My Life as Paleni

Finally an update

2006-08-21T22:09:00.000-05:00

Hello to everyone who is still reading this blog. Sorry for the lack of updates. This blog is for my life as Paleni and I'm reverting back to just Blaine since I am now back in the states.

Well, since I left Fiji, I have been just hanging out at my parents' place. In late June, my parents and I drove out to Norfolk, Virginia, to visit old friends of theirs. I lived out there when I was a kid. It's crazy how everything is different with so many new condos and such going up.

In mid-July, I took a roadtrip by myself around the Midwest to visit a college friend in Chicago, Peace Corps friends in Ohio and Pittsburgh, and old work friends in Des Moines.

At the start of this month, I started looking for a job. And, the big news is: I now have a job! I got lucky. I sent out 10 cold resumes and got back only 2 responses. The second one didn't pan out. I had a phone interview with the first company and then they wanted to fly me out for an in-person interview. Last Friday was the interview, and the next day they offered me the job. I accepted today and it's official. I did get a lot of emails and phone calls from headhunters looking for contract-only positions, but I only wanted fulltime positions (more stable). I focused my search on the Denver area, as I really love that area. I did get some contacts from companies in other cities.

The new job is with Amadeus Consulting in Boulder, Colorado. Amadeus is great company from what I saw and with whom I met. They are a custom software development shop using .Net. I'm ready to start as soon as possible. I got 2 weeks to find an apartment and move out there. I start on September 5.

While I was out there, they gave me a couple more days before flying out, so I was able to see a couple old work friends out there. But, now I'm going back, so I will definitely see them again.

I'll give you another update when I get out there.

T Minus One Week

2006-05-27T21:49:00.000-05:00

I have one week left before I leave Fiji. Last Friday was my last day at work. The company treated everyone to a free lunch at a fancy restaurant. The boss gave a small speech for my leaving. Earlier in the week, I sat down with the boss and told him all of the issues I've had and why I'm leaving the company. Hopefully, he will act on some of my suggestions.

Yesterday was the final of the Super 14 rugby competition. I posted when the season started that we were running a betting pool at work. We had a huge party at one guy's place last night. We put in half of the bet money for the party. We had BBQ and lots of beer. The match was between the Crusaders and the Hurricanes. I was going for the Crusaders. It was extremely foggy in Christchurch and could barely see anything on the TV. There was only one try in the match and the Crusaders won by 7 points. One of the guys won the betting pool and won $160.

In this final week, I will be doing some final shopping, packing my bags and cleaning up the house. My flatmate is moving into another flat with another co-worker. I'm looking forward to getting back. This chapter of my life is now closing. I've definitely had many experiences that I won't forget living in the South Pacific for 4 years.

Fiji Election Results

2006-05-20T20:57:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago, the 2006 General Election started with a week of casting votes and a week of counting. Voting didn't start out too well with almost every polling station opening 2 to 6 hours late on the opening day due to the ballot papers showing up late or the wrong ballot papers being delivered to some stations. There were also a lot of complaints of registered voters not appearing on the ballot roll, so most were not allowed to vote, or their vote was held for later validation. I don't know the total number of people that voted, but I believe it is less than the last election in 2001. The disturbing number is that there were 16,000 invalid votes. Luckily, there was no hanging chad fiasco, as there are no chads, but just ticks. Those votes would have probably changed the results. But, the incumbent SDL party won the majority and is the first party in Fiji history to win a second term. There are 71 Parliament seats. The majority votes in each division wins that seat. The party with at least 36 seats take control of the government and the party decides who will be the Prime Minister. The previous PM, Laisenia Qarase, has remained in that position. The great news is that the PM has offered Cabinet seats to the opposition party and they have accepted. They are still working out the details. The Cabinet will be sworn in on Tuesday. This is the first time in Fiji history to have a multi-party Cabinet. This is a very positive sign for the Fiji government.

New office building

2006-04-14T21:49:00.000-05:00

The day after I got back from Samoa, my company was moving to a new building. I come to the, now old, office and everthing is gone except the desks and the servers. I turn off all of the servers and we use the company truck to move it to the new office. The movers came and moved all of the furniture. We were outgrowing the old office. We got an entire building to ourselves in one of the campuses of USP (the local university). They are slowly converting the campus to an IT campus. We got one of the tutorial buildings. Another IT company moved in before us, and I assume others are coming soon. It's not in downtown as the old office, and it's harder to get to places and has less restaurants nearby. Hopefully they will add a coffeeshop or restaurant eventually when more companies move in. The building is nice. We need to add data and voice lines and do some small remodeling. Hopefully over the next week, we'll get everything unpacked and settle in.

Back from Samoa

2006-04-14T21:13:00.000-05:00

I arrived back in Fiji from Samoa on Wednesday morning of this week. It was a good, relaxing trip. Didn't think about work much. I did everything that I wanted to do. I caught up with the few remaining volunteers I know who are still in the country. Also met a few of the newbie volunteers. I visited my old workplace. I had lunch with my counterpart who I trained while I was there. I had lunch at my favorite places. I had a small scare when I first arrived into town and found that Pinati's building was leveled to the ground. I thought it had closed. Luckily, it just moved down the street into a new building, which is much better than the old one. I had the very good grilled fish and oka (raw fish) at Seafood Gourmet. I, of course, had Vailima on many of the days while I was there. I brought back 2 full bottles to save for some future occasion. On the first Sunday, I went to see a movie with some of the volunteers. They were showing Sione's Wedding in both theaters the entire day. It's made by the same New Zealand Samoans that make Bro'Town. It was very funny and amusing seeing the Samoan culture in New Zealand. After a few days in Apia, I traveled to the big island of Savaii and stayed at a beach fale resort in Manase, the same place we stayed when my parents visited me 2 years ago. I just hung out on the beach and did nothing. I went back to Apia for one night and then headed out to the village of my Samoan family for the last weekend. All of the kids were bigger, including Paleni, my namesake. I believe he has never seen a palagi (white person) and he would instantly cry when he saw me. He finally got used to me the night before I was heading back to Apia. I just hung out like I always do in the village. Went to church on Sunday. Had to'ona'i (the Sunday meal) with my Samoans parents. I headed back to Apia and bought an ava bowl that I'll keep as a souvenir. I went out to dinner at a fancy seafood restaurant with the work friends who are still in Samoa and had a few drinks before taking the shuttle to the airport and flying out. I enjoyed my trip and am happy that I got a chance to get back.

Back to Samoa one more time

2006-03-31T20:23:00.000-06:00

Tonight I'm flying to Samoa, probably for the last time. I took the last of my annual leave and visiting Samoa for 10 days. I'm happy to go back when I still have the chance. There are only a few volunteers left that I know. I'll meet some of the new ones who have come in after I left. I'll stop in at the Peace Corps office and suprise the staff. The main reason for going back is to have Vailima, the world's best beer, one more time. And to eat at Pinati's, the world's "best" restaurant. That line can only be fully understood by those who have lived in Samoa. I'll visit my Samoan family and see my namesake and see, I'm sure, how he is living up to the name (i.e. getting pudgy). I'll find out how much of the language I still remember, which wasn't perfect to start with. I'll visit some friends at the bank I used to work at. I'll try to get to Savaii and stay at one of the beach fales (Samoan huts). I'll let you know how it goes when I get back.

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

2006-03-04T22:03:00.000-06:00

This post is dedicated in honor of the great Silao Kasiano. Today, which is Saturday in Samoa, is the going away party for Silao. Silao has worked at the Peace Corps Samoa office for the last 25 years. He was kinda forced to resign by the central Peace Corps office. Either it was him or his wife, who also works at the Samoa office. Apparently Peace Corps has a nepotism policy. Silao and his wife, Ana, have worked together for many years in different sections of the office. He is the training manager and she is the head of administration. Peace Corps has known about it since they married, but decided to enforce it now. I hear they discussed it and they decided Silao will resign. He is content with the decision and I hear he has gained employment with the SIT program. I forget what the acronym stands for, but, basically, it's where students come on a study abroad program.
I wish Silao the best in his future endeavors. I know Peace Corps Samoa will be very different without him. He is one of the greatest people I know. Every volunteer first goes through training for 2 months, and it was Silao who was the father-figure to many a trainee during those 2 months. I know he has had an impact on many volunteers. He has treated us to many rounds of Vailima. And anyone who knows him will immediately know the title I gave this blog entry. "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" is Silao's most favorite song of all time. I'm sure every Samoa volunteer has heard Silao sing it karaoke. Everytime I hear that song, I will always think of Silao and the great memories I've had while in Samoa. The Samoa office is giving him a scrapbook and giving a slideshow of all of the pictures of him throughout the years. I wish I could have been there. There was email going around about donations and letters to send him. I hope they gave him the present that I donated some money for. Silao absolutely loves playing golf and the staff and volunteers were going to give him some new clubs.
Here is a photo of Silao and Ana that I took 3 years ago this month.

Update (March 8): I got an email today with an update. Over $3500 tala was raised from staff and from current and past volunteers. They did get him new golf clubs and a cash gift. They said he was lost for words when they presented him with the clubs. Here's a photo from the night when they presented the clubs. Silao is standing far left. The ones presenting are Matt, the IT guy, and Teuila, the medical officer. Here is a blog entry from a current volunteer who attended.

Fiji goes to the polls in May

2006-03-02T16:30:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, the Prime Minister announced that the 2006 General Election will be held from May 6 to 11 [Fiji Times article]. Political parties are concerned the Elections Office is not ready. They say the fairness and impartiality of the votes could be compromised. Parliament is being dissolved later this month and some controversial bills will not be debated until the new Parliament reconvenes after the election [Fiji Times article].

This will be interesting to watch, to say the least. The campaigning will kick in full force and I'm sure more mud-slinging will come out in the media from the candidates. They have already been doing that without a secured poll date. And when the ballots are counted, that will be the most interesting. I'm sure which ever party wins, the other major party will surely contest it. Let's just hope that everyone can respect everyone else and accept the decision of the citizens and not take it in their own hands.

Last months in Fiji

2006-02-27T23:11:00.000-06:00

After much consideration last week, I have decided to leave Fiji and return to America. I gave my resignation letter yesterday. I gave 3 months notice as required by my contract. It's much more than the usual 2 week notice required in America. Three months is good because it gives me time to document everything and make sure everyone here at work knows what I know before I leave. And also it won't be cold in America when I return as it will be end of spring by then. I want to get used to winter gradually. And the Super 14 rugby will be over. My last day of work will be May 27. My plan right now is to fly back sometime in the week after Memorial Day.

My work visa expires in January 2008. I'm sure you're wondering why I have decided to leave now. I'm sure some of you thought I may never come back. There are many reasons. I'll mention the main points here. I turn 30 in August and I'd like to be able to start settling down somewhere. Get a steady job and buy a house. And eventually find a wife. Given the state of everything here in Fiji, which I can get into in other posts, I won't be able to live here permanently. The longer I live here, the more it will hurt me financially if I return to America to live. I still have school loans to pay off for one. If I work here and stay here long term, I would be fine financially with the low cost of living here. But, given I am a temporary resident and given the state of the economy and government here, there are many reasons why it will not be feasible for me to live here permanently. It is in my best interest to leave now and have more time to settle somewhere in the states.

I will admit that the main reason for leaving now is my unhappiness with my job. I mentioned this to my boss when I gave my resignation letter yesterday. I won't get into the details. Before I leave I will have a long discussion, I'm sure, with my boss about my grievances. Even if work got better, I would still leave given the stuff I just mentioned above. In my 8 years of working professionally, I have learned some things that drive me insane at work. I've always said I want to work for a small company, but I think I've reversed that decision. I want a job where I can work 9 to 5 with no excessive or forced overtime and be able to focus on just programming. In my jobs at small companies, I've always done everything under the sun, because of the small number of staff. I have learned that doing systems work drives me frickin' insane. I can do systems work, but I just don't want to do systems work. I enjoy programming and want to stick with that in my next job.

So, in early June, I will be returning to America. My plan currently is to crash at my parents' place, visit my brother, and hang out and do nothing for a little while. Then I will start applying for jobs. I'm open to move anywhere. I read an article that .Net programmers are still saught after even though tech job hirings have gone down. So, I'm sure I'll find a job without too much trouble if I'm flexible.

I'll let you know on here how my last 3 months in Fiji go.

First Contact

2006-02-21T21:54:00.000-06:00

... or, should it be "First Contacts"?
It's both. It's first contacts as, yesterday, I got contacts for the first time. And, first contact, as the first time my finger came in direct contact with my eyeball.
The last time I inquired about contacts, the doctor said with my stigmatism, I could only get hard contacts, and I didn't want to mess with that. Now, the technology has advanced, so I can get soft, disposable contacts now.
I ordered a starter pair a couple weeks ago and they arrived yesterday. I went and they showed me how to get them in and out. They were impressed with how fast I picked it up. I took them in and out a couple times to get used to it. I was hesitant at first to lightly press against my eyeball with my thumb to get the contact out. They showed me the cleaning and all that stuff. I've see all my friends do it, so it was just refresher. I wore them for 6 hours to break them in. I definitely felt them in there. It was interesting to be able to see and not feeling the weight of the glasses on my face. I kept blinking and stuff to re-gain focus. My computer screen was bit fuzzy and it wasn't with the glasses. Everything else was fine. I'll see how it goes over the next few days.
This morning I woke up and added a new task into my normal morning routine. Basically, I'm not wearing the contacts today. I spent 30 minutes trying to put the damn thing into my eye. It didn't work like it did yesterday. The thing kept sticking to my finger and wouldn't stay in my eye. I was doing the whole forcing-my-eye-open-with-the-fingers thing and pressing it to my eye and moving the eye left and right to get it to settle in there, but it wasn't doing it today. I got frustrated and gave up. I'll try again tomorrow morning. I still have to get the hang of it, I guess. If everything goes well, I'll order more to have on hand when these wear out.

Bro'Town

2006-02-21T21:28:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, I bought the DVD ofthe first season of Bro'Town at a local video rental shop that was selling it. Bro'Town is an adult cartoon from New Zealand about the life of Samoan teenagers (and one Maori) growing up in New Zealand. It is written and voice-acted by the Naked Samoans, a New Zealand comedy troupe. I watched the first 4 episodes last night. It is very funny when you know some Samoan culture. They poked fun at every aspect so far. They focus on growing up "brown" and "getting along" in a multi-ethnic society.
I knew about it for a while and only saw the last episode of the first season and found it hilarious and wanted to get a hold of it. I coworker came back from New Zealand a couple weeks ago. I had asked to get me a copy of season 1 and 2 which are out on DVD. He only brought back season 2 as he couldn't find season 1. So, I was glad when the video shop was selling it. They are currently working on season 3, and I hope to get a hold of that when it comes out. Hopefully someone will be going to NZ when it comes out. I'm sure I'll watch the rest of the episodes within the week.

Weekend trip to Ba

2006-02-19T23:33:00.000-06:00

A couple coworker friends and I took a small weekend trip to the west side of the island this last weekend. The main reason for going is to drop one of the guys off at the airport yesterday morning for his flight to New Zealand for a work trip. They just invited me along for the ride. I did my usual shopping on Saturday morning. We left around noon and drove to Ba (pronounced "Mbah"). We spent the night at my flatmate's parents' house. He had already went up on Friday to visit his parents. It takes 3 hours by car to get to Nadi, where the airport is, and another hour drive north to Ba. We picked up a case of stubbies in Nadi. North of Nadi, people were selling stuff on the side of the road and we stopped and bought a bundle of fish as a gift for the family. They had the cable channel, so we watched two games of the Super 14. My Crusaders won. The two guys who came with me were rooting for the other team. We drank the beer while watching the game and nibbled on some excellent goat curry made by my flatmate's mum (as they say here). After the game, we had a late dinner. His mom made dhal, the aforementioned goat curry, fish curry and crab curry, with the usual roti and rice. I've already mentioned how I love Indian food made by Indian mothers, so it was definitely good. We crashed in their spare bedroom and woke up early to get to the airport for his 9 am flight. We had pumpkin curry and fish curry for breakfast. I just had the pumpkin as it's one of my favorites and I don't like fish breath in the morning. We drove to the airport in Nadi and dropped the guy off. There were two other coworkers who just came in from Samoa from talking to a new client there. There was a mini-meeting at the airport with 7 of us there. Our manager arrived on his own as he was flying to NZ also. We visited a relative of my flatmate who lives by the airport. They gave us some lamb palau and breadfruit. We drove back to Ba and picked up another coworker who was visiting his parents also. We drove back to the house and just hung out. We had palau for lunch. We had the lamb palau we got as the gift and the goat palau that his mom made. My flatmate's parents always give us a ton of food. I brought back a big box. There were homegrown bananas, cucumbers, carrots, lemons and dhal peas. My friend bought some homemade ghee that was made by a neighbor. We already have some at the house along with hand-pounded Indian spices. We have also received eggs from their own chickens, but not on this occasion. The two of us drove back yesterday and we got back around 5 PM. I did my laundry that I usual do on Sunday mornings. I had some leftover palau that his mom gave me as take-away from lunch. I went to bed early to catch up on my sleep. My flatmate and the other guy came in this morning from Ba.

Super 14 is underway

2006-02-16T22:55:00.000-06:00

Today is the second weekend of the Super 14 rugby competition. Everyone in Fiji loves rugby and this is definitely one of the top competitions people watch. This is definitely one of my favorites to watch also. It has good teams and great game play. For the rugby challenged, Super 14 is a private competition that uses the IRB rules (as far as I can tell) with its own point system and made up of 14 teams from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. I have adopted the Crusaders as "my team". While I was in Samoa, the New Zealand All Blacks were the country favorite next to the local team of course. I saw the All Blacks play and they are damn good. Some All Blacks are on the Crusaders team also. I then go for the best New Zealand team, which is the Crusaders. Last year, the competition was called Super 12 and I'll let you figure out why. I find it strange that they base the name on the number of teams, which is pretty much guaranteed to change. I would of just kept calling it Super 12 even if there are more than 12 teams. And more teams are trying to join, so it will probably be Super 16 next year. Some guy in Alabama is domain squatting on super16.com hoping to make some money when it does.
We all love the game here at work. We have a betting pool going on. Being the geek that I am, I wrote a quick web application to let everyone make bets on the intranet. Of course, if I win, they are going to accuse me of cheating. I will only win by luck, as I'm not a rugby guru like some of the guys at work. The games are only shown on the local cable and satellite channels. I'll go to the bar or a friend's house to see some of them during the season.

Romantic Dinner ... at McDonalds

2006-02-13T18:20:00.000-06:00

I have the perfect idea to win your date over on Valentines Day... take her to McDonalds for a romantic candlelight dinner. And you can show her how much money you have with the free sundae they'll give her (with the purchase of 2 meals of course).

