The Blythlyway in Guyana

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

I’ve been laid out with a flu for the last week or so, shut up in our house mostly, although I did attempt a trip out on the bicycle because we needed cooking gas. It seemed like a good idea at the time and practical until I realized, while pedaling back from the store with the propane canister balanced on the handle bars, that I was staring rather intently at the spectacle of the ground going by under my feet instead of watching for on-coming traffic. I put myself on bike probation for a few days after that. Spent one of those days comatose in the hammock unaware of the passing of time, the difference between light and dark. One good indicator that you are sick in the tropics is that you actually get cold- and the once welcome breeze feels like a flail against you bare skin- so you put on clothing and you lay in bed freezing looking for a non-existent blanket, while your spouse sweats with the fan on. And you shut windows in an attempt to keep the air still and, perhaps like sickness everywhere, you retreat slowly inside the shell of yourself, wishing you would disappear and yet fearful that you are already gone.

The enclosing canopy of the mosquito netting is a great aide in this isolation. If we bring the laptop into the bed and turn on the electronic phantasmagoria of a movie, the mosquito netting becomes a curtain for the world. The images can actually replace existence entirely for the duration of the film and whole experiences of life can be translated directly into the mind. Done too often though this private cinema paradiso begins to withdraw my very being from Guyana, so that when it is over, and I suddenly find myself hot and sick in the tropics, it can become an embittering excursion not worth the ticket price. If movies are disturbing reading a book under the veil can be outright dangerous given the right combustible mix of materials. For unlike a movie, which provides its own finite set of images to provoke, the written word on paper starts the mind going and allows for those moments of pause, between paragraphs or whilst turning the page, where we look up and cannot remember any longer where the line is drawn. Add a mosquito netting and a strange location and it can be through a glass darkly indeed.

All of which is to say: there is a great difference between being in my house after sickness, in the gentle musk of the now steady mists of the rainy season, staring out into the neighbors yard in Stanleytown verses being shut inside the walls of a house as the mind loses contact with the actual physical reality of the country and replaces the terrain outside the windows with scenes from the miasma of my mind. It’s still a little confusing to me but I’ll try to walk you through it. It has something to do with wealth, the extreme and grossly unequal distribution of resources in this world, and perhaps most directly my own bewilderment at how rich I find myself suddenly to be. But let me start by talking about our recent holiday.

We got another chance to travel further a field in Guyana. Miriam took some vacation time and we joined up with Brian and Kristen, the American couple that live up in Skeldon. Kristen has pretty good connections around the country (due to her time here with Peace Corp) and she made our travel through the country much smoother than it otherwise have been. Eventually we were headed for a city called Bartica, which is located up the Essiquibo river at the conflux of three major rivers- the Essiquibo, the Mazaruni, and the Cuyuni. I had first heard mention of the place when someone I had met said he was leaving for a month to stay with an uncle of his in Bartica. When I asked him where it was, he couldn’t really say for sure- he had never been himself. Increasingly as we spoke to others of our impending trip we learned that very few people from Berbice had been there before. Not that it is very far away from New Amsterdam (maybe 100 miles as the Canje Pheasant flies), but you can’t get there in a straight line. It involves a lot of travel by a variety of vehicles and they all add up. With the price of accommodation, if they don’t know someone to stay with in the area, and the trip is financially out of reach of the majority of Guyanese. That and the ones who can would rather save their money and go to New York or London. Besides the chance that they could find a family member to stay with are greater overseas.

