FLORA – this beautiful white hibiscus that Kiki picked and brought to our Teitei guest and me. Gorgeous, eh?
FAUNA – frankly, I did not pay much attention to the fauna. I should have. So should Akka. Ashmita told him there were spiders in the room 2 where the guest was, but he did not go spray. Our poor guest: she got bites. When she left, she assured us she had had a good time – that we were 85% wonderful. Eighty-five percent? Yes. We were 85% wonderful and 15% spiders. OOPS. Have to fix that!
Otherwise, fauna-wise – for this week I resorted to poetry.
This poem is in the form of a crostic, where each letter of the title is the first letter of a verse.
HEN
Hungry! I’m a walking stomach. peck peck peck peck
Egg! I’ve laid an Egg! Brrrrrruuuuk brrrrrrruuuk bruuuuuuuuk
Nesting now. I’ll show you what BROODY is. Do not disturb… or else!
***
What I was really doing this week: finishing another quilt. The firetruck one for Keanu. It is by far the cutest quilt I have ever made and so I am going to show lots of details.
Nicole did the basic design, and picked out all the cloth at the store. After everything was basically laid out, Granddaddy (Austin) was invited to put in his two cents. The MONKEYS were his idea.
Here is the fire truck.
The building.
The fire. This is the weak part – it needed to be ragged, but the satin was too shreddy. At the base in the pale yellow is the ouline of Keanu’s hand.
The Tool Box – which is a pocket. K. F. D. is for Keanu Fire Department.
The helicopter. I put this in at the last because the top left of the quilt was boring.
So anyway, I took it down to Keanu on Tuesday. Here is how it was received:
Rain, which I thought was GONE. I’m not going to mention weather any more!
FLORA
The biggest plant thing to me this week was that Akka chopped down the big avocado tree right out the kitchen window.
I saw him sitting in a branch with the tree mostly gone. SNIFF! That was a wonderful tree — gave us so many wonderful avocados. I guess we have several other fruitful trees, and that one WAS blocking the view a bit. Still, it hurt seeing it dismembered.
That night at Happy Circle, I found out it hurt more than that. Akka was happy that, “My phone didn’t get broken and I didn’t get hurt worse than I was.” WHAT ???? Turns out that just after we were talking, the branch he was sawing somehow bounced back and the dead branch he was resting his feet on broke. He got popped out of the tree (on the steep hill) in one direction and his phone went flying a different direction. The phone was fine, and Akka got a bruised rib and a sore thumb joint.
Happier Flora
I was hunting here for my elusive fauna
Bushy weeds, but pretty ones.
FAUNA
The original purpose of this blog, started nearly 10 years ago, was to inspire me to OBSERVE my environment more. So yesterday rolled around and I still had not paid attention to any animals. Then while taking a walk, some little yellow butterflies caught my eye. Hooray! Butterflies! I thought. Super interesting and nearly impossible to catch.
Those little yellow ones are so stinkin’ fast! I saw them on the road below the house, and completely lost them! I saw some beside our house in the yellow flower bush, and lost them.
I found a bigger butterfly, that finally landed on a branch – and using the zoom function on the phone, I was able to get a shot.
And finally, FINALLY, I got shots of the yellow one.
Here it is, resting for a split second. First is the location – the butterfly is on a leaf inside the marked circle. Next is that photo enlarged.
And here is the ONE shot I was able to get of that yellow butterfly in flight.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
FARM
I realized there is a piece of infrastructure that went up during my blog hiatus.
Behold a new nursery, funded by the Pacific Development and Conservation Trust from New Zealand. Austin is trying to tell me the history of this Development Trust – it came from money from a legal suit that NZ won because of the sinking of the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior. This nursery is beside the hatchery, and Junia is growing seedlings of trees for the forest and for permaculture in it.
FAMILY
We have another member of the Teitei family living in the compound and most of you do not know him yet.
This is Eroni.
He is our main Happy Chicken Man, and he helps out with whatever he sees.
Eroni’s brother Vula lived with us in Suva for a few years and was like an extra son; but we barely knew Eroni. Eroni went to serve in the Baha’i gardens in Israel, and at the end of his eight years, he sent word to Junia to ask Austin if he could work here. That was a surprise, but we decided to let him come here for awhile.
Now he is a total keeper. One more “sonny boy” on the farm. :)
It’s really not raining any more. But I’m afraid the months of deluge really impacted our agriculture. Vegetables are very expensive in our market; meanwhile, according to my friend Manik, the veggies from Tailevu (east side of this island – the “rainy” side) are now very cheap. I think they got our weather. It is crazy. Sigatoka was always the Salad Bowl…. now what are we?
FLORA
This is tej pathee – curry leaf. It grows in great abundance, gets infested with aphid like insects so we abandon that bush, then find it growing somewhere else. This is a new bush – well, one I just discovered. Very healthy.
FAUNA STUFF
Can you guess what this is?
Here is a close up.
Ideas?
I don’t know the proper name for it, but it is matted fur that came off the belly of one of the sheep. Austin was going to throw it away, but I rescued it, thinking it ought to be good for something. But I still can’t think of anything.
If you have any uses in mind, please tell me. Otherwise, I guess I’ll trim it to an oval and use it for a floor mat.