This shows the difference between McDonalds in developed and developing countries. It's definitely hip for the young kids to go to McDs here. In America, as you know, McDonalds is considered the lowest, cheapest restaurant to go to. Here, and more so in Samoa, McDonalds is the more expensive, "classier" joint to go to. Here, McDonalds are clean establishments with actual soap and tissues in the toilets. And, people (of all ages) want to work there and make decent money and give good service, unlike high school kids in America wanting to make a buck and don't give a shit about customer service.

Haram nam Paleni hai

2006-02-09T18:05:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I had my first Hindi language class. The local French Cultural Centre has classes for French, of course, Fijian and Hindi. Since I hang out with Indian guys alot, I figure I'd learn their language. Mostly, to know when they are talking about me. The class is 2 - 2 hour sessions a week and runs until May. The course costs FJ$280 (~US$170). There are 4 other people taking the class. There is a local dialect the language called Hindustani or Fiji-Hindi and there is the standard Hindi they speak in India. Everyone learns standard Hindi in school, but speaks Fiji-Hindi everywhere else. It's actually not an officially recognized language. But since everyone speaks it, that's what I want to learn. Hindi does have script letters, but we are using the English alphabet. I don't need to write it, only speak it. From the first class, the trickest part of the language is saying the sounds right as there are some complicated sounds for an English speaker. But the grammar seems basic and is consistent, unlike English. So, once you learn the vocabulary, it should be easy to form sentences. Now, I'll slowly replace my Samoan with Hindi.

Superbowl Monday

2006-02-06T17:50:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I took the day off work to watch the Superbowl. With the timezone here, the Superbowl kickoff was at 11 AM Monday here. A week ago I was worried I wouldn't be able to see the game. Luckily I finally ran into a Peace Corps volunteer working in Suva. He and other Americans attending the local university he knows were going to an expat's house to watch the game and he invited me. The owner made BBQ wings and others brought pizza and chips. Besides no beer, it was a normal Superbowl watching experience, except no commercials. But I've been used to that with watching it in Samoa. I didn't have a team as I'm now more into rugby, but with all of the errors by Seattle, I started to root for the Steelers. I've always seen at least the Superbowl for as long as I can remember, so it was good to see it again this year.

In the morning I ran some errands in town. Coincidence has it that a cruise ship was docked in Suva for the day, so Suva had a larger-than-normal number of white people. So the locals were trying to get the tourists to buy their crap. Since I'm white, they all assume I'm a tourist. Everyone is coming up to me trying to sell stuff and I tell them I'm not a tourist and, in my head, I say to go try to rip someone else off. If anyone sees a "I'm not a tourist" shirt, please send it to me, as I would love you for life. I'll be sure to wear it when the cruise ships come in, so I won't get annoyed by everyone coming up to me.

Will the real Blaine Grady please stand up?

2006-01-20T01:19:00.000-06:00

If you read the comments, there were a couple posts from a lady saying she knows a guy with the same name as I. She included a link to her blog and her latest post is about me having that same name as her friend. It turns out she does know my cousin who has the same name as I. And even more strange, his older brother has the same name as my brother, Brandon. So, there are 2 sets of brothers with the same names and are related. My family members, of course, know this, but others who know me, don't. The other Blaine is older than I. My parents, as far as I know, didn't know they were naming their kids the same as kids of my Dad's cousin. We only met them once when I was kid and all I remember was being at the house. The other Blaine posted comments to her blog and I found his blog. I emailed her to get me in contact with him to catch up and say Hi.

Calm After the Storm

2006-01-18T00:01:00.000-06:00

Everything is mostly calm after the coup scare. On Monday, the prime minister and the military commander met with the president. They seemed to have ironed out their main source of contention. Instead of speaking publicly, the commander will have regular meetings with the PM to discuss issues and hopefully resolve them. The commander and the police chief will be more involved in security meetings. The commander had issue with some controversial bills that the PM was trying to steamroll through Parliament that the commander and many others saw as racist. The commander's opinion on these bills will be entertained more by the PM and the PM said they will ask for more public opinions on these bills as well. The commander expressed concerns about legit elections this year. There is still some ongoing controversy. There is an army investigation into the commander's ex-righthand man who was forced to resign on confronting the commander, which caused the initial scare. We don't know if he tried to cause a mutiny against the commander. The commander says he threatened to shoot him. But that's a bit confusing, because he would be jailed I would think if he did that. The Fiji Labour Party (FLP) says it has sources (it hasn't divulged yet) that the PM was behind the failed military mutiny. The police are investigated these possibly inflammatory accusations. I mentioned that the head of the FLP made public comments that they will support a military takeover of the government. The PM says they are making their accusations against him to try to cover-up their remarks about supporting a coup. Police are investigating that as well. The FLP is also saying the major party is tampering with voter registrations to rig the upcoming elections. But everything is mostly back to normal. The general environment is calm. The tourism bureau says tourists are comfortable visiting now with an increase in bookings. Let's hope everyone can keep the communication channels open to resolve issues to keep Fiji coup free, but there is still a long way to go.

Coup Scare

2006-01-13T21:13:00.000-06:00

There was a coup scare two days ago on Thursday. First of all, there is no coup (yet) and I'm fine. It happened on Thursday morning, but I didn't hear about it until the 6 PM news. I was still at work and another coworker says he got a call from his father saying that the commander of the military was arrested in the morning. I was like, "Oh shit". It was a rumor that didn't happen. From the papers yesterday and today, more is clear on what happened. For background, lets just say that the political party currently running the government and the military are constantly at odds and very public about it. More so, it's the prime minister against the military commander. The commander has problems with the government in its laxidasical approach to prosecuting those involved in the 2000 coup and especially a bill the leading party is trying to run through parliament which will give amnesty to future coup starters. The military was who restored control during the coup. The commander has been very public about his views and some are saying this is weakening national stability. Strangely the commander has said publicly that he will do whatever he seems fit including taking over the government if necessary. And also, the head of the Labour Party on Thursday said she will support the military in doing this. FYI, the Labour Party was the party in power when the last coup happened in 2000. They were then replaced by the current government. The Labour Party says they want to continue what they started when they were coup'd out. Fortunately, no coup yet, but I feel that the commander, who supposedly is against coups, will probably do so. The first coup in 1987 was by the then military commander and he succeeded. Nevertheless, there were many comments from the public and civil servants about what to do with the commander, but nobody was doing anything. There were complaints against the prime minister about not doing his job and passing the buck to the President. And that's where is at now. On Thursday morning, the military commander's right-hand man confronted the commander and said he should resign because he is leading towards treason with his opposition to the government. He said either he or the commander would go. Well, today the right-hand man was forced to resign by the commander. But on Thursday there were rumors that the commander was arrested and a mutiny within the military. The base was locked down tight. The Navy and the police went on high alert. The prime minister called a national security council. Just the disagreement with the commander. Everything is fairly calm now. Now, the commander and PM will meet with the President on Monday. No official statement from the PM or President yet. You can read the local paper online for yesterday and today. This article is good as a chronology of events. The US Embassy here even posted a warning to its citizens; the Australia High Commission did the same. I feel totally safe. This problem is entirely contained within the government and military and there is no threat to citizens of any country living here. I'll, of course, play it safe if any crazy shit goes down.

Addicted to Podcasts

2006-01-08T20:43:00.000-06:00

I mentioned last month that I jumped onto the podcasting bandwagon. I think I am now addicted to it. I've been searching and finding some good free podcasts and have subscribed to them with iTunes. We got a Christmas bonus, so I broke down and bought myself a MP3 player. It's not a iPod, but I recently bought an Akira MP-OL300 from a local electronics shop at a decent price I think, given that electronics in general are very expensive here. I've been downloading the podcasts with iTunes and copying them to my Akira. I've been going to the coffeeshop and listening to them there. I like the Akira. It recharges off the USB port and the battery lasts a long time. My podcast listening has currently replaced my book reading. I haven't read my book since before Christmas. If anyone wants to send me an iPod or video iPod, I won't complain too much.

Work Christmas Tree

2006-01-03T20:23:00.000-06:00

Thanks to my friend Sarah for sending an unexpected package of goodies. But she does like my company's Christmas tree more than me as it got more goodies than I... Oh wait, I asked for people to send ornaments to spruce of the tree. So, thanks again Sarah for sending some. She sent 12 new ornaments that I promptly put on the tree. She also sent a Santa hat and a dozen candy canes that I gave to work mates. The guys here didn't know what they were and hadn't had them before. She did give me a Ohio U. shirt. She's getting her Masters there. I don't know about promoting Ohio, but I'll guess I wear it. I have a few friends there and I drove through it a few times. Here's a picture of the updated tree.

Sexy New Glasses

2006-01-02T20:09:00.000-06:00

Today I got my new sexy, sleek, fashionable glasses. They are thin, black, top-framed glasses. I usually get brown framed glasses, but I liked these with bottomless frames. So far, I haven't got the usual headache when I get new glasses. They are very light, so they feel different on my face. I may have to get them adjusted so they don't keep slipping down my nose. Don't be afraid, but here's a close-up with the new specs. What do you think?

New Years on the Island

2006-01-02T01:00:00.000-06:00

Happy New Years to everyone!

I got back yesterday evening from the island. It was a fun, relaxing time on the island. We almost took over the island with 18 of us going. It's a small island; takes about an hour to walk around it. It has white sand all around it, although there is a bit of coral on the beach and close to shore. The married couples and the single females stayed in bures (Fijian huts), while the single guys bunked in their backpacker dorm. We just killed time by walking around the island a couple times, kayaking, snorkeling, playing volleyball and playing way too much pool. The best part was sleeping in a hammock in the shade right next to the beach with the cool wind. I treated myself to a coconut oil back massage done by an extremely cute Fijian lady. We brought 6 bottles of hard stuff (poison as we call it) to start off the evenings. One night they broke out the karaoke and the girls in our group were singing all night. On New Years Eve, they had a mini-olympics during the day. At the start they had a kava ceremony. They split up all of the guests into 2 teams and had competitions such as tug-o-war, javelin throwing, fill the bottle, kayak race, ping pong and volleyball. I helped win the tug-o-war and kayak race for our team. My team won the overall, but we didn't get any prize. At night, they had a huge lovo (food cooked in earth oven) buffet. They had a competition for Miss and Mr. Bounty Island. A guy with us was in the run, but lost to another guy. They passed out plastic bowlers and top hats and noise makers. They had the usual champagne and kisses when the new year came. Fiji is in the time zone to celebrate New Years first. And Samoa is the last. One way they celebrate New Years differently here than other places I've been is getting people wet, and more specifically, being on a beach at the time, throwing people into the ocean. Needless to say, the guys eventually turned on me. I figured I'd use my weight as an advantage to slow them down, but eventually lost. Funny thing is that our Samoan coworker, who is quite small, was able to lift me and carry me to the ocean. He is frickin' strong to lift my heavy ass. I got a few scrapes when I landed on some coral. Eventually, everyone in the group was soaking wet and kept on drinking. Good time had by all. Not too much of a hangover. Others have taken pictures. I'll get some and post them soon.

Fantasy Football

2005-12-27T21:12:00.000-06:00

For the last 16 weeks, I've been playing Fantasy Football on Yahoo! We've been having a private league, originally with fellow volunteers in Samoa, for three years now. It has branched out a little from there and now we are scattered around the globe, but we are still playing. I'm sure we'll keep doing it. The first year I was the league champion. I had Priest Holmes that year when he exploded. Last year, I think I got third place. And, this year, I got third place again. I should of won this year, but my top guys decided to get injured. I had Marc Bulger and LaDainian Tomlinson. Both had great seasons until they got themselves injured. I was unbeaten for the first 8 weeks. Lost a few games and ended with a 11-3 record and first place in the league going into the playoffs. I lost by only 8 points in the semi-finals, but won this weekend to get third place. Congrats to Aaron, who's still in Samoa, for winning the league. He came back from 0-4 to win the league. Fantasy football is fun to play. It keeps me in the game, at least interested in the players that are on my team. The big thing now is to make sure I see the Super Bowl. I'm sure they will be playing it on the satellite network here. I'll crash my friend's house who has satellite.

Merry Christmas

2005-12-25T01:04:00.000-06:00

Merry Christmas everyone! This is my first Christmas in Fiji. It is the hottest time of the year here. It's interesting to be sweating at Christmas while I'm used to being cold. I did spend a couple Christmases in Samoa, but it's hotter here than I remember there.

A workmate invited me to his in-laws house for Christmas dinner. It made it easy that they live right next door to me. They had three tables full of food. There is no turkey, stuffing or pumpkin pie in the country. But they had ham, chicken, pork and beets. This was some of the best meat I've had in a few years. They had some local foods and seafood, such as mussels, smoke salmon, raw tuna and seaweed. For dessert, they had homemade cheesecake and trifle. We did the usual thing: eat yourself into a coma. My adopted dog, Sebi, was trying his hardest to get in, barking and jumping on the fence. I got the scraps to give to him and Max.

My family in Iowa is having the traditional Christmas dinner at Uncle Bob's house. Merry Christmas again. I won't be thinking of you while I'm on a sunny island in a few days.

Christmas at Work

2005-12-22T20:02:00.000-06:00

Last night we had the end-of-the-year company dinner at a local restaurant, Quick Wok. The noteworthy thing to mentioned is we had the company awards. Those being the Fisherman and Victim awards. The fisherman is the person who does the most fishing, for the "fish" of the opposite sex. The victim is someone who is the butt of jokes or "victimized" somehow, like someone who recently got married. Everyone puts in their votes and the winners were announced at the dinner. All of the votes were read out, usually with some reason for the vote. They are always funny as they relate to the funny things that go on at work. A first this year is that we have a Fisherwoman, and the Victim got his award because the Fisherwoman was trying to catch him, but he kept getting away. After the dinner, we went to the nightclub. It was good today is a slack day, as most of us arrived late from mild hangovers. This morning we had the fancy tea (cake and sandwiches) and had the gift exchange. I don't know if people think I am an alcoholic, but I got a bottle of wine last year and a bottle of Jack Daniels this year. I found a cool, inexpensive neon sign of the Route 66 sign as my gift to the guy of the name I picked. We have a long weekend as Monday and Tuesday are holidays for Christmas and Boxing Day. Wednesday is a work day, but we are leaving in the afternoon to go to Nadi in the West. On Thursday morning, we are going on a company retreat to Bounty Island for New Years. We are just going to eat, drink and swim for 4 days and 3 nights. I'll definitely bring the bottle of Jack to the island. So, basically, no work until Jan 3.

Onto the Buzzword Bandwagon

2005-12-21T20:13:00.000-06:00

Podcasting is definitely the buzzword of the year and I sort of jumped onto it this week. I don't have an iPod, so I can't have the full experience, but I downloaded and installed iTunes. Actually, the way I got into it is a few days ago I wanted to watch some trailers to kill time. The best place I know of is Apple's Movie Trailers. And, with Apple, you have to install Quicktime to see the trailers. So, I went to their Quicktime site to get the free download. But now you can't just download Quicktime by itself, Apple has bundled it with iTunes. So, you're forced to download something larger for just part of it. So, I downloaded them together and installed them. I now had Quicktime, so I watched some trailers. I figured that iTunes is installed, I'll play with it. I found a great podcast from the original guys who did The Screensavers on the now defunct TechTV. So, I subscribed to the podcast inside of iTunes and have been listening to it. The podcast is This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton and other TWiTs, as they are called. The guys make it interesting with their funny dialog. I've also subscribed to the Story of the Day and Technology podcasts on NPR. I can't easily watch the video podcasts as I don't have a super fast connection and they take awhile to download. I did eventually find a hidden, obscure link on Apple's site where you can download Quicktime by itself, but after I downloaded the aforementioned bundle. They are getting as bad as Microsoft.

Reading: Genesis of the Grail Kings

2005-12-18T18:42:00.000-06:00

I finished The Elixir and the Stone a couple days ago. It was an OK book. It does have an extensive bibliography which I'm not going to check, but it seems the authors are finding references to Hermeticism in just about everything just because they say so without much explanation or direct references in the footnotes, but could be mentioned, of course, in the vast biblio. I'm not saying it's not possible as I don't know much of the plethora of individuals they've cited as having Hermetic tendencies, but they say along the lines of "So-and-so's music/art/literature is Hermetic in concept" and leaves it at that. But the book is the encyclopedia of Hermetic individuals and says at the end how, they think, it is coming back and why it should come back.

I've gotten another book from my coworker friend. The next book I'm reading is Genesis of the Grail Kings by Laurence Gardner. It's another nonfictional account, along the lines of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, on the truth behind the bloodline of the Holy Grail. It looks like this book has Egyptians references though. I'll see if it's more readable than Holy Blood.

Good to have fire insurance

2005-12-18T17:43:00.000-06:00

There are times when you fully realize you are not living in a fully-developed country. I call Fiji a 2-1/2 world country. It's not like the third world countries in Africa. That description has now been replaced with the PC versions of "developed" and "developing" countries. Fiji is definitely in the latter. Suva is a decent city, but when certain things happen, you quickly realize that the whole country is lacking from a very important feature of a developed country: adequate infrastructure. Perfect example is what happened Saturday in the supposedly most developed part of the country: the center of downtown Suva. Here is where all of the large stores are, and large network of small shops, the biggest market in the country and the main bus station hub in the greater Suva area. Saturday morning a small fire broke out in the biggest branch of the major grocery store here (Morris Hedstrom or MH), located in downtown. The fire was quickly noticed and fire authorities notified quickly. The fire brigade arrived and ran into problems quickly. They had trouble attaching the hoses to the hydrants, and when they did, either the hoses were cracked and leaking or there was no water pressure. So, the brigade could do nothing but watch the building burn to the ground. They tried contacting the water authority to get pressure, but couldn't find anybody. They eventually had to pump in sea water to extinguish the flame but far to late. Fortunately, noone was insured. Here are the articles from the Fiji Times: Fire fiasco and Fire crews just too slow. Today, the business owners are in the paper voicing their obvious frustrations. They don't know the exact cause of the fire yet. Fire experts from Australia have been flown in to investigate. I'm sure officials will be held accountable. Issues seem to only get resolved when some catastrophe happens first. As the title says, it's good to have fire insurance.
On the same topic as water, even at my house, when there is a heavy sustained rain, the water will turn dark brown. I drink directly from the tap when it's not brown. I'm not sure how much the water is filtered, but I haven't gotten sick here. I think my stomach got used to the "bad" water while I was in Samoa. It hasn't happened at my house yet, but in heavy rains, the water may also be disconnected because the pressure builds in the small pipes and usually busts some water main somewhere.
Electricity is also poor around the country, even in Suva which is hard to believe. I hear of homes not having power for some time and the power company is notorious for their horrible customer service. Telephone is decent, but it is ungodly expensive. Mobile service is slowly getting cheaper, but land line rentals have skyrocketed while the call rates have been reduced a little, but still expensive. Here, you have to pay for every minute of every call, no matter if it's local or not.
And the most visible of the poor infrastructure are the roads. You have not seen potholes like the ones here. The roads must be made with cheap materials, because it doesn't take long, given the frequents rains we have, for the roads to develop potholes. There was reader comment in the paper not long ago about a road that was recently finished and about 3 months later, it had numerous potholes. The public works department is constantly re-patching the roads, which is a waste of time and money, because the patching is shoddy and it washes away again. Also, the public works guys don't seem to know how to properly patch a road if they have to dig it up to lay a pipe or something. They just did some pipe laying on the main road in my suburb. They dug up the road, put the pipe in and just threw some dirt in it. Now there is a small gorge across the road. Buses and taxis are always making complaints about the roads damaging their vehicles. A couple weeks ago, a taxi driver got compensation, not enough, but some at least, for his car being damaged by a pothole. Take a ride with any taxi here and you quickly experience the art of pothole evasion.

