june 7

The following post was actually written on June 7, 2015. I will be posting a few belated posts throughout this week because I wrote them offline but had limited internet access to post them.

Also, I promise later posts will include more photos.  I haven't had much time during training to deal with photos, but once training is over, my schedule will change dramatically and I'll have more time in the office.
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I just don't know where to start.

I should say, I haven't had as much time to experience Fiji as I have to experience training for the organization I'm working for. One really important focus of the training has been bonding with fellow staff members. I guess I hadn't expected that to be as significant of a piece of this trip as it is, and it has caught me off guard a little. The training has clearly been set up very intentionally to cause us to all connect deeply and quickly, to come to rely on each other for emotional support. And it's very effective.

This has involved a group of around 25 international staff members (mostly from the U.S. but some from Australia and New Zealand) and a similar number of local staff, all of us doing various ice breaker exercises and going through training in a very hands on, experiential way. All of this has been going on at the base... but only a handful of us will actually be stationed at the base throughout the summer. So tomorrow, the first group is leaving to go through orientation at the sites of the programs they're leading (one group heads off to the outlying islands, another heads off to the villages in the highlands) while those of us at the base will stay here and go through site-specific training. So far, all our training has been relatively broad and general, but tomorrow it gets much more specific to our respective programs and positions.

I think I've generally been overstimulated and kept busy to the extent that I wasn't really processing being here-- which was fine. It doesn't have to happen all at once.

But then... this evening at sunset, we walked up to a hilltop nearby. When we got there, a group of the local staff was already there playing their guitars and singing (I am kicking myself for having forgotten my digital audio recorder to capture the music. I don't know what I'll do without hearing it after this summer is over.) and the regional director's 9 year old kid ran up to me and handed me a Fiji Bitter as I walked through the gate nearing the hilltop, and I walked up over the crest to see the most spectacular panoramic that can possibly exist on the planet. Honest to god, I don't even want to describe it, because I don't know how to avoid sounding cliche, or resorting to a Tolkien-esque level of flowery language. Golden, grassy, rolling hills; the ocean, all around, all across the horizon, surrounding the spot of land I was on like a giant hug; hilly islands at various spots in the distance as if they were placed there by a damn graphic designer, clouds above them and behind them so you seriously had to figure out it a particular shape in the distance was a cloud or an island, and they may as well have been the same thing, all against the backdrop of a ridiculous rainbow colored sunset.

I felt way too many things at once. All the feelings I've probably ever felt in my life, all right there. I felt tiny and huge; I felt ashamed for ever having been stressed out about life, silly for ever having had a complaint; I felt angry that this place has just been sitting here my whole life and I'm just now seeing it; I felt terrified that someone actually hired me and brought me to this place for a purpose and now I have to f***ing earn it, and how can anyone ever earn that? I felt completely and utterly alone, and then I felt completely silly for that when I was in the midst of a culture that is so community-based that if you compliment their shirt they will literally take it off and give it to you.

Mostly, I think I was experiencing some form of bliss.