We arraigned to meet up with Kristen and Brian in the capital Georgetown the first night, as they would be arriving there a few days prior to us and it was on our route. They had set up for us all to stay at the Parsonage of Redeemer Lutheran Church the first night before moving on from Georgetown. We packed up the house, locked up, said goodbye to the fowl (who we left in the good hands of the neighbor girl Faith) and without incident took the ferry across the Berbice river and found a car to drive us down the road to town. We have figured out that you can hire a car instead of a mini-bus for a slightly larger fee (about a dollar extra), which in our minds was well worth the price. Four people instead of up to twenty, same speed, but you’re closer to the ground. We were dropped off right outside the church and quickly found the parsonage. This parsonage has been uninhabited for sometime now. There was a nightclub right next to the house and the Pastor apparently couldn’t put up with the house shaking till 3 a.m.. Immediately it stuck me as an odd house: very large rooms with huge distended ceilings which diagonaled from one side to the other. And the place was on lockdown. Bolts on this, padlocks here and there, and grates on everything. Some of the windows, we learned later that night, had been tied shut, latched, and barred. Sheriff Street apparently isn’t the safest place in the country.

We went for a truly lovely walk on the sea wall during the cool afternoon period before sunset, only turning around at a point where part of the interior of the city drains into the sea, not raw sewage exactly, but the smell didn’t match the expanse of the view. We then stopped at an Americanized Shell gas station to pick up a few things to eat. In the states, only when we are on the road do we buy pre-packaged goods from convenient stores. Partly because I dislike most of the food you can get there-in, but also because I don’t believe it is either healthy for me or the world to subsist on a diet of artificial, preserved, packaged “food” shipped from who knows where, produced who knows how and grown in the midst of poison. I feel pretty strongly about it actually. So it was disturbing that I bought a package of Kraft Mac and Cheese (because I was missing my sister I can only assume), a variety of other name brand goods, and a bottle of wine (the first such bottle we had seen in four months). We dropped a quick 4,000 Guyanese dollars, about twenty bucks. Not an insignificant amount of money, but it was more the feeling that I had just participated in the model way to shop that really disturbed me. Reinforced, no doubt, by the four teenage boys who were loitering inside the store, getting their first taste of the Promised Land. The store wasn’t in fact a shell gas station, which you would see while driving in Topeka, but a tricked out model, with extra trimmings (thus the good wine selection), and the sense that more was in store if the people would choose it to be. I was obviously still affected later, while I made the mac and cheese, because I threw the brilliant orange powder straight into the water that was boiling the noodles. I swore a little too loudly upon discovery of my error and then remembered that there was a church meeting going on directly under my feet. Lesson learned: Don’t swear loudly in the parsonage, at least not in someone else’s parsonage. Hey I’m new at this Pastor’s wife stuff, OK.

Later that evening I was laying in bed, under the mosquito netting reading, when I had my first, pre-sickness vision. We were staying in a spare room. Many doors and grates and gates were locked between us and the outside world, not to mention other parts of the house even. It was close – no air circulation except for a little fan, which recycled our exhaled breath back to us. The room had a ceiling which on the far side was 15 ft high or more and yet sloped downwards in such a way that over our heads it was less than 8 ft. On the tall part of the wall there was a closet, which stretched from floor to ceiling. I couldn’t even reach the bottom of the top door and it was hard to imagine what good that closet was to anyone. I read late into the night under the mosquito netting, which also was shaped like a pup tent so that our feet were almost hidden from view. I was reading a book by Octavia Butler entitled “Parable of the Sower” I had read it before, but was trying to re-examine it in the light of Guyana. The book takes place in the not so distant future in California. The state of the union is not so good. People live in locked down, walled off communities eking out a survival while outside their armored walls, murder, rape, and general chaotic lawlessness reign. At one point I put the book down and pulled my eyes away from the page towards the interior of the room. I had forgotten where I was and now seen unexpectedly the closet reinforced the sloping walls so that I felt I was shrinking into a corner of a cell. The mosquito netting made it appear hazily padded- for my protection of course. I didn’t sleep well that evening, even though the night club had been shut down a few months earlier (it could be coincidental that the man who owned it was just extradited to the United States, maybe illegally, because of either his drug activity, or his criminal networks and/or something about him maybe working with the government on a shadow group made up of criminals and businessmen which is believed to be responsible for the extra judicial killings of other criminals, as well as maybe the theft of AK 47’s from a police storage facility.) Life mirrors fiction or fiction mirrors life. It was confusing to me that night how little I knew of life.