The eye gods have spoken

2005-12-15T20:43:00.000-06:00

I guess the eye gods wanted me to get my eyes checked. Yesterday, they made my glasses fall from my face and knew I was going to catch them at a weird angle and knew that the glasses were free government-issue Peace Corps glasses, so they knew the glasses would break to force me to go to the eye doctor. Clever, aren't they? Besides the possible pagan god influence, my glasses did break yesterday as I was changing for aerobics. My glasses fell from my face and I caught them with my arm pressing them against my body, but caught them at an angle where it snapped a whole ear piece from the frame. It was hard to keep it on your face with only one ear piece. I mostly went without them, seeing everything a blur. I was able to make lamb curry last night without them. This morning I went to an optometrist, at first, only to see if they can fix my glasses. They were able to solder it back it on and I'm wearing the same glasses right now. Well, the glasses probably aren't going to survive long now. The doctor asked if I wanted to get rechecked for a new prescription. Given it's been over three years (before Peace Corps), the eye gods wanted me to get them checked. It was an expat doctor and it was a professional office. You don't know what to expect with 2-1/2 world countries. But private care is usually up to par with developed countries. I've heard bad things about the public hospital here and in Samoa, so I have private care, but haven't had to use it yet. Well, I got the eye checkup and he said my eyes actually got a little better with my current prescription being too strong. He also said the pressure in my eyes were normal but on the high side of normal. He said it's fine now, but I just have to keep checking for possible glaucoma. Well I picked out new frames. They are shorter and square-framed. I'll post a picture when I get them in a few weeks or so. A while ago when I got my eyes checked, I asked about contacts, but the doctor said with my stigmatism, I could only get hard contacts, which I didn't want to mess with. Now, the doctor today said I can get soft contacts. I'll look into them in a few weeks after I get my frames. If I get them, it may be weird for a while not having glasses. I'll probably try to adjust the invisible glasses that my mind thinks is still there. I've had glasses since I was a child. Mom can attest to the numerous glasses that I used to sit on or break somehow in my childhood. So, there may be the sexier, less geeky Paleni in the near future.

Time to get fatter

2005-12-15T20:30:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was the last aerobics for the year. I don't think I will have enough motivation to go to the gym to do weights, the very reason I go to aerobics. The instructor said he would call me to join him when he goes to the gym, but haven't heard from him yet, probably next week. Unfortunately the evening classes won't start up until late January, when the next university term starts. There will be a Body Pump class starting on January 9, but it's at 5:30 AM. I'm not one to get up that early. We do have a company dinner next Thursday and a special tea on Friday where we will present our Secret Santa gifts. So, I shouldn't be doing any extra holiday eating until then. No different than anyone else. We all put on the extra weight at holiday time. I'll go back to my 3 times a week aerobics in the new year when they start back up. I haven't weighed myself recently, but I have been able to tighten the belt an extra notch, so I've lost something. I'm always going to be a hefty guy, but my main goal is to cut some inches off the belly and I'll be happy.

Fiji wins George Sevens

2005-12-11T17:03:00.000-06:00

The Fiji Sevens rugby team won the George Sevens competition this weekend in South Africa. It was their first event title win since the same event 3 years ago. This event was more interesting because the usual strong teams (New Zealand, England and Australia) were beaten by large point margins by Fiji and Samoa. Fiji also won the Rugby World Cup Sevens 2005 tournament in Hong Kong back in March. That was a big deal here. The government declared an official holiday commemorating the win and had a huge celebration at the national stadium where the practically the whole country came to see the champions.
To the rugby-challenged, Sevens is a modified version of the normal rugby that everyone has seen. There are seven men playing on a side and each half is 7 minutes long. The traditional game has 15 men on a side and 40-minute halfs. Fiji's 15s team isn't as good as the 7s. It seems Fijians don't have the endurance to last 80 minutes, but are strong and fast enough to last 14 minutes.

In other sports news, Fiji was host to an international boxing event between local Joy Ali and Argentina's Xavier Mamani. They both had their respective titles on the line. Well, it wasn't much of a fight as Mamani KOed Ali in under 2 minutes of the first round. The other lower bout fights before the main fight all ended in the first round also. Glad I didn't go. The people who spent $50 to see the match are demanding their money back, and rightly so.

AND1 Streetball

2005-12-07T15:07:00.000-06:00

AND1 Streetball tour came to Fiji and they had an exhibition at the FMF Dome (local stadium) last night. It was entertaining. It was fun to see the fancy slam-dunks live instead of on TV. The AND1 guys had open mics, so they provided funny commentary throughout the event. They had 5 local teams play against each other and the AND1 team in matches leading up to the final. It wasn't any serious competition. The AND1 guys would do funny stuff on the court. I didn't know there were any local players that can play good ball, but the local teams last night played pretty good. The AND1 team, of course, won all of the matches, but not by much, but I think they didn't try very hard as I said they were goofing off on the court. There was one local girl who played very well, leaving most of the guys in the dust. One of the AND1 guys was hitting on her on the court, dancing for her and hugging her to distract her. They had the 3 on 3 half-court games at the beginning and ended with a single 5 on 5 full-court game. I think this is the first main basketball event that's been here in a while. Only its derivative, netball, is played competitively here. Maybe b-ball will pick up eventually. I saw in the paper a little while ago and they are trying to get people interested in American football. They had a training camp at a nearby park a few weeks ago. I don't think it will take off. That whole forward passing thing confuses people familiar with rugby. They do show football games on the subscriber TV channels here.

New Snowbow Woodcrafts site

2005-12-02T23:29:00.000-06:00

As most of you know, my Dad makes small, hand-made woodcrafts as a hobby in his spare time. Dad came up with a clever name for his home 'business': Snowbow Woodcrafts. When I was in Colorado before joining Peace Corps 4 years ago, I wrote a website to show off his woodcrafts. I registered the domain and my friend, who was a coworker at the time, graciously hosted it on his servers for free, up until yesterday (Thanks Mark). I figured it was time to rewrite it in the latest technology I'm using now. I started writing it a month ago. We switched over to the new site today. Check out the link above. I also have a link in the right column of this page. Dad is still adding more items to the site. You can check back later for more items. And, of course, if you like anything, you can email him and he can send it to you. You can help him with a little money on the side. You can't buy anything directly from the site right now. If it gets popular, I'll program that in later.

I totally re-designed and re-programmed the whole thing from scratch. It is written using ASP.Net in the C# language. I'm also using the Nolics.Net ORM framework. If you are at a company doing .Net programming with databases, I highly recommend using Nolics. I'm not getting a check from them for this free advert. It is just a very good framework. The site is now hosted at DiscountASP.net. They are a dedicated ASP hosting provider. I also recommend them as they have very good support and you can do everything yourself with their 'control panel' written in ASP.Net. No check from them either.

Reading: The Elixir and the Stone

2005-12-01T22:52:00.000-06:00

I finished The Book of Hiram and have received another book from the coworker who has been my supplier of books from his collection. The book is The Elixir and the Stone by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the trio who wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail. This book seems to be on the same line as the last book. It talks about the clash of science and religion and that the respected scientists of centuries ago were alchemists and 'magicians', putting history into true context. Seems like a decent read.

Thoughts on Religion Summed Up

2005-12-01T22:41:00.000-06:00

I finished The Book of Hiram last night. It was an OK read. The nutshell of the book is that, from the evidence that they've uncovered, Christianity and Judaism is based on astrology, which most people, including the authors, believe is a fake science.

The very last chapter of the book summed up the beliefs of a Freemason. My thoughts on religion are summed up well in the following quotes from this chapter.

Man never had the right to usurp the unexercised prerogative of God, and condemn and punish another for his belief. [...] Birthplace and education give us our faith. Few believe in any religion because they have examined the evidences of its authenticity, and made up a formal judgement, upon weighing the testimony. Not one in ten thousand knows anything about the proofs of his faith. We believe what we are taught; and those are most fanatical who know least of the evidences on which their creed is based. [...] No evil hath so afflicted the world as intolerance of religious opinion; the human beings it has slain in various ways, if once and together brought to life, would make a nation of people, which, left to live and increase, would have doubled the population of the civilized portion of the world; among which civilized portion it is chiefly that religious wars are waged. [...] Every man's opinions are his own private property, and the rights of all men to maintain each his own are perfectly equal.

Christmas at work

2005-11-30T21:49:00.000-06:00

This morning, while the power was still out, the girls at work were setting up the small Christmas tree that was stored in the closet. I helped put on the lights and some of the ornaments. Reminded me when Mom, my brother and I would set up the tree at home years ago. They don't have many ornaments and all of them are either gold or silver. I know some people want to send me something. If you want, you can send a colorful ornament to donate to the Christmas tree. My postal address is in the right hand column of this page. If you send it within the week by airmail, it should get here by Christmas. I'll take a picture and post it here closer to the day.

Also, a few days ago, we all picked a name for the office Secret Santa/gift exchange. The max cost for the gift is $10. I can't say who I got, even though you won't know him anyway. Now I have to see what's out there to buy for him. Our social chair hasn't chosen an exact date to the do the exchange, but we are probably going to have a special tea on the Friday before Christmas day and do it then. I'll let you know what I get.

Programming without Electricity

2005-11-30T20:43:00.000-06:00

The answer to the title of this entry is that you can't. I am writing this entry from a nearby Internet cafe because nothing is working at work, because the electricity has been cut. Around 11 AM, the lights go out and backup battery kicks in and starts beeping like normal saying there is no power. First thing we all think is that the power in the whole building has gone out, as electricity in Fiji is not 100% guaranteed by any means. We wait a little while, battery is still beeping. The beeping gets faster and I tell everyone to shutdown their machines and I turn off the servers. Soon the battery reserve fails and everything goes dead. No power whatsoever. I then go out of the office onto the floor of the building and notice two strange things. The elevator still has power and the office next to ours still has power also. Our secretary calls the power company and discovers that they cut our power. Why? Because we haven't paid our bill for the last two months. We inquire why we weren't told of the disconnection ahead of time. That's where it get interesting. First of all, we are tenant of an office building owned by another company. I find out that our electricity bill is under the name of this company, not ours. So the bills have always gone to this company, who then sends it up to us. It turns out that they haven't given us the bill for the last two months. Our secretary who takes care of these things, didn't realize we haven't received a bill in a while and only will get a check written when she receives a bill. So, basically, we didn't pay at not all of our fault and they cut our power. We went to the power company and paid the arrears and asked if they can restore it as soon as possible. We're still waiting on that as I write this entry. The interesting part is that they said they called the number on the account yesterday, which is the building owner, as I said. We're still trying to figure out why the building owner didn't tell us that our power was going to get cut today. The power company said they will restore it in the afternoon today. We are definitely going to change the account name so it is under our company name, so hopefully they will send us the bills directly from now on and will tell us directly if our power is being cut. I have to wait around until it comes back on so I can turn my servers back on. We just lost a whole day of work. The guys at work are just playing cards and kram board to kill time. A sort-of free day off.

[Update 3:20 PM] About 10 minutes after the initial post, the power was restored. I turned the servers back on and am writing this update from work. You kinda need electricity to do programming.

Ubuntu

2005-11-29T00:28:00.000-06:00

About a month or so ago, I read about Ubuntu, a new Linux distribution, on Slashdot. At that time, I went to their website to check it out and found out that they actually send you free CDs anywhere in the world. So, I said, "Why not?" and signed up with their ShipIt service. They do let you download it, but I don't want to waste our limited monthly downloads and it would take a while. Well, today I got the CDs in the mail. They released a new version (5.10) and waited to send me the latest version. As you probably know, I now work with Microsoft technologies. I haven't played with Linux since my days at Kragie-Newell in Des Moines after graduating. I've heard good things about Ubuntu, so I'll see if I have time to play with it. I have an ancient desktop (a 386) at work. I'll install Ubuntu on that and play with it. The great thing about Linux is that it runs well on older hardware. They also have a cool name. Their website says it's a African word for "humanity to others". I'll let you know when I get around to installing it. I'm sure the GUI has gotten better since the last time I saw it. I'll try to remember my command line. I'll see if I can get my .Net code running on Linux using Mono.

Big Movie Weekend

2005-11-28T00:46:00.000-06:00

This past weekend was a big movie weekend for me. The local cinema, Village 6, usually comes out with only one movie a week that I find interesting enough to go watch. This last weekend, they came out with three new ones and two from the previous week I didn't get to see yet. On Thursday I saw The Man and Red Shadow. The Man was funny and I love Eugene Levy. If you haven't seen him in all of the Christopher Guest mock-umentaries, you're missing out. I see that Red Shadow was made in 2001 and for some reason, Village 6 decided to play it now. Well, don't see it. It didn't have much action, it tried to be a love story and it had clumsy Ninjas. It has to be the worst Ninja movie ever. On Saturday, I saw Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Saw 2. Wallace and Gromit was the usual witty English, cheese-loving adventure. If you like horror/thrillers, you need to see Saw 2 and the prequel, Saw. I just rented Saw a few months ago. It was good movie with a great suprise ending. Saw 2 was not as great as the first, but still good and with the usual suprise ending. And then finally on Sunday, the new Harry Potter. It was one of the better ones of the bunch. I think Aeon Flux is coming here this weekend, so I will probably go see that. I will definitely go see King Kong when it comes here in 2 weeks.

Turkey Day

2005-11-23T15:15:00.000-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving to all in America. Think about me on your 4-day weekend while you're gorging yourself on turkey and watching football. No Thanksgiving here, so I have to work. I know the Peace Corps and US Embassy staff here have the days off. If you want lots of vacations, work for Peace Corps (as staff, not volunteer) or US Embassy in a foreign country. You get the local holidays and US holidays off. I haven't seen turkey or ham anywhere in the country, so it will be hard to even have a Thanksgiving meal. Closest I get is Indian food, although different kind.

The Grady family back in Monona will have their usual Thanksgiving dinner together at Uncle Ron's house. Unfortunately, the Grady family is now getting too big that not everyone shows up for the holiday gatherings. Usually just a few uncles and aunts and a few cousins. Dad says more snow is expected. Always a trade-off: you get the holiday, but snow; I get no holiday, but have 80+ degrees.

Fa Soifua Dorie

2005-11-21T14:43:00.000-06:00

Today, one of my best friends, Dorie, is leaving Samoa. She finished her Peace Corps service and she's heading back to the mainland. Best wishes to her on her future endeavors, which include going back to school next year and eventually marrying her Man and spending all of his money. Dorie is great because she's a chic and she's a computer geek. Geek chics are rare. We shared many a fun moments that I won't forget. I tried to convince her to visit me before she headed back to US, but she says she had a family mandate to be back before Thanksgiving. When I last saw her, we didn't say good-bye, as she doesn't like them. No need, as I'll be sure to visit her whenever I get back to visit. Or, she can visit me (hint hint).

Also with Dorie leaving means that when everyone from her group leaves by the end of the year, all of the volunteers I know from Samoa, except one person, will have left the island. It's just surreal to think about. An era has passed.

An Official Blonde Moment

2005-11-21T14:19:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I had an official blonde moment, meaning I did something completely silly. No offence to any blondes reading this. A couple weeks ago, I knew that I was running low on shaving cream, so I went to the pharmacy to buy some. Side note: outside of basic things like toothpaste and aspirin at the local grocery store, you have to buy everything else at a pharmacy or chemist here. Well, I bought the Gillette shaving cream as that's my normal brand. Yesterday is when I ran out of my current bottle. I grab the new bottle and remove the cap and notice that the nozzle is different. I just think to myself that they changed it. I then press the nozzle and a spray mist comes out instead of the usual green goo. I think it's malfunctioning, thinking it's releasing built-up air. I press it a few more times and get the same mist. I then notice the room has a strong "cool mist" scent as that's the name on the bottle. I then read the bottle a bit more carefully, and go "Doh!". It's actually deodorant. The Gillette deodorant bottle looks exactly like the shaving cream one. Up until yesterday, I thought I bought shaving cream, and was expecting that when I opened it. I don't know what I was thinking when I bought it. I'm pretty sure I went to the shaving cream section. I need to go back and see if the shaving cream and deodorant are right next to each other. If they aren't, I'm officially blonde. Just a stupid moment of mine to pass onto you.

Humble abode pictures

2005-11-18T22:16:00.000-06:00

I got around to borrowing my flatmates camera and taking photos of my house. I live in a suburb of Suva called Vatuwaqa (q sounds like g). The house is a two-bedroom place in the back on the same compound as the landowner with he and his family living in the front house.

Shot from the front door. My room is on the right. TV and fridge are hidden off to the right.

Full shot of the kitchen. The doors are the shower room and toilet room. They have separate rooms for each here.

The bachelor pad. Note unmade bed, curtains that I never open and the pile of dirty laundry.

My friend, Sebi. He loves me from the attention and food I give him. He likes to bark at strangers to show that he's protecting us.

Latest addition to the family, Max. The family just got him 3 days ago. He likes to chew on everything and needs constant attention or he whines. But he's cute.

Work Pictures

2005-11-18T22:03:00.000-06:00

These pictures were taken by my flat/work mate at the end of one work day.

Me at my computer. Note how I have become one with the collective by wearing a M$ shirt.

The guys playing kram board. The black and white pieces start in the middle and you hit it with the red striker to put it in the corner pockets. You have to put the single king in before your last piece. If you "scratch" (put striker in a pocket), you put another piece back in the center. Put all your same-color pieces in before the other team to win. Games can get pretty crazy and loud.

RIP Scriptus.ws

2005-11-18T20:41:00.000-06:00

A moment of silence please for my old website...

It seems official today that my old website scriptus.ws is now officially gone from the Internet. I went to the URL early in the afternoon just to see if it still worked and it did. Then about 2 hours later, I refreshed and then got a "Financial Freedom" get rich ad. It seems the registrar has retaken control of the domain and pointing it at a temporary ad site. It probably happened earlier, but the cache of my proxy server probably expired and pulled in the "new" site. Luckily, I remembered how to get into the server it was hosted on (an old friend's server in Fort Collins, CO) and I grabbed the original text files that made up my old blog. So, soon, look in the archives of this blog and you'll see my original posts while I was in the Peace Corps in Samoa.

