Continue reading on page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Vorovoro Photo Gallery >>
We've got to get them out of there, Hunter thought. They don't realize how big it is. She yelled as loudly as she could until, through the shimmering haze, Poques appeared atop the hill. "We can stop this thing!" he yelled. "Let's get a bucket brigade going! Everybody can bloody well stand around watching, but I'm going to do something!"
Hunter kept shouting, urging the Internet tribe members to retreat. Finally Poques returned to the beach with a few others. His sooty face was twisted with rage and he was shouting: The fire could be stopped, five of the yavusa were in the interior fighting it. What about everything that Tui Mali had said on September 1? "So much for the idea of one tribe," Poques said bitterly.
There was no time to dwell on his anger. Keene had left the island earlier to go scuba diving, and Sara-Jane Bowness, another Tribewanted staffer, was able to confer with him by cell phone. Now she and Hunter made an announcement: Grab a daypack and fill it with your essentials. Be aboard the boat in ten minutes. The Internet tribe is evacuating.
I ran to my tent, threw a few items in a pack, and returned, but nobody seemed to be moving toward the boat. I stood around feeling impotent, and then, without making a conscious decision, wandered off into the trees.
Dense green jungle ended abruptly and was replaced by acres of blackened
earth. Smoke rose from the ground, and pockets of flames lapped at the edges of the burned area, which radiated intense heat like the coals of some giant barbecue. Through the smoke Va calmly strolled up. She had bare feet and was holding a giant banana leaf by its long stem. "Bula, James," she said as pleasantly as if she were greeting me at breakfast. She began swatting the hot spots with the leaf. Then after a couple of minutes: "Could you get me some water?"
I ran out to the beach, found a bucket, and dunked it in the sea. When I turned around I saw Bowness. "The boat is leaving," she said tensely. "You have to get off of the island. We have to go, now."
I thought of the fire and how we could stop it from inflicting more damage. I thought of Poques, of Va in her bare feet, of all of the palangi running away in the boat. "No, I'm not going," I told Bowness. "I'm sorry."
Poques, Holt, Scarborough, a couple other insurgents, and I worked with the Fijians to battle the wildfire, sweating heavily to put out the last of the destructive flames. By late afternoon the situation was under control. The blaze had torched about 20 acres, nearly a tenth of the island, but the damage was largely limited to the undergrowth, with only a few trees significantly charred. Within a rainy season or two, Vorovoro will look as though nothing happened. The cause? One of the yavusa had been doing a controlled burn in a small plot of cassava when he was bitten by ants. He left to go rinse them off, forgot to extinguish the fire, and it went wild.
Those of us who stayed behind jokingly called ourselves the "Vorovoro Volunteer Fire Department," and, slightly more seriously, wondered if we would be expelled from the tribe when the others returned. For Poques the incident had exposed a critical rift: The tribe was an altruistic enterprise—people united to do good for the world—but it was also a business whose employees had to worry about legal liability and the bottom line. The fire also showed the tribe's strength, though, as a substantial group had stuck around. Poques doubted that guests at a big resort would have done the same.
When Keene returned with the evacuees late in the afternoon on the next day, he played the peacemaker. "We understand completely why you wanted to stay and help put out the fire," he said. "And I'm sure you understand why we had to give people the option to evacuate." It was an expert display of diplomacy. With a single rhetorical sweep he extinguished the insurgency—we weren't rebels after all because management approved of our actions—and affirmed the project's democratic ideals.
Poques was mollified, and the incident that had temporarily pulled the tribe apart left us all feeling closer. Later Poques would use the issues raised by the fire to lobby Keene to transfer more power from the management to the members. Keene, convinced, floated a proposal to give each month's elected chief an island-development budget of $3,000. It was passed by the tribe. Democracy had its limits on Vorovoro—the members could never take over and oust Keene and James, because the pair owned the company, held the lease, and had final say on all financial matters—but Poques proved that those limits could be expanded. He also triumphed when people voted to abolish a three-weeks-a-year cap on visits. "The whole adventure is far from over," he said. "I want to see the project out from day one to the very end."
On my last day on the island I joined Dan Keene and Ryan Smith on a short boat ride to go snorkeling at the Great Sea Reef, known locally as Cakaulevu. Holding my breath, I dove to 25 feet along a coral wall patrolled by dozens of small yellow-and-purple fish. A larger one, multicolored like rainbow sherbet, caught my eye, and I tailed it until my air ran out. When I surfaced, Smith and Keene were laughing. "There was a big reef shark right behind you," Keene said.
The snorkeling trip was the farthest I'd strayed from the village in two weeks, and when I returned I was struck by how much we'd accomplished. The Fijians had made significant progress on the grand bure, and its log framework rose impressively into the sky. The clearing had been enhanced by a long wooden dining table, a volleyball net rigged between two palms, coconut shells split for use as ashtrays around the campfire, and a hammock for beachside naps.
The tribal tech, however charming, reminded me that eco-utopia was illusory. Our group had come to experience "primitive" living—to sleep under the stars, bathe with water from a bucket, look at the horizon without seeing a single building—while the yavusa hoped the revenue we brought would allow them to escape some of these very same things. The Internet had connected two disparate groups of people from opposite sides of the globe, but ultimately it would make us more alike. Keene knew it too and, believing that modernization was inevitable, thought that all the new tribe could do was try to steer development in a positive direction.
The job was shared by all of us. We needed to build a jetty so that arriving boats wouldn't damage the coral in the lagoon, to cap the number of visitors at any one time, to figure out what we could grow on the island so that supply runs from Vanua Levu could be reduced. A boat was coming soon to take me back to the mainland, and that was OK. I would make my opinions known to the rest of the tribe. I needed to get off the island and back online.
Continue reading on page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Vorovoro Photo Gallery >>
Subscribe now and save!
Plan an adventure trip
