After my 11-hour flight from LAX, my group and I arrived in Fiji. We quickly left the mainland to go to a small island named Kuata. Kuata is a beautiful island that honeymooners and vacationers go to if they want to get away from the mainland. We really enjoyed our time in Kuata and felt like we were on a vacation after our fourteen hours of service each day. Then we left Kuata and went to a small village on a different island, named Somo Somo.
My experience in Somo Somo was much different than in Kuata. Instead of living the tourist life, we were culturally immersed, and lived with locals. On our first day in Somo Somo we arrived via boat, and saw what would be home for the next week. We soon realized that we had no drinking water except for one hose shared by the five huts next to ours. We walked into our hut and saw that we would sleep on mats made of palm leaves, which were on the soil, instead of our former mattresses. This was very different than the Fiji I had experienced the night before. I had assumed that Fijians didn’t live like we did at Kuata but I wasn’t expecting to not be able to charge my camera because the entire island didn’t have electricity. After talking with the locals about their lifestyle, they said that most islands in Fiji are like Somo Somo and not like Kuata. The luxurious Fiji that tourists vacation on is very different than the real Fiji that the majority of the locals live in.
My group worked on other islands restoring reefs for another 2 weeks and then went back to America. My life was back to normal, but my perspective on what “normal” was like drastically changed. I began to really think about just how fortunate I was to be able to wake up, in my bed, and walk to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water at my leisure. Something that seemed so simple was not available for everyone. I want to make it clear, I did know that a significant amount of people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water the same way I do. But there was something so personal about the fact that my friend Ropate didn’t. My experience in Fiji made the issue of access to clean drinking water, beds with mattresses, electricity etc. extremely personal. Now, I am still very undecided as to my major, but I know that I want to help people like Ropate have these things that I so easily take for granted.
During my trip to Fiji I made some incredible friends, learned some Fijian, and even swam with sharks, but I learned what I really want to do with my life, and that is help people like my friends that I made in Fiji. Now I just need to decide what major, and ultimately profession will best suit me to do that.