The Grady name lives on

2005-11-17T16:32:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I got an email from my Dad saying that my cousin, Randy, has a new addition to the family, and IT'S A BOY! Eric Randall Grady was born on Nov. 16 8:10 AM (Central time in US), weighing 8 pounds, 11 ounces and is 20.75 inches long. Congrats to Randy and his wife. The biggest news about Eric's birth is that he is male and has the Grady name. Meaning the Grady name will now survive for at least one more generation. I was starting to wonder if the Grady name, as from the lineage of my grand-father, would survive. Randy and I are the only guys with the Grady name with the opportunity to procreate. Given that my grandmother had 9 children, you'd think there would be more guys with the Grady name, but all my other guy cousins were from my aunts. As everyone knows, I am currently unmarried, and not in the forseeable future. And, up to now, Randy was only having girls. So, thanks to Randy for finally submitting a Y chromosone to the world. I don't feel so pressured now to submit mine. Of course, I'll probably have all girls.

Here is a picture of the new guy with his proud grand-mother.

Fiji News: Adam and Eve, not Steve

2005-11-17T16:21:00.000-06:00

[Article is taken from and copyright The Fiji Times.]

Adam and Eve, not Steve
Verenaisi Raicola (Friday, November 18, 2005)

GAYS and lesbians have been around since time immemorial.

In the Bible, we learn that they pressed for their rights so much that Yahweh rained fire and brimstone from the sky and destroyed them along with the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

In Fiji, the debate has grown strong since the landmark decision by the High Court to acquit two males who were sent to jail after they were caught having un-natural sex.

In quashing the conviction of Australian tourist Thomas McCoskar and local lorry boy Dhirendra Nand, Justice Gerard Winter said several clauses of Fiji's penal code discriminated against homosexuals.

He declared Section 175 (a) and (c) of the Penal Code inconsistent with the Constitution and invalid.

The Methodist Church has been on the forefront of the debate on homosexuals, making a strong stand against gays and in turn criticised for "casting the first stone".

Applications by the Methodist church for a permit to march against homosexuality have been denied by Commissioner Central Inoke Devo.

He said a march would encourage discrimination and hatred against gays.

However, the church's assistant secretary of the department of christian citizenship and social services, Reverend Iliesa Naivalu, said the church had been misunderstood.

He said the march in Nausori in June did not represent the church's views because the Rewa division on their own expressed their stand against the lifestyle of gays and lesbians without the knowledge of the other 37 church divisions.

"That is why we want to march again. After the annual conference, the church decided we needed to do more to oppose the legalisation of the lifestyle of gays and lesbians.

"The notice of motion for a march was brought to the standing committee which decides between conferences on any issue and that's why they wanted another demonstration."

On what the church would achieve from the march, Mr Naivalu said: "Through public demonstration, the church wishes to peacefully and freely express its opposition to the elevation of homosexuality as a civil right and its legal protection under clause 38 (2) of the Constitution, as was evident in a court ruling.

"This, we learnt, was by default and not intended by those who formulated the Constitution.

"They led the nation to believe that such a clause was intended to remove discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and not to mandate approval for a sin.

"We are aware of the church's calling to include all who need Christ, including homosexuals.

"God calls us to reject sin and to love and value all humans.

"However, true Christian love does not condone immorality or the lives affected and ruined by it," he said.

Mr Naivalu said the bottom line why the Methodist church wanted to march was to make the Government amend the Constitution to suit Fiji's way of life and be specific on the gay issue by making it illegal.

"Lawyers are smart in changing and altering laws to suit their agenda at any specific time, so we want the matter defined clearly in the Constitution so that there is no contradiction later," he said.

"We do not hate the people who practise this lifestyle. We want to make it clear that we are against the lifestyle they live.

"In fact, we are against sodomy because it is an immoral act and the same thing goes for lesbians.

"God made man and woman to multiply and fill the four corners of the earth, not lust for another man or woman that is a sickness.

Asked why there was much emphasis put on lesbians and gays instead of marriage breakdown, excessive yaqona drinking, extra-marital affairs, scams and other immoral acts practised by Christians, he said: "The church is concerned because with the other sins, people accept that they are wrong and repent.

"But homosexuals use their right as a defence even though it is clear that God created only males and females and no other sex or species.

"In his kingdom there are no minorities and I mean, how do we define homosexuals?"

Mr Naivalu said it was not fair for people to accuse them of discrimination against homosexuals because they were not going around judging them.

On whether there were gays in the church, Mr Naivalu said "yes".

He said that was why during Social Services Week, more than 200,000 members of christian churches around the country were educated not to criticise or point at homosexuals but confront them and encourage them to leave the wrong and do the right thing.

Mr Naivalu, who has dealt with homosexual cases in the church, said some admitted to pastors that they did not find peace.

"Inside them there is always guilt and there is no love but lust.

"It is a behaviour they pick up and more young people are lured into the gay lifestyle because money spins inside it," he said.

On how the church was dealing with gays who stayed in the homes of churchgoers, Mr Naivalu said: "We stress to the families to counsel their gay relatives.

"The self esteem in homes needs to boosted. Boys need to be taught their role while girls are taught theirs," he said.

Boys who are slightly weak need to be given manly chores and guided the right way while girls who become too tough need to be toned down and reminded that they will become a mother one day.

Mr Naivalu said from their experience, it was discovered that there were more and more gays and lesbians because of the absence of the mother or the father at home.

"Many fathers are absent while single mothers have to raise their child alone."

Mr Naivalu said the Methodist church did not want people to accept the lifestyle of homosexuals as a norm because anything can change.

"We should not compare our self with New Zealand and Australia because we are different.

"We should remember that this country has been given to God.

"Ask anyone on the street and they will say that such practice should not be condoned because they fear what Fiji will become in the future.

"I mean, what are we trying to portray to our children? We must ask ourselves what will happen to our future.

"If we look around most people who condone such lifestyle are single adults. They do not have children to worry about and they are only concerned about their rights whereas the church cares and worries about the welfare of all."

On the argument that minorities are normal people who live their own life, mind their own business and pay tax and should be left alone, he said: "We are talking about the crux of being a human that is why we make this call."

Mr Naivalu said it was the duty of the church to save souls.

"We love everyone but we cannot overlook immorality and condone it as if it is normal because it is a sickness and that is why healing is needed."

He said the church should not be silent on such issues because if there was immorality in the land, everyone would not escape the wrath of God.

Mr Naivalu said Sodom and Gomorrah was a classic case of how God's anger applied in such a situation and the church would not be silent in something they knew would bring serious implication to all.

He said immoral acts pointed to the end of days and the church would continue to encourage sinners to repent.

Mr Naivalu urged men and women to advocate the right thing.

"That is the crux of our being a church. We are helping people but what is immoral is just that and there is no other question about it.

"The church will do everything to make sure the act of sodomy is made illegal," he said.

2000 Steps, Part 2

2005-11-11T21:55:00.000-06:00

I went to my Saturday step aerobics class this morning. I haven't been to the last 2 Saturday classes because of too much drinking the previous night. I did drink last night, hanging out at my house with work friends, but didn't drink enough to keep me from aerobics today. The class went well. Had another guy besides the instructor. The main reason for posting this is to say that the instructor, at the request of some of us in the class, has moved Body Attack to Wednesday and Friday is now a combo of step and attack. So, now I can go 3 times a week. Step on Monday, attack on Wednesday and step again on Saturday. I don't like going on back-to-back days. I prefer spacing it out over the week. So, I should be getting my stomach a bit smaller, if I can cut back on my sugar intake.

The answer to the title of these entries is that on the Les Mills Body Step information webpage, it says that each session has over 2000 steps.

[Update: Nov 15] I went to class again yesterday. The instructor told us that, contrary to what he said last week, he is keeping Body Jam on Wednesday because of popular demand. Darn! I guess I'll go to Body Pump on Thursday then to keep with 3 times a week. He said he'll re-evaluate the class schedule in December.

[Update: Nov 22] Funny thing happened yesterday at class. The usual instructor hurt his back (not the funny part) and he is out the rest of the year to recover. The instructor doing the Body Pump class is taking over his classes. She doesn't do Body Jam, so she is now having Body Attack on Wednesday. So, we're thinking he should of listened to us in the first place and kept Body Attack on Wednesday. So, now I'll finally go on Wednesday. Of course, it will probably change back when he returns.

[Update: Nov 29] The usual instructor made a "miraculous recovery", as said by the other instructor. So, now he is back doing the class again as of yesterday. He had a small limp and did the low-impact version of the routine, but he survived the class. Good news is that he is keeping Body Attack on Wednesday. The classes will go for a few more weeks before taking a break for the Christmas holiday.

Fiji News: The Church and Homosexuality, Part 2

2005-11-11T21:44:00.000-06:00

[All articles below are taken from and copyright The Fiji Times.]

Third application filed for anti-gay march (Saturday, November 12, 2005)

DESPITE warnings it could face prosecution for inciting discrimination, the Methodist Church has applied for the third time to the Commissioner Central for a permit to march in protest against homosexuality.

The application, made yesterday to Commissioner Inoke Devo, comes a day after the second application for a march by the Rewa circuit was rejected.

Methodist Church department of Christian citizenship and social services assistant secretary Reverend Iliesa Naivalu lodged the application to march through Suva next Saturday (November 19).

He said the march was to express the church's opposition to a High Court judgment that virtually legalised private homosexual practices.

He said such sexual practices were immoral.

Mr Devo said he wrote to the Solicitor-General for legal advice after receiving the application and would liaise with police over the application.

Mr Naivalu said the church was opposed to the elevation of homosexuality as a civil right and its legal protection under Section 38 (2) of the Constitution.

"This, we have learnt, was by default and clearly unintended by those who formulated our Constitution, who have led the nation to believe that such a clause was intended to remove discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and not to mandate approval for such a sinful lifestyle, even in private," he said.

Mr Naivalu said by applying for a permit, the church was acting in line with its duty to speak out in defence of biblical teachings.

The church's Rewa circuit marched through Nausori Town on June 26 in protest against homosexuality.

Rejecting a second application to march on Thursday, Mr Devo said the church had already been given an opportunity to express its views on the matter.

The circuit was told that the freedom of expression, as enshrined under the Constitution, and the religion of a particular group was not absolute and that limitations had been prescribed under the law.

The Fiji Human Rights Commission has made it clear the church could face prosecution if it held another march to protest against homosexuality.

Commission director Dr Shaista Shameem said the first march or assembly was counted as freedom of expression but if there were plans for second or third marches, it would be seen as encouraging discrimination.

She said freedom of expression and assembly were human rights that had limitations people had to be aware of.

But, programs trying to cure people of homosexuality in order to save could do more harm than good, the New Zealand AIDS Foundation says.

Letter to the Editor: Church stand (Saturday, November 12, 2005)

SIR, your editorial (FT 10/11/05 makes a number of baseless assumptions and innuendoes.

You misleadingly attribute the Methodist Church as having a motive to 'ensure an all-threatening frenzy of hatred ...' towards homosexuals.

The facts, which you have not bothered to check with us, are quite different.

The Methodist Church firmly believes in the authority of the Bible, and the biblical teaching that heterosexuality is God's natural order of creation; that homosexuality is an 'abomination' and 'unnatural'.

The church, in line with biblical teaching, is opposed to the elevation of homosexuality as a civil right, and its legal protection under clause Sec 38 - (2) of our Constitution is evidenced in a recent ruling.

This, we have learnt, was by default and clearly unintended by those who formulated our Constitution, and who have led the nation to believe that such a clause was intended to remove discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and not to mandate approval for such a sinful lifestyle, even in private.

We are quite aware of the church's calling to include all who need Christ, including homosexuals.

God calls us to reject sin, but to love and value all people.

Yet, true Christian love does not ignore immorality and the lives ruined by it.

In the public processions applied for, the Methodist Church is acting in line with its prophetic duty to speak out in defence of God's words, and biblical teachings.

That is part of the church's calling, as well as its constitutional right.

As you clearly put it when referring to such rights in your editorial, "no person has the right to trample on it".

We sincerely hope that such persons include The Fiji Times editorial staff, and those of the Human Rights Commission.

- Iliesa Naivalu (Rev), Suva

Fiji News: Chief Proposes Banishing AIDS Cases

2005-11-10T16:41:00.000-06:00

[Article taken from Pacific Magazine and copyright The Fiji Times.]

FIJI: Chief Proposes Banishing AIDS Cases (Thursday, May 5, 2005)

People with AIDS should be sent to an isolated island so they do not infect the population says Rewa chief Ratu Isoa Damudamu.

Speaking at a Rewa provincial workshop, he said since there was no law for everyone to have their blood tested, there should be a harsher move by the government.

"Nothing can be done because if they are around those who are not infected, they could cause problems including wiping out a whole generation because most people with the disease are still out there."

He said church youth groups should be abolished because it was a meeting place for youths to indulge in immoral activities.

He said the recent high school games were a meeting place for youths and children to indulge in indecent activities which could leave them infected with the disease.

He said since the age group infected is between 15 and 29 years, youths are the main carriers. - Fiji Times/Pacnews

Fiji News: The Church and Homosexuality

2005-11-10T16:22:00.000-06:00

[All articles below are taken from and copyright The Fiji Times.]

State rejects church march (Thursday, November 10, 2005)

A METHODIST Church application for a second protest march against homosexuality has been rejected.

Commissioner Central Inoke Devo rejected the application on the grounds it would encourage discrimination and hatred against the gay community.

The church had applied for a permit to march against homosexuality for the second time next Saturday.

Fiji Human Rights Commission director Dr Shaista Shameem warned earlier the church could face prosecution if it insisted on a second march against homosexuality.

The Methodist Church's Rewa circuit marched through Nausori Town on June 26 in protest against homosexuality.

Rewa circuit head Reverend Malakai Tui-kadavu applied for the second permit to march this week.

Police Commissioner Andrew Hughes welcomed the decision to reject the march permit, saying police were concerned about crowd numbers in such marches.

Editorial Comment: Zeal or zealot (Thursday, November 10, 2005)

IF the Methodist Church believes the Government has not listened to its concerns, surely the best avenue to take that grievance up would be the closest Cabinet minister in church pews on any given Sunday.

But the church seems to have overlooked that.

It has also overlooked the fact that the Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase is a lay preacher and available most Sundays at Centenary Church or the closest one to wherever he is in the country.

But perhaps to simply have a quiet chat with the Prime Minister after church is not open enough or threatening enough a statement.

Perhaps what the church is after is not to pass its views on to the Government at all but to ensure an all-threatening frenzy of hatred to scare some members of its own congregation into rejecting their homosexual tendencies.

If the church was really after a peaceful approach that might encourage homosexual members of the congregation to return to the fold, it is certainly picking the wrong way to go about it.

With one protest march under its belt already, the Methodist Church now runs the risk of becoming a body that is overzealous in its zeal to convert people to - not Christianity - but non-homosexuality.

It is willing to trample all over rights enshrined in the Constitution and in numerous internationally-binding treaties Fiji is a signatory to.

After consultation with the Solicitor General's Office, police and everyone else he needed to talk to, the Commissioner Central Inoke Devo has made a wise decision by rejecting an application by the church for a protest march against homosexuality.

He says he did so on the grounds that another march would encourage discrimination and hatred against the gay community.

Despite the Fiji Human Rights Commission's warning that the Methodist Church could face prosecution if it insisted on a second march against homosexuality, Reverend Malakai Tuikadavu did not withdraw his application for a permit to march next Saturday.

In a country that fancies itself a virtual heaven on earth, the singleminded, intolerant attitude of the Methodist Church towards people who may not think like their ministers sticks out terribly.

It forgets that every citizen, taxpayer, landowner, tenant, visitor, man, woman or child in this country has equal intrinsic rights that no other person has the right to trample on.

In its zeal to "save" homosexuals, the Methodist Church is now running the risk of doing just the opposite.

It is casting the first stone.

Plan will harm gays (Friday, November 11, 2005)

PROGRAMS aimed at trying to cure homosexuals in order to save them, risk causing severe psychological harm to the individuals who take part in them, the New Zealand AIDS Foundation says.

The foundation was reacting to a statement by the Methodist Church, which has been campaigning to change human rights protection provisions in the Constitution to remove reference to sexual orientation.

Commissioner Central Inoke Devo rejected an application from the church to March in Nausori on Saturday week in protest against homosexuality.

"Authoritative medical and psychiatric organisations the world over have condemned these so-called reparative therapies as dangerous, unnecessary and likely to produce harm rather than good," NZAF executive director Rachael le Mesurier said.

"They are based on an assumption that homosexuality is an illness or aberration. It is not. Since 1973 homosexuality has been recognised as a naturally occurring variant of human sexual orientation, not chosen, and not something that requires treatment or cure."

Ms Le Mesurier said homosexuals could experience satisfying, fulfiling lives and relationships and could actively and constructively contribute to the health and well-being of their communities.

She reiterated remarks made by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ratu Epeli Nailatikau, at the recent Pan-Pacific conference on HIV and AIDS in Auckland where he said Pacific leaders and churches needed to "return homosexuals to their accepted place in society and encourage legislation for equal human rights for gay men and other minorities."

2000 Steps

2005-11-07T17:44:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, I went to my regular aerobics class. Monday is the Body Step class, my favorite. I usually go at least twice a week. I have been going for at least 6 months now. The classes are held at the Community Recreation Centre at the University of the South Pacific (USP). USP is right on my bus route between my flat and work downtown, so it's easy to get to. The classes themselves are put on by 4 individuals who just got together to offer the classes and rent the CRC rec room. Three of them are instructors for the classes and the other is the administrator/money collector and occassional participant. The classes cost FJ$2.50 per session (cheaper for USP instructors and students). Not many students and a few instructors attend.

The sessions use the Les Mills Group Fitness programs. The programs use specially-choreographed routines using the latest popular music. The instructors buy the DVD and music CD, and we use those routines during our classes. The instructors have applied to become certified with the Les Mills program. We only have the Body Step, Attack, Jam, Pump and Combat classes. I only go to the step and attack classes. I've found I prefer aerobics over other types of exercise, like weights and running. With aerobics I can keep the motivation to keep going regularly and having an instructor to follow keeps me going during the exercise without giving up early. As you probably can guess, not many man attend the classes. There are a few at times. Usually I am the only one. I don't mind just me and 10 girls. I can handle them. One issue I have with some of the moves is that they are too dance-y. My hips can't move gracefully like a woman's. Which is why I think most men don't attend. Also, why I don't go to the Body Jam class. When there is a dance-y move, I just substitute it with something else. My coordination is good enough that I can substitute and still keep the timing. I'm one of the regulars, so I know what moves to do when I first hear the music. Aerobics is great for me. I always get a good sweat and am slowly shrinking the gut.

