Teach Me How to Be a Fijian Youth

My decision to join the Peace Corps was set in motion through a series of lived experiences. The first of which were annual summer trips to a remote cabin in New York’s mountainous Adirondacks. The two weeks I lived without electricity every year, and without constant distraction, were always my favorite. I would spend the two weeks flipping rocks in the creek in search of crawfish with my cousin Sam, playing card games that were loud with familial disagreement and jests, and canoeing out to the raft to swim in the cold waters of the lake. Mornings and afternoons stretched as endlessly as the surrounding forests.

In college, I spent my junior year fall semester in Prague, Czech Republic “studying,” but moreso tasting different cultures across Europe and testing my liver’s capabilities to process frothy mugs of Pilsner Urqel beers. In that jumbled time, I found myself considering that the United States might not be all that superior to the rest of the world. Besides family trips to two Caribbean islands, that fall semester in Prague held my first experiences outside the US. As was common among my college peers, I galivanted through major cities in Europe. I boated with friends on aquamarine waters off of Split, Croatia, I experimented with legal substances in Amsterdam, and I toured Auschwitz slightly hungover from a prior night out in Krakow, Poland. Most wholesomely, I took an improv class with my then-girlfriend and thirteen quirky souls with a variety of backgrounds. I’ve been improvising ever since.

That next summer, I lined up an internship on an internal audit consulting team in New York City that I convinced myself would be a worthwhile next step. In August before my senior year of college, I found myself pouring through spreadsheets of a transit authority’s payroll in search of errors or fraud. Was this what adult life would be like? When I couldn’t force my eyes to engage with spreadsheets any longer, I watched motivational TED Talks looking for inspiration, and perused far-flung work opportunities. At some point, I found my way onto the Peace Corps website.

In my senior year of college, I wrote my thesis on how global cocoa price increases caused children of cocoa-producing families to work less on their cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast. A mouthful; and I still have those phrases neatly arranged from the hundreds of repetitions throughout papers and presentations. My thesis was good enough for a B+, but I still didn’t know what cocoa fruit looked like; all I knew was what could be gleaned from a Unicef Data Set covering child welfare in the Ivory Coast. My thesis class was inspiring, but I didn’t have much confidence that my paper told the whole story of cocoa prices and child labor.

Flash forward to today. Now I know what the fruit of the cacao plant feels like in my hand because I’ve gone into the jungle to chop wood with my host brothers in Naitasiri, Fiji. I am proud to report that I’ve found that life exists far beyond the reaches of spreadsheets and cubicles and that the color of the cacao fruit in Fiji is orange on the outside, with slimy white cocoa seeds on the inside.

The youth playing a game of touch rugby on an island in the river. I would go on to join this game, have so much fun, and lose a toenail in the process.

On my first Saturday in my two-month training village, I follow my brothers and their friends out the door after breakfast. The boys are barefoot and wear swim trunks and tee shirts. About half of them carry machetes in their hands. The group of boys ranges from eight to seventeen years old. At twenty-five, I stand out because of more than just my age. I am the only one who applies sunscreen on our way to the jungle.

The boys chatter excitedly as we walk through the village. We are off to “tabuka” or cut firewood. Fridays and Saturdays of the Fijian week are similarly named, “vakaraubuka” and “vakarauwai.” The words mean to prepare water and prepare wood, two of the most important tasks to a people who live off the land. Many years ago, cutting firewood must have been a Friday ritual, but now, with the drag of school taking up the days from Monday to Friday, it is a job left for Saturdays. In my village, there is running water in most of the houses, most of the time. With modern infrastructure, preparing water is no longer as time-consuming. If the water isn't running, my family can walk 40 meters to my uncle's tank to fill a couple twenty-liter jugs. As for preparing the wood, that job is as romantic as ever.

A favorite quote of mine goes as follows: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.” We never leave behind the basic tasks of living. Rather, they are at the core of what it means to be human. Our simplest tasks can be done with the ease that comes with allowing ourselves to be wholly present. Or they can be done begrudgingly as our minds wander, wishing we were doing something else. In a 21st-century American context, perhaps this quote could more aptly read: “Before enlightenment, fold laundry, wash dishes. After enlightenment, fold laundry, wash dishes.”

