Where is now?
Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Fri 19 Sep 2014 21:52
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It is 5.30 Saturday morning, the silence is
returning. Now we can hear the birds again and honestly we can hear the fish
chasing each other, the big going for the smaller that desperately try to find
their survival in the air by jumping out of the water, and after comes the biggy
with a big splash.
The supply boat just left after being here all
night. They arrived late yesterday and started to load/unload but when darkness
set in I guess they could not go through the passage so they stayed all night.
The supply boat was a big event, when it came into
sight I thought something was wrong with my eyes.
When it came even closer I realised that
whoever built that ship did not believe in straight lines. It must have been
designed by Hundertwasser (yes check him out on google, you might fall in love
with his architecture!).
Not only was she a piece of art but they had loaded
her on one side only I guess, she was leaning heavely to starboard.
12 hours before she arrived people from the
village started to come down to the beach and boil mussels, they prepare them
for their relatives in Suva.
When the ship comes they get them on board in the
refrigerator and off they go. We got a bowl of mussels and made a delicious soup
last night.
The mussels are found in the lagoon and there is
plenty. The villagers walk/dive for them and you find that the women do the job.
And not only that, since they shall not show their shoulders/knees etc, they do
the job in gowns. Heavy for sure, and our host Salote (yes we checked now, this
is how she spells her name) who does that a lot tells us it is very heavy to
dive in a full dress.
Well back to the ship, a few hours before she
arrives things start to pile up on the beach and when she is anchored an intense
activity breaks out. Small boats go back and forth between the beach and the
ship (or whatever she is). People and cargo is loaded and unloaded. It all
goes by hand except for some heavy loads that were taken with a crane. It
looked almost dangerous when the cargo came into the smaller boat and almost
sank it.
As the activity goes on the passengers on board
stay on the side already leaning looking at the show.
The size of the boat is probably 30-40 meter and 7
meter wide, probably made to make it through the passages.
People leaving with her to Suva will not be back
before next month when she comes back. The journey from here to Suva will last
til tuesday.
They will stop at 2 more islands on the way and on
Sunday they have to stop and go to church.
As the ship stayed all night we hear their help
engine going loud all night and on top of that the passengers enjoyed themselves
by singing, o boy, do they know how to sing!
Yesterday we had an another exciting thing going
and that was having Salote and Mini (our local host family) for lunch on
board. Salote wanted to teach Ellinor and Erika how to weave mats. So they sat
here on the floor in the saloon weaving. Mini grabbed the guitar and they sang
fijian songs for us. Magic!
We tried to sing some Swedish songs for them but we
felt we were so bad in comparison.
Being here now can make you wonder if you are
capable of taking it all in. You grab the NOW with the camera and there it is, a
frozen moment of people in a small atholl far out in the South Pacific. I have
dicussed it before, mindfulness, and I think it means living now and
here.
But now is between the future and the past, now
cannot be grasped as it will be before or after, no matter how small a unit you
make it, there is always a smaller one. That was also observed by Aristoteles
who maybe jokingly wrote somethng about time being non existent.
Time is future or past, and as the future is not
here yet and the past has already been, well then there is no time. As you might
know, Aristoteles had a strong opinion about theories, they all had to be proved
in reality.
NOW can change the future and the past affects us
NOW.
I guess you can skip now by asking the seasick
person hanging over the rail: "do you want the sandwiches now or shall I throw
them over board to save you the job of eating them?"
A last question, IF anybody has time to just copy
and paste some news about the Swedish and Fijian election in a mail it would be
appreciated. We cannot get any news here. But please do not send any kilometers
of text and no pictures! We are on satellite.
Now Im going to jump in the kayak and grab the
tranquility of this place. The best kayaking I had in my entire life is here,
promise.
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