I'll give you a small link hunt. Be the first person to post a comment as to what the title of this entry references. Your prize is self-gratification.

Reading: The Book of Hiram

2005-11-07T16:24:00.000-06:00

Skye, a book-eating friend who's still serving in Peace Corps Samoa, has made a suggestion that I make an entry about what book I'm currently reading. Whenever we email, we always mention the current book, and in her case, books, we are reading. I donated my collection of Neal Stephenson and Neil Gaiman books to the volunteer library, giving her first dibs. It sounds like a good idea. So, the book I am currently reading is...

The Book of Hiram, by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas

This is the fourth book in a pseduo-series by both others discussing the origins of Freemasonry. Their research has lead them into controversial realm of the true origins of Jesus and Christianity, connecting many events together, at which the Church has gone to great lengths to hide. I'm only 4 chapters into this book right now. I'll let you know when I finish it.

I have read their previous books: Hiram Key, Second Messiah and Uriel's Machine. These guys are quite genius in the way they have brought together many different scientific disciplines to unravel a highly probably account of the myths we currently believe.

A co-worker friend owns these books and has loaned them to me and has got me interested in the subject. I usually only ready sci-fi, but now have started non-fiction books. I probably stayed away from NF because the usual NF books were required from school and were boring. He has a whole collection that I'll get through eventually and mention here. I've also read other books, that I just mention here with links. These books weren't great reads, but put forth plausible ideas about Mary Magdalene and the Hebrew/Egypt connection.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
Moses and Akhenaten
The Hebrew Pharaohs of Egypt

More books to come...
Feel free to leave comments if you want to discuss/argue about these books.

Paleni Junior

2005-11-06T01:37:00.000-06:00

Don't be too scared, but I have a clone being raised by my Samoan family. Well, actually my Samoan brother and his wife had their first child last year. I visited the family for a big holiday, White Sunday, the second Sunday of October. I found out then that they had a child and they named it after me. Funny story about his name. My family only knew my Samoan name and incorrectly assumed my real name was Balance. So they actually named the boy Balance, but when they discovered my real name is Blaine, they contacted the pastor quick to change his name on the official records. I asked them to name him Paleni, but they wanted to stick with my birth name for him also. So, he is Blaine Isaako. Children's surnames are their father's first name. Makes family trees interesting. But, they call him Paleni, as they do me. Below is the photo of the two Palenis. This was taken on October 10, 2004, outside the village church before little Paleni was baptized on White Sunday.

My Life as Paleni

2005-11-05T21:48:00.000-06:00

My name is Blaine Grady, but I go by Paleni. It's pronounced Pah-lay-nee. It is the Samoan word for "balance". If you know me and when I get around to posting a picture of myself, you will know that I am a white guy. So, you ask why I have a Samoan nickname.

Let's go back to April 2002. I was living in Lakewood, Colorado, USA. I was unemployed since the start of February. I was working for a small startup Internet company. I won't go into the details, but things went sour and the comany went under, a dot bomb as they say. I was deciding what to do with my life. I guess I should say that I'm a computer programmer. Been working professionally since my graduation from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa in May 1998. Computer industry was starting to burn me out, so back to determining what I was going to do. On a whim one night, I said to myself, "Let's join the Peace Corps". So, I went online and applied. I went to the local recruiter in Denver for an interview. A couple months later, after all of the paperwork and medical examinations that they require, I was accepted. I was assigned to work as an IT volunteer in the Pacific Island nation of Samoa.

I won't go into the details of my volunteer service in Samoa. It was a great experience that I will never forget. My last blog had some details about that. It is was when I went to Samoa as a Peace Corps volunteer, well, technically a trainee, that I got my new name. All volunteers go through a training of about two months. They learn the local language and cutoms and are sworn in as official volunteers. It is tradition, at least with Peace Corps Samoa, that each volunteer is given a name in the local language. So, basically, Paleni is the Samoan-ified version of my real name, Blaine. The main thing about Samoan language is that they have a limited alphabet (no B for example) and two consonants cannot be together, so we get Paleni. It just turns out that it actually translates to "balance". During my 2 years in Samoa, I worked as the system administrator at the Development Bank of Samoa, training a local Samoan to take over for me. You may see the humor in my name knowing that I worked at a bank. When they were speaking in Samoan and talking about a balance of an account, I would look up, thinking they were calling my name. I got better in the language and know when they were and weren't calling my name.

I finished my Peace Corps service in December 2004. During my service, I came to know of a software development company in Fiji. I wasn't ready to go back to America to live and work for different reasons. And they wanted to hire me. So, now I am living and working in Suva, Fiji. I've been here since January this year and I will be here for three years total. When I first came to Fiji to meet the company, I introduced myself as Paleni. They all know me now as Paleni. So, now Paleni has become my South Pacific name. Thus the title of my blog. I'll talk about my life as Paleni in the South Pacific.

Let's try this blogging thing one more time

2005-11-05T21:24:00.000-06:00

Welcome to my new blog. I've decided to be more proactive in writing a blog. Friends and family know that I had a much-ignored blog on my website scriptus.ws. Being too busy and lazy, I haven't updated the website in over a year. And I was using a very basic perl script to run the blog. I had to telnet or ftp into my site and post a text file. It was a tedious process to post one entry. As you can see, I created an account on Google's Blogger. It will be much easier to post entries and people can post comments. Tons better than my past blog. I let the scriptus.ws domain registration expire, but the registrar is still pointing it at my site. If you have been going there to see if I've finally posted another entry, don't. This will now be the place to find about my life as Paleni. My Scriptus nickname has been fading. I now go by Paleni, as I will explain in my next post to fully introduce myself to those you who don't know me yet. I will be back-dating some posts to inform you of some key events in the last few months. Hope you enjoy my blog. I will try to post interesting tidbits. I know my family and friends will be exciting to here I'm starting my blog up again. I don't consider most parts of my life exciting enough to post on the Internet, but I know others are interested, so I'll make more of an effort to post. I'll try to find the creative writing side of me. Enjoy.

First Hindi Movie

2005-11-04T23:36:00.000-06:00

[Back-dated entry]
Today I went to my first Hindi movie. It was an interesting experience. Fiji has a large Indian population and Bollywood movies are very big here. Most of my friends are Indian. Eventually I want to learn the language. I know a handful of words. They actually speak a modified version of "pure" Hindi, called Hindustani. All of the movies are in Hindi, but every Indian here understands it, but not the other way. The movie was Garam Masala. It has English subtitles, so I was able to "enjoy" it. It's about a guy who tries to juggle 3 fiancees. Let's say it didn't have much of a plot, but it was funny. If you have never seen a Hindi movie, I recommend it for entertainment value. Every movie has at least 2 or 3 song and dance sequences. I've been told that if it doesn't have singing, it won't sell. The movies are around 3 hours long and have an intermission. I guess Bollywood directors know Indians can't sit for more than 2 hours at a time. When I first came here, before I found my own apartment, I lived with my friend and his family for a couple weeks. His mother and sisters would watch the local Hindi channel, ZTV, on the local cable channel. For nothing else to do, I watched and was entertained by the soap operas. I, of course, couldn't understand it, but enjoyed the dramatic expressions of the actors and sound effects with the quick zoom-ins and such. If interested, garam(hot) masala is the ground mixture of seeds that is the main ingredient in Indian curries. They don't use curry powder. The movie title is the name of a fashion magazine in the movie. Will let you know if I see any other Bollywood flix.

Software Factory Website

2005-11-03T23:16:00.000-06:00

[Back-dated entry]
Today, I published the new website for the company I work for here in Fiji. I designed and programmed it myself.

Software Factory Limited

Regretfully, it took almost a year to get it published. I started working on the website when I started learning the C# language. I was using the website to learn the language and play around with things like database-driven navigation. I got it working many months ago, but I got busy with other stuff and it was put off. I started to think it was overly done and I didn't like the design, even with many attempts to fix it. A month ago, I decided to just scratch it and rewrite the whole thing. I didn't make it database-driven, as it doesn't need to be. I came up with a simple, clean design. It still uses ASP.Net with C#. I'm using C# to auto-generate the template. I'll stop with the geek talk.

Happy Diwali

2005-10-31T13:05:00.000-06:00

[Back-dated entry]
Today is the Hindu holiday of Diwali, or Festival of Lights. It is a big holiday, to the size of Christmas in the US. It is an official holiday here in Fiji. It's been commercialized like every other holiday. All the merchants have had their big Diwali sales for the last few weeks. A friend invited me to his house. Given its name, families line their homes with many colorful lights. The ladies usually dress in new clothes. And like July 4 in US, people shoot off fireworks. At my friend's house, I had traditional Indian sweets while we watched everyone in the neighborhood shoot of fireworks. I heared a couple M80s go off. My favorite savoury is called sena. It's actually an Indian treat unique to Fiji. It is taro leaves, or dalo, as they call it here, rolled with Indian spices and deep-fried. After the fireworks, we did my favorite thing, eat Indian food. They only eat vegetarian food on Diwali. They had lentil curry and cabbage curry, tomato chutney, rice and puri. I watched part of a Hindi movie they put on before heading home, which had English subtitles delayed by a frame.

Finally! Broadband in Fiji

2005-10-01T03:40:00.000-05:00

[Back-dated entry]
The only thing that I miss from America is broadband Internet access. Since living in the Pacific since October 2002, I've had to suffer with dial-up. And given the monopolies, it isn't cheap. My work was paying US$300 per month for 56Kbps dial-up access, and we shared that with 20 employees.

Today, Unwired Fiji has gone live and I was sure I was one of the first to drop dialup for their broadband wireless service. It's not as cheap as America yet, but it's getting better. Now, we are paying about US$200 per month for 256Kbps speed and unfortunately a transfer cap of 1.5GB. If we go over that cap, they just down-throttle us to 64Kbps. Unfortunately the government has given an exclusive international license to FinTel for who knows how many more years.

Side note: Happy Birthday to my brother, Brandon, turning 31 today.

Work Trip to Australia

2005-09-05T03:00:00.000-05:00

[Back-dated entry]
Today we got back from Australia, attending the Microsoft TechEd conference in the Gold Coast. We flew into Sydney on August 28, visited Canberra and then drove to Broadbeach for the conference from August 30 to September 2 and hung around Sydney until flying back. The best part is the company paid for everything. I actually went to the conference all of the days and learned about Microsoft's new technologies. Below are choice photos.

The gang outside the Parliament house in Canberra.

Our typical morning breakfast: bread, eggs & tomatos. Imagine 10 guys sharing a two bedroom flat with ONE bathroom. Note to self: wear earplugs next time.

Arriving in Broadbeach in the Gold Coast. Check the date on the clock: my birthday.

On one night of the conference, they trekked everyone to Movie World where they rented the entire park for the whole night. They had free beer and food throughout the park and had their rides open. The other guys had never been on a rollercoaster before. Here is the very excited Paula posing with Scooby-Doo and gang.

The whole gang outside the convention centre on the last day of the conference.

Why do I always get stuck being the BBQ chef?

We were only at Sydney Harbour at night for dinner and club-ing. Here is a picture with a famous structure in the background.

Back to Fiji. Note to Australia Immigration: nobody overstayed.

Middle Earth

2004-01-20T21:25:00.000-06:00

Hello all. I'm here to tell you of my journeys to Middle Earth and back. To unaware people, I'm talking of New Zealand. That is where Lord of Rings was filmed and they refer to it as Middle Earth (mostly as a marketing ploy). New Zealand is a beautiful country and there isn't a limit to what you can do, except your pocketbook (it adds up real fast).
Before I went to New Zealand, I spent Christmas in Samoa. I spent a few days with my Samoan family before Christmas. Did the usual thing in the village. Lots of laying around, doing nothing. I came back to Apia on Christmas Eve. The Australian volunteers were having a dinner at the house of an out-of-town expat which one of the volunteers was housesitting. It was a nice, and expensive, house. We had a good dinner and fun hanging out.
We flew out for New Zealand late on the 26th. I was travelling with another volunteer, Suong. We met up with Shawn in the North Island 10 days later. At least 10 other volunteers were in New Zealand at the same time doing other things. It was a popular place since we're so close. We toured the South Island first. We stayed in Christchurch, the biggest city on that island. We didn't do much there except hang around. We watched the last Lord of Rings movie there. It still hasn't come out in Samoa. It was the first movie theater I went to that had assigned seating. Next we headed to Queenstown for 4 days. Queenstown calls itself the "adventure capitol of the world". It's definitely a tourist town. Tons of adventurous things to do. We went to the Skyline. It's a restaurant on top of a mountain. The only way to get up there is by gondola. On top of the mountain, they have these small street luges that you ride down on a curvy track. I also did Fly By Wire and Jetboating. Check out the link. It's better than me explaining it. We were there for New Years. Hundreds of people were down on the harbor. They had a live music stage and a DJ playing current pop music for the teeny-boppers. At midnight, they shot off fireworks from a boat in the harbor. Next, we went to Te Anau, which is 2 hours south of Queenstown. This town is the main hub for Milford Sound. Milford Sound is beautiful area of mountains on the southwest coast. We went on a one-day guided hike on the Milford Track, the hiking trail from Te Anau to the Sound. We took a boat across Lake Te Anau to the trailhead and hiked on the Milford Track. The whole trek usually takes 4 days. After one night back in Christchurch, we headed to the north island.
We met up with Shawn in Auckland on the north island. We spent a couple days in Auckland, just walking around downtown, went to a couple movies in a 'real' theater. We, then, headed off to Rotorua. Rotorua is known for it's natural hot springs and mud pools. The town smells like rotten eggs because of the sulfur. The best thing we did was white water rafting. We rafted on the Kaituna river. It's a grade 5, the highest level a non-experienced rafter can go on. The best part was the 21-foot waterfall. It's the highest commercial waterfall. None of us fell out, but got plenty soaked. The whole raft went under the rapids, but we popped out successfully. I did fall out of the raft at a different spot on the river. The raft went sideways and the guide didn't say to hang on beforehand, and I couldn't grab on in time I knew I was falling out. It was good fun. It's not fun unless you fall out. They have a tourist center called the Agrodome. One it's not a dome. It has farm shows and some minor adventure rides. You can imagine why I'm not interested in the farm shows. I've heard about the Zorb and wanted to try it. It's a big ball you get in and roll down a hill. It was OK, but not worth the money you pay. Also, Suong went skydiving. Shawn and I just watched. I would go skydiving, but unfortunately I exceed the weight limit. When I lose weight, I might head back and try it.
Before heading back to Auckland for a day, we made a side trip to Waitomo Caves. We went on a 2 hour guided trip into one of the caves. It was great fun. We got into wetsuits and put on lamp helmets. We were climbing through the cave and swimming in the river in the cave. The water was a bit cold. Got nice and muddy. We, then, headed north to the town of Paihia in the Bay of Islands. We did a bunch of things there. The worst thing was swimming with the dolphins. My advice is don't do it. Well you pay to swim with the dolphins but when you board, they say that you may not (and you pay for it). Of course, we didn't. We did see about 15 dolphins swimming together. We couldn't swim because there were babies present. Everything else was good. We went parasailing on the harbor. It wasn't as exciting as I thought it would be. It's a great view of the harbor and mountains, though. You fly up to 1200 feet. We went on an all day horseback trip on a private farm. That was great. They have a private cave that we went into about 200 feet. We ate lunch along a creekside. The best part was swimming the horses. We got to a portion of the stream that was deep and rode the horses bareback into the stream. I had to hang on so I didn't fall off. We also went on an all day guided trip to the northern most accessible point in New Zealand. Cape Reinga is where the Tasman Sea and Pacific Ocean come together. We drove there along the 90-mile beach. We actually drove on the beach. The guide said that it's declared as a public highway. They have massive sand dunes and we sandboarded down one of them. You take a boogie board and slid down the dune. It was fast and fun. But climbing up the dune to the top is less than fun. It wasn't worth going back for a second time. We had lunch on the beach, visited the ancient Kauri tree forest and ate at a 'famous' fish and chips shop. It didn't ruin our day, but our van got a flat tire. We put on the spare and kept going. The last thing I did in Paihia was 4-wheel ATV riding on a private farm. It was fun to drive up and down the hillside.
That's the major stuff we did in NZ. It's a cool place to be. Well, I'm back at work now. It's going to be real busy for me over the new few months. I just received 2 new servers and 20 new computers. I have to set up the new servers and rebuild every computer in the bank. The company from Fiji is coming in 2 weeks to start the 2 months of installing and training of the new loan system. Should be plenty of stress ahead of me.

Tele Mea

2003-11-05T21:24:00.000-06:00

Sorry for not updating this blog more often. I've been too lazy. I'll try to update it more often. I'll highlight the big stuff that has happened in the last 2 months. The title of this entry means "many things".

The biggest holiday each year is White Sunday or Lotu a Tamaiti. It's held on the second Sunday of October. The Samoan name translates to "children's church". All of the kids dress up in the their best Sunday whites and they get to run church. They did a lot of singing and lot of skits. Traditionally the kids eat last. But on this day, they get to eat with the adults and they are served by the adults. I brought them some candy and toys. It was good time hanging out in the village. It was still cool in the village.

As of October 12, myself and my group have been here for a year now. It doesn't feel like I've been here a year. My group had a celebratory dinner together to mark the occasion.

On October 15, more volunteers arrived in country to start their training. This group is mostly IT volunteers. More geeks to talk to. They have 8 guys and 8 girls. The guy to girl ratio in Samoa is starting to balance out. Most of the IT volunteers are going to be teaching in schools. Only 2 will be working in offices. There are a few health and a few special needs volunteers.

Last week, my bank sent me out to Fiji for a week, all expenses paid. I had to work during the day, so I didn't get to do any touristy stuff. I didn't get out of the capitol of Suva, but it was fun and enjoyable. I went with 4 others from my bank. Two went for a traning course. Myself, my counterpart and my boss went out to observe the loan system that we are installing early next year. After work, we went to the movie theater there, went to some nice restaurants and, of course, the bars. I drank plenty of the local brew, Fiji Bitter. Sorry, I didn't get any pictures. Nothing really interesting inside of a big city. I'll see if I can get back to do some touristy stuff.

On November 1, Peace Corps had its annual Halloween party. Everybody came in costume. I had my costume planned for months ahead. I dressed as a faafafine. I believe I mentioned them on here before, but they are men who dress in drag and play the part of women in Samoan culture. It was my first time putting on women's clothes. So far, my last. It was fun and crazy. Too many men were grabbing my chest and butt, but I didn't mind it. I'd like to thank JR for the wig, Sarah for giving me all of the clothes and Katie for perty-ing me up. You can see the hideous picture here.