On this first Saturday, my own path to enlightenment heads out from the village hall to the broken bridge that spans the river. The boys and I cannot communicate much with words. They point at things like a rock and tell me the Fijian name. Grass. Shoes. Knife. I forget the words as quickly as I learn them, and with much less effort. Maybe one day they will stick, but it is my second week in Fiji, and most of our talking must be done in English. I try to learn the boys’ names, and I ask what grades they are in. The only names I have down are my twin brothers, Seru and Alaisa. The only catch—I still cannot tell their faces apart. In a week or so I will have my brothers and cousins’ names on command, but today I simply follow, smile, and enjoy the sunshine and pleasant air.

We reach the river and must hop from a large rock to the ledge that leads up to the old single-car bridge. This task requires my full concentration and a lengthy lunge. From there, it is a ten-foot climb up to the bridge itself, with dirt footholds caked onto cement. I am lucky to have enough indoor bouldering experience so that I can prop myself up without difficulty.

The bridge is missing one cement segment and in its place are two one-foot-wide metal beams. One metal beam is warped to create an arc that the boys use as a bouncing board to spring through the air. I gingerly walk across the flat metal beam that is suspended twelve feet above the water. The beam is only two steps, and yet I still doubt it would pass any American safety standards for a playground. The boys all move with an ease that comes from years of movement in bare feet and the natural body awareness that follows. I move with the grace of a foreigner to this land, a baby deer taking its first steps.

From the bridge, we walk about thirty minutes down a dirt road surrounded on either side by jungle. The road thins and dissipates into brush before tumbling down towards the river. The boys take the lead and wade into the river before pushing off the sandy bottom to swim across. Many of the boys swim with three limbs and use their fourth to hold their machetes overhead. After being here for a week, I’ve shown my ability to swim competently, yet the boys still watch me warily, as though I might drown at any moment.

We reach the other side and climb up a grassy bank where a path has been laid by years and years of boys' feet. We walk along the path for another twenty or so minutes. My eleven-year-old brother Sikeli breaks into a rendition of “Lei Lusi.” Sikeli and the other pre-pubescent boys have the soprano and alto covered while the post-pubescent boys take up the tenor and base. I listen, dumbfounded by the beauty of this spontaneous song. The song is a contemporary love tune that I will soon hear at every Fijian social event; an anthem of the times. The original song will never top that spontaneous jungle rendition though.

At some point, a few of the boys disappear and return with enough cacao fruit for all to share. As we walk, we each suck on the seeds of the cocoa plant and spit them out onto the side of the muddy trail. When you chew the seeds, they are incredibly bitter. The boys laugh at me as I chew then spit out the dark purple innards and the harsh taste along with it. After that, I suck the slimy white outer layer and spit out the seeds. The white layer is sweet and tangy and tastes nothing like chocolate.

When we reach the right place in the jungle I am shown a good log where I can sit and rest. In minutes, the boys have dispersed to chop the dead Guava trees of the forest. At age sixteen, my brothers Alaisa and Seru could raise me above their heads as though I were a younger brother. Their machete chops are fast and firm. Sefo, fifteen, sits beside me and hands me his machete to allow me a few chops. What takes a Fijian teenager five or six swings takes me twice as many.

The boys do not hurry as they work. They talk, sing, or drum out a beat on a tree. The leisurely pace leaves me antsy at times. How long have we been in the jungle? When is lunch? I have no way to tell time besides the rising heat of the day. Time is measured in bundles of wood collected rather than hours and minutes.

As with most experiences I’ve had in Fiji, learning something new often requires feeling absolutely useless at first go. Besides my few pitiful chops, I help naught. I find solace in being a source of entertainment for the boys and hopefully validating their weekly chores by taking an interest in the task.

As the boys finish chopping their wood, they start to gather their small bundles into larger bundles. One bundle per boy. Some boys have rope draped across their torsos like Miss Universe beauty pageant sashes. Other boys simply use the rope that the jungle provides. There are pointer-finger-thick vines that are perfect for wrapping up a bundle of wood. Or, they peel a strip of bark and use the supple tree skin to tie the bundle.

