Claudia Nei

Free time? What is this free time you speak of?

Free time is a beautiful thing!  It gives one the choice between wasting their life away or being productive by completing fulfilling tasks or being productive by fulfilling dreadful tasks! Such is the liberty of free time.

It’s so easy to get caught up in routine and i suppose for the last two months thats what has happened; i’ve been caught up in exams and school that everything else gets pushed aside.  Those two weeks in Fiji, they don’t seem that long ago but at the same time they’ve felt longer than the last two months have been.  Reading my journal and looking through pictures, memories come flooding back.  Fiji almost seemed like an escape, a break in the daily grind and a place where, for once, you can take a breath of humid air and reflect about life and how fast it’s passing you.  Whats been on my mind recently is how different Fiji is from Richmond, and by extension how different a third world country is from a first world one.  Often times, i feel like theres a romantiziation of third world life- and this irks me to extremes.  Theres a reason why we don’t live like that, it’s not ideal.  Its hard to sort out reason from flaming emotions, especially when irrationality from fatigue kicks in.

Coming back home, quite frankly, doesn’t feel like home at all.  It took a while for me to realize where i am now, apart from the drastic temperature difference. Jumping back into my own life, the tied and true routine of school, study and volunteer seems so mundane and dreary, especially after Fiji.  I couldn’t bring myself to blog because of how different it felt to me, how something that was once so familiar is now something i can’t quite imagine myself doing for the next five years.   I feel as though we’ve built an alternate life there, and to come back into what we once created makes it dated and so much more flawed.  Its frustrating to add newfound changes to an old model that can’t seem to accommodate for them.   Jumping back into the problems at home, I don’t quite remember feeling so bitter and remorseful.

But seeing a new cycle of students, a new location, a new start, i’m getting all excited again! I should really get to writing that letter, but i don’t know how to start it, and once i start i bet i won’t know how to finish it.  Either way, it’s a much needed break from all the studying, (or perhaps lack of) that has been dominating, and will continue to dominate, this month and the next.

Everything has passed by so quickly! Days seem like a blur, rewarding but they pass too quickly for my liking.  There have been several things I’ve taken notice of, particularly the families and how they interact. The fathers are the “worker bees” of the family, they do most of the labor. The mothers cook and clean , the children are taken care of by both parents.  The children are responsible for their education and also for helping around the house.  What struck me the most is the dependency of the families.  They rely on each other to survive: without the mother there would not be food on the table everyday, and without the father there no one would earn the money for the household.  Comparing this to modern life and how a first world society runs, I find that this dependency is lacking.  Families, in comparison, sustain themselves.  Females can hold their own jobs and can live without the male, the father’s can learn to cook for themselves or find other methods of obtaining a meal.  I feel like perhaps, this is the reason why modern families experience more unhappy marriages.  They lack the same reliance, and maybe because of this they lack the basic interactions that make families in a third world country so strong.  The sense of community is so strong here, the sense of family is so incredible, that sometimes I feel nostalgic about my family.  Its strange, being treated so kindly in another country while at home I don’t experience this same level of community.

These last few days have left me with a mixture of emotions I don’t know quite how to handle. It’s a confusing soup of conflicting feelings that juxtapose and enhance each other, making everything more surreal and so the more strange. Pride and guilt, joy and shock, grief and thankfulness- I don’t know quite deal with these. The sacrifice of the goat left many questions, many of which got me thinking of what life is like in the third world, what life is like for my family, what modern life is like, and what life itself entails. I was shocked and didn’t know how to react: on one hand I was left feeling uneasy, but on the other hand I felt a deep thankfulness that they conducted the ritual in a quick and efficient manner. To add to the confusion, immediatley afterwards we hiked up a mountain and celebrated the Festival of Colours. The atmosphere of the festival was entirely different from the ritual; everyone was happy, everyone was smiling, everyone was joyous and caught in the sensual music, I put the thoughts of the goat behind me. Its eerie and strange how people can fluxuate from one extreme of emotion to the other. In all honestly, I don’t know what to make of these emotions and what has happened. Reflecting upon myself and upon the world that I reside in, I guess there is no answer. People do what they must to survive, whether a goat is sacrificed in the process or a person passes away; life continues callously forward. Another thing may be how tight knit and close this community is; they experience life together. They experience hurricane, festivities, success, and failure together- they life together. I wonder why this sense of community is lacking where I come from. I wonder where all these differences stemmed from, and often I find myself surprised at the hospitality of this country while in my own, often times I feel like a stranger in a sea of faces. Maybe all these emotions will lead to something miraculous, maybe they’ll lead to nothing. But its strange to put words to this experience for the sole reason that even I don’t know how to explain it. It’s going to a be a long journey coming to terms with what has occurred, and for the rest of my life I don’t think I’ll forget this day.

Paint with your mind’s eye a green lanscape- rolling lush green hills, green palm tress, green houses, green sugar canes, green grash, gorgeous saturated green as far as the eye can see only broken up by the sparatic neon coloured houses and tan people walking casually down the road. As if painted by a child who only knows of saturated simple colours, I have to say I am left breathless at this sight. Despite the natural raw beauty of the country, the differences are almost as stark as the flourescent landscape to the light blue sky.

