The Blythlyway in Guyana

2007-07-02T10:39:00.000-07:00

Miriam Adelaide and I, on the 3rd Anniversary of our wedding, having a picnic lunch in a central park of Georgetown, while Gandi marches on behind us.

2007-07-02T10:31:00.000-07:00

Miriam in a sari at an event at Holy Cross Church.

2007-07-02T10:17:00.000-07:00

Congo-Nya Town Hall New Amsterdam Family Cultural Event.

Three Members of Congo-Nya starting up the talking drums that would keep building with the addition of four more drummers and their leader on the Shaka-Shaka. It is almost hard to believe when you see actual musicians in New Amsterdam as opposed to electronic replay. It was a great priviledge to be the offical photographer of the whole day, using a new video camera that the band now owns. For years, over twenty-five years, people have been photographing and videoing the band and then leaving so that the band gets to see very little of the footage and never owns any of it. Now they can record their own gigs for future promotion, making videos or commercials, or just be able to see themselves perform. The youth drummer were particularly happy to see themselves on TV. I got to walk all over town and film everything, but I would never have done that if it was not that I was holding Congo-Nya's camera. In fact I got approached a number of times and asked in not exactly friendly terms who I was recording for, only to get smiles and blessings to continue when I told them it was Congo-Nya's camera.

2007-07-02T10:04:00.000-07:00

The youth drumming band at town hall New Amsterdam. Everyone calls these youths with drums the Taliban, as in they will come in and take over if you don't watch out. And on practise days in Braks home, when the boys arrive they do creep in and take over everything. They also are pretty good musicians already and were the hit of the entire night. The bassist had to wrap his leg around his chair to get enough leverage to hit the drum and when he got up to drag it off stage it looked bigger than him. And they sung a version of a popular song called 'Poverty' that was potent.

2007-07-02T09:59:00.000-07:00

Just got a copy of this photo of me walking with the band Congo-Nya in Georgetown during cricket world cup.

2007-07-02T09:55:00.000-07:00

Joey up getting coconuts

2007-06-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

The road ends at a fence, but it is a public path that goes through to the back road. Mostly the gate is to keep the grazing animals away from the growing vegetables. The electrical line ends right here. The electric company comes around every once in awhile in company of the police and they arrest anyone who has set up a tenous wire to the last pole. But, if anyone goes into the office to ask about offical lines being extended they are told that there is no plan to extend electric lines. So everyone hooks up to the poles that are there with dangerous fire/electicution hazzard wires and relies on the word of the street being spread to them before the police show up at the door. The white pipe on the right is typical of the place where these children get their daily water. Usually it is a broken pipe, which sticks out from the stagnant water of the trenchs. The water comes out of the pipe usually once a day for a few hours, but sometimes nothing comes out for weeks and then everyone goes searching.

2007-06-27T10:52:00.000-07:00

The last Stand Pipe. There is no water connection beyond this pipe, no water connection anywhere on the back road where hundreds of people live.

2007-06-27T10:43:00.001-07:00

Hanging out under the eves while the rain comes down.

2007-06-27T10:37:00.001-07:00

Drums. Some to keep the Culture, others to carry and store water for drinking and washing up.

2007-06-27T10:32:00.001-07:00

Playing drums, singing and dancing. The start of an afternoon practice session for the youth of the neighborhood.

2007-06-27T10:20:00.001-07:00

Deep in the middle of a drumming practice session for the young upcoming drummers of the neighborhood. They are going to be given a spot in a show coming up at the New Amsterdam town hall. They are learning to play together well, but sometimes the shaker plays too fast or the bassist drifts a little, then Braks puts a stop to it and tells them they have to concentrate. "Now, play the music proper." he instructs and they are off again chasing the beat.

2007-06-27T10:14:00.001-07:00

The neighbor's burro and it's little one.

2007-06-27T10:06:00.001-07:00

"The ball rolls down the road and you just have to keep walking behind it."
-Unknown Rasta

2007-06-27T09:58:00.001-07:00

The road makes a great football pitch, coconut husks make good goal markers. The cheerleaders in the Green Bay Packers outfit carry the buckets, which they use to get the water that they need for daily life. The pipe is only about two hundred yards away, which is close compared to many places on the road and in the world.

2007-06-27T09:43:00.001-07:00

When the rains come down the back road becomes a mire, and it impossible to walk in anything other than your bare feet or muck boots. In this picture the road was under two feet of water, and it effectively cuts the women and children who live in these houses off from the rest of the world of New Amsterdam. Our own house, with it's zinc roof, becomes a lonely enclosed place when the rain beats down its drum. The sounds from outside cease. It feels good to be alone and enclosed. But we have electric lights and water running from pipes inside the house, not to mention windows to shut out the sometimes sideways rain.

2007-06-27T09:35:00.001-07:00

Children fishing in the trench on a sunny dry day. They get very excited whenever they pull anything out, be it fish on the line or tadpole in the bucket. Keep on biking down the road for about half a mile and these scenes are repeated again and again, adding to the real sense of life that happens here on the cow dam.

2007-06-27T09:29:00.001-07:00

Another side. Where people leave the area, to go abroad or as they say in Guyana 'Outside', or simply to some other part of town. Then the houses stand unused and slowly rot or are eaten by wood ants. Or someone moves in and the building continues. In the mean time the children have more rooms to explore and play in.

