Bula Vinaka!

It's been almost 3 weeks since our awesome country directors arrived in Fiji! It's gone by really fast and it feels like we've gotten a lot done.

The first two weeks most of us worked on finding contacts for our projects as well as working on some manual labor projects. We've continued a garden project the team last year started with the Tavua Hospital. We've built one clay stove, kind of a tester because most of the stoves that were built last year cracked so we're trying to find the right clay mix. We've met with a number of women's groups and contacts in villages to figure out what the different people want and need. On wednesday the 26th we're having a big workshop where most of the groups will present ideas as to what we can do for the community. At the workshop there will be a reps. from the women's groups and some villages, we're hoping to get people even more excited about what we're here to do and help the locals see what we can do for them and decide what they want us to teach them/help them with.

We've decided what project categories we want to focus on so far, we've got the following going:

- Square Foot Gardening
- Nutrition
- Health (including hygiene, disease protection and prevention, hospital volunteer opportunities, teen pregnancy and other STDs, etc)
- Business Classes/ Business start-ups
- Fitness
- PRISM (A doctor from the States focuses on community health and is using a lot of our volunteers to reach out to communities to make them healthier and stop non-communicable diseases)
- Adobe/Clay Stoves
- Music Classes & Theater
- ESL (English as a Second Language)
- Schools (all grade levels)
- FRIEND Organization - (a Fiji NGO that goes out into rural communities to teach self-reliance)
- PWD (People with Disabilities)
- Village Construction

All groups are moving forward with goals and we find that the community is excited that we're here to help out.

The team is doing great and we all get along really well and spend our free time playing games and enjoying ourselves. This past weekend we went to Lautoka, a city an hour and a half from Tavua, and went a super sweet hike. It was beautiful there! Really tropical ans almost like walking through a rain forest. plus, the view was amazing!

That's all for now :)