Tribewanted: Vorovoro

Coming in live from Vorovoro, reaching out to all the tribe family, this is Hammock Society FM. I’m gazing out across the Pacific Ocean in anticipation of seeing a whale swim by cos that’s what happened a week ago. A big, fat, whale… breaching and diving, breaching and diving. It was pretty awesome. But this is no time for day dreaming, I’m here with a fellow team member, he’s the tallest team member staggering in at a whooping 6ft5” and is our current Sustainability Manager … Ben Katz.

Hello everybody.

You’ve just returned from a month’s holiday in Hawaii, feeling fully recharged, what ideas have you come back with?

I’ve got a lot of ideas. I hope we can get them all done. I really want to make sure we have enough water. We’ve just enough now for cooking and for tribe to drink but not for bathing or the gardens so that’s my main focus. Once we get that, we can produce more of our own food and really help with sustainability.

Water storage has been a hot topic on the forums recently, what ideas do you have floating around in your head?

There’s two ideas and we’re still looking into both of them. One of them is more plastic water tanks and that’s definitely reliable. The other is building a large reservoir water catchment system. We’ll be able to store more water than with the plastic tanks and it will probably be more cost effective in terms of dollars per litre stored, it will allow us to grow more fish to eat as well as preventing the pond from becoming a mosquito fun house. It could also be somewhere for tribe to bathe.

I like the reservoir idea but not sure that I would wanna bathe in that when I have the ocean… unless you’re gonna install some water-slides down from the showers. Yes, let’s do that… wohoooooooooooo!

We’re still looking into costs and we need to do some soil tests first to see if it’s feasible.

I love water-slides.

We need water storage.

OK, let’s sort the water storage first and then we’ll chat about water-slides. I would definitely come to Vorovoro if it had a waterpark but many tribe members come for the eco side of the project and are surprised by how little fruit and veg we are growing on the island…

Right now, it’s two fold as budgetry problems as well as water issues. If there was space in the budget we could hire a garden team and just have them devoted to the gardens but we would need water for that as well. Once we get water it should be much easier. Also, there seems to big construction projects happening and once these taper off we’ll have much more time for the gardens.

I’m responsible for the budgets now which is a new challenge for me, what do you find challenging working on a remote desert island?

Communication with the outside world is really difficult. You have to plan your time out effectively. The availability of materials and quality materials is poor so town shopping trips are not always successful – this is frustrating. Things are constantly breaking, I’ve brought some new tools back from Hawaii. Little things like this slow down the projects. And water, without water we have to bring in most of our food. With enough water, we have enough land where we can grow a significant amount. There’s talk of starting some gardens on Tui Mali’s land on the mainland so that’s another option but we should focus here on the island first.

You have also been developing contact into the wider community outside Vorovoro and are involved with a group called H.O.P.E. Does this stand for Hammocks Opposing Physical Exercise? I wanna join up…

It stands for Helping Our Polluted Environment.

It’s not quite as catchy but it’s a good message. What do you do?

The main thing we’ve accomplished is putting in 37 litter bins on Labasa high street. Previously they had big, metal barrels… pretty unattractive. We had a group of youths and school kids to come and decorate our bins, they look pretty cool. Now we’ve got the bins in place we’re starting an awareness campaign cos people just throw their trash wherever they happen to be. Some bins have been vandalised which is disheartening. The closing mechanism is a little pin and people keep on stealing the pin and all the rubbish is falling out.

Do you think people are just recycling the (stolen) pins?

That’s a nice thought but I don’t think so. We’re looking into redesigning the closing mechanism. It’s a pain in the ass.

How about we booby trap the pin with some sort of electrocution device? Buzz the thieves megavolt styleee…

Probably get arrested.

OK, I’ll come up with a legal retaliation to protect the bins. It seems you’re doing some good work in Labasa. Recently, a little birdie told me you’re using ideas from the movie ‘Back to the Future’… the part where he’s got a food blender attached to the car and uses waste as fuel… is this true?

I love that movie! Our taxi company has a couple of diesel engines and we’ve put in motion the plans to start a bio-diesel co-op to make a diesel fule from waste vegetable oil. We can’t get all the chemicals and ingredients in Labasa so we may have to look in Suva. It’s a pretty simple process and we should be able to do it. At the university I went to we built a bio-diesel processor and now alot of the university transport is running on that.

Now this doesn’t sound like you’re normal university. Tell me a little bit more…

It’s called the Maharishi University of Management started by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who started the Transcendental Meditation movement. Everyone in the university practices Transcendental Meditation. The university teaches what it calls the Science of Creative Intelligence or S.C.I. One of the central themes is: to know that by which all else is known. Through the practice of Transcendental Meditation, you transcend thought to a state of pure consciousness, pure creative intelligence. It is from here that all manifest creation and the governing laws of nature arise.