2007-06-27T09:19:00.001-07:00

As the road continues and the sun starts to set, the houses continue to be built in the reclaimed bush in the ever expanding unregulated side of New Amsterdam. On day not too long from now, these houses will be next to more houses and more children will live their lives in this beautiful yet burden filled Cow Dam.

2007-06-27T09:03:00.000-07:00

I have decided to try a pictorial essay on the part of New Amsterdam commonly called Cow Dam. It is my intention to show some photos of what is a trip in my every day life on the bicycle to the backside of New Amsterdam. I hope you see many things as I do every time I go for a visit.

This is a road that leads back to Cow Dam. It is made of a broken rock conglomerate, which seems like a terrible idea as I bounce down its irregular surface, worse even than the cobblestone streets near another place I have called home in Philadelphia. But when the heavy rains come and every street floods, this material stays roughly intact. In other words you don't have to plunge barefoot through calf high mud, which is the case on any road that is smooth and dirt. This road was dirt just two years ago. Everyone says it is a great improvement. Like every road in New Amsterdam it is traveled by people on foot, on bike, and the occasional car, as well as inhabited by donkeys, goats and cows.

2007-05-19T14:44:00.000-07:00

Miriam on the way out of Lethem.

2007-05-14T13:41:00.000-07:00

The sun was going down at the Maipaima Eco-lodge and flamboyant scarlet Macaws the size of eagles were flying overhead and settling into the tops of the heavily vined trees that surrounded me. I was reclining in a chair, sipping a cup of after dinner cocoa while peacefully watching this strange new world convert itself into night. The chair was on a raised wooded platform, abutting the central thatch covered Benab in the middle of a cleared circle of the tropical rainforest. The circle was about 200 yards in diameter, beyond which vision was cut off completely by the darkening wall of the ancient woods. Miriam was inside washing the dishes from the dinner I had prepared (Chicken ala Orange- the chicken carried in with us raw, wrapped in newspaper, the orange picked from a tree in a nearby village).

There was a sudden alarm raised by some unseen birds nesting nearby, followed by a long sustained roar. The sound originated from close enough that it distracted me from the neon spotted preying mantis on the rail in front of me, which I had been watching eat a squirming insect head. It occurred to me that it actually was possible that the noise was coming from a terrifically large wild cat that was very close. My first impression was enhanced by the sight of Griffin and Harper (two young men from Nappi village) who came running out of the forest very close to the sounds origin. They, however, didn’t keep running to the security of the Benab, as I would have thought prudent, but turned almost immediately and disappeared back into the wall of green, headed, I guessed, closer to the sound. Well Griffin was our guide, he had walked us in the 7 miles from the openness of the savannah and talked with knowledge about every tree we passed, and Harper was the caretaker of the lodge for the month on the rotating village schedule, so I figured if they wanted to rush into the darkening forest towards a sound which makes me nervous in a zoo, then they must know what they’re doing.

I took another sip of my cocoa and resumed my observation of, what I might have failed to stress, was truly a ferocious, neon spotted preying mantis, which was at that very moment ripping the flesh from a still living creature. Sure it was only about two inches long, but up close, real close like I was now, its mandibles were extremely vicious and moved with lighting speed.

Griffin came running back out of the forest; Harper didn’t reappear. The birds started screaming again in alarm; the jaguar paused in its maiming of Harper and roared again. Griffin saw me and started yelling excitedly and motioning for me to hurry over. I got up slowly from my chair, cocoa still in hand. I didn’t feel the need to rush into anything, I hadn’t after all told them to go into the Jungle (lets drop this educated rainforest crap) after a Tiger in the dark. Griffin’s shout became audible.

“A family of Howler monkeys is right near by, do you want to see them?”

Oh. Monkeys. We had been hearing them all day long declare the hour at their eternally set times. Monkeys, nice, not as cool as a Jaguar of course…But Monkeys in the neighborhood, that’s great. I started to take another sip of my cocoa. Then it occurred to me that Howler monkeys are large primates that live entirely in the tops of trees, hundreds of feet off the ground, and if I hurried I could actually see some before it got completely dark, because they were only a few hundred feet away. I ran through the kitchen and told Miriam and we both ran out across the sand of the clearing and into the rainforest close on the barefoot heels of Griffin. We dodged around roots and over logs, through a rain gully or two, and then stood still straining our necks upwards trying to locate them way up in the canopy. In the quiet, just before my eyes made out the first hanging silhouette, I realized that both Miriam and I were barefoot as well: barefoot in the jungle at dusk, looking up into the trees for monkeys.

Ever since we learned we would be coming to Guyana, Miriam and I had been hoping to get into the interior. Not that the majority of Guyanese get a chance to see the savannahs and rainforests of their own country in their lifetimes. For most it is a trip they cannot either afford to make or don’t feel compelled to take. But for us now nearing our time of departure we had begun to think seriously about how we could make a trip. A few casual conversations had put us in the enviable position of having a Guyanese family decide to take us under their wing and show us some of the variety of their land. A woman in the Lutheran church up the Corentyne had a sister who lived in an Amerindian village called Nappi, located in the Rupununi Savannah at the foot of the Kanuku mountains, near the town of Lethem on the boarder with Brazil. If we could get to Lethem they would meet us there. If you’ve ever been shown the overwhelming hospitality of the Guyanese, you will already realize that we were going to be shepherded and given to feel like family from the moment we met the first relative in Georgetown until we were returned to our own home in Stanleytown.