FAMILY
Two Kiki pix
Keith wanted to demo how to scape a coconut, but he had not actually scaped one by hand before, so I showed him how. Some people call it “scratching” a coconut, and that is a better description. You go scratch-scratch-scratch, shift, scratch-scratch-scratch, shift, etc. Kiki got as good as me Very Quickly.
Keith in his scout uniform. The sulu (skirt) is actually supposed to just be below the knees, but his upper body is so developed that he had to get the bigger size.. The serrated hem is traditional – traffic policemen still wear white sulus with the serrated hem. I took the photo just this morning, and only now notice I let him go to school in flipflops. Oops.
CULTURE CORNER – a Muslim funeral
My dear friend died on Saturday night. We took her body to the hospital. Her funeral was on Sunday morning.
My neighbor was Muslim, and this was my first Muslim funeral. I have posted about Hindu, Fijian and Baha’i funerals in this blog. But I was so unready for anything just a few hours after her death, it did not occur to me to take a single photo. It did not occur to me to try to observe the proceedings. I simply attended.
The men sat under a very large tarp canopy outside. The women sat on the large porch of the house. Everyone was mostly silent. A hundred people or more in Muslim dress arrived. Representatives from every household in our community were there. With no notice to speak of at all, this was quite a large funeral. My friend’s body lay on a pallet in the middle of the porch, covered by a heavy green sheet.
At some point a kindly Muslim gent came and spoke to the ladies. I’m told that he said they would uncover her body now for viewing, and that everyone could look, but please do not touch. I did not go to view the body again, as I had seen her last night. She just looked like she was sleeping.
Men washed hands and feet for a few moments at a sink by the porch – then went to perform a prayer. I wandered into the kitchen where my friend’s Fijian relatives were hanging out. I hung out, too, visiting them. I found it more comfortable than sitting quietly.
After awhile, I heard Austin’s voice really clearly – his voice carries. Turned out he was making a speech at the husband’s invitation. Turned out that was the closing speech. Whatever service there was at the house, I had missed it.
The body was wrapped in the mat and the cloth, and carried to a van. Most of the men left for the cemetery also. I assume there was a graveside service at the cemetery – I hope to attend a graveside service some day to understand it better.
Anyway, respectful care of the body is breathtakingly speedy, but the Muslim funeral process itself is not overly quick. Now the family has embarked on nightly prayers for forty nights. Everyone is welcome. That gives a blessed space for grief and healing.
***
Thank you all for reading along. I hope you all have a blessed week.
I woke up this morning with chilly feet: in the southern hemisphere we are going into autumn. But the coconut oil is still liquid, so we haven’t gone into a tropical freeze yet.
FLORA
On my way up to the pavilion, I was surprised by a cactus flower.
Actually there were a lot of cactus flowers.
All those cacti had buds or blooms. And also the crown of thorns plant.
I like this photo because it shows the thorns and the flower, and also some weird moss. That moss is stuck on. It is like dueling natures are competing. One side wants thorns and the other side wants to cover up and soften them.
I wasn’t going up to the pavilion on a flower-hunting mission – that was just a bonus. I wanted to see the graveled path Eroni was making to the pavilion. (We need the path because when it rains, walking up the hill and across the flat is a soggy slog. Ick.)
It’s getting there. This path, when extended will enter the pavilion straight on. The flower lined path for the last twenty feet or so will have to be shifted to the right. Right?
I also wanted to show y’all the beautiful tiles.
The tiling is all done except for the step. When I went up the first time to look at them, there was a large ring of droppings on them from birds roosting in the cupola. Ugh.
It took a few days, but Austin dealt with it.
He hung four pairs of old CDs, shiny sides out, from rafters in the cupola. Birds feel threatened by the flashy lights and they no longer tarry there. It reminds me of my great aunt hanging pie tins in her cherry tree.
FAUNA
I know long-time readers want to catch up on the dogs. Surprisingly we have exactly the same cohort that we had two years ago.
Jumper – the lord of the compound.
Winky – the lady of the compound.
And Po, the dowager queen.
FAMILY
We were really happy that JoyceLee was able to come visit. Joyce is Monica and Akka’s daughter who now lives with Monica’s father and some extended family in Lautoka.
Here she is with Keanu and Kiki. We were so happy to see how much she loves books.
Joyce and Granddaddy.
Kiki made her a birthday cake.
Happy happy. Joyce’s other grandmother “Ta Droka” is the woman in the photo.
FOLLOW UP
I’d wanted to tell you just a little more about the **Woo-Hoo** project boat. Austin has an assistant named Wilson who is both learning the coral strategies and has also become a licensed boat driver.
With the boat, Austin and Wilson now have the flexibility to do a lot more monitoring and to set up nurseries in more places. All very interesting.
It was possible to purchase the boat and engine and necessary equipment because of a one-year grant from UNEP (United Nations Environmental Programme) and from donations to Global Giving. Here is a link for those who are interested in Austin’s project: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/emergency-response-to-massive-coral-bleaching/
Now for the most INTERSTING thing about the boat to me. What color would you say the interior is? I would say white. Right?
Wrong!
It’s not white. It is gray.
Austin and Wilson explained that they were careful to get a gray interior because it reflects less light and does not lead to cataracts as quickly as white paint does. Once I was told, I could see it.
Flora and Fauna Weekly Report 