Tag Archives: Fiji

Exploding Sodium

Text: During his Peace Corps years teaching chemistry in Fiji, JW would take his students down to the bay every now and then with a chunk of sodium. His school lab had real sodium, kept in oil. He would fish out a small piece and throw it as far as possible into the water. It would skim across the surface and then catch fire and sometimes explode. The students loved it. He had seen it done by another teacher before trying it himself.

Context: JW is my father. He served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Fiji for two years following his undergraduate studies, teaching high school chemistry at a local school. The demonstration is not part of any sanctioned curriculum, but rather an informal reward to a well-behaved class. It is generally considered dangerous, and therefore impossible in a well supervised urban school setting. JW has not seen the practice done outside of his peace corps years in Fiji. He has retold this story to me on several occasions.

Analysis: This is a good example of occupational lore. The sodium demonstration is a chemistry teacher’s vernacular practice: it is not taught in the credentialing program, and the manuals tell you not to do it; you learn it from your own teacher and transmit it to your students. Its status as both pedagogically vivid and institutionally suspect is what gives it folkloric stability: every chemistry teacher who has ever done it remembers their own teacher’s version, and JW’s repeated retelling of the story, with the same opening and the same skimming and the same explosion, is itself an iteration of the form that keeps the practice circulating. The Peace Corps placement adds a second layer. An American chemistry-teacher folkway moved with JW to Fiji and entered a different pedagogical ecology, where his students may now be carrying it forward as their own, possibly without ever knowing whose Ohio classroom it had been picked up from in the first place.

“Waikao”

Text: ‘Waikao’: spoken in Fiji when you say something that is meant to be understood in an ironic sense. Not literal. Then the listener thinks about what you might mean and it is nearly always a funny meaning. So after ‘waikao’ is laughter. In English we used to say ‘psych!’ for a similar effect, but not quite the same since ‘psych’ is kind of teasing the person you are talking to, but waikao is more a collective fun. We don’t have that expression in English.”

Context: JW served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Fiji in the two years following his undergraduate studies and picked up ‘waikao’ (pronounced “why-cow”) during his time in the village where he taught. He reports that the structure is always the same: a literal-sounding statement, then the marker, then a beat for the listener’s reinterpretation, then, ideally, shared laughter. He noted that the phrase is unlikely to appear in any Fijian dictionary, noting that the dictionaries available during his service were written by missionaries in the 1800s and the living spoken language had drifted considerably from them. He is not sure whether ‘waikao’ remains current today or was simply trendy at the time. 

Analysis: ‘Waikao’ is a discourse marker that retroactively reframes a prior utterance as ironic and invites the listener to construct the joke for themselves. Both ‘waikao’ and English ‘psych!’ are post-hoc ironic markers, but the social geometry differs. ‘Psych!’ involves the speaker pulling the rug from under a particular listener. ‘Waikao’ is collective and constructive, with the speaker handing the listener a small interpretive task and the laughter arriving when the listener completes it. As folk speech the form is stable across speakers (‘waikao’ marker is fixed) while the content varies entirely with what was just said. That JW learned the word from oral use rather than any printed source is appropriate of linguistic folklore: missionary-compiled Fijian dictionaries recorded the formal vocabulary, but casual phrases and terms like ‘waikao’ are exactly what might slip through the cracks of such projects to document a living language. 

The Thunderbird

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: College Student
Residence: Morris Plains, NJ, USA
Language: English

“The Thunderbird is a mysterious being, and is said to be the biggest bird alive today. Its wingspan is over 20 feet long and it feeds on small dogs and sometimes even children. While on vacation to Fiji, my 4th grade teacher became aware of such a creature. Reports of pets going missing had aroused suspicion within the neighborhood. There is even a report of seeing that of a shadow in the sky. While out for a walk with his dog, he felt eyes on him. Surrounded by trees, on a path, he couldn’t tell where from. He left as fast as he could, without a second thought. Later that day, a report came in from the path he was on of a woman being picked up by what could only be the Thunderbird. There were huge claw marks on her shoulders and the talons had impaled her. How did she get free? Who knows. She fractured both her ankles from the fall, but was lucky to be alive. Let’s just say, that was my teacher’s first and last time in Fiji.”

This is a story the informant heard from his 4th-grade science teacher once he had finished his work. It was a way the teacher mixed the facts of science with the mystical legends and unexplained aspects of the world. He made science more engaging because he believed in more than just scientific research. It also encourages students to travel and explore the parts of the world that they don’t know.