Anita, the woman from the church, first met us in Georgetown at the ticketing office. She gave us some materials to take with us to give to her sister Eleanor in Nappi: yards of mosquito netting mostly. Anita had waited at the ticketing office for over three hours for us as the Berbice river ferry had broken down and delayed us considerably. We purchased our bus tickets, which are not available in advance except at a small unmarked office miles from the bus depot and then only on the day of the journey, and even then the woman behind the desk shook her head and said it was impossible, before printing out tickets for us a moment later after some amount of silence (just a hint never ask why it is not possible just wait quietly for a few minutes and often it is easily done, I can’t explain it that is just how it is with paper work here in Guyana, saying anything makes it worse). A niece picked us up and drove us to her sister’s house, which was a block from the bus station (these women were both daughters of Eleanor). We stored our bags there for the afternoon and then took a quick shower later that evening before getting on the bus, and then another a week later when we would get off the return bus considerably hotter in the mid afternoon sun. As I said we were shepherded.

To enter the bus station is to suddenly feel like you are in South America. The costal areas of Guyana do not evoke South America. Everyone speaks English and the population makes me think I am either in India or Africa, or even an island in the Caribbean, but not South America. But once in the bus station, the language changes to Portuguese and the people buying tickets are suddenly now either Brazilians, with their instantly recognizable sense of style and quick, smooth sensuality, or Amerindians, whose features you see in everyone in the country even though they themselves are fairly hidden on the coast. There were two older Amerindian women who stood silently in line in front of us waiting to check in. They both wore dark blocky wrap around sunglasses, even though it was nighttime. In fact they kept them on the entire trip and the blankness of their eyes contributed to a perception of great stoicism, which I often project onto those who carry themselves with such repose. I later learned that cataracts are quite common in the remote villages (perhaps due to diet) and more than likely it was for this reason that the women wore the dark glasses, which I have also seen on my own grandmother before and after her cataract surgery. But on that night, in the waterfall of Portuguese and amidst the peacocks of a new country, I thought the grandmothers were observing much on the sly and I envied them their unobstructed vision.

If you have taken a Greyhound bus for any length of time across the United States, then you will understand something of the trip that took us in for the next 18 hours. I personally have taken many Greyhound trips, some of which lasted many days, and I consider then some part of my education on America. Likewise I would recommend this bus trip, at least one way. If you can afford the plane fare, I would be envious of the trip back from Lethem over the vast track of rainforest, but without driving through it I am not sure how it is possible to understand the actual distance.

As I said the trip started out as something familiar. The BMW bus was comfortable with large seats and overhead compartments. No chemical toilet on board, so none of the unpleasantness of the smell near the back seats where we had been assigned. We drifted off to sleep on the Linden highway, which is the best-paved road in the country, and I only woke again after we stopped in Linden itself. A stop in the middle of the night on some back street in a middle sized town. Hazily remembered except for the vastness of the lit up and operating open pit mines that surround the town. These mines are what produce the great quantity of dust that flies so liberally in Lethem that peoples eyes start to develop creeping patches of scar tissue in the corners, which slowly grow over the pupil and render them blind. The eye seeks to protect itself from the ravaging of the earth, while the raw materials get shipped down river and then made into aluminum in some other country.

Then much drifting in and out of sleep through the bumps, as the road became dirt shortly after Linden and darkness took over all around. Around two in the morning we stopped at a building with bathrooms and snacks and nothing else to be seen in any direction but more darkness and the shadowy outlines of high encroaching trees.

Sleeping upright in a seat, weither it be on a bus, car, plane or train, is an acquired skill. I learned it best when I was a cab driver in my early twenties. After a few months on the job I could tip back the seat just slightly, cross my ankles underneath me, and drift off with the radio receiver in my hand, only disturbed when I heard my car number squawked out by dispatch. It is a form of meditation done properly.

As the dawn’s light started creeping in I began to realize that I was not on a Greyhound bus. The road had gotten extremely narrow in the night and heavily rutted. Both sides of the road were lined by hundred foot tall trees, any low spots in the track were standing water. The driver apparently considered this a mandate for appalling speed (in the rainy season the bus probably needs as much momentum as it can get to wade through the water holes). The result was that we were hurtling through a tunnel of trees, with light and vision flickering nauseatingly and branches reaching in through open windows tearing at flesh, all while plunging up and down with the unexpectedness of a carnival ride. People were starting to vomit. I had the worrying sense that I might just join them at any minute. I locked my eyes forward down the aisle and out the front windshield in an attempt to settle my stomach and so that at least I would see our impending death as it rounded the next blind corner. But looking down the aisle was not dissimilar to being in heavy seas on a large vessel. The horizon dipped in and out of view and my stomach tried to hide each time in my throat. The only possibility was to close my eyes and practice that meditation I preached a moment ago. Occasionally bags would work themselves loose from the overhead compartments and fling themselves violently on those at peace below.

We came to a river in the middle of the morning and got out to watch the barge make its way across to us. Boards were laid out at rivers edge, where the bus and a large truck backed down and across them onto the barge, where there were more boards thrown across huge gaps in the steel decking. The passengers all stood by the railings and tried not to be crushed by the loading vehicles. A small motorboat pushed its nose against the side of the barge to turn it around in the current and then the pilot took us across. A nice hour long diversion in the fresh air, then back on board the space mountain roller coaster for a few more hours, till suddenly, with the abruptness of a line, the trees stopped and we were in the wide open savannah. Instantly grasslands stretched out towards distant hills and my vision was unobstructed because the only trees were scrubbed cashew trees, which had dispersed themselves evenly as far as my eye could see.