A little less than 2 months ago, I joined a paddling team. A couple volunteers already row for this team and I knew one of the senior rowers. I really hadn't been doing anything outside of work besides tafao-ing (hanging out). We row in what are called paopao, the 6 man canoes. We row with free paddles, paddling forward, not like crew. The team is a competitive team, but they are open to anyone to just come and paddle. The team name is Nafanua. They have juniors and seniors and men and women teams. We practice 3 times a week for a couple hours after work. It's fun and I enjoy it. I'm getting some exercise besides walking. My arms were in extreme pain the first week I did it. But now my arms are used to it, although it's hard for me to do the long distances. Practice makes perfect. I'm just doing it for fun, but it would be cool to race next year. One of the volunteers, Shawn, raced with the team at Teuila Festival and our team took first place. You can see me in a couple shots in the paopao here.

Happy Labor Day

2003-08-31T22:23:00.000-05:00

Happy Labor Day to everyone in the states. I guess that's everyone but me. Samoa had their Labor Day a month ago. We were off work then. But I'm working today.
I see it has been almost 2 months since my last post. I'm still alive. There hasn't been much going on. Just mostly work. I'll mention the exciting stuff here.
On August 23, us, volunteers, played the Japan volunteers in a game of softball. It seemed they were going to win. They scored big early. We actually came back in the last inning and tied the game at 7 all. So nobody can brag unless we play again in the future. I played catcher. I was proud of myself. I actually got the runner out coming to home and threw the ball to first for a double-play. After the game, they treated us to a BBQ. Peace Corps brought the drinks. It was a good time. It's cool to meet people from around the world.
The trainees swore-in as volunteers on August 27. A bunch of us went to the ceremony. I saw what it looks like from the background. They also had it at Coconuts resort. It's a nice place with good food. Early in the training, one of the couples decided to leave Peace Corps. The remaining 15 trainees survived training and became volunteers. They are a cool group. Some more interesting personalities to add to the Peace Corps pot. This whole group is working in different villages. As tradition, the current volunteers threw the new volunteers a party. The usual drunken fun, but nothing crazy this time.
Last Saturday was my birthday. I'm getting old. :) A whopping 27. I went to visit my family in the village last weekend. Since I knew I was going there, I co-celebrated my birthday with the swearing-in party. A friend baked a devil's food cake and everyone sang happy birthday (in both languages). And I blew out 26 imaginary candles and one real one. At least I got a little drunk at that party, since I didn't drink any in the village. My family gave me a big meal and served ice cream. All stays in the village are relaxing. I watched a bunch of TV to kill time.
I found out some good news today at work. I've been working on a recommendation to the bank's board of directors on choosing a new loan system to replace the dinosaur they're currently using. We had 3 vendors bid for the business. I mentioned Software Factory before. The director came out to visit for a week last month. He gave a demo of the system. Software Factory is the one that I recommended. The board selected my recommendation. More work ahead of me, we have to implement now. Before that can happen, we have to install an inter-island connection to connect our remote offices, install new servers and install new client computers. Tons of fun ahead. One very good thing out of this is that my bank will fly me out to Fiji to look at the system at the development bank there. Very excited about that.
This week is Teuila Festival. It's a big tourist event held the first week in September each year. They have a bunch of dancing and exhibits. The highlights are the boat races and the Miss Samoa competition. You can even vote on their website. The funniest thing about it is that there is always one girl who is sponsored by McDonalds.
The next group will be arriving in about 6 weeks. This will be the IT group. I hope to help with the training. It should be fun. I'll let you all know when they arrive.

July 4th

2003-07-06T22:22:00.000-05:00

Happy (belated) July 4th! On the day itself, I took off work and relaxed. We normally have to work on US holidays, but my boss let me take it off. On Saturday, all of the volunteers had a picnic on the beach. Peace Corps rented some buses and we drove down to Lalomanu beach. Everybody brought some food, potluck-style. I carried out a "tradition". I manned the grill all day and cooked the chicken and hotdogs. I didn't go in the water. I'm not a fan of salt and sun. The trainees came from the village and were able to celebrate with us. We had a keg of Vailima. It only lasted a few hours. People had to make a beer run to the nearest store. I don't usually start drinking at noon. :) I put my beer on the chicken. We did have some fireworks. We had 2 sparklers! Woo-hoo! My camera isn't working, so if you want to see pictures, I'd recommend going to Andrew's website at http://www.americanidle.org/. He takes a metric butt-load of pictures. He also has a regularly updated blog. Post some comments on his site. He lives for it!

On July 27, I went back to village for one day. Another guy in my group, Aaron, went back to celebrate his birthday with his family. I tagged along. We stayed up late drinking beer and playing Suipi, a Samoan card game. We played with a deck that has the 11, 12, and 13 cards of each suit. It makes for an interesting game with those. On Friday afternoon, I watched my family cook food. They actually let me help with the food prep. I made the coconut cream from scratched: husk the coconut, crack it open, scrape out the meat, and wring out the cream. And I fed the pigs. It was fun to help. I watched my family make koko Samoa (Samoan cocoa). They roast the beans, shuck them and smash the meat. It is a very strong cocoa. My stomach can't handle it. The next morning, we trekked over to the training village, Poutasi, and visited the trainees for a while. We got a ride back with the trainers, so we didn't have to ride the bus. It's nice to not have a sore butt after riding the bus.

On July 20, I saw my first Manu Samoa game. They are the upper-league rugby team. They played Ireland. Unfortunately, Manu Samoa got beat 40-14. It was fun game to watch. The stadium was packed. Samoans get very vocal at rugby games. Only one guy got hauled away by the police (not sure for what though). During half-time, the police marching band was entertainment. They were amusing to watch. They were shaking their butts and everything.

Work is still busy. I finished the big, long technical document. I gave it to computer vendors so they can bid on the work. I've been talking to a company in Fiji that wrote a loans program that I'm looking into. I've been doing some web programming work. I didn't need to do it now. (don't tell the boss) I wanted to do some programming. The funny thing is that I'm writing stuff in ColdFusion, a programming language, and I don't have the application to run it. So, I don't know if any of my code works. I'll be getting it shortly. I'll be writing some Access database projects here shortly, so that will be some more programming. The management of the bank is having their strategic planning meetings. IT stuff is a big part of it. I mentioned to them that they should provide "substantial resources in strengthening the IT infrastructure". So, hopefully, I'll get a bunch of money to buy new computers and buy software packages that actually do what they need. There's a lot of work ahead of me.

New Trainees - Group 70

2003-06-14T22:21:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday, June 11, the new trainees arrived at 3 AM in the morning. Peace Corps chartered a bus to drive us to the airport around midnight. We waited for them to arrive. There were about 15 current volunteers plus the trainers and some staff. When they arrived, we waited in the lobby area with the Peace Corps banner. When they came out of the customs check, we rushed them and gave them ulas (flower necklaces). We loaded up their stuff into the trucks and headed back to Apia. The main airport is about an hour bus ride from Apia. We dropped them off at the hotel where they do training until they head to the village. We all left so we could get some sleep. Unfortunately I didn't sleep much. The new group has 17 people - 11 guys, 6 girls. It's unusual for there to be so many guys. There are 2 married couples in the group, a 65-year old man and 2 of them have served in the Peace Corps before. This group is mostly village-based development, but 2 are future farmers and 2 are coastal management. The next IT group will come in October.
Later that day before lunch, we had the traditional ava ceremony to welcome them in Samoan tradition. I took part in the ceremony. I won't get into details, but people sit in certain places based on their position as a matai or whether you're the one doing the welcoming. The training director was the orator for the current volunteers and staff side. He had me sit next to him, which made me a honorary matai for that ceremony. I only spoke one line to give permission to the real orator to speak on my behalf, since I can't talk fluently. I was amazed that I could understand some of what was said during the ceremony. They did the traditional speeches and then passed around the ava. We had lunch to finish it off.
I mentioned not getting much sleep and I didn't get much sleep the previous few days also. I spent the previous weekend in Savai'i. I went for a collective birthday party for the Savai'i volunteers. I spent the weekend at another volunteer's house. On Sunday we went to an awesome waterfall and fresh water pool. It wasn't too far from his house, so we walked. It's called Olemoe Falls. You hike through a cow pasture and the pool is set in a valley. You have to climb down a 30-foot ladder to the get to the pool. It has one big waterfall and a bunch of little falls dumping into the pool all around the pool. It was beautiful. I got up at 4 AM on Monday to take the early boat back to Apia to work that day. Well on Wednesday, I think I set a personal record. I was tired and took a nap at 3 PM. Well I didn't wake up until 6 AM the next morning. I guess I was tired.
Last night the current volunteers put on a fiafia for the trainees. We spent a couple weeks practicing and planning it. I was a part of the sasa and the haka. The sasa is the coordinated slap dance done sitting down. We did actions related to living in Samoa - making ava, rowing a boat, calling a taxi, drinking Vailima and praying. The performance was a little botched because we couldn't hear our caller and people got out of sync. But it was fun. It doesn't have to be perfect. Five girls performed the traditional Samoan dance. Then me and four other guys performed a haka. The haka is actually a Maori (New Zealand natives) dance. It easier to do than the Samoan guy dances. The haka involves making a lot of noise and screaming. All we wore is an ie around our waists and we had banana leaf ulas around our necks and around our legs. We also painted a rough version of the traditional Maori face tattoo on our faces. We looked damn freaky. It was fun. Taui performed a fire knife dance. The highlight of the night was the taupo dance. It's the traditional dance of the virgin. I believe being an actual virgin is no longer a requirement to perform the dance. Karmie, a current volunteer, performed the dance. She got decked out in a very extravagant outfit and is covered in coconut oil. It's typical that people come up and stick money to her skin. She had some soles (slang for boys) from her school assist. In the middle of it, us guys from the haka ran out and started screaming. She said she made about $60. She gave the money to her students. Afterwards we had a huge dinner. After the fiafia, we went to some volunteers' houses and partied until the wee hours. The Peace Corps band played. All of the volunteers and trainees and bunch of Samoans showed up. It was a fun party. We getting the trainees used to the usual activity on the weekends. :)
I think my digital camera is dead, so I didn't get any pictures of the fiafia. But other volunteers got pictures. I'll get pictures from them and post them on my website.

Happy Father's Day to all Dads out there!

Samoa Independence Day

2003-06-06T22:20:00.000-05:00

On June 1, Samoa celebrated its 41st year of independence. Samoa gained political freedom from New Zealand on January 1, 1962. If you're wondering, I didn't get the month wrong. They celebrate independence in June instead of January. I don't know why, but I would guess that there are two many holidays at the beginning of the year so they decided to move it. They want time to drink beer in the middle of the year, I guess. Everybody was off work on Monday and Tuesday. Since June 1 landed on a Sunday, they held all of the festivities on Monday. In the morning, about everyone in the country gathered at Mulinuu. It's the village just outside of Apia proper that houses the Parliament house. The main thing is that the Head of State Malietoa spoke to the crowd and then they had the march. A ton of schools, sports organizations and NGOs (non-government organizations) marched together in front of Malietoa. They didn't march through the streets. They just passed in front of Malietoa and maybe played or sang a song or gave him gift. It went on for a few hours. A ton of BBQ stands were set up so you can get some BBQ chicken in the morning. They don't eat "normal" breakfast foods in the morning here. The next big thing was the boat race. It was short but cool to see. Five groups raced through Apia Harbor on fautasi. Fautasi are very long 40 man fishing boats. One man in the boat beats on a drum, I assume to keep rhythm. There were some sivas in the afternoon in Mulinuu, but I missed those. Unfortunately, I don't have pictures. My digital camera decided to die on me. I might have to get another camera or go back to normal film, but that's a pain to get on the website.
In the afternoon, Peace Corps sponsored a sports day. Staff, volunteers and Japanese volunteers played a couple games of softball. It was fun. The first game, we split up the teams. All of the big hitters were on the other team. They killed us 10 - 0. The second game, we had PC staff against PC and Japanese volunteers. We beat them 15 - 6. A couple of the staff hadn't played softball before, only cricket. One guy kept hitting like a cricket batter and hitting the ball way right field in foul territory. I played catcher both games. My quadriceps hurt for five days from squatting so much.
There was a popular bar in town called the Coast. It was on the second floor of a building with another bar underneath. Last Saturday was the last day it was open. A bunch of us went to have last drinks. The management closed the Coast and opened a new place right next door, called the Lighthouse. It opened on Independence Day and it's more of a dance club. It's much bigger. The only problem is that they are now charging cover. I heard they closed the Coast because of fear it would collapse eventually. Too many people were up there at one time for an old building. It didn't collapse on the last day. The new place is on ground level.

IT Conference

2003-05-28T22:20:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was the first-ever Samoa IT Conference. It was all-day event. I got my bank to pay for myself and 2 others from the bank to attend. It was $100 WST per person. All food and refreshments were provided (read: free beer). They had two tracks: technical and non-technical. Of course, I went to the technical track. They had talks on wireless networking, firewalls, Microsoft .Net and GIS. There was an intro talk from the Prime Minister and the closing talk was from the Samoa IT Steering Committee on their report. They constructed a document listing their goals for IT in Samoa. You can check it out at http://www.samoa.ws/ict/. I believe their next goal is start getting input from different stakeholders to figure out strategies for achieving their goals. I was hoping the conference would have discussed strategies, but it didn't. But it was fun to attend. The best part was socializing with other geeks in Samoa. The other great thing is that a group of local geeks are trying to start a new computer society. They're trying to get it started by the end of July. The tentative name is the Samoa Computer Society Inc. For all geeks reading this, you'll get a kick out of the acronym it creates. It's my favorite acronym: SCSI (pronouned "scuzzy" for the non-geeks). They're not incorporated, but they put that in to play off the popular acronym. I'll definitely get involved with it. My suggestion to the group was to create a professional society that can do training to users and, more importantly, try to influence the government in IT decisions. I'll let you know how it goes.

About a week and a half ago, Samoa had a few days of just massive downpour. It's time like those when you discover how bad the drainage system is in Samoa. All of the drainage systems backed up. The entire country was without running water for 2 days. There was millions of tala of damage to the piping, water plants and many flooded businesses. There were some massive landslides in Samoa and American Samoa. Four people died in Am. Samoa and one died here. After the water came back on, it took another 2 days for it resume full pressure. Luckily many Samoans, including my house, have rainwater collection tanks. So I never ran out of water, but just less of a convenience. I'm used to bucket showers from the village anyway.

A question. Do you know how many days are in any month without looking at a calendar? I don't know if everyone knows this, but you count your knuckles. A knuckle means 31 days and the gap inbetween means 30 days. I bring this up because I discovered that Samoans know this because they learned it from another Peace Corps volunteer awhile ago. I was having some after work beers with my boss (she paid) and another lady from work. One asked how many days are in May, and I started counting my knuckles. My boss said she knew the same trick that was propogated from another volunteer. I thought it was interesting.

Good news on work front in relation to my motivation. I've regained my motivation and have been very productive at work. I'm still working on the monolithic technical document for the new loan system, and it's coming along well. I've been learning little bits and pieces of loan algorithms.

The next couple of weeks will be packed full of stuff. Next week is Samoa's 41st Independence Day celebration. They'll have marches and boat races and sivas. I'll definitely get pictures. And on June 13, the next group of trainees will be arriving. They will be village-based developers. As a tradition, the volunteers put on a fiafia for the trainees. I mentioned the ones the volunteers did for us when we were trainees. But I'll be in this one. Should be fun. I'll tell you all about it.

Manuia le Aso Tina

2003-05-12T22:19:00.000-05:00

Happy Mothers Day! (that's what the title of this log means) I spent Mothers Day in the village. I just got back from the village this morning as I write this log. It was a relaxing weekend, as all stays in the village are. Mothers Day is big here. It's celebrated more than in the states. There isn't anything outside of church, but the church service is definitely deidicated to the mothers. All of the mothers sat together. All of the children sat together. They took up a third of the church alone. The children got up on stage and sung a song to the mothers. Near the end, the mothers went up on stage. All of the children went to their mothers and gave them candy necklances and kisses (not candy kind). I did the same for my mother and grandmother. Candy necklaces seem like a strange thing to give older women, but they'll undoubtedly share with everyone else, which is a very large part of the culture. As gifts I gave my mother and grandmother some raw fabric for them to make something out of. Yesderday, Monday, is an official work holiday. They held a district-wide rugby competition in the village next to mine. My village had two teams that played. One won, one lost to the opposing teams. I went and watched the first few games. Other than these, I did a lot of sleeping and some reading.

Last Friday was the last day of the class I taught at Samoa Polytechnic on basics of the Internet. I gave the final exam. The class went well. The students that attended all of the classes passed. Near the end I gave them step-by-step instructions on how to do a certain task. That helped better than me just talking and not be able to show them (not having a projector). I don't know if I want to do more formal teaching. There won't be any more short courses at Polytechnic for a while. I prefer informal tutoring. There's less grunt work involved. No lessons to plan, no tests to grade. I'll need to get some speech therapy, but that's not on my list of top things to do.

Work is going good, but slow. I've been lacking motivation lately. I need to get back into the groove of things. It's not a bad thing, but it's just that I'm not doing a lot of programming right now. The bank doesn't need that right now. I'm writing a bunch of documentation to lay out the procedures and requirements for a new loan program. We want to contract out some work to the local companies to write a new program for the bank. It's a very large project. The program is the life-blood of the bank. The bank currently uses a 20-year old DOS application. That needs to go. And it doesn't do what they need, so I want to make sure they get one that does. After that, I'm going to upgrade the servers to support the new loan program. And I want to upgrade everybody's computer to new operating systems, and replace some of the ancient machines that are still in use. We'll see how much money I can squeeze out of the boss. :) I'm learning a lot about Windows administrative. As you may know, I've been mainly using Macinstosh before the Peace Corps. Here it's all Windows. I've moved over to the Dark Side.

I forgot to mention this in my log about HILT (and the one after that). On the morning of March 28 around 6:30 AM local time, I experienced my first earthquake. I just woke up, but hadn't got out of bed yet. Then the entire house started to shake. It was very minor, only lasted a few seconds, not enough power to damage anything or knock anything over. It was an interesting feeling.

