Graduation

It’s that time already. Kids grow up so fast, don’t they? Why, I remember the day we all met at Brisbane airport before boarding the plane. So young, so naïve, so excited! So pale. All kind of angry we hadn’t been given free excess baggage, but still excited. And now here we are, spread across Fiji, from the Burning West to the Exotic-but-equally-burning East, with a little pocket hunkered down in Suva. It’s been almost four months, and we’ve learnt a lot. We’re not so young anymore (obviously); we’re definitely not so naïve - we no longer think that taxi drivers want to marry us because we’re nice people; and for the most part, we’re not so pale. And to top it all off, we’re no longer the new kids in town.

That’s right people. Graduation occurs in Fiji every three to six months when a new intake of volunteers arrives and the former new kids are no longer...new. That was sort of self-explanatory. To experience it both as a newbie and a graduand is actually fairly interesting (read: interesting only to people who care about social interaction), and made something apparent to me. Wait for it, it’s a good one.

I actually know stuff! Who knew that after four months, useful and interesting information has filtered through my sun-bleached (SUN-BLEACHED I TELL YOU) hair and into my skull? Furthermore, the slower pace of life hasn’t destroyed all my brain cells because I was actually able to recall said pieces of useful and interesting information and pass them along to some of the new first-years when we went away for the weekend.

So, whilst you people at home reading this constantly comment/critique that I don’t do any work; that it looks like I’m having a ball; that all my photos are so awesome; that my hair really is lighter, are you sure you haven’t dyed it?; let the record show that even though most of the above statements are true (all of them except the hair one), I’m also being wise, just, and largely awesome on an epic scale. So really, Fiji hasn’t changed me at all.

The graduating class of 29 April 2011

A couple of other things have happened in the last week that aren’t worth their own posts, so I’ll summarise here. Since I’ve returned from Australia (whoa, it's weird to say returned from Australia), I’ve seen three movies in four days, with another two to come on the weekend. BUT I only had two choc tops. I’ve been called fat by our house cleaner (she obviously didn’t realise that I could very well have had one more choc top); went to the Fijian equivalent of Rock Eisteddfod/Wakakiri, which was way more awesome than I expected it would to be, despite the use of about four of the same songs from the Suva Soundtrack in nearly 15 performances (which led to almost 15 exasperated face-palms on my part); and did some real work. True story.