In the open, and on the sandy smoother roads, the driver really let loose. I didn’t realize you could four-wheel drift a bus with eight wheels, but, on those winding roads with nothing to hit, the driver repeatedly proved it could be done. Occasionally we came to small creeks crossed by narrow slat board bridges exactly wide enough for six out of our eight wheels. Once we all got out and walked over before the driver crept across all alone while we watched the bus sway precipitously.

Before we arrived in Lethem we stopped by the side of the river, which is the border with Brazil. All the Brazilians got off and went through customs in a canvas tent set up on the side of the road. Two large pillars of a steel bridge rose out of either side of the river, but it was hard to tell if they were being worked on currently or had been abandoned. Somebody is going to need to build a pillar in the middle of the river for it to be finished. Currently there are small boats to take you across to Brazil, all of which I am sure only cross at this point and then seek out the little tent for their approval. What we had seen is the road, which connects the capital of Guyana to Brazil. It is about 500 Kilometers long and takes about 18 hours on those days when it is passable at all. There is no road at all connecting Georgetown with Guyana’s northern neighbor Venezuela.

The streets of Lethem are wide, like any western town with more land than it knows what to do with. After winding around town, dropping off almost everyone else on the bus at their front doorstep, we got off finally, crossed the street and were met by another relative (this time a son who works for the Guyanese Geology and Mines Commission). He had someone take us in the back of a pick-up truck to an empty house where we could stay the night. When we arrived at the house a woman came over from somewhere nearby and showed us how to use the shower and pointed out the large pot of food that she had made for us to eat. We were stunned by all of this, which was completely unarranged by us and freely given. The son stopped by and said he would come get us in the morning. Miriam and I walked around town for awhile and then sat on a cement bench on the edge of town and watched the sun go down and the mountains fade from view. It felt like we were on the mesa in Taos, New Mexico and we were instantly at ease in this new, but familiar topography.

In the morning we loaded into the back of the pick-up truck with our packs, two five-gallon bottles of water, and two frozen chickens. Eleanor’s son had suggested we buy chicken when we asked if we should bring any food in with us. The water is the privilege of the traveler, yet at the same time the stigmatism of the alien: our bodies will reject the water that is clean to you. We thundered out of Lethem holding our hats against the wind, eyes squinting, teeth tasting dirt.

Riding fast across the open expanse of a savannah in the back of a pick-up truck is, I believe, one of the great pleasures in life. It makes you understand why dogs are so damned happy to go for a car ride. Once after being in the mountains for 14 days away from the human world, I hitched a ride on a small county road in Northern California in the back of a pick-up truck. At that moment I might as well have been an astronaut, such was the expansiveness of the worlds suddenly zipping by my eyes. After a time the chicken started to thaw and the pink water began to roll around the bed of the truck mixing with our packs. But in the back of a pick-up truck that kind of thing just doesn’t really matter, because it is necessary to concentrate pretty hard on just staying IN the back of the pick-up truck as the driver unleashes across a dirt expanse with the cavalier freedom of the raised axle four by four.

The road crossed draws, which would be four foot full in the rainy season, and wound through eight-foot high conical termites mounds. After about forty-five minutes the clouds started to close around us and hard fat drops fell. The driver stopped the truck and put our bags inside the cab and kicked the younger passenger out to the back to make room for Miriam and I to sit, her on my lap, inside the cab. It was tempting to turn down the offer and pretend that it didn’t matter to us if we got soaked. But we had no idea what we were going to, and showing up wet didn’t seem like an intelligent choice, so we gratefully accepted and drove through the rain while the young man stood outside, erect like a bird letting the water bead down his back. It is little gestures like this that put me into my place of honor here and remind me that I shall forever return the hospitality of strangers to those who are strangers in my home.

Nappi Village is one of three villages in the Macushi territory on the Northwestern side of the Kanuku Mountains. The center of the village is on a small rise and consequently looks over the wide grasslands around it that is dotted with numerous homes. There are two gigantic Mango trees, which provide shade and snacks to the school children of the nursery and primary school located with-in a stones throw of their heavy laden branches (for one school day we took successive classes outside under these trees and sang songs with them and told the story of How the Macaw Got His Colored Wings, which I had perfected on the walk out of the rainforest after having my first real glimpse of these birds just before the monkeys came roaring). There are also three churches in various states of construction, which was surprising for such a small population, and according to Eleanor was also causing some division in the community. I suggested that perhaps we should stay away from all three so as to not enter into the division, but Eleanor put paid to my sly attempt to skip out on church by quickly announcing that we were her visitors so we would attend the Catholic church the next morning. We did attend that Sunday morning service, done in both English and Macushi, while the breeze fluttered the pieces of colored cloth and cut strips of newspaper that truly beautifully decorated the space overhead with the spirit.

It is a small place, Nappi Village, less than 500 people I’d hazard to guess. There are no electricity lines here at all. The water comes from wells dug in the ground or is collected from the sky. The truck we rode in on was the only vehicle I saw that week, besides bikes, a motorbike or two, and bullock carts. The main forms of transportation across the 35 km into Lethem are bicycle and oxcart. We had seen a farmer, loaded up with 100 lbs of plantains, pedaling into the Lethem market as we were coming in that afternoon. When Eleanor was the head teacher not that long ago, she would take a bullock cart into Lethem and back spending the entire day on the road to pick up the teachers salaries. The houses are made with either a local adobe brick or an imported red brick and they are roofed tightly with the fronds of a local palm and occasionally the rust ready zinc. There were no mosquitoes, or at least so few that we could count them, which was freeing in a way that I’d forgotten. It was currently the end of a dry season though and we learned that it was a different story during the rains. About one in five villagers get malaria in their live and those often more than once. In the rainy season sometimes it is not easy at all to get to Lethem and even the paths in the surrounding area can be under thigh-high water. As with the blocky dark glasses on the bus passengers, I can place an unflinching gaze on the faces of the villagers of Nappi as they look towards the immortal sunset from under their thatch covered doorways.