Easter

2003-04-21T22:18:00.000-05:00

Happy Belated Easter! I spent Easter with my family in the training village. We had Friday and Monday off from work. On Thursday after work I took the last bus to the village and I came back today on the too-frickin' early bus (5:30 AM). I achieved a goal. A cute Samoan girl actually sat on my lap for both bus trips. If you remember, Samoans won't sit on Palagis on buses. Of course I knew her already from my village. One's legs can get a little tired on a 1.5 hour bus ride on bad roads. Easter was mostly uneventful although it didn't help that I had a mild cold the whole weekend. I feel better now but still fighting it. I brought some drugs to the village. I mainly just had a headache. To those who worry to much, I'M FINE. :)
On Good Friday, they had a 9 AM church service. And they had a sunrise service on Easter Sunday at 4:30 AM. I missed the usual 3:30 PM service on Sunday; I tried sleeping off my illnesses. Most of the weekend, I slept alot and watched a bunch of TV. On Monday I walked along the beach. I didn't feel well enough to swim. I'm not a big fan of salt water anyway.
For the Sunday meal, to'ona'i, all of us volunteers who were in the village for the weekend were invited to the pastor's house. There were 5 of us: myself, Shawn, Mindy, Mary and Beth. I don't know if I mentioned it but the pastor was on sabbatical while we were training so we never met him. The village actually built a new house for the pastor. It's a nice house. We ate to'ona'i and chatted for a while.
The big event of the weekend was the wedding. Kris' sister got married on Saturday. It's what's called a fa'alavelave (something that's big, takes a lot of planning and takes a lot of money). The chuch service was at 10 AM. The whole church was filled. They lined the entire church floor with fine mats. The service is similar to a wedding service in America, just a different language. Then they had a big reception at the church hall. They had a band and lot of dancing. They had tons of food. They had hand-woven a bunch of "dinner baskets". Each person got a basket and it had a ton of food in it. There were about 200 people. The biggest difference with Samoan weddings is the gift-giving. The bride and groom get the least amount of gifts. It took about an hour to hand out all of the gifts. The families of the bride and groom and important people in the village (chiefs and pastor) get the gifts. There were a ton of fine mats given out. They also gave slaughtered livestock as gifts. They carried in all of the livestock to present to the families. They carried in a bunch of pigs. The pigs were huge; took 5 men to carry in. They carried in a few cows divided into 7 or 8 pieces. It was fun to experience.
A funny thing that you wouldn't think you'd find in a Samoan village is a Sony Playstation and DVD player. Vic's family actually has these. I played a quick game of Syphon Filter on the Playstation and Shawn and I watched the Minority Report DVD one night.

I started teaching on April 9. The class is going OK. I have 8 students. The biggest problem is my rate of speech. Americans have problems understanding me; imagine Samoans who know English as a second language. I'm trying to consciously slow down. The other problem is that I don't have a projector, so I can't show them what I'm doing. Explaining it alone doesn't help. There have been three classes so far; five to go. It's going slower than I thought. A few people are asking a lot of questions, which is good. I'll let you know how it goes when I see how many people pass.

HILT

2003-04-06T22:17:00.000-05:00

It's been a crazy couple of weeks. The weekend of the 28th was a big party and the VAC meeting in Savai'i. All last week was our HILT. We spend a whole week on the beach learning some language and cultural.
Every quarter there is a VAC meeting. VAC is the Volunteer Advisory Committee. The volunteers meet and talk about volunteer issues. Usually around VAC meetings is some kind of partying. The VAC meeting was held on Saturday, the 29th, at Le Lagoto Resort on Savai'i. A volunteer, Van, teaches at Vaipouli College just up the road from the resort, so Van threw a party on Friday night. The volunteers on Upolu took the last boat to Savai'i on Friday. We met up with the Savai'i volunteers at the wharf. The cool thing was that Van's pule (or boss) let us use the school bus to drive us from the wharf to the college. We all loaded on the bus and were driven to the college, about 1.5 hour drive. We stopped for beer and the Savai'i volunteers had a brought a trash can full of beer on the bus. It was a loud and crazy ride. See the picture. Our Peace Corps band actually lugged the whole drum set from Apia to play at the party. The party was fun. The band played. Van and other volunteers cooked some good food. The only bad part was sleeping on concrete in a fale and being eaten by mosquistoes. Didn't get a lot of sleep but oh well. I was planning on going to the VAC meeting, but decided against it. A bunch of us went back to Apia in the eary afternoon. We got back in time to watch the Dave Tua fight. Dave Tua is a popular Samoan boxer. We took the fast boat back to the Upolu wharf. It's a smaller boat and only takes 35 minutes instead of 1.5 hours. It can be a little bumpy.
From March 31 to April 4, my group spent the week at Faofao Beach Fales in Saleapaga. We had our HILT and ESC. HILT is High Intensity Language Training; an opportunity to refresh our language skills. Combined with it was ESC, or Early Service Conference. Some speakers came into talk about different things and we talked about some administrative issues. We stayed in little fales located right on the beach. It was a beautiful beach. We went swimming everyday. We met in the main fale everyday to have our sessions and that is where we at our meals. They provided very good Samoan food every day. In my photo album, I have pictures of the fales and of the beach. I took of the picture of the outside showers. It's always fun to take a shower outside. The resort has a bunch of cats running around. One night I woke up to a cat who jumped in to my fale and slept with me. I took of picture of her. Aaron from our group wanted a cat for his house. This is the cat he took with him. So, I can visit her now. She's a very affectionate cat. He named her Tiu, which is Samoan for ginger. Peace Corps hired another trainer. Her name is Toe and she is only 21. I can see problems in her future with volunteers hitting on her. They wanted to hire a trainer that is closer to our age. We had Latu during our training and he is very cool. I have a picture of me playing Mu with her. Mu is a modified version of checkers. Our last night in the village, the resort put on a fiafia for us. I have pictures of it. The girls danced the traditional Siva Samoa. The boys danced a common slap dance (the boys slap themselves during a choreographed routine). And a boy performed the Siva Afi, or fire dance. After the official activities, they had open dancing. All of the boys danced with the Peace Corps girls and the girls danced with the Peace Corps boys. I danced with some of the cute Samoan girls. I also have a picture of Toe and Mary dancing Siva Samoa, and a picture of our training director and his wife dancing.
As you might have known, last Tuesday was April Fool's Day. We played an evil prank on our country director. He came to talk to our group during HILT about some administrative issues on that morning. The night before a few of us drafted a letter to present to him on Tuesday morning. The letter went into length about how much of a family our group has become. And Su had came to Samoa to escape an arranged marriage (she's Indian). But we can't break up our group, so we had all decided, the entire group (all 12 of us), to early terminate our Peace Corps service. And we all signed the letter stating this fact. Well, instead of signing it, we all signed "April Fool's". We read the letter next morning and we played it well. Su was actually being sad, which is hard for her (she's always cheery). And some people cried during the reading. We handed the letter to him, but he didn't read the page with our "signatures". He was about to cry and asked one of our trainers to say a prayer in Samoan. It was getting a little tense, so we directed him to the last page. When he saw "April Fool's", he just broke out in a smile and he was quite relieved. He said he has 21 months to get us all back. We'll see. It was good prank.
I'm back at work now. I need to get back in the working spirit. Been gone at the beach for the week. I need to get remotivated to work. I forgot to mention in my last post that I did get my computer about 6 weeks ago. It's good to have. I start teaching my night course at Polytech this Wednesday. I teach 2 hours each Wednesday and Friday for 4 weeks. I'll let you know how it goes.

I'm Back!

2003-03-21T21:16:00.000-06:00

Hello everyone! I've been gone awhile, from the Internet that is. On March 1, my domain name registrar decided to change crucial information about about domain name, thus removing it from the face of the Internet. From what I've found out, their database got messed up somehow and when they "fixed" it, everything was not correct. The new database said that my domain had expired, so control was returned back to the main .ws registrar. My domain doesn't expire until January 2004. Well, finally after 3 weeks of emails and calling, they finally fixed it and here I am. I'd like to thank Mark in Colorado for calling my registrar in my place (it's a tad expensive to call the states from here). Let's happen it doesn't happen again.

Since I've been gone a long time, here's what's been happening in the last month.
Been working a lot and partying less since Valentine's Day. Work is very busy. I'm working on upgrading every computer in the company. There are 45 computers total. We're looking at replacing 15 of them (getting rid of the antiques). The others, we'll just upgrade with new versions of software. I'm learning a lot about Windows server management. I've always done Linux and MacOS X before Peace Corps. The other complication is that since we have a slow and unreliable Internet connection, I need to look into ways of downloading stuff only once and redistributing to all of the computers. We actually metered bandwidth. We have to pay extra for any bandwidth over 1 gigabyte a month (which isn't a lot).
As a side project, I'm going to teach a night course at a local college, Samoa Polytechnic. I'll be starting next month. I'll be teaching "Internet Basics". The course are designed for working adults to gain further training. Andrew, in my group, will also be teaching a class on "Basic HTML". Other classes are using Word, Excel and Access. I've been busy working on creating the manual for the class. It takes a long time to write a manual. I know this stuff like the back of my hand, but it's difficult and time-consuming to try to organize my thoughts onto paper. Shawn, also in my group, is a full-time teacher at Polytech. He asked us if we were interested in teaching.
Outside of work, I've just been hanging out on weekends, watching a bunch of movies and reading. I've started playing tennis a couple times a week with Shawn. He brought rackets from America and there is a tennis court at Samoa College, next door to Polytech. I've been getting most of my exercise by walking to work everyday and walking everywhere else.
A couple weeks ago, Su's sister came to visit. One day after work, Mary, Mindy and myself went up to Leulumoega to visit Su's house. She and another volunteer, Mandy, teach at Leulumoega College. Su and her sister were cooking Indian food. In my photo gallery, you'll see a picture of us just before we ate. Su didn't have enough plates and silverware for all of us, so we put the food on banana leaves and ate everything with our hands. It was an Indian meal with a Samoan twist. It was very delicious. We stayed the night and took the early bus into Apia to go back to work.
The last weekend in February was the Marist 7s Rugby championships here in town at Apia Park, the big sports complex. I've seen rugby on TV, but it was good to see live. Rugby is more interesting to watch than football. Rugby is more fast-paced and no woosy penalties. Rugby is big here. Samoa has our major league rugby team, Manu Samoa, which translates to "Samoan Beast". I have yet to watch a Cricket game and I don't know any of the rules.

Next weekend, we're having our VAC meeting. VAC, or volunteer action committee, is a quarterly meeting when the volunteers discuss different issues. This meeting will be Savaii. So we're all heading over there. Most volunteers live in Upolu, mainly in Apia. A volunteer, Van, is hosting an all weekend party at her house, near the village we're meeting in. Should be fun. Savaii is always fun to visit.
And the week after VAC, my group, group 69, is having our HILT (high intensity language training). It's a week long training to refresh our language skills. We're going to Saleapaga which is next to Lalomanu on the southeast side of Upolu. We're going to live on the beach for a week in little beach fales. (see picture of Lalomanu in my photos). I'll get pictures and post them.

Photos, V-day and Savai'i

2003-02-18T21:15:00.000-06:00

Good news, everyone! I've finally posted some photos. Check them out here. I'll be updating them more often now, since I have access to a computer at work, so I'm using my digital camera. The current photos are of my family and my village and of my house in Apia.
To make it easier for everyone who wants to read this, I've created an announcement-only mailing list. Everytime I update my site, I'll send a short email to the list with a link to my site. So, now you don't have to keep checking the site. Just wait until you get an email and then you can read what I've updated. If you want to receive these emails, subscribe here. If you know of anyone else who wants to read what I'm up to, just have them click on the above link. You can remove yourself from the list at anytime; instructions are provided in each email. Only I can send emails to this list, so there is no worry of getting spam.

As for stuff that's been happening to me, everything interesting happened in the last week.
Happy belated V-day to everyone! No actually, Bah Humbug! I never did like Valentine's day! But this last one was fun. Drank three days in a row, always fun! On V-day itself, a whole bunch of volunteers hung out at another volunteer's house. We just hang out drinking and chatting until 3 AM. On Saturday, Mindy and Mary from my group threw a V-day party. My whole group came and bunch of other volunteers. We drank and chatted there too; are you shocked? It also was the first live performance of the unofficial Peace Corps band (no name yet). A few people have gotten together to play and sing. They even write their own songs. There is a picture in my photo album. The drumset you see was bought that day. Someone was actually selling one and a few of the guys chipped in to buy it.
Monday and Tuesday of this week, the bank flew me and a coworker out to Savai'i. We had to manually give them a copy of the loan database, since there is no network between the agencies. Instead of taking the boat, we flew over. The plane is a very small 8-passenger puddle-jumper. It flies low, so you get a good view of the islands. Very beautiful! I have pictures in my photo album. The bank has an agency in Salelologa, the main wharf town on the southeast, and an agency in Asau, on the northwest. We drove around the entire island, stopping in Asau to update their database. It was a nice long drive.
I'm starting to do real work. I've spent time working on the website, cleaning it up and stuff. Haven't done much data-entry. I won't be doing anymore of that once I get my new machine (soon hopefully).

Superbowl

2003-01-30T21:14:00.000-06:00

Did everyone watch the Superbowl? The Superbowl is shown in Samoa, if anyone wondered. It is broadcast on the American Forces Network coming out of American Samoa. The only bad thing about getting it here, is that there are no commercials. I didn't get to see the time-honored tradition of Superbowl commercials. A friend from Colorado said they weren't that great anyway. Instead of regular commercials, AFN has their own American propaganda commercials. Very funny. Why do the armed forces advertise recruitment to people already in the armed forced? Well, the Superbowl was fun to watch. I didn't have any favorite. We had a large Peace Corps Superbowl party. Almost every volunteer was there. We lucked out. A bar, Otto's Reef, opened just for us to watch the game. The funny part was that the bar ran out of beer the night before, so they let us bring our own beer and food inside.
Not much else going on in the last couple weeks. Work is going OK. The bank just ordered my computer today. So hopefully in a few weeks I'll have my computer. I've been doing some data-entry to kill time (and some braincells).
I've been reading some books to kill time. I'm listing the books on my homepage. As a shameless plug to for you rich Americans to help a poor volunteer in the middle of nowhere, feel free to send me a book from my Amazon wishlist. Thanks in advance.
Another volunteer from my group, Andrew, has recently published his new website about his Peace Corps experience. Check it out at http://www.americanidle.org/. It has tons of pictures and other goodies about Peace Corps and Samoa. There are some pictures of me, if you're dying to see my beautiful mug.

A Cave, a Wedding and a Birthday

2003-01-17T21:13:00.000-06:00

The title says what I did the last couple weeks. Oh yeah, I got married. No, just kidding.
Last weekend, about half of us from my group visited Piula Cave Pool. It's on the northeast side of Upolu. It's about a 45 minute bus ride to Piula Theological College between the villages of Lufilufi and Falefa. On a hillside on the college grounds, sits a large Methodist church. Right underneath it is a natural fresh-water cave pool. It's not very large; there are two medium size pools. To get to the second pool, you have to swim under water through a small opening in the rock wall. Kind-of scary at first, because you don't know how far it is. But it's very close; 10 seconds underwater. For chickens, you can always walk around to the second pool. At the end of the second pool, where is fairly dark, you can sit on the ledge. We've heard there is a third pool, but you would need an underwater flashlight to try to find it. The underwater passage is a little tight. I got a nice bruise on my head for hitting the overhanging rocks. It was fun.
The wedding was my Samoan brother's, Isa'ako. On the same day, was my aunt's 65th birthday. The festivities were last Monday. On the Thursday before, my sister stopped by work and said what was happening and asked me to come. I had to work Monday and Tuesday. I took the last bus, 5:30 PM, to the village on Monday. I came back to town on the first bus, 5:30 AM, on Tuesday. I was falling asleep at work that day. Before going, I heard that weddings can be very big deals. This wedding was very short and sweet. The moment I got off the bus, we went right to the church for the wedding. It lasted only 30 minutes. There were some songs and prayers and the vows. We went back to the fale. There we celebrated my aunt's birthday with cake and ice cream. We had a big meal, as usual. Afterwards, there was a small fiafia. One of my nieces danced a few songs. The wedding party danced a song. Then, of course, they have to make the palagi dance, me. My aunt and I danced a song. All of the ladies got up and danced and they made me, the only guy, dance with them. I went to bed late but couldn't sleep well. It was extremely hot that night. Then I got up early to head to work.
The other thing, not mentioned in the title, is that the website for my bank went live yesterday. Check it out at http://www.dbsamoa.ws/. I didn't do anything on this website, though. It was all done by the local ISP, CSL. I was told that I will be taking over and doing all future updates. I'll let you know when I do something for it. I'm still waiting on my own computer at work. I've just been doing data-entry to help catch them up for December. I definitely know how inefficient their system is, so I can write them a better one.

Only in Samoa

2003-01-04T21:12:00.000-06:00

I had an "only in Samoa" kind of experience that I wanted to share. Last Friday, I went out with a couple Peace Corps friends. We were going to eventually hit the dance club. One of the girls, Carolyn, has a Samoan sister who is a police officer. So we went there to pick her up. It was after hours (around 8), so I guess that's when the cops break out the booze. They us a couple free beers each and they were drinking whiskey. After an hour or so, we decided to go to the club. Instead of the normal mode of transportation, a taxi, we drove in style. We got a ride in the police van to the night club, and the driver wasn't joining us. I find that funny, so I thought I'd mention it.
This morning turned out to be unexpectantly eventful. I was still sleeping at around 8:30. Knock on my door. Three friends from my group ask if I want to go for a walk. So I put on my sandals (I already had clothes on) and headed out the door. One of them says, 'Oh we didn't mention where we are going. Sliding Rocks.' Now that's a walk. It's about a 2 hour walk from where I live. Although I was very happy to go. You can guess from its name what it is. It a very cool stream with mini waterfalls you can slide down. It was very fun. The last mile of the walk to the rocks was all uphill, but I made it. Got my exercise. We stayed for a couple hours. The first hour we were alone and then more people showed up. Samoans are a bit crazy sometimes. Some guys were running down the rocks and jumping off high cliffs into fairly shallow water. We just slid on our butts. On the way back, we walked about 2 miles before we hitched a ride for the rest of way. We walked enough for one day. Hitching is common here and it's very handy to get around free.
I figured it would happen eventually. A week ago I was bitten by a dog. Don't worry. It's minor and it healed. Two other people in my group have been bitten already. Most Samoans treat dogs very badly. Dogs are only good for guard-duty. The problem is that they will attack anyone just walking by a house. Throwing rocks is the best way to shoo them off. They always run (so far). I've seen it in the village. People will cane a dog for just being in the way. They are beaten so much, they become mean. You also see many "malformed" dogs: dogs with weird masses growing on them, broken legs, missing eyes. It's a fact of life here. I needed to adjust to throwing rocks at dogs. I don't want to hurt a dog, but they're not going to feel bad about hurting me. The only good part about being bitten here is that there are no rabies in Samoa.
Last night I had my first bonding with the family that lives in front of me. I hung out the family while they "fai le saka", meaning preparing a traditional meal in an umu. Look at my Thanksgiving log for details. I helped a little by helping to scrape the coconuts to make the coconut cream. We had lamb chops, herring cooked in coconut cream, taro and breadfruit. I also became friendly with the family dogs, Shadow and Scooby Doo (actual names). They know me now, so they'll protect me instead of eat me. It also helps to feed them your leftovers.
Well, I start work tomorrow.