A bundle might weigh 40 or 50 pounds, and I wonder how the boys will manage to walk these bundles back to the village. Once tied, the boys hoist the bundles onto their shoulders and begin walking toward the river. Here, there is a sandy bank, and one after another the boys dump their mornings’ work into the water. After a hot morning of chopping wood, the cool river water is a salve from the heavens.

A few younger boys take turns diving off the river bank at a steeper part. I have an image forever ingrained in my mind of a 9-year-old boy, arms outstretched as he arcs through the air above my seat on the sand. His silhouette is cast by the sun overhead and in his hand is his machete; a universal tool for many of the men in Fiji. I long for a camera to snap this into a single frame. But my electronics aren’t made for the river, and it is difficult to take photos without altering the scene in some way. I settle for the mental snapshot.

My brothers bring a bamboo log down to the river for me to float on, and it is time to cast off. Each boy floats with their personal bundle. The river fluctuates in depth, so at times we are running weightless on the river bottom, and at times we are floating.

The sun has hidden itself and a drizzle has started to sprinkle the land. One of the boys is shivering from the cold of the water now that the sun has disappeared. I am colder than I expected, but with the discomfort of the chill comes an intense feeling of aliveness. And there is always singing to keep the spirit warm if the physical body starts to lose heat.

The float is over a mile, and the river snakes back and forth. I enjoy the laughter and splashing while longing for the dry clothes that await the end of this journey. Each turn in the river gives way to a new river bank. The boys show me where to steer my bamboo log so that I avoid some of the downed trees that lie at the bottom of the river. Once or twice, I bang a shin and curse the tree that was hidden beneath the surface of the water.

After what feels like an hour, I see a few colorfully painted houses in the distance. The village comes back into view and the boys swim towards the shore. Each of the boys takes turns marching up the steep and muddy embankment with a heavy bundle resting between their neck and shoulder. I can hardly keep my balance on the muddy slope without any added weight.

Once up the embankment, my new host home is right there as we left it. My host mom, Na, has fish and greens in broth and warm cassava waiting inside. She smiles from the kitchen as her three Fijian sons each dump a bundle of sticks proportional to their size and strength next to the house. I don’t have a bundle, but she smiles because I am learning her culture and the strength of her sons. This wood will be used to cook countless meals in the house and heat just as many kettles for hot cups of tea. As I stand dripping outside the kitchen door, my Na hands me a towel. I have scarcely been so glad to be handed a dry towel. Sitting down at the dining table with the family never feels so good.

The boys of Fiji grow up fast and carry machetes young. I think of my own antics at the ages of thirteen to fifteen. My friends and I might play roller hockey or soccer, and then bike to 7-Eleven to buy junk food and Slurpies. But that is only if we are not too busy getting lost in the endless worlds that video games provide. At this age, it seems that there is a universal need to have long excursions with friends. Heading to the jungle to chop firewood for a village is far more beautiful than the bike runs to Seven Eleven. And beyond the time in nature, there is a strong sense of purpose in providing the cooking fuel for the family.

Once the firewood is delivered and lunch is finished, the boys have the afternoon to play or wander to their hearts’ content. Sometimes that means hovering around a television watching YouTube videos, but many afternoons inevitably end up on the rugby field.

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Rugby, Jesus, food, and kava all compete for a place at the heart of Fijian culture. If a Fijian Rugby match and church fell at the same time, I’d venture to guess that Jesus would look out at empty pews.

During my first month in Fiji, the Rugby World Cup was well underway. Every weekend, for three weeks, Fiji would play a hugely consequential match. One match is at 3:45AM local time, versus Georgia. Fiji might be the slight favorite. My bedroom is just behind the television, and I am woken by cheers in the living room. Fiji has started a comeback and in a show of camaraderie with the country and my family, I sloth my way out to the living room to find 20 Fijian faces and 40 Fijian eyes all glued to the television. My phone tells me it is 4:15AM. Fiji mounts an impressive comeback to win, and by the time 5:30AM rolls around, the living room is full of high-fives and sleepy faces. I head back to sleep before 10AM church.

If soccer is the beautiful game, fifteens tackle rugby is the grueling and beautiful game. Luckily, I only play touch rugby with the youths of the village. Saula is 22 years old, and as I arrive at my first day of rugby training, he is the only one warming up on the field and setting out cones. The rest of the guys sit and banter. I head out to stretch alongside Saula. Soon after, he walks me through the basic form of tossing a rugby ball. There is a propeller hand and a guiding hand. Passing back and forth while running up and down the field, I start to get my muscles to move in concert with the ball.

