Nurse Batai examines a villager
Sunday, August 3, 2014

Hungry Anyone?

It's been two weeks of lousy weather! The wind has been blowing 15 - 30 knots for days and days and days!! The howling sound, so ominous, really gets to you at times. Combined with the jerky motions on the boat from the wind chop, it makes you feel unsettled, jumpy. Sleep is difficult...ugh....Mother Nature can really be cruel at times. We started calling our weather router, Commanders Weather, a week ago - hoping for a decent weather window to head to the capital of Fiji, Suva, to re-stock our seriously dwindling supplies. You know it's getting bad, when you're walking along with other cruisers and you start asking the question, "If you could go to a restaurant right now, and order anything in the world, what would you choose?" We are down to some of the last of our supplies. A dozen or so eggs - unrefrigerated and four weeks old, one onion, a few cloves of garlic, no fresh veggies, 4 rolls of retarded toilet paper. Retarded you say? Yeah, Americans, enjoy your two ply double rolls. Enjoy your hearty Saran Wrap and aluminum foil, your Glad ziplock bags. Even though I actually purchased the Glad brand of ziplock bags in New Zealand, in no way are they the quality that you can purchase in the United States. Anyway, needless to say, proper provisioning and keeping the crew happy on a boat is an art form. And can practically be a full time job.

Anyway, this dreamy food conversation was taking place, while we were on a 10K walk back from the third village on the island of Fulaga with the island nurse and four other cruisers. This was our second day of volunteering with a health census. Height/weight and the dreaded BMI. Blood sugar and blood pressure as well. This was a three day event for the three villages - one village a day. Ben was in charge of measuring peoples height (go figure!), Larry did the BMI formula, and I (I'm not sure how I landed in this job) poked peoples fingers for a mere drop of blood. Now this sounds easy, doesn't it? Not so much. First off, it was early morning and these peoples hands were freezing! Second, have you ever felt the calluses on a mans hands who has been fishing and farming and woodcarving and who knows what else his entire life? And third, we were doing this on our hands and knees on the floor because a table and chair is practically unheard of here in these islands! The first day I was all gentle and all, using the individual clicking pokey things, sometimes having to do it numerous times for that single drop. By the second day I had moved onto the needle looking gadget that really seemed to do the trick but I did make a few of the people jump...sorry.

It really was a great experience, and wonderful to meet almost every person on the island - say, "Bula!", and shake their hand. We had that feeling of - right...this is why we are doing what we are doing, slowly sailing around the world. And the best thing of all was really getting to know Batai - the sweet, gentle, smart, hardworking male nurse/doctor/nutritionist/trauma center - who literally has his finger on the pulse of all the inhabitants of Fulaga. It is a tremendous undertaking for a twenty seven year old, and possibly a three year commitment. He is originally from Suva, a big bustling city, where he started working at the age of nine, selling his mothers homemade roti on the street till all hours of the night, after his father left the family. Batai, being the oldest of three children, had the weight of the world on his shoulders. After we learned the story of his life, he asked us, what were our childhoods like? Larry and I looked at each other, and in that quiet beat our minds were racing...what could we say? We both looked at Batai and said one word...spoiled.

The health concerns in this census were weight, diabetes, and hypertension. Only theirs is not from too many trips to McDonalds. It is more likely due to genetics, and the all famous taro root and sweet potatoes and all things - as I like to say, white death. So, starving by noon, we were served lunch both days, consisting of white bread, white crackers, and jam. I thought I was gonna go into a diabetic coma! The hot water boiled with lemon leaves was a treat though.

As you can clearly see, this 10K walk was challenging. Not only because we were trudging through mangroves and climbing up rocks and through tree roots and thick black mud, and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes (we'd run out of mosquito repellant by now), but we were also covered in burrs from the thickets that you walk through all over this island (the poking of the stickers does sort of take your mind off the itch of the mosquito :).

So, in times like these, doesn't the question - if you could order anything in the world to eat right now what would it be - seem appropriate?