The next morning we took a taxi to the central market and then, with Kristen in the front, proceeded to wind our way through the cars and stall and people. It is fascinating to be both very odd, four white people with backpacks on our backs winding our way through a foreign capital market, and yet also have at least on of us be completely knowledgeable about what and where we going. I didn’t really know anything- just weaved. We went through the backside of the market where I had been in the middle of the night and I didn’t recognize the area until we were almost through it. It was all commerce and people moving now, none of the quiet of the previous groupings remained. We got to the wooden ferry dock and walked down stairs to the waters edge where we loaded ourselves onto one of many open wooden boats with an outboard motor lined with benches to accommodate up to 30 people. These are the passenger ferries across the Demerara River. Everything appears so random and haphazard to the tourist that it seems remarkable that there are life jackets for everyone, and even more so that everyone puts one on without command. After waiting for a few minutes for the boat to fill, they backed out and motored us through ocean tankers and fishing trawlers and then quickly across the broad expanse of the river to another ferry dock, which was flanked by the rusting hulks of abandoned freighters and iron docks long neglected. Fisherman reeled their nets in hand over hand, bouncing barefooted on their keels in the turbulence of many wakes. The fare for the trip was 80 guyanese dollars- about 50 cents. Once we disembarked, more people to weave through and then the jostle with conductors for this car or that bus. Here again Kristen just held the reigns and before I had thought about anything we were in the back seat of a car bouncing down the road. Must remember to get myself a guide more often. I hadn’t realized how pleasant it could be not to have to deal with anything or anyone.

I am becoming far to used to these jaunts down the coastal roads of Guyana. They are not as interesting as they were at first; they become simply crowded roads that you must traverse to get from here to there. I imagine that after you’ve done the commute twenty times it’s about as exciting as driving on the interstate in rush hour. Except there are those unpredictable cows and burros to deal with. And every once in awhile you pass something which makes you snap to attention. Like say a forty foot tall India God with a Monkey head. But I’m sure that becomes fairly average quickly, like say the twenty-foot pink elephant with glasses on the side of the highway outside of Madison Wisconsin. Nothing to see here. Mundane travel. Are we there yet?

Parika is the small town at the end of the road where we bought some provisions from the roadside stalls and the dark alleyway groceries. We milled about in the lethargic dusty Sunday afternoon. We lost our nice metal water bottle in this town in classic tourist style. Put it down in a pile of our bags, some of food, others with our gear, and then walked away a half hour later after picking up everything in a hurry, only to realize it was gone twenty paces down the road. And of course nowhere to be found after that. Maybe the kids whom I didn’t give any money to got it when we left it behind, or perhaps the old woman who was sitting nearby- come to think of it she did look kind of shifty. You can start down that path or just realize that it is gone and probably more interesting to who ever picked it up than it was to us. It was a nice water bottle thought, served us well and shall be missed.

In order to get to the next form of transportation you have to sneak around the unmarked side of a larger ferry terminal, squeeze down a narrow alley of vendors and across some sand of the river beach to a half shack where they take your name down and the number of your party and then you can proceed to the waters edge and load into a smaller wooded vessel with an outboard motor which seats 15. Of course I merely bleated and followed. There were suddenly a large number of white people gathered around as we got on the boats. VSO, British volunteers, on holiday like ourselves. There is an odd instinct not to look at other white people when you first see them, almost an overcompensation in an attempt not to acknowledge them as different than anyone else around. Or maybe it is that I don’t want to think that I could possibly look as out of place as they do.

