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?