Celebrating my Birthday Fiji style

I celebrated my first birthday in Fiji this week. I’d like to thank everyone that sent birthday wishes. It was great to hear from so many of you. I had a great day cooking up a storm for a large group of people that came over in the evening for a kava drinking session.  Arthur surprised me with a birthday cake that came from Labasa with his nephew Johnny Hewson and a group of young men. They came to plant cassava and to drink kava. Unfortunately my camera was dead so no pictures.

Aside from my birthday, we’ve had a busy week working on the addition to our kitchen and with planting more taro and cassava. Due to the damage to crops, there is a shortage of root crops in many areas of Fiji post TC Winston. The government is providing emergency rations to many communities and encouraging everyone to plant food crops to speed the recovery. Our crops were not too badly damaged and are already recovering.

Work on our shelter continues. We almost have completed the base plate and flooring. Hopefully we’ll have some walls and roof up in the next week. I’m looking forward to being out of the tent. We’ve had to put up tarps to provide some shade over the work area as it has been very hot with temperatures in the 30’s.  The tarps have also been great for collecting rainwater. We had a cloud burst 2 days ago and filled our rain barrel, all the water containers, and every pot and basin that we have in less than half an hour.