The boat ride takes and hour plus some depending on the weather. The boat is the major form of public transportation up the Essiquibo river to Bartica. There is also a larger ferry, which is cheaper, but it takes five hours or more. Potentially there is a dirt road or track, which follows the river, but its reliability is questionable and it is used seldomly, not to mention that there is no bridge at the end of it and Bartica is on the other bank. The Essiquibo is extremely wide. It holds thousands of little islands. The biggest island is the size of Barbados. Quickly the continuity of docks and wood mills is replaced by the blank wall of the forest. Then individual clearings sporadically pass by. Some with two or three grand cement houses in the India fashion, with great verandas, all amidst the cultivation of banana trees. Some just barley visible through a break in the bush- starting at a plank for a dock and ending in the thatch of a roof or the gray wood planking of a less grandiose dwelling. If the rain clouds come, the boat drives through them and everyone huddles under their benches sheet of vinyl spread out over laps and stretched over ducked heads like a picnic interrupted. Always the green wall re-asserts itself and I admit that I was not fond of the prospect of being dropped off at its face, needing to be swallowed by it to get somewhere else. I rather preferred the openness of the water to the dark green unseen.

We were dropped off a little before Bartica at a private area known as Shanklands. A woman met us at the dock and as we were walking up the hill she and Kristen talked about the arrangements, which had been made. It turned out that the bunkhouse had been filled by a group of Guyana University Students, but they were going to give us one of the houses for the same rate. The buildings were at the top of a hill, and the house was facing out to the river. It felt Palatial: open air bedrooms, bathrooms in each room, a large kitchen area, and a huge porch with both hammocks and pillowed benches. Yes, I think we could manage all right with this change in plans.

We cooked a fine dinner of burritos with tortillas made from scratch and drank that bottle of Chilean red wine as the sunset and the river slowly faded out below us. Two toucans barked at each other from opposite trees in the yard, one on a full ancient mangrove, and the other on the skeleton of some unknown species. It was the most relaxing place in Guyana I have been, so separate from the locks and chaos that it was hard to place both locales within the same country. I slept the sleep I imagine the rulers of Grenada slept when using their summer residences.

In the morning Miriam and I took out a kayak and paddled on the river to a small island where we swam briefly (we had swum the previous day for the first time in this land of many waters, as nowhere else did we had been did anyone seem to think it was clean enough to get into the water). The island was like so many in lakes in Minnesota or Wisconsin, but it still had something of a jungle on it and flip-flops didn’t seem protective enough to explore even that miniature interior. In the water when logs floated by it was hard not to see caiman alligators instead. On the island next to the one we swan on Eddie Grant (Guyana’s famous musician of Electric Avenue and Romancing the Stone fame) was refurbishing a house. Later in the morning we walked the system of paths they have created in their back forest at Shanklands. We ran into the Guyanese University students collecting amphibian specimens. That afternoon we were picked up by our next host and taken to Bartica in his small outboard motorboat. The bill for our night at Shanklands was five dollars a person.

Balkaran is the proprietor of a wonderful guesthouse in Bartica, as well as a guide for the whole region on the river and off. As we where going up the river, a fish zinged when it should have zagged, and suddenly leaped up into Miriam’s arms. “Good luck” Balakaran declared and I would not argue with him. Balkaran used to be a diver for gold up the river. He would be attached to the air line coming down from hundreds of feet above and work on the bottom of the river for twelve-hour shifts. Unsurprisingly he got the bends once. Actually about 40 others got it as well in a short period of time. He was one of 2 who actually lived. Because of his vast knowledge of the region, scientists from around the world use him as a guide. He has an insect named after him. His wife and he are extremely hospitable people and the guesthouse has a wrap around veranda where we sat and took in the expansive views of the river for hours. The nicest room in the place cost us 30 US$.
Bartica itself has actual hills outside the main town. It elevates the neighborhoods somehow, for while the houses are made almost identically to everywhere else in Guyana, there is not a grid and the people seem tucked away in their homes not stacked on top of each other. We walked through the jungle surprised by the occasional agricultural plots with wide views to the lower river. We came across army ants for the first time. Thousands of ants make their own path and eat everything in sight; nothing in the jungle messes with them. Eventually we came out at the river near a little section of beach where someone had once tried to start a resort. Across the river, on an island, is the highest security prison in Guyana. On the side we were on there was a large house, a huge dock and deck, even a covered bar- all abandoned and partly falling into the river. Which is kind of the way I prefer my resorts. But it is always somewhat surprising how many fairly large projects people have abandoned over the years in Guyana. This area of the country was the first place the Dutch originally settled. Until it became not so worth the investment for them and they packed up and moved to other shores. The sea wall they built in the 1600’s is still mostly intact, though it is the sea wall that the British built in the 1700’s that holds back the water. Of course the British left fairly recently, during their 20th century empirical devaluation and downsizing, but they stayed around long enough so that English is the language spoken on this little peninsula on the confluence of three rivers, one of which reaches into Venezuela, another almost to Brazil. It is very odd to be so deep into South America and not speak or even hear any Spanish or Portuguese even. It is a very good indicator just how isolated the country is from it’s land neighbors. Bartica sits at the beginning of the dense interior of this portion of South America. Boat travel is the only real way to get anywhere, besides flying, and the rivers farther up turn into demanding rapids which only the most knowledgeable even attempt to navigate. The police and boarder patrols have boats that are much slower than many other people’s boats. To say that smuggling exists is to insult many of the people who have keep the people of this country alive for the last hundred years. It also is a good reality check on the idea that governments can control the flow of illegal goods, such as drugs.

Unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to go farther up river with Balkaran as he was already engaged in a few such trips. The gas for these trips is incredibly expensive and would have doubled the cost of our stay in Bartica. But most likely it would have been worth the money to us. Instead we ate out one night at a little Brazilian restaurant, which some peace corp volunteers had recommended. I’m not sure that it had a name. It was just a small little one-room interior with an outside area under a zinc roof. The chef stood outside at his large vertical grill and he brought swords to us stacked with meat off of which he cut any piece we asked for; beef, chicken, sausage, slices of crackling pork fat. He offered us meat when ever it was ready and we had to fight him off more than once, to which he replied “I’ll be back very quickly” It was simply the best meat I’ve eaten in awhile. After an hour and a half we left, and yet, even with a nice piece of what I would call flan, it cost only 4$ a person.

Time caught up and we retraced our steps by boat, then mini-bus, then boat and car again, till we were back in Georgetown for one last night away. In the coarse of that day we had the openness of two rivers, the hot cramped wait for a bus to fill, and a walk into the center of the Starbroek market- crowding humanity at every elbow and space enough to squeeze barely through. To wash the travel off we were taken to a certain residence in Georgetown where, by flashing our passports at the gate, we could stroll into the pool area and, all alone, swim laps or dive deep under the water exploring the tile floor. Concrete walls blocked out the world and only palm trees and the American flag broke the continuity of the blue sky.

The next morning we visited one of the larger grocery stores in the capital and stocked up on some of the more hard to find goods; certain spices, balsamic vinegar, more wine, and whatever else it was that we hadn’t seen in awhile. We passed on the Americanized version of fresh vegetables: individual onions wrapped in plastic, two tomatoes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in plastic, a sad eggplant also strapped down to a board with plastic. Then we used plastic to pay for everything we had gathered up- the first place we have been able to pay with a visa card. I’ll admit that we almost bought a pint of Ben and Jerry ice cream for 10 dollars, but we held off (exercising extreme consumption discipline I thought). We loaded up Brian and Kristen’s car and took off towards the ferry dock. Where we proceeded to wait for two hours behind a line of trucks. But we didn’t mind, we needed some time to read the paper, sit quietly in one place before being suddenly back home. As we sat there reading in the car, three different men offered to walk up to the counter and buy our tickets for us hoping only for an extra 50 cents in compensation. Two other men washed the car with a bucket and rags, doing extremely good detail work for 2 dollars.

Upon our arrival home we calculated that we had spent about 50,000 Guyanese dollars or about 250 US$ for five days of travel in an exotic location. It was well worth it to us. A teacher’s salary is around 20,000 Guyanese dollars a month; a Police Officer gets maybe 30,000. Not sure how they would make the calculation work out.

