Alpaca My Bags! : Day Six - Village Life

Day six was a great day. We worked hella hard on the community service project. We moved a lot of rocks and got our hands very dirty. Thank God for the work gloves. I took a lot of water breaks… holly Hartman is a really intense worker. I managed to escape getting a sunburn another day. I cannot deal with the number of flies that swarm our food during lunch. I could really use an executioner rn. Lisa actually thought I was dancing when I was actually swarming flies away from my face today at lunch. Shoutout to Lisa for ripping yesterday’s knot out of my hair. #MVP. Post lunch, Madiha and I raided the boys’ house in a search to find a card reader. We failed to find one, but we found gummies among Jamison’s stuff. The Fijian boys took us for a hike to the farm. I didn’t know what I was in for when I agreed to go. That was a lot more incline than I planned for. My legs were covered in dirt up to my knees. It wasn’t really a farm at all. It was a Kava farm. I axed some branch with a machete, so that was pretty fun. We took a bunch of pictures that we needed for our village scavenger hunt. Instead of playing volleyball today, Chase and I took the time to go to villagers’ houses and sat down and talked to them and got to know them by having a conversation. It was nice that it was just him and me because everybody else sort of feels like the paparazzi. We got to meet the youngest child in the village and learn all about their family. The last thing we did while visiting with them was take their pictures. Today we learned that the most important part of photography is connecting with people. I learned a lot about Fijian culture and life and it was amazing to see the inside of the houses. The next person we visited was the eldest person in the village. Her name was Mary, and she was 84 years old. When Chase and I walked in the door, she started crying tears of joy because she was so happy to have visitors. Another woman named Ili came with us to translate because Mary didn’t speak English at all. She said that she was so happy we visited because she felt like everybody forgets to visit the old people. She sang for us in Fijian and she remembered an English song. Mary asked us if Chase and I were husband and wife. I laughed and shook my head and said no no we are best friends, but I think she thought were brother and sister. ha oh well. It was honestly the highlight of my trip. She asked us to take her family portrait and we promised to send it to her. When we got up to leave, she said something to Ili and Ili turned to us and said that Mary asked if we could visit tomorrow. We promised. She kissed our hands and we said goodbye. That just about did us in. We took pictures of the sunset. I helped Fijian kids with their math homework. Dinner was edible today!! After dinner, we took pictures of the stars. I didn’t take any though because I let other people use my tripod. Overall, it was a great day. My lows today were the dirt on my legs and the flies swarming me. My highs today were playing keep it up with a balloon at lunch, connecting with the villagers with Chase, and laying on the ground staring at the stars with Madiha, Chase, Brett, and Mrs. Simon. We spotted the Southern Cross in the sky.