Three quarters of a mile from the village center we were dropped at a house surrounded by palm trees and set against the glorious panorama of the Kanuku Mountains. Grandma Eleanor came out to meet us. I overplay this just a little tiny bit, but I can think of no other way to describe the hospitality given to us by this wonderful woman: a bed in her house, home-cooked meals, long talks on her porch, and introductions to all her friends. We learned just small fragments of her life over the course of those conversations. Although not originally from the village of Nappi, and of east Indian decent, Eleanor has lived in the Rupununi for 36 years or more and raised nine children here. She came originally as a schoolteacher. She lives alone now, so much a part of the village that she is on the council of elders, and her husband and children, who live in Georgetown, come back to Nappi, to Eleanor, and to their original home whenever work and money allow. It was this home that became our home for the week. We slung up hammocks outside on the porch and swung in them for hours reading and looking up occasionally with disbelief that we were near the mountains again.

On great aspect of Eleanor’s house was that she had a generator, one of two in the area. Every night, a little after dusk, a neighbor would ride over on his bike and fire up her generator for her. Plus she had a television. So every night children and adults came over and sat around for a few hours watching images from around the world. We would meet people on the road during the day walking barefoot and driving oxen, talk a little and then say goodbye, only for them to say, “I’ll be over later for the show”. It was like a cinema in the days before television. At the end of the show the generator would be turned off; the whole world quieted with only the heavenly bodies as light, in and among humans dwelling.

After two days of walking around the village, laying in the hammocks reading, eating tasty food and watching the evening show, Eleanor decided that we were rested from the bus ride and made arrangements for a man we had met named Giles to take us on a walk into the mountains, to the headwaters of Nappi creek. She gave us directions to his house and we set off in the morning behind a bullock cart loaded with school children.

This way my first chance to look closely at the construction of these two wheeled carts. The axle a single golden rod of the trunk of a hardwood tree, the wheels cross-cut disks: two sturdy things put together with hand tools and rolled across rocky roads and through waist high creeks by a team of oxen. It takes a certain amount of disbelieving witness to remember that wheels, good wheels, can be made without metals.

We turned off at Giles path and he came out of his home to greet us, threw on a shirt, grabbed a small cloth bag in one hand, a cutlass in the other, and off we went. Never did find out what was in that bag, but I learned pretty quickly to stay a few yards back from Giles as his cutlass arm struck quickly and with out warning at anything starting to invade the path. I must also mention that Giles wore no shoes.

We learned that everyday Giles walks five miles back and forth to his farm barefoot. Earlier I had noticed the children of the village playing football, some with a ball others with an empty plastic coke bottle ½ filled with rocks. The children were running full speed on a rock-strewn pitch and kicking a rock-filled bottle as hard as they could with bare feet. The villagers of Nappi have tough feet.

I, on the other hand, do not. Though my favorite footwear is a pair of flip-flops, and though I’ve been known to wear these until the snow builds up a few feet, I have been a ginger foot all my life. A gravel road might just as well be broken glass for the slow steady way in which I must place my bare feet upon it and limp across. For this hike I was wearing my only pair of shoes that were not flip-flops- my football boots. I have written previously about how these shoes give me pretty bad blisters if I do not tape my feet. So now I was following a barefoot older man into the forest with tape wrapped around my pale dainty toes and shoes on top of that. To make matters worse, at first we were just walking in savannah lowland and the path was muddy and blocked by large pools. So while Giles just barefooted though them, I had to jump around looking for a roughly dry spot to land on if I wanted to have dry shoes, which I did.

At the line where the forest started the world was quickly blocked out by that all encompassing green that still makes me a little nervous. The path narrowed and then became many paths, all of them about equally used. The paths are not hiking trails but ways to get from one section of farm to another. We might have been able to find the headwaters, if there was a map, but we most likely would have walked in circles a few times in the process. Farther in the path became less clear, less packed dirt and more tangled with potentially sharp things to step upon (there is one type of seed that falls from a tree that looks as if it is specifically designed to impale a wayward barefoot). Giles’ pace didn’t slow at all. We crossed the Nappi creek once; Giles and Miriam (who had highly engineered sandals on) waded straight across, while I picked my way across hopping from rock to rock. I was feeling pretty good about my dry feet until five minutes later when we had to re-cross the creek and there were now no rocks to hop upon. I waded across resigned and, it might have been my imagination, but I thought I saw Giles give a grin. He didn’t talk much that whole day so I took every gesture as significant. We continued picking our way across stones and traveling on top of root systems as much as on the ground and I became convinced that Giles feet were made of something other than flesh.

In the end we came to a waterfall in a channel carved through stone and Miriam and I stripped down and dove into the coldest clearest water we have seen in Guyana. I know some people like the ocean, and others large lakes, but give me a cold mountain river flowing over boulders and I’ll pick it every time. The headwaters of Nappi creek turned out to look something like any number of rivers on the North Shore of Minnesota and we ate hardboiled eggs and peeled a summit orange with the growing knowledge that the unfamiliar can turn out quite familiar after all.

