Visitors, Slivers, Pineapples, Chillies, and Trucks

Oh my goodness time has gotten away on me. Its already well into the new year and I missed sending my best wishes to everyone. I hope that everyone had a restful and joyful Christmas season and the best to everyone in 2018. We were fortunate to have several sets of visitors over the season. Our first visitors were Freddy Steiner and his wife from Labasa who dropped by for tea on Boxing Day. Then on the 27th we had Arthur’s nieces Patricia, Oveena, and Rachel from New Zealand arrive for a few days with 3 of their kids, Rachel’s husband Bola, and cousin Larry from Labasa. It was a full house and we enjoyed every minute of their company. Arthur and I had a quiet New Year’s eve followed by a quiet New Year’s day. And then on January 4th Jim and Melanie Carter from Whitehorse, Yukon arrived for a visit. They were vacationing in Savusavu with their family and rented a vehicle to make the trip to Wainunu. It was wonderful to share our home with so many visitors and a great way to end 2017 and bring in 2018.

After all the visiting it was time to get back to farming but no sooner than the Carters had left I took a massive hardwood splinter from my deck in my foot. I can’t express how incapacitating this has been for me in both pain and time away from daily activities. I was not able to remove it immediately so after a night of pain, we went to

Nabouwalu Hospital to see if they could remove it. But no luck, and following a tetanus shot, penicillin shot, oral antibiotics was told to come back in a week. Again after two more nights of pain, I decided that I was not going to wait for a week and needed to go to Labasa to have it removed. I took the 5am bus and arrived at the hospital at 10:40am. Because it was not an emergency I was seen in the Outpatient Department. I was registered and given a number and told to wait to see the triage nurse – 98 and they were just serving 36. I will never complain about wait times in Canada again!!! I finally saw a doctor at 2:30pm, had an X-ray taken which didn’t show the piece of wood, saw another doctor at 4:30, had an ultrasound scan which showed a likely foreign body, saw a surgeon at 6:00 and had it removed at 6:30pm. A very sizeable sliver at 2 cm (3/4″) long. It’s healed fairly well now after almost two weeks and I’m walking easier.

Aside from visitors and my health care experience, life on the farm continues. We sold 55 meat birds for the Christmas season and are now raising an additional 50 meat birds for Easter. Our laying birds continue to lay about 70 eggs per day. Our layer pullets have moved down to a new shelter close to our main layer birds. Based on the success we’ve had this past year and on the growing demand, we plan to expand our small poultry business this year. Arthur and Charlie will start building an extension to our main chicken shelter soon. By the end of this year we hope to have about 200 laying birds. We’ve also had bumper crops of pineapples and chillies.  Before my mishap with the sliver I was busy making pineapple jam and jelly as well as canning about 50 pineapple. Fiji lemons which are very similar to seville oranges were also in season so I just had to make marmalade.  We planted some crocodile chilies before my last trip to Canada and they are now bearing like crazy.  These chilies are called crocodile chilies in Fiji because of their nubbly skin but they look like ghost chilies are are dammed hot.

Arthur is in Suva right now on a truck buying expedition. We have decided that we are done with being dependent on bus travel and on hiring trucks for transportation. This will give us a bit more independence and flexibility as well as reduce our travel times. We will be able to take our produce and crops to market and not be dependent on a middleman coming to the farm, as well as being able to purchase bulk chicken feed. This is his third trip to Suva in the past 2 months to try to find an appropriate truck. Initially we were looking at purchasing a new 3 ton truck but couldn’t justify the large down payment and monthly loan payments. So we looked at a number of older used vehicles. But what a lot of rust buckets!!! The first truck we looked at they wanted $10,000 for a 1985 Toyota 2 ton flat bed truck, which needed to be towed back on its test drive. The second truck the wanted $7,500 for a 1991 Isuzu that was ready to fall apart on the lot. The third truck they wanted $20,000 for a 1993 Hino truck with 400,000km, granted it was well maintained. So we’re back to looking at new and we think we finally have found something that it not too pricey. Arthur is making the deal today.