Marine biologist Liz Neeley is excited to be a part of a coral conservation project in Fiji, but her colleagues keep forgetting her.

Liz Neeley is the former executive director of The Story Collider and cohost of its podcast. She's a marine biologist by training, and an optimistic worrier by nature. As the oldest of five children, she specializes in keeping the peace and not telling Mom. After grad school, Liz stumbled into ocean conservation. She focused on coral reef management and restoration in Fiji and Papua New Guinea, and dabbled in international trade policy on deep sea corals. Next, she spent almost a decade at COMPASS helping scientists understand journalism, policymaking, and social media. Follow her at @lizneeley

This story originally aired on Oct. 13, 2017, in an episode titled “Invisibility.”

Story Transcript

Outside it’s balmy and breezy and beautiful, and inside I’m churning. Where is my ride? I have been waiting for more than an hour and a half and at this point I've done all my deep breathing, I have smelled every flower in this beautiful hotel lobby and I’m becoming increasingly concerned. I’m afraid that I’m going to miss a meeting I've traveled more than seven thousand miles to attend.

I’m in Fiji. I work in coral conservation and my job is to teach local journalists about ocean science, to teach local scientists how you do something like talk to journalists, and then throw parties to introduce them to each other. It’s the best job in the world and Fiji is the best place in the world to do this kind of work. Not only do they have incredible coral reefs but they also have embraced this powerful idea that if you bring together community leadership, traditional management and the best of modern science that this is how you help communities thrive when it comes to conservation.

I’m convinced that when we talk about saving the planet, this kind of approach is the only way we’re going to save anything, much less ourselves. And that’s why I've thrown my career into this kind of work instead of the traditional research path I thought I was undertaking.

Today, I’m in Fiji for a meeting where all my colleagues, coral reef experts and journalists, scientists, every kind of person from Fiji working on this is coming together in a village called Nanduri for a meeting of the locally managed Marine Area Network, and I’m terrified I’m going to miss it. It has already been a rough couple of days. I've been traveling for thirty-some hours. I flew from D.C. to L.A. to Honolulu to Fiji and then caught a connecting flight.

When I got to my hotel last night, it was calm and cozy and quiet. I was grateful. I just collapsed. I dreamt that someone was massaging my head and running their fingers through my hair and gradually realized I wasn’t asleep and I could still feel what ended up being two giant cockroaches onto me. Fortunately, I've been working in the tropic for years and this is not a problem that a little patience and a shoe cannot handle. But it means I didn’t have very much sleep, I've gotten up really early for this meeting and I’m waiting and waiting and waiting.

Fortunately, I do have a cell phone. It’s one of those Nokia bricks. It’s way too early in the morning to call anyone in Fiji, plus everyone I know is already on their way to this meeting.

I have three numbers programmed into it. The first one is my boss, the second one is my mom. I don't want to call them. This isn’t my first trip into the field or even in Fiji but it is my first big solo work and I feel like I've got something to prove. I need to be able to show that I can hack it doing international conservation work.

So fortunately, the third number in the phone says Peace Corps Ralph. Twelve hours ago, Peace Corps Ralph was a stranger who just plopped down beside me at the airport in Fiji. He was one of those people, he had curly hair and a sunburned nose, big smile, he was chatty and impossible not to like. And even better, he seemed very at ease in his own skin, he knew how to deal with people and he seemed comfortable in his traditional Fijian garb of a Hawaiian-print shirt and a men’s dress skirt called a sulu.

So I thought he seems like the kind of guy I can send a really awkward text message to that’s like, hypothetically speaking, if someone got stranded, how might they make their way. Fortunately, he was the kind of guy who could take a text message like that and immediately turn it into a road trip adventure.

So Peace Corps Ralph enlists Peace Corps Josh and, in no time, all three of us are first on a bus and then we get picked up by an improbably purple pickup truck with roses painted on the window. So we’re on our way. My problem of not being able to get to the meeting is tentatively solved. But I've got a much bigger one starting to boil now.

In Fiji, you do not just waltz up into a village unannounced. I’m off-schedule, showing up in a way that I’m not supposed to be, and this is just sort of breathtakingly rude. It damages the exact kind of relationships that we’re here to build. Fortunately, I don't have to tell this to the Peace Corps guys. They know. In fact, they've already arranged with Peace Corps Katie that she will give us shelter in her hut for the hour or so before the rest of that convoy of scientists and conservationists shows up.

When they roll up in all their vans and trucks, they're all starting to pile out, they're surprised to see me, but not apologetic. They're kind of laughing like, “Ha-ha, did we forget you?”