Fairly soon after our return I got sick. “Traveling is dangerous” was the reason I was told. And I dropped out of the world beyond the four walls of my house. I lay in the hammock for hours reading books on the Atlantic Slave trade which so shaped this new world and the old, and some on the various histories of the Caribbean revolutions of the last two hundred years. C L R James is a reason by himself to get sick and read. Throw in a few movies- some depicting Ethiopia and Cambodia while others contrasted those countries with the landscapes of Europe and the social extravagances of America - and by the time I could stand up for a few consecutive minutes without slumping back to bed I had realized that I was extremely, unequivocally rich.

And I just had the flu, some unnamed variety even, who knows what’s gonna happen if I were to get some serious ailment. A friend related their two weeks of Dengue fever, lying in bed sweating with a blinding headache and no fan available. And the stories of Malaria-- I’d rather not even contemplate how that might affect me. Yet people deal with these and worse daily, often without access to any medical care at all. Or even when there is a facility it isn’t any medical care that I would consider worth the money (which isn’t much) or the risk (which is fairly staggering). Because, unlike so many, I can consider my options. There is no question that entering the Guyanese medical world is not a good option. We have been told, by both Guyanese and Americans who have seen the system at work, we should get out of the country if serious illness or injury should occur. Waive your passport at the gate.

Without going into any of the really terrible details, two simple facts should make the point fairly clearly. First, one of the things that the women’s group at Miriam’s parish does every year around Christmas is to visit the New Amsterdam hospital. The main items they bring with them are congregationally tailored bed linens. It’s a great, practical, hands on way to help the hospital. But the point here is that the New Amsterdam hospital, which is the second largest in the country I believe, cannot afford to buy sheets for it’s beds. Secondly, the hospitals throughout the country do not always have adequate supplies of clean water. It is not simply that there are serious questions around sterility of equipment and supplies, but they don’t have water- to drink for instance. Not because there is not a lot of water around, but because they don’t have storage tanks in order to have adequate reserves, because the municipal system only pumps water at certain hours everyday, give or take, etc. etc.

It comes back again and always to infrastructure. Or lack there of. To resources. To the availability to acquire and implement sums of money. The small, yet unapproachable amount of money required to take your children to see the landscape of your own country; if they can’t see it why would they stay in it to help it grow. The huge sums of money that are required to build bridges across huge rivers; without these bridges everyone has to wait for hours to go half a mile. The small sums can be easily passed from one person to another, one family to another. I don’t have the slightest idea how the large sums of money get accumulated and properly used. Well that’s not true, but the details are not very exciting and I would probably just get upset talking about the international banking system. But I would finish with one thought. Debt relief for countries such as Guyana is not nearly enough. It is not enough to say to someone who has no money that they don’t have to worry about paying you the interest on the money you loaned them years ago. They can’t pay you back anyway and they can’t afford to send their children to school. If you have enough to eat, enough clothing to wear, cars to drive and even interesting jobs with which to stimulate your wallet and the minds of your children, then give people who don’t have any of these things the money they need to invest in their future possibilities. Go further and pressure your government to do the same. Not simply money for food now, but money for infrastructure, for building and inspiring the future. Look around a little, in whichever country you are in, there are plenty of people to talk to, share with, and learn from. There is so much of everything you can think of in the world that there has got to be enough to go around. As they say in Guyana “You gotta keep trying”.

2 Comments:

At 12:01 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello, sounds like a neat trip. When you were staying at the parsonage did you happen to find out if they still have the Redeemer Youthsingers of Guyana? I recently picked up an LP of the Youthsingers, as they are called on the cover, from about 1977-9. I got curious and this is about the only sign I can find that they were once around. They do a series of Guyanese folk songs on par tof side 2 and have choral songs with some Jamaican elements as well. Randy

 
At 7:23 AM, Blogger J. Arthur Blyth said...

Sorry I didn't really get much of a chance to interact with the redeemer church itself. I will say that the state of music making in the church is pretty far backwards from where it was in the late seventies. It would be very surprising to me if this group was still active and downright amazing if they ever recorded anything recently.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home