Waking up to rain, but breakfasting to rainbows

So the weather has been mostly rainy and gray since my co-intern and I arrived. But this morning, despite the seemingly persistent drizzle when I woke up, the sun came out and several rainbow appeared while we ate breakfast. I took a few pictures which I will post later.

Work is going to be very interesting, but for the most part I'm going to refrain from post details both because I don't know what the confidentiality issues are and because I want to be respectful of the governments and organizations we are working with. However, if I make the news for designing a virus that destroys MS Access databases, trust me that it will be well deserved, borne out of intense frustration (which hasn't actually come to fruition yet, but I see it around the corner).

Right now I'm on the housing search, and there are a few promising options. We've been staying in our boss's home, and it is exceptionally lovely. International staff typically receive considerably higher salaries than local staff (arguably because they are filling positions that require expertise that could not be filled by local staff), so they tend to have nicer places, closer to town, than the local staff. This home is gorgeous. It overlooks the harbor, rolling hills/mountains, and has a small terraced garden with a swimming pool. Most importantly, it has security guards.

It turns out I am not living in a very safe city. Co-intern and I had our security briefing from the UN security officer yesterday, and it was both eye-opening and very frightening. Of course the man has a degree in intelligence and used to work for the government, so he was not going to state things lightly.

In 2006 there was a military coup in Fiji. In 2009 (after a series of events) the president suspended the constitution and put the leader of the coup in charge of the country. As a result of this political situation, Fiji was kicked out of the Commonwealth and the Pacific Islands Forum, and donor nations stopped providing [as much] aid directly to the government. This, of course, had severe economic consequences. There has been a major increase in begging and prostitution, which Fijians say were not seen before the coup. Most frighteningly for me, there has been a serious increase in the number of home invasions, including break ins and sexual assaults. Sexual assault isn't about money, it's about power and control, but its easy to see how they're all related. The security officer said the rate is about 1 a day (unofficially, the official numbers would never show this).

So I want to make sure I stay in a place with fences, locks, and hopefully guards. I'm on the lookout, and I'll let y'all know the results!