And I’m kind of laughing back like, “Ah-ha-ha, you did.” But I’m also secretly sort of proud that I've gotten myself here with minimal amount of hassle, plus there's no time to argue. We all need to immediately get ourselves into a really important ceremony.

In Fiji, you do something called sevusevu. This is a ceremony in which you make an offering and you request the permission of the chief of the area to enter the territory or village. The chief that we’re here to meet, he's not just any chief. He's a high chief. In fact, he is the paramount high chief of this entire region. His full title is Tui Macuata, Ratu Aisea Katonivere. “Ratu” means chief so Ratu Aisea.

And he is intimidating. He's tall and he's broad and he's fierce. I've heard stories about his military service in Lebanon. I've also heard stories about the way he takes poachers on directly, sinking their boats and burning their nets. So it feels particularly appropriate that we are here to beg his permission to walk on his land and to swim in his sea.

The sevusevu ceremony is solemn. There are mats on the floor and we are all kneeling at Ratu Aisea’s feet. I keep my head down and my mouth shut and there are all these formal words of introduction in Fijian. As the ceremony comes to a close, Ratu Aisea claps three times and, at this point, we are welcomed into the village.

This is not just a formality either. It’s a recognition of our interdependence and I have accepted my own duties and obligations to the village the same way that they have taken on responsibility for me.

The rest of the day passes in a happy blur. The meetings go great. We’re sharing all these stories about how much we can do when we come together to share information and to work together. And then in the afternoon we get to go see the fruits of this labor and dive on the coral reef.

My dive buddy is a conservationist and outsider like me and she's struggling with her gear. She can’t control her buoyancy. So I reach over and I grab her vest so that I can hold her down because it’s dangerous to ascend rapidly. Together we swim over and through these coral reefs and I feel something amazing. The sense of place. The sense of what is possible when people come together.

I’m just suffused with this happy feeling and, as we get out of the water, I’m happy to let everyone else go shower first. I wave goodbye to Peace Corps Josh and Peace Corps Ralph as they paddle off into the sunset as if it is a movie and I just take a deep breath being thankful to be here in this beautiful place with these wonderful people on this beautiful day.

It’s my turn to shower so I hurry up, soap up, rinse off, jump out and then burst out to realize the convoy has left me again. What is wrong with them? What is wrong with me? How could they? My dive buddy! And how can we be a team if they can’t even remember something as important as get Liz in the car? It has just been a day and I’m shaken.

So when I head into the main hall to tell my Fijian hosts what had happened, I feel awful. But they think this is hilarious. They are rolling with laughter. There is a Fijian word “kaila.” It means to shout with laughter and that is what is happening all around me right now. I realize they're not laughing at me. This isn’t even about me. This is life. It happens. We laugh at it.

And Ratu Aisea says, “Don’t worry. Don’t you remember, I told you you're under my protection.”

So he had his driver get his private truck, black this time, not purple. And as we glide through this quiet, dark Fijian night, I’m looking out the window and up into stars like I have never seen before with the Milky Way stretching above me. I think about place. I think about home and what it means to be connected to other people.

About a year later, I had the opportunity to return Ratu Aisea’s generosity to me. He had won a major ocean conservation award and was being brought to Washington D.C. for the galas and the parties. Yet, as everyone was scrambling trying to think about how do we plan to celebrate and recognize him for this conservation leadership, they weren’t thinking about basic hospitality and how to welcome him into our community the way he had welcomed me into his.

So I took it upon myself. I made sure to meet him at the airport. I brought him a Nokia phone so he could call home. And I guided him through our meetings on Capitol Hill, meetings with senators. I took photographs of him in front of the White House. And as I drove him back to Dulles International Airport, I realized I had one final ceremonial obligation. I'd been working on this but I wasn’t sure I had the courage.

As he stepped into the security line, I stopped caring about what the passengers would think, screwed up my courage, balled up my fists and sang, “Isa isa vulagi lasa dina, nomu lako au na rarawa kina.”

It’s a hard song to sing with a lump in your throat. It’s the traditional Fijian song of farewell. It’s called Isa Lei. It is about sorrow and longing, what it means to be together, what it means to be to apart. And the chief, he had just been standing there smiling at me.

I know culture is not like magic. Learning a few words of the language, respecting and admiring the ceremonies, this doesn’t make me one of his people, but he is my Ratu.

There's a happy postscript to this story. Many years later, I was in a different kind of lobby feeling a different kind of annoyance. I’m working at the University of Washington in the Fisheries Department surrounded by the smell of dead fish and there's a guy who keeps staring at me. It gets to the point where I finally turn to him and go, “What?”

And he goes, “Fiji?” It’s Peace Corps Ralph. Six years and six thousand miles later, finally, someone remembers me.