On the way out we swung by Giles’ farm: a number of different hectares burnt out of the jungle at different intervals over the years and at different stages of crop planting. Again at first it appeared very unusual to our new eyes: Banana trees and Cassava trees against the back wall of the tropical rainforest, and such rapid hungry growth that I couldn’t make out sweet potatoes from the invading forest eager to reclaim its land. But as my eyes adjusted I found corn stalks in among the unknown vertical vines, and squash spreading out in competition with the tentacles of the forest floor, and finally tomatoes staked out with their green morsels just starting to speckle red. I did not know that slash and burn rainforest agriculture would be so familiar as a tomato. Giles showed us his main living quarters on the farm, a simple two walled structure with a thatched roof. He used to live here all the time with his wife and children, but when the kids became old enough to attend the village school he moved closer into the village so that he would have to commute to the farm and not them to school.

As we crossed the creek one last time heading back, I noticed that Giles’ right foot had two small cuts, just nicks really, but red and soft, newly made from that days walk. My own feet were now about at the point of blistering and as we walked, and as the path became a little smoother, I remembered a season in Vermont farming in a muddy clay barefoot everyday, flip-flops discarded till the ½ mile walk down the gravel road to home. I let Miriam and Giles get ahead of me and then stripped off my wet shoes, my wetter socks, and that athletic tape which I had sheepishly re-applied after the waterfall swim while Giles looked on. I strapped the shoes to the outside of my pack and put one foot in front of the other, so to speak.

The earth was cool and instantly soothing. Mud squished between my toes and made me slip here and there, but I only went down once. And I did step on something fairly prickly under my right little toe, but I picked it our pretty quick without even really trying and kept going on down the path. Turns out there isn’t anything particularly unusual about the material that makes up the feet of the villagers of Nappi. They just don’t start with the assumption that shoes are necessary. They start by placing their souls directly on the earth.

Sometime after Easter I received a gift of a cross with the instructions that I could keep it or give it to who ever I choose. I don’t own many crosses personally, though it is a symbol that I have lived with all my life. The only cross I can think of that I claim ownership to is one that I use for a clang inside a clay fired bell hung above our door to announce the arrival of the stranger. The gift cross is wooden and has a painting on it. The painting is of a man walking on a path with a cutlass in his hand. Technically the man has on flip-flops, but then again I do like flip-flops. In the painting there are large trees, mountains, and pathways through the mountains. There is a field of corn. I think I shall keep this cross, as I could not have a better souvenir from my time spent in Nappi village at the foot of the Kanuku Mountains. It hangs in our kitchen and reminds me of one of the ways that it is possible for my brothers and sisters to live.

2007-05-05T14:01:00.000-07:00

Guyana Gothic

Our Veranda. Well technically I think that a veranda is on the second floor, but we always sit off the ground on the green bench so we have our own level of heights. We take coffee every morning here together and many evenings have a drink of rum on the same spot.

2007-05-05T13:48:00.000-07:00

I am sure that many of you are chomping at the bit waiting for news of our Fowl. Francis and Amber are going strong. They roost in the tree despite my best efforts to provide them a shelter from the rain. Nightshade, our older hen, died from some mysterious illness, which I was unable to cure. The older Rooster, Pretentious, fled the area shortly after, which was good because it is just not fun to have two roosters and one hen. Amber sat some eggs in Feb. and the next generation was up and moving around the yard after some weeks of the coup. But one afternoon a stray dog found a gap in the back fence and had itself a tasty little snack on legs. Amber gives us plenty of eggs and the yolks are a vivid living color. Francis is a fairly squawky one and there are days when I wish for a slingshot in the morning as he roves around under the windows indicating that he is awake to the world, while I only wish a few more winks. But that is the danger of having fowl in the yard.

2007-04-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

Maipaima ecolodge, Nappi Village.

Miriam and I were taken into this fantastic setting seven miles inside of the Kanuku mountain. A easily walkable dirt road connects the village of Nappi to the Eco-lodge. Private bedrooms, a fabulous kitchen, flush toilets, and a river runs around it for constant swimming and bathing. This lodge is open for tourists and is pretty amazing. Using this as a base the rest of the bush is at your feet especially with a local guide. On the one night we stayed here a family of Howler Monkeys strolled by in the tree tops right next door yet 300 feet overhead. I would strongly suggest trying to come to Guyana and stay in the Kanuku Mountains, I have a hard time imagining a better eco-tourist destination. The place has not seen very many visitors and is very remote, yet completely accessible for just about any physical ability. The possibilities of trips farther into the Mountains are spectacular. For more information try: Conservation International, or Foster parrots, or contact the lodge itself at mike_nappi2002@yahoo.uk.co Make sure you go in the dry season though as otherwise the area can be underwater.

2007-04-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

Watching the life of the Bush gather in the tree-tops. At dusk the bush comes alive and in the clearing of the Nappi Eco-Lodge the ability to look clearly in a 360 makes for amazing viewing. In the morning sit back and drink coffee, while the Macaws fly by and the Howler Monkeys stroll the heights. This location is ideal to start longer trips into the bush. The Kanuku Mountains are said to have the most species diversity in the country. It would be easy to spend two weeks here relaxing in the clearing during the dusk and dawn and hiking all over the bush during the day.

