sound asleep in our rooms. He even came into my room, where i was sleeping with a fellow volunteer and took my purse, containing my wallet with ids, check cards, my memory card with all my photos (at least he didt take my camera, it was locked up in one of my drawers). In my purse was also the ipod that my sisters sent me for my birthday, my phone, and my p.o.box key. We luckily had other volunteers staying with us that night, but they too, got their stuff stolen. Cameras, ipods, phones, speakers, wallets... We basically got cleaned out! The scary thing is we didnt hear him, and i'm a pretty light sleeper! i even wake myslef up at times if i hear my teeth grinding against each other or the sound of the wind would sometimes wake me up. But not this time. The story gets worse. We called my stolen phone with my roomates phone and the guy answers! Not only that, but he tells us to give him our pin numbers (wich we obviously DIDNT do) & starts making obscene comments and goes as far as calling all the female volunteers in my phone trying to get their addresses and also saying obscenities to them. He even called my sister in Chicago.
So for the past week I've been living in a hotel, out of my bag once again, displaced, uncertain and leaving my fate up to PC programming. They are working on getting us a house - or, god forbid...nurses quarters-, but there are many steps involved in the process. They have to make sure the ministry of health is going to pay for it, that it is a sturdy enough house to withstand a cyclone, that there are burlgar bars in place (i recently learned that burglar bars are not in fact bars to prevent burglars from coming into your house, but rather are there to give you five minutes of deterrence from the burglar). It sucks because we had just settled in, we had finally made the house a home and in a matter of hours, it was nothing but an empty shell, with boxes and plastic bags on the floor... I'm back to basics now, and, oh well.... it's like my dad says, "I ain't got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of..." At least he didn't take my sense of humor, no?