KAVA-ING IN

© Sally Hammond

I had happily accepted this invitation to the village for lunch. After all, what an honour, to be invited into someone’s home to share lunch – in this case a lovo (an earth-pit cooked feast) and see first-hand how people live outside of ‘resort-land’, all that many tourists to Fiji get to experience.

And I am doing pretty well, I  think, making small talk with the adults, getting the kids to grin for the camera, that sort of thing. And now, suddenly one of those gap-toothed cherubs is right in front of me, beaming shyly, carefully holding half a coconut shell of dirty dishwater (or that’s what it looks like) and expecting me to drink it.

I’d watching one of the menfolk mixing the brew. Two small paper packets of ground yaqona (pronounced yankona) would just about do our fairly reticent group of kava-swilling neophytes, he estimated. Carefully he placed the powder that had been previously ground from the dried roots of a bush belonging to the pepper family, in a nylon bag and  swilled it around to mix it into the water in the kava bowl. A sort of mega-teabag.

The solemn-eyed child is waiting, offering me the first bowl of kava.

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More about kava – what it is (what it can do to you!) the etiquette of the ceremony, and staying in an authentic Fijian village – as well as a little about Fiji, those tranquil friendly islands in the South Pacific.

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(Finishes)

I feel I have failed miserably in this crash course in Fijian Social Interaction 101. But my new friends, this courteous Fijian village family, forgive my inadequacies. As we sit together on the newly woven mat, eating fish and chicken and local plants with our fingers, there’s a sense of closeness, despite my kava-klutz behaviour.

 

Maybe, just maybe – no promises – next time I might get it right. I might just drain the bowl in one courteous grateful gulp.

 ©Sally Hammond 2006

(Sally and Gordon Hammond travelled as guests of Air Pacific 

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