Did any of you teachers sit in a lotus position and hover in the classrooms?

I never saw anyone hover, I heard stories though.

It must have been an amazing environment to work in – full of wise men just like our own Tui Mali. I believe he will be opening the showers this week. Yes, that’s right ladies and gentlemen… the showers are ready to be used.

The showers have gone on longer than anyone really anticipated. There was alot of different opinions on the forums and for me the challenge was trying to appease everybody and at the same time coming up with a finished product that would contribute to the sustainability of the island. Some decisions I had to make that I wasn’t sure were right at the time, for example, using cement and PVC for building materials. These definitely aren’t sustainable materials but we needed to consider maintenance… we can’t be building new showers every year or so. The more things we build the more maintenance we’re going to have but we want to get to a point where maintenance is low enough we have time to focus on the gardens. If this was a community where people lived out their lives, things would be a lot different. We have to make a few sacrifices in order to provide Tribe members with the opportunity to experience community living without them living here full time.

Pupu has been working his heart out under the sweltering sun on the showers. He often said there was two many cooks in the kitchen and found it frustrating to work in these conditions, getting told different things. Do you share his feelings?

Yeah, it is difficult. People come with different expectations, skill sets and ideas… it’s difficult to mange all of those. Some people come here and really wanna get involved, they start working on a project and leave it half finished or it doesn’t work, maybe wasting some materials. We have to think about what this project is trying to accomplish… the experience of living in a community and having a voice… to inspire people to think about sustainability… it’s an experiment and a learning curve for everyone. With good communication it works out for the best in the end. We’re always happy to try out new things as long as we’re learning from them.

Excuse we while I have a big yawn, I’m not bored, I’m a bit tired cos some frigging chicken was stalking my bure and making a racket last night.

One of the local chicken production companies called Crest has a production programme where they will give you 1000 baby chicks and all the materials to build the pen and all the food and after six months they buy them back off you for $1 a chick. I want to look more into that. It could be a good opportunity to learn more about raising chickens. It would also provide us with a much needed source of compost for the gardens and we could piggyback our own chicken production on top of it, buy a hundred of our own chicks…

Don’t build that thing anywhere near me.

Also, pigs like to wallow in mud and our current pig sty doesn’t have a mud wallowing section. Their current location is the sight for the bore hole so it might relocated, if not, we’ll extend the current sty to include a muddy area.

I hear the bore hole machinery is in the nearby Mali village of Nakawaka, but the workers have taken a month’s holiday. The barge which transports the machinery has gone AWOL. Goodness knows what is happening. Tui Mali has waited five years for this already. The pig is in limbo… she looks pregnant by the way.

She is. My contacts at the Agricultural Department tell me the type of pig we have isn’t the best for this environment so we may look into getting the proper variety of pig.

We need pigs for celebrations. Put ‘em in the lovo (underground oven). I’m a veggie by the way. Sorry piggy.

I would also like to bring some sheep onto the island, keep them on a tether… mow the grass. They are much less destructive than goats. They produce really good manure which would be great for compost. It’s all interconnected. Everything must fit into the puzzle.

Anything else Dr Doolittle?

In the mid-west of the U.S., alot of areas have bat boxes to reduce the number of mosquitoes.

Let’s get some. Go bats!

There are government forms for bringing in new species of plant and animals. If there was a bat species that the Quarantine Office would OK then that’s great – but it’s unlikely. In the meantime, I want to poure coconut oil into the open water barrels to prevent mosquitoes breeding.

While I prepare Team Fiji to build an arc for your new livestock plans, is there a message for the readers out there?

We’re really trying to figure out how to get the on-line community more involved with the project. Some of this is improving the website and our communication technologies on the island. We’ve got some other projects in the works too, keep your eyes open for the Tribewanted Design Challenge.

It’s good to have you back Mr Katz. You doing a sustainability forum this week?

Yeah, we start off with a holistic view of sustainability, talk about what it is to be a human being and what are our needs. We talk about community and what it means to be connected to your environment. We then pick a specific area to talk about like food, waste, energy etc. and often because they’re all interconnected we touch on most areas. I like to lead the discussion in a way that gets people thinking about how they live their lives back home and encourages everyone to express their thought and ideas. I want to give everybody a chance to get involved. Create an atmosphere that makes people feel safe to voice their opinion. Everybody is encouraged to share their thoughts and ideas and I think the result is that tribe members come away feeling that they have participated in answering some tough questions and gets people thinking.

Sounds good to me. Until next time readers…. Chill out, don’t workout. Go Hammocks!