Manuia le tausaga fou

2003-01-02T21:11:00.000-06:00

Happy New Year! I'm back from all of my holiday travels.
I visited my Samoan family for Christmas. It was a relaxing time. I arrrived in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. The only official activity was a little concert the children of the village performed the night of Chistmas eve. It was from 10 PM to midnight. I was tired. On Christmas, everybody plays volleyball. The villages compete against each other for small amounts of money. The next day, Boxing Day, I drank for the first time in the village with my brothers. We drank and watch pre-recorded rugby games and boxing matches. A good mixer: take a niu and dump in some vodka and drink. A brother and his family who now live in Australia came to visit. He's definitely more wealthy than the rest of his family. I'm not for sure, but I expect that he bought a bunch of things for the family. The family has a new refrigerator, a microwave and new kitchenware. He also brought a Nintendo system on which the kids played Pokemon kids games. I came back to Apia on the next day, Friday. My mom visited me in Apia on Saturday morning and brought some mats and a fine mat for my place.
For new years, our group went to visit those of who live on Savai'i. We didn't get to visit any sites on Savai'i. We wanted to go to the western point of the island, which is also the western most point of the world and the last sunset of the year. No buses were running and there is a tour guide, named Warren, who couldn't take us because he was getting a matai title. There is also a very nice waterfall, from what I hear. We got two years to see them. We just visited the houses of our three friends. We spent New Years in Tuasivi, on the northeast corner of the island. Jeni's house is right on the ocean. We went swimming in the ocean on New Year's eve. I snorkled for a bit; my first time. We just played games and drank all night long. We didn't get to sleep until 6 AM. We toasted each New Years for each of the time zones in the states. We counted down at our midnight and toasted. It was fun. The day after New Years is a holiday here. It's a holiday because it's the day after New Years. I find that funny. We came back on that day. The only buses that ran were for the ferry.
Now that I've ridden the buses quite a few times over the holidays, I've been immersed in culture. It's uncomfortable, but quite amusing to ride in an extremely packed bus. Samoans are curtious to Palagis when they get on the bus. Samoans will move around to give you a seat and they're too polite to sit on your lap. The buses here are completely unstructured. Everything is at the whim of the driver. With a packed bus, the driver will stop to fill up gas, will just stop at a store and get a drink. On my way to the village, the bus stopped at the hardware store and they loaded up a bunch of siding into the aisle. Since it was the first day the bus and boat ran after the holidays, it was chaos on the day after New Years when we came back. When we boarded the boat, everyone just packed in around the door. They overbooked the boat, people were sitting and laying the aisles. I would say there was at least 200 people. For that many people, there were only 3 buses to bus people back to Apia. It was unbelievable to see how packed these buses got. As the bus was pulling away, a guy was literally hanging on the outside of the bus. Everybody who doesn't get on the bus have to find their own way home. We didn't make it. A few of us hitched a ride. The others, including me, crammed five people into a taxi. A bus ride is $2; a taxi ride is $35. It was interesting.
I start work on the 6th. Time to hit the grind I guess.

Manuia le Kirisimasi

2002-12-22T21:10:00.000-06:00

Merry Christmas (early)! I'm heading back to my training village to spend Xmas with my Samoan family. It will be my first time riding the buses here. You might find that an odd statement, but riding the bus is a very cultural experience. I'll let you know how it goes when I get back. The buses get extremely packed, especially around holidays. The bus can seat about 35 people, but I heard of other Peace Corps people riding on buses with about 80. It's normal to just sit on somebody you don't know. Should be fun. I'm spending a few days in the village for Christmas. I heard that our village is going to throw us a fiafia. Should be fun.
I moved into my new house last Thursday. Most people in my group have moved to their houses. A few are in temporary housing until their host agencies find a place. My house is great. My bank bought me furniture and a bunch of kithen supplies (pans & dishware). They bought me a fan, of which I am very happy. Fans out here are extremely expensive. I have the fan on me all night. They even bought me 2 leather couches. The kitchen is the same size as the living room and has tons of counter space. The only bad thing is no hot water. Cold showers for 2 years! I have a family living in front of me. They have been taking care of me. Samoan hospitality sometimes makes me feel guilty. I try to do something, but they won't let me. They don't know what it means to live alone. I'll give them something for their hospitality. I already had a bunch of my group come over and hang out. I let anyone who wants to crash for a night do so. I already had 4 people crash for 1 night. I like the company. We're a close-knit group; we like hanging around each other. This Saturday I'm having a house-warming party. I'll make dinner and we'll hang out. We'll visit each others' places eventually.
I started work last Friday. It's kind of boring right now, because I don't have a computer. I told them what I wanted and they're ordering it. Friday, they had their annual Christmas lunch. And that night, they had their Xmas party. I went for a few hours. I got a little tipsy. Don't worry, I took a taxi, since I can't drive in the Peace Corps. We don't start work again until January 6. Samoa has a lot of holidays jammed into 2 weeks. They celebrate Xmas, Boxing Day on Dec. 26, New Years, Independence Day on Jan. 2, and the Head of State's B-day on Jan. 4. Samoans like to drink beer. I wonder if I can buy stock in Vailima. :)

O a'u o le Pisikoa

2002-12-16T21:09:00.000-06:00

Good news! I passed training and will swear in as an official Volunteer tomorrow. The title of this blog translates to "I am a Peace Corps (Volunteer)". I actually passed the language proficiency interview one level above the required level to pass. A couple in my group got 4 levels above (show offs). The cool thing is that everyone in my group passed the language test the first time. If you didn't pass, you would have to have 20 more hours of language. Tomorrow we swear in at a nice resort on the southern part of the island. Thursday we all move to all our houses. Three in the group will be going to the other island, Savai'i. The rest will be in Apia. I'll be moving in then. I'll have pictures eventually. I start work on Friday. There isn't much going on at work. I start on the day when there is big Xmas party. I hear Xmas is mostly just for Samoans to get sh*t-faced drunk. I'll write the next blog drunk. :) I'll update the site in a week to say how the house and work are going. On to the final days in the village...
Nothing much happened in the village until the last day. As a final farewell to the village, each Peace Corps group puts on what is called a fiafia. We practices for it for a month beforehand. A fiafia is a large celebration of dancing. Yes, I actually danced (with my shirt off nonetheless). Our group had a bunch of dances we practiced. We started off with a war dance, which consists of the men looking mean and yelling Samoan. FYI, the traditional men's dress during a fiafia is wearing nothing but an ie (see below) and an ula (a flower necklace). We danced to a Samoan of which I never learned the title or the words. We just did cheesy scripted actions. The best part was the sasa dance. It's a sitting dance where you slap yourself alot (the name of the dance is similar to the word for to hit). We go through the actions of harvesting coconuts to feed "chickens". During the last bit, while the girls were scraping the coconuts, the guys were the chickens eating the coconuts. In between the dances a group of 1 girl and 2 guys danced a soa. It's where the girl dances traditional Samoan dance (siva Samoa) while the guys support her by screaming and hitting themselves. The guys role is improv. I did OK. The ladies of the village put on their own dances as well. They danced siva Samoa and some Western songs and dances. As a farewell, some of our group put on a play to thank the village. It was religious-centered but it had parts where the lead role was kicking people and the village laughed very hard. Samoans like violence; it's strange. It was fun.
We each said goodbye to our families. My family gave me some very cool outfits, some shoes and some necklaces. During the fiafia, the village gave a slew of gifts to the whole group. We divided up the gifts among the group. I got a can of pisupo, a hand fan and some ie's. Pisupo is the Samoan version of corned beef. Most of my group don't like it, but I like it. I won't eat the can I got. I got it as a momento. I may give it as a gift. As I was about to leave, my family gave me something of which I am very happy to receive. They gave me a fine mat which was woven by my grandmother. Fine mats are the most treasured gifts one can give in traditional Samoan culture. I'll hang onto it for a long time. Goodbyes weren't too sad. I'm going to visit my family during Christmas. I'm sure the goodbyes will be sad when I leave then.
I'll be in Apia from now on. I'll have more access to emails so I can stay in touch better. I hope to catch some of you on IM very soon.

Thanksgiving

2002-11-29T21:08:00.000-06:00

Happy (belated) Thanksgiving! Today we had a Thanksgiving dinner at the director's house for all of the volunteers. There was a lot of good food. Everything was perfect except there was no creamed corn. The director has a very nice house. It's on a hill and overlooks the entire city. On Thanksgiving day itself, a bunch of volunteers went to another volunteer's house to have a very untraditional thanksgiving dinner. We had an Indian (not native americans) dinner. We had some nice and spicy foods with names I can't remember, but it was very good.
Last week in the village we had a cultural day. We spent the day making and cooking food in the traditional Samoan cooking style. Samoans cook food on an umu, a fire made out of rocks, wood, coconuts shells, banana leaves. They put all of the food on the stones and shells and cover the food with more rocks and banana leaves. We had chickens, a pig, crabs, taro, bananas and palusami. I can now say I choked a chicken literally, not just figuratively. To kill chickens, we choked them to death and then the ladies plucked the feathers by dipping them in boiling water and then disembowled them and such. They wrap them in banana leaves and throw them on the umu. The guys killed the pig by choking it also. They seared the pig on the fire to burn off the hair. They disembowled it and throw it on the umu also. We also made palusami from scratch. It's made from coconut cream and three types of leaves. We also made the cream from scratch, which is a lot of work by the way. We husk a cocunut, crack it open, scrape the meat out by using an specific coconut scraping contraption, and then use a strainer to squeeze all of the juice out of the scraped coconut. It takes a lot of coconuts to make a cup of cream. We then wrap the cream in the leaves and cook them on the umu and it makes palusami. After cooking, we had a traditional Samoan dinner assigning roles to people. Our director had the roll of server and food fanner. I was a matai, so I got to eat first. Everything was great except that most of us got sick from the food. Probably someone with an open sore was preparing the food. Oh well.
Nothing else special happened in the village. We're still doing training. We are practicing for our fiafia, which is a celebration of dance. We're going to put it on for the village when we leave in 2 weeks. Believe it or not, I'll be dancing. We'll be doing traditional Samoan dances. It should be fun.
I don't think I'll be back in Apia until we're done with our village stay after 2 weeks. I'll give you an update when I get back.

Training in Apia

2002-11-16T21:07:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow we're heading back to the village. We spent the last two weeks on volunteer visit and on-the-job training. The first week we had volunteer visit. A lot of volunteers went to the other island of Savai'i for their visit. I was the only trainee who stayed in Apia. The volunteer I was with was Chelsea. She's been here a year working for the Public Service Commission of the Samoan government. A common struggle among volunteers and expecially with Chelsea is getting their host organization to get moving and do stuff. She basically did nothing for 8 months while trying to do something and then they finally let her do computer training for staff. She does do occassional help desk calls. When I was at work with her, she did a one hour tutorial, and then we did basically nothing for the rest of the day. I was there for 2 days. I checked email and looked at every picture she had since she got here. Her training is about to end, so who knows what she can do going forward. After work, we went to a couple of restaurants I haven't been to yet. We went swimming in the ocean one evening. We went to the market, bought food, and made a great veggie stirfry at her place. I came up with the idea to put some dark honey in it. Very tasty. She has a nice house; very large. And one night, a bunch of the current volunteers and myself (since I was in town) went to a Siva Afi (fire dance) at a local club. There is a local organization that puts on shows and competes in the championships each year in Hawai'i. One of the current volunteers, Taui (pronounced Tah-wee), performed at the show. He has been practicing for 4 months and he did great. There were local fire dancers and some Hawaiian dances. Samoa does their their own dance style. It's very fluid and involves gently hand motions.
Last week we had four days of OJT (on-the-job training). As I mentioned in an earlier log, that I will be working for the Development Bank of Samoa. OJT was mostly unproductive. There wasn't much training. I just met everyone. Of course I can't remember anyone's name. I can never remember a Samoan name the first time I hear it. They talk Samoan when they converse, but they talked English to me since I'm not good it at yet. The two most frequent questions I received, besides my name, are "Are you single?" and "Do you drink beer?". Almost everybody loves beer here. There is only one beer you can find very easily: Vailima. It's a local beer. It's Samoan for "water in the hand". It's a very tasty beer. My group has been out drinking quite a few times. The other interesting thing about Samoan culture is dating. When someone asks if you have a friend or someone of opposite sex wants to be your friend, that means you are dating. Everybody lies about whether they are married. The best way to find if a person is married is ask someone else. After I said I was single, the ladies were pointing all of the "single" girls in the office. I also heard dating is extremely complicated here. Since I've had no experience in America, I think I might pass on the dating here.
The bank has a small computer department of 4 people: one tech and three data entry people. They have an extremely inefficient computer system, so they have people doing ungodly amounts of data entry. I don't think I won't have nothing to do. They have a large list of stuff they want me to do. I'll be making their website and doing some tech work, and hopefully I'll make their current system more efficient, but that can take more than 2 years. I surfed the internet and played Solitaire for most of OJT. The best part is that they showed me 4 houses that were available. I got to choose which house I wanted. The host organization is responsible for each volunteer's housing. Nearly all volunteers never choose their house. They just move into whatever house their organization chooses. I feel privileged. My house is very nice. It's inside Apia proper and it's pretty large. It's three bedrooms with a large kitchen and a large living room. It's behind the owner's family house. So I'll probably be adopted by that family. It's probably only a mile from work. The bank is located on beach road which runs along Apia harbor. There are whole slew of shops all down the strip.
Well, tomorrow we head back to the village. We have another 4 weeks of training in the village and one final week in Apia before we swear in. We'll be back in Apia for a few days here and there while we stay in the village. I hope to update this log in a couple weeks.

Living in the Nu'u

2002-11-03T21:07:00.000-06:00

I'm back in Apia for two weeks. We just spent 2 weeks in the village. We are staying in the village (nu'u) of Matautu. We each are living with a host family. Samoan families are very large. Each family has a head of the family, called a matai. My Samoan father is Tupuola Ma'a and he is the matai and he is one of the ali'i (or chiefs) in the village. My mom is Vi'iga. My father is the matai of two complexes. My parents live in the complex up the road. I live in the complex with my aunt, Talu and her kids. I live with at least 20 people. Each complex consists of multiple fales (Samoan houses). A house is just a large open room with a floor, pillars and a roof. That's it. My family curtained off a part of one of the fales to be my room. I have a bed and table and chair and a chest to store my stuff. I'm the only one with a bed. Everyone just sleeps on a mat. I have a mosquito net to keep the bugs off me at night. My family has a lot of kids, so I hang out with them. I sing and dance and play volleyball with them. I'm great entertainment for them. My sister is an excellent seamstress. She made me new clothes everyday. Some are quite colorful. Here, both men and women wear what are called lavalavas. It's just a piece of cloth wrapped around your waist. I'm more conscious now about not flashing the family jewels. Don't worry, I wear underwear, but I heard some Samoans free-ball it. My only complaint is they serve waaaaay to much food. They serve at least 6 plates of food each meal. Luckily, it's cultural accepted to not eat it all. It's actually best not to. In Samoan culture, only the guest (me) and my father and mother eat together. The rest sit and watch us and fan us to keep the flies away. Only after we are done eating, does everybody else eat. They eat the rest of the food you didn't eat. The village is on the south side of the island right on the beach. It's a beautiful beach. I've been twice. They also have a natural fresh water pool right next to the beach. It's great to clean off in it. And some people bathe in it. Most Samoans bathe in public. All they wear is a lavalava and they shower underneath a water tap. Luckily my family has the water tap enclosed in an outhouse like structure.
My foot has healed and it's back to normal. No infection. I do have prickly heat, but I got that in Iowa. It's extremely hot here all of the time and I'm always sweating. I have a hand fan to try to keep cool.
Each of us have been given our assignments. As I mentioned in the last log, I'm for sure going to be working at the Development Bank of Samoa. Next week, I have four days of on-the-job training. I'll find out what I'll be doing and who I'll be working with. I'll let you know. For the next few days we have volunteer visit. Each trainee is visiting a current volunteer. I'm here in Apia with a tech volunteer working for the government. Most of the group is going to Savai'i (the other island).

Heading to the village

2002-10-18T22:05:00.000-05:00

Monday, our group is heading to the village. They us told was not to do to offend our host families. Samoans are very respectful in their actions and language. Our trainers say they are very excited about our arrival. They will throw us a large ava ceremony and then we will meet our families. It's exciting and stressful at the same time. We don't know a lot of the language yet. We finished our first week of language training. It can be daunting at times. I only know sounds (which are tricky), simple greetings and simple sentences. We haven't done much else. We met with our potential technical counterparts. I feel I know where I will be assigned. The Development Bank of Samoa is looking for the only programmer. The others are looking for computer teachers and techs. I am the only programmer in the group. Yesterday we had "water safety", which means they brought us out on a boat and let us snorkel. Unfortunately, I didn't go in because my foot is still healing. My foot is getting betting. I can walk on it fully now.
I'll be in the village for the next two weeks and will be back in Apia for on the job training. I'll give an update on how the village stay went when I get back.

Take one for the team

2002-10-14T22:05:00.000-05:00

I made it to Samoa. It's very beautiful. I arrived last Saturday. We are in a hotel for a week and then we move to a village to live with a host family until we swear in on December 18. We started training on Monday. We're starting to learn the language. It's a cool language, but very complex.
I'm with 11 other people in my training group. There are 8 IT people and 4 teachers. It's a good group. We get along well.
Saturday we went on a tour of Apia, the capitol city. Sunday, we went to the beach, and that's when the "fun" began. Within a minute of entering the water, I stood on sharp piece of corral. It punctured my foot about .75 inch. The nurse gave me a tentanus shot and I'm on antibiotics. I'll be hobbling for a while. I took one for the team. Now no one else will get hurt.

Bon Voyage!

2002-10-06T22:03:00.000-05:00

Today is my last day in Monona. My parents and I are driving to Cedar Rapids tonight, which is 2.5 hours away. My plane leaves for LA tomorrow morning at 7:43 AM. My group has staging at the Omni Hotel in LA for a couple days. We have 12 hours of orientation and paperwork. The rest of it will be leisure time. Never been to LA, so we'll see if we can find some freaky stuff. We leave LA late on the night of the 10th. We have a layover in Auckland, New Zealand, and then onto Samoa. We will arrive in Samoa on the 13th local time. We'll be crossing the International Dateline and then crossing back over it. I haven't calculated the distance. I don't want to; I just know it will be a looonng flight.
There are three other Americans, that I know of, going in my group. There is Vic from Virginia, Kris from Atlanta and Jeni from Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Like myself, Kris has an online blog. Check it out at http://www.krisrush.com/pc/.
There's probably Internet access in the hotel, so I may give my LA experience. If not, I'll write next from Samoa.