2007-04-24T13:38:00.000-07:00

Miriam picking a ripe Paw-paw from a huge tree growing in the middle of the clearing where the Nappi Eco-lodge is located.

2007-04-24T13:29:00.000-07:00

Me on a vine called a monkey ladder. I couldn't resist.

2007-04-24T13:20:00.000-07:00

Miriam, Giles and I at the headwaters of Nappi creek in the Kanuku Mountains.

2007-04-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

The main living area at Giles farm in the Kanuku mountains. Giles and his family farm at least four different slash and burn small plots in the middle of otherwise dense forest. The plots are of different age and are used on a rotating basis for a number of years and then left to grow back into the bush. Giles used to spend most nights here, but as his children got to school age he moved to a house nearer to the village so that he and not his children would have to walk the five miles or so one way every day.

2007-04-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

Miriam walking down the main village road towards the Kanuku mountains. Many of the people of Nappi travel this road a few times a day on foot or by Oxcart( which she is walking behind on the road) to go to their farms in the bush.

2007-04-24T12:54:00.000-07:00

Miriam and I in Eleanors back yard. In the background you can see a part of a storage unit that is about the size of a typical house and farther in the background a few other houses spread around the area surrounding the village of Nappi.

2007-04-24T12:49:00.000-07:00

Eleanors house on the savannah. In the background are the Kanuku mountains.

2007-04-24T12:41:00.000-07:00

Eleanor's house. The kitchen is the structure on the left. Miriam is reclining in one of the hammocks. The dog's name is spot. Water was collected off the metal roof, or brought up in buckets from the hand dug well a little ways off. It rained enough while we where there so that we didn't have to haul any water. But taking bucket baths in the wide open Savannah was a great way to get clean.

2007-04-24T12:33:00.000-07:00

The Kitchen of our host/grandmother Eleanor. It is a fantastic space, seperate from the house in a building made of a type of adobe brick and palm roof, it has a huge table and two stoves. The nine children that she raised in this kitchen certainly ate well if they ate anything like we did. I dream of having a kitchen like this one day.

2007-04-24T12:28:00.000-07:00

Congo-Nya opening the Rainforest Music Festival in Georgetown during the Cricket World Cup.

2007-04-24T12:21:00.000-07:00

Playing on the streets of Georgetown.

2007-04-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

Spending the evening inside the compound during the first weekend I spent with Congo-Nya in Georgetown.

2007-03-24T07:57:00.000-07:00

I am not an early mover in the morning, never have been. Generally I prefer to sleep until the sun has had time to reacquaint itself with the sky. I leave the virginal rapture of the sunrise to the Dawnists and content myself with the more tranquil termination of day into night, which the dusk proceeds. The colors are after all the same. “But the morning is such a peaceful time.”, some, like my spouse, would retort. And I couldn’t agree more- nothing like peace and quiet for a pleasant sleep.

The only exceptions to my prejudice against seeing the sunrise, which have proven consistent over the course of my life to this point, are either those evenings when I have managed to stay awake all through the night or when I am going on a trip. When I was a small child in Nebraska I remember the hazy time period of the pre-dawn when my parents would lift me from my bed and shuttle me to the packed Volkswagen bus, where I would fall back to sleep on the floor sharing the inside of flannel sleeping bag with my sister and brother. When we awoke again, miles had gone by underneath our heads, we were much closer to Chicago, and family, and Christmas, and the day was indeed a different and exciting place to enter into. Other mornings in the mountains, in the wee hours of an alpine start, I have gladly jumped out of the sleeping bag into the day’s fresh chill, downed a quick hot cup of tea, and gone ever upwards through rock and snow until at last reaching the High Point: if I were allowed to see it that day. There I would sit still and quiet in the exposure: everything dropping away. Then back down again to safety before the storm came or the night fell. On these days it was imperative to rise early, the outcome of the day, perhaps even the safety of my person depended on an early start.

While in Guyana I have been starting my days on average around 7:00 (5:30 on Sundays of course), mostly having to do with the proximity of our rooster to the bedroom window and Miriam’s regularity with making a cup of coffee. I can not say it has ever felt necessary to be up at that time, it simply seems like what is expected in this land when the sun always rises around 6:15 give or take a half-hour. Day comes so you rise; shinning is not required. But last Friday the prospect of rising before the dawn in order to meet Braks and the rest of Congo-Nya at the ferry terminal for the first boat to Georgetown had me bouncing out of the bed. Here again was a chance to move before the sun, to climb towards a place where I might find something new to listen to in the quiet of the High Point( if it were to be reveled to me) past now not the Rock and Ice, but the sun and city of this tropical costal capital in South America. As the blind Reverend Gary Davis sings, for this weekend at least: I belong to the band Halleluiah.

The Cricket World Cup has started to take over the country of Guyana. It started last week with the West Indies defeating Pakistan. In the Caribbean everyone celebrated, in Pakistan (especially when the team lost their next game to Ireland) people rioted, burned the team in effigy and threatened the autocratic cricket team selection board with overthrow. Interestingly the political climate in Pakistan also suggests that the military dictatorship is in trouble. It is not a stretch to say that the Cricket World Cup can influence political events. Not really knowing anything about cricket before moving here I can understand that Americans perhaps have not even heard that this event was being held. It is in fact the third largest sporting event held globally after the Olympics and the Football World Cup. A lot of people are flying from around the world to the islands to watch matches for a month’s time. Guyana, because it really is an island in the Caribbean, which happens to also be attached to a mostly unpopulated rainforest section of the continent of South America, is part of this event. Starting on the 28th of March, 8 games will be played in a brand new stadium, financed by India, in Georgetown during the second round of the tournament. The government is placing the growth of the tourism industry and even Guyana’s future on the ability to host these games. Georgetown is going through a massive clean up in order to make it hospitable for foreigners. Hotels are being built and upgraded, roads are being repaired, and there has even been some talk about installing traffic lights and garbage cans. Braks has been talking about going to Georgetown for some time now and it is in order to get a feel for what is going on in the city in the weeks leading up to the games here that we headed down on Friday. Most simply put the event is exciting, but also a possible way for the band to actually make some money.

