The Ladyboys of Tilak High School

The end is nigh.  On Monday we started a 10 day countdown to my last day at Red Cross (which will be next Friday, the 15th).  Today we said goodbye to Chris, who’s placement was in Nausori and who had lunch with Kate and I today before going to the airport.  Tomorrow Rob (who’s placement was in Nadi) is leaving.  Its madness!  All along, I had maintained that I would stick with my original plan and fly out of Fiji on the 24th of August, but today I phone Air New-Zealand and asked to change my leaving date to the 1st of September.  Of course I am looking forward to seeing my family and friends back home in England and Luxembourg, and starting my studies in Plymouth, but the thing is that I now have family and friends here in Fiji too, and leaving them in going to be awful.

Last Saturday I went with Kate, Ateca and Ema (all Red Cross volunteers) to visit Mate (our Red Cross Health and Welfare Officer!) at her home, which is somewhere between Lautoka and Ba.  The walk from the bus-stop to Mate’s house was great – you could see right out to sea, and it was a beautiful day; clear skies, but a bit of a breeze so it wasn’t too hot.  We spent the whole morning sitting in the shade and drinking tropical root juice (kava) and watching the many tiny puppies roam around, fight, play, fall asleep etc.  We had a nice big lunch (plenty of sausages and cassava), then all feel asleep!  By the time we woke up, it was time to go home, because I had to get back to Lautoka in time for ‘Tilak Nite’, which Alesi and I had tickets for.

‘Tilak Nite’ was an oppertunity for students of Tilak High School to dance, sing, bang drums, etc, and raise money for their school.  It was a fun evening.  Barey a performance went by that didn’t involve at least one male student dressed in his sister’s sari/sulu chamba/miniskirt.  Most of the performances were dances, and were really enjoyable.  So far in Fiji I hadn’t seen much indian dance, but at Tilak Nite there were some great traditional indian performances which were very interesting to watch, as well as lots of meke and modern dance too.  We got back quite late so on Sunday I just relaxed and went to church.

Red Cross-wise, thing are winding down now.  There isn’t any point in starting something new just before we leave, so we are just doing odds and ends, drinking tea, planning our goodbye party and preparing for our final two puppet shows which we will be doing next week – one at Lautoka Chinese School and one at Teidamu Primary School.  Yesterday, a group of us went to unload a container full of wheelchairs for the Sai Centre.  When the Fiji Red Cross society comes across people who are in need of wheelchairs, it is the Sai Centre who provide them, so it is our duty to at least help them unload them all from the container!  However this was no mean feat.  The container was the size of a small bungalow and contained hundreds of boxes of unassambled wheelchairs, all of which had to be off-loaded onto a truck, driven to the warehouse, unloaded from the truck and into the lift, taken up to the second floor and then stacked up neatly.  More than 10 of us (6 from Red Cross and the rest from elsewhere) began work at 11am – by 5pm, we still hadn’t quite finished!  I slept very well last night!  My biceps are very sore this morning though..