Visit Lelean Memorial School and lunch with Tom Cooke.

After a lazy breakfast, we forego returning to the flea market for Cynthia’s sulu jaba and drive to Leleane school in Nausori, a town about an hour on the King’s Highway outside Suva where both Cynthia and Wayne worked their third years as Peace Corps Volunteers.

The current principal of this large Methodist school is gracious and she chats with Wayne and Cynthia and lets us drive around the extensive grounds, hunting for the houses where Wayne — up the hill to the right where the male boarders stayed but he’s not 100 percent sure we find it — and Cynthia — up a dirt road way to the left where she finds it in a depressingly inhabited but dilapidated state — once lived. The school is much larger now than then, with a whole new wing and more than 1,000 students.

We drive into Nausori to see Tom Cooke, a former Peace Corps Volunteer and Fiji staff member who lives in a rented place while the house to which he will retire permanently is being built in Viti Levu’s central highlands a few hours’ bus ride distant. He has prepared a Fijian feast for our lunch, which includes daruka, the flower-bud of sugar cane, which is in season only for two weeks a year. We hang out on mats and talk away the afternoon, learning about Tom’s life, passion for food, and Fijian politics.

Example: All the large billboards we have seen that say “Embrace Truth Reject Lies” are campaign signs for the current party in power, which is not viewed very favorably these days. George Konrote is President and elections must be held this year but the opposition party cannot campaign until 30 days AFTER the ruling party announces that it will begin its campaign, which Konrote has not yet done. So the signs are NOT campaign signs but are public service announcements to help the populace understand that all those nasty things being said about political parties these days are malarkey. (A bit more on this will be revealed two days hence.)

We drive back to town, have a quick drink at our consulate, and drive downtown to the Governor’s House Restaurant for dinner in the mansion of the former Governor-General of the republic. Beautiful place with old movie posters and photographs on the white walls under high ceilings.

We return to our hotel.

Another distinctly memorable and local day in Paradise.