Liam, the other male Peace Corps volunteer in my village comes shortly after, and we start an impromptu warm-up scrimmage. The guys have fun and try to beat the defense, only to let me or Liam score. After Saula beats the defense on a well-timed cut, he opts to pass me the ball for the try. A try is the rugby touchdown equivalent.

After a few training sessions and pickup games with the kids, I start to fall in love with the sport. The way a defense must approach as a line, the near-miraculous string of passes it takes to beat a defense, and the endurance, strength, and agility required—rugby is a beautiful game.

One Saturday afternoon, after the boys have cut wood, a pickup game is kindling on the village field. The field is green with lush grass but also covered in small craters and dried cow turds. Everyone is barefoot except for a few older boys in cleats. I jog out to the field with bare feet and join one of the teams. With players ranging from 14 to 30, and ten players a side, each player brings their own strengths to the team. Some of the smaller boys can dart through gaps in the defense as a mouse shapeshifts through a hole that was only barely visible moments before. A few of the older guys control the game with passing. I just try to keep up.

Running across the uneven turf in bare feet, I keep one eye on the ball movement and the other on the pitch. The ball comes, and I turn to pass the ball on to our next attacker. The defender is younger and turns his head too quickly. I fake the pass and cut back through the hole the boy has left. With only grass ahead of me, for a moment I think I can score, but soon realize my legs aren’t moving fast enough. A defender is closing the gap between us as a cheetah hunts a gazelle on the plains. Seconds before I am touched, I toss the ball towards a streaking attacker. The ball hangs in the air and is catchable, but a little higher than I intended. My teammate bobbles the ball and then it drops to the ground. Turnover.

In Rugby, it takes near perfection and usually a sprinkle of creativity to score. Turning back to play defense, a few teammates give me nods of approval as the opposing team runs to move into an attacking formation. By the end of the two months, I don’t feel like a liability on the field and have occasional strokes of brilliance. More than anything though, I try to play safe defense and pass the ball to the next guy on offense.

After an hour of running back and forth, my explosiveness is disappearing. A last try scored by one of the young wingers ends the match. There is no score kept, the game is an up-and-down battle for the joy of running. Saula calls the younger guys in to stretch after the match. We count to ten in various stretches before dropping to a knee to pray. Good thing Jesus and Rugby aren’t in competition—they lead Fiji hand-in-hand. Saula instructs the younger kids to help him pick candy wrappers up as we walk off the field.

Saula turns to me, “Iko via sili na wavu?” Want to go swimming at the bridge?

“Io,” (pronounced “ee-oh”) means yes in Fijian.

We reach the bridge and take turns diving and jumping into the water below before jogging back up the sandy hill to the top of the old bridge. The sun starts to set behind the clouds, and the chill of the evening air is welcome after a long sweaty afternoon run.

“Here, picture,” Saula says, beckoning us all together to capture the moment. Liam and I are moved towards the center of the crowd of boys.

I love to look at that photo. Liam and I are easy to pick out; our smiles are all the same though—pure joy, born through exhaustion.

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Another Saturday, early in my 8-week stay in the village, I am deep inside a post-lunch slumber when I receive a knock on my door. My 14-year-old cousin, Rusiate, and 16-year-old brother, Seru, have come to get me so that I do not miss the excitement. Jasiliva, my host-sister, has organized a chicken delivery from her work to the house. That morning, I watched my father, brother, and cousin construct a new chicken coop out of wood and netting. Now, the chickens are here!

In a stupor, I follow Rusiate and Seru wherever they are taking me. The first thing that hits me is the smell. About 100 uniformly bred chickens are squawking in the back of a flatbed truck with a large awning over the top. Many of the chickens have their eyes closed and are missing patches of feathers. A few chickens seem to be outright dead.

Rusiate and Seru hop into the back of the truck and look for healthier chickens to snap up by the legs. I am handed two of the chickens, talons up, and their squawking soon dissolves to stillness as blood rushes to their chicken heads. The bumps on their yellow skin strike me as peculiar. Although I ate chicken weekly for the first 20 years of my life, I have never felt a chicken’s skin this intimately. With a total of eight chickens between us, Rusiate, Seru, Jasiliva and I walk back down the hill to the chicken coop where we show the chickens their new home.