The opening ceremony was great! Super eventeratining and welcoming, I don’t think I’ve smiled so much in one sitting watching people I didn’t know dance. However, after interacting with people and calming down to notice certain things, many differences became apparent. There weren’t any girls, and for a while I only talked to a little baby. She was so small and so young, I felt like I was looking at my younger sister when she was just under one year old. Crawling on all fours, she smiled and laughed with an innocence I had long forgotten. What I found particularly strange is that people here drink out of bowls; water, tea and soup are all drank out of bowls. Yes, not that peculiar on the first glance but when a baby is crawling on all fours and the mother holds out a bowl to her and she gulps it down, tounge slurping and water dripping down her face and into her dress, the sight is extremely canine. I was somewhat taken aback- I thought of my sister and how she would never have gotten fed like this. I suppose i’ve always associated babies and how they were fed with baby bottles and tiny bowls, but in th e thrid world these luxuries don’t exist. Its shocking to see how i’ve never thought of this before. I supose I better be used to these shocks. It’s quite strange to come to a location where things are so different; I’m so used to being able to speak my mind about something that feels uneasy to me. But here in Fiji, it’s not my place to speak these things. And I suppose, that’s one aspect i’ll have to learn to cope with.

cold, damp, soaked, wet, uncomfortable, and a thousand other words in the english rhetoric to describe the exhilarating feeling of being a human sponge.  I make it sound worse than it is, but it really wasn’t all too bad.  After a while you don’t notice the water; in front of a massive sea of wet recyclables the rain becomes a minor detail.  I’m really impressed that everyone was a diligent as they were, or perhaps i shouldn’t be since a major motivator would have been going hone to a hot shower as soon as possible.  But this last bottle drive is the last large fundraiser before we leave.  it’s so exciting and its so heartbreaking that this long journey, gr 12 and everything that it entailed, is reaching an end.  High school is cummulating into a few large exams, univeristy letters and this trip? it’s pretty sad to realize that this trip is the only positive event that’s happening.

Compared to the education my parents grew up with, school in Canada is definitely much more liberal.  In Hong Kong, my parents described a school system which had exams that determined if you passed or failed the year in first grade.  The system also made it so that a certain % of students had to retake their grade again.  From what they expressed, school wasn’t a learning environment, it is a memorizing environment.  The word explaining it is literally translated into “dead remember”.  In contrast to the schooling we receive here, i wonder how the edcuation in Hong Kong became like that?  It seems incredibly traditional, with a teacher lecturing at the front and then assigning homework.  Their student’s understanding and comprehension of the material has no effect on them, and it seems like the adults view education not as a journey of learning and growth but as a responsibility that the students should have, though whether or not they achieve it is none of their concern.  Despite this, i do see connections to Canada.  All around the world, school is incredibly competitive.  Students compete for the best grades to get into the most prestigious schools.  I know its wistful thinking, but sometimes i wish this competition wasn’t as cutthroat.  Perhaps it would be less stressful and more enjoyable, more about learning, if grades became a measure of effort, diligence, and understanding.  Then again, when it comes to the future, i suppose everyone sees a good school as the multipurpose key that opens a multitude of doors, or the swiss army knife that can cut in all directions.

The world is vast and large, with diverse people and cultures more than I can even comprehend.  Living in Richmond seems so small and safe; I’ll walk the same trodden path to school, the same beat down road to the library, and the same worn out street back home.  It’s so easy to stay in the familiar and live in complacency, and i guess the quote is trying to say that if you only live in your own bubble, in  the familiarities and redundancies of  an enviroment almost devoid of uncertainty you only limit yourself and your view of the world to simply one “page” if you will.  I can explore every nook, every punuation dot and every paragraph break but I’d never be able to understand what other pages, other cultures and other countries, would be like? Maybe they don’t use commas, or they dont capitalize? I would never know.  To travel is to broaden one’s horizons and to paint a larger more livid image of the world and the people who reside in it.  Traveling to Fiji will definately be a new experience, and i’m trying my best to go in without expectations and without any idea of what will happen.  I enjoy the uncertainty that accompanies travel, “who knows what will happen” factor.  I don’t enjoy expectations, so right now I don’t know what to expect from the trip other than lots of water and a nice resort.

First post of 2011! Heres to a great year.

New years is always a great time, a “fresh” new start: a new year, a new decade, and for most of us, in a few months new prospects and new schools.  2011 seems like such an optimistic year, and I’m so excited I can hardly wait.  I know I’m being incredible optimistic (its almost uncharacteristic!) but i suppose winter vacation and time away from school to breath is a good thing. Breathing is always a good thing.

One thing has been crossing my mind, I wonder what New Years is like for people around the world.  Especially for myself, I’ve come to think of New Years as, almost, just another day.  In other countries they’ll still have to work on New Years, they still have to work on new years eve, and despite the festivities what defines a new year for them? There have been a lot of celebrations at this time of year, and for myself that is what characterizes a “New Year”.  But if i didn’t have those, the potlucks and hot pots, what would my New Years be like? I spent New Year Eve doing homework so I’m not exuberant about that, but without the celebration and the hype, New Years would be another day for me.  This holiday season has really got me questioning what a holiday would be like without the hype? Wouldn’t it just be another day.

Merry Christmas! Hope everyone is enjoying a relaxing and festive holiday break.  I’ve always loved this time of year, the festivities and the holiday cheer always brings out the best in people.  Maybe its the sweet smell of freshly baked cookies wafting in from a warm kitchen? Or the smiles and excitement when people receive gifts? My personal favorite is curling up on the loveseat with a blanket, a good book, and a steaming hot cup of milk tea by the fire.

But there is one thing that has been on my mind this year that normally i would ignore: what about people in different parts of the world less fortunate than ours?  From the world religions assignment, most of the less literate countries were Islam, not Christian.  Does this mean they don’t celebrate Christmas? Since (at least my family) celebrates Christmas because of the birth of Christ, its a religious celebration.  Looking at the more literate countries, Christianity reigns as the main religion.  So can i assume that Christmas is a “wealthy literate persons” holiday?   But even without the religious celebrations, most people wouldn’t have luxuries such as a fireplace and hot coca.  They wouldn’t even have a book to read, much less be able to read.