I am under the impression these chickens are supposed to lay eggs for the family. If they are, they don’t lay them fast enough. One by one we eat the chickens in curries and soups until the chicken coop is once again empty. As I peer into my bowl of soup at dinner one night, I cannot help but notice with new clarity the little bumps on the skin of the chicken.

Fijian villages are filled with free-roaming chickens and roosters, beautiful birds with feathers of deep reds, maroons, and even highlights of blue-black. The chickens that came in the truck were a single variety of brown.

Among the free-roaming chickens, little chicklets follow mothers across the footpaths, and roosters dart after female chickens to engage in the quickest of mating rituals. Often the female chickens are too fast to catch, but other times the rooster is on top of the female in a flash and off just as quickly. Love or lust, hard to say.

I never get to see Jasiliva’s workplace, but I can’t help but think it would make me sad to see the factory-farmed chickens lay their eggs. On the other hand, Jasi likes the job because it is close to home, and it also appears to be the single largest source of income for my host family of 7.

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At dinners, the whole family gathers and talks about the going-ons in the village. I often ask the kids about school and offer to help them with their schoolwork. Soon, I have a study hall running many nights. Cousins and friends pop over to our living room to sprawl their books out on the floor, and I take turns explaining trigonometry and algebra problems step-by-step.

Often, my students look lost. They have shaky foundations to their math skills upon which the giant boulders of trigonometry and geometry are being placed. As is so often the case, it appears as though new math is being taught to students who do not have a thorough understanding of the math from years prior.

Although the teaching takes great patience, I enjoy the problem-solving and camaraderie. After all that the boys are teaching me, it is nice that I can give something back.

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On my second venture into the forest to cut wood, Jasiliva joins us for the fun. She works six days a week and is still up for an adventure on her one day off.

We follow the same path out towards the river, about a thirty-minute walk, but head to a new grove this time. I gather that the boys rotate where they cut the dead guava trees. The expanse of forest that belongs to the village is huge, and there are seemingly endless places to cut wood without exhausting the supply.

This time, I am allowed to take more swings with the machete and start to find a groove. Jasiliva tells me I should be careful. When she was a young girl, she chopped part of her pinky toe. The idea of a gaggle of boys with machetes is frightening at first coming from America. On the other hand, I suppose that navigating the streets of an American town, with the occasional reckless driver, might be just as dangerous.

Once my bundle fit for a twelve-year-old is complete, we tie it and prepare for operation river float. But first, we play tackle rugby in the three-foot-deep water with a wet shirt that someone has donated to the cause of a ball. Running through the thigh-deep water is exhausting, and launching to tackle the slow-moving ball carriers has us all smiling.

I have my own bundle to float with, and upon arriving home, I am challenged with hoisting it onto my shoulders and navigating the treacherous muddy path from the river bank to the village. It is a short walk, but I nearly lose my footing half a dozen times. Mom is so proud when I toss my wood beside the home. My first bundle; a significant milestone in the aging of a Fijian boy.

To celebrate we are having cow for lunch. Bulumakau, as the animal is called in Fiji - a conjunction of the words bull and cow. I wouldn’t have picked this as our celebratory meal, but if the family is happy, I’m happy. Besides, it is served in a hot broth with rourou leaves, and the meal warms whatever cold has seeped into my body from the river.

Playing with children is part of being a member of the Peace Corps and an important part of the human experience. Why? Children remind us how to be careless and unselfconscious. Me—I often go through this world analyzing and overthinking. But when I walk barefoot through the jungle or run across the rugby pitch, my thoughts dissipate into the ground below and the air around me.

I have moved on from my two-month training village. Today, I live in a 300-person village at the base of the tallest mountain in Fiji. I have my own two-room house, I have my own machete to help my neighbors with their farming, and I cook most of my own meals. In many ways, I am a Fijian adult these days. As I try to navigate life as an American in a Fijian village, I remember the boys who gave me a taste of what it is like to grow up in this land.

Two months is a short time to grow into an adult, but Fijian boys grow up fast, and so too must I.