I showed up at the ferry at 5:30 for the 6:00 first boat. This of course is ridiculous here in Guyana, being early, but I still get a little nervous about time. You would think that weeks of watching school children slowly dribbling into class for the first two hours of every school day would set me straight with what time means here, but I cling to start time as always. Everybody else showed up by 6:30. The boat had just stopped loading by that point and the large two story gates had been closed and locked. It is an interesting moment at the ferry; the crowd is somewhat arbitrarily cut in two by a large fence even though nobody on either side is going anywhere as the boat has already been loaded. Sometimes a person will be able to convince someone to open the gate by the not so subtle use of explicative combined with apparent personal power, but mostly everyone is either locked in or locked out. The crowd stands around talking to each other, and passing things through the links, and then the boat leaves and the gates are opened and the crowd becomes one again. I don’t understand it, but there is a lot I don’t understand down here. Cast upon new ground, first realize that you know nothing.

I had spent most of the time waiting sitting on a set of wooden bleachers off to the side watching the constant flow of people. It was fun to realize that I knew a good many of the people walking around this foreign city in the early morning. There were two buses full of my fifth form Tutorial students on their way to Georgetown for a field trip, a few little children from Miriam’s parish with their mothers, market venders, taxi drivers, a doctor, and my newspaperman. It was good for me to start early on my weekend practice of sitting still and watching the world pass until somebody else told me it was time to move on. I wasn’t quite there yet, I was fidgety, kept getting up and walking around, trying to get comfortable, not being sure where I should stand, then returning to the bleachers off to the side to attempt to observe unobtrusively. Then the band arrived. Seven men from the age of 17 to 58 carrying drums and bags for travel. As naturally as I could I jumped right in with them, picking up a drum and a bag while moving into step besides Braks. We had missed the first ferry, but that was because Braks wanted to take the smaller passenger transport instead. I hadn’t known it existed, but then again I know nothing.

I have tried before to explain some of the monetary values of the Guyanese economy, usually the exchange rate and that sort of simple building block. What I perhaps have not stressed enough is that there really is no work, especially for the poor young black men who make up the band. They have not been shown much in the way of education by the school system, but even if they had been their options are pretty bleak. Maybe a clerk’s job at a store along with thirty others waiting on five customers. Or perhaps a governmental job with say the post office, or the schools, hospitals, or police. All these pay at an average of less than a hundred dollars a month. The electric bill at our house where we mostly just have a fridge and a few lights runs about 25 dollars a month. What happens is that just about anyone who can get an education and then pull all the right strings leaves the country to find work abroad. The remainder of the young men are part of a large pool of unskilled labour and are treated as so many mules- weither it is cutting sugar cane all day in the fields with a machete or mixing cement in huge piles by hand in the middle of the street for hours on end for the occasional house that is being built by someone with overseas funding. The lucky ones are those who get to actually do this punishing labour, everybody else has to figure out someway to get a little cash to live. While sitting in the house some days I think to myself that I am strange. I sit inside the house many days reading and writing not going anywhere at all. Then I look out the window and see that in every other house there are men and women of all ages sitting in their houses or on their porches day after day not going anywhere at all. The only strange part about me is that I don’t need to be making money while I am here and I will continue to eat. That and come August I will be going somewhere. In this economic context the Conga-Nya Cultural Foundation is not only a keeper of the communities culture, but a very necessary employer. I have been going around to the schools in the area with the band for about a month. The show that they provide for the children and staff of these schools is a great event in the school year and one of the best things I have seen happening in these schools which all too often are chaos and mental drudgery. The average amount that the band gets paid for each show is probably around 6,000 Guyanese dollars. Take out 1,000 for transportation, divide the rest somehow between the six members of the band (not even including Braks the leader in the cut) and maybe everyone walks away with 800 Guyanese. That’s about four dollars U.S. The work is not consistent and it don’t really pay, what do you say want to join up? Or course it beats shoveling concrete.

Now here we all were headed to the capital to get a feel for what was going on. New world and new situations, for me as well as for some of the members of the band who had not done this before either. I was glad for the time I’ve spent talking with Braks and sitting in his home often times for hours with nothing in particular to do. I felt that our friendship had been allowed the time to grow in trust and openness that made it possible for me to accompany then on this trip to Georgetown. As much as I like to think I am a good guy to have around, Braks was only adding to his burdens by inviting me into the group. An extra person to squeeze in a bus, an extra person to house, an extra person to feed.

Right before I left the house I realized that we only had 3,500 guyanese dollars left. 18 dollars US for two days in a capital city didn’t seem like a very significant amount of money. I took all of it and figured I would go to the bank sometime in the weekend because, well I can, I have a bank account, unlike everyone else in the band except for maybe Braks. Besides I had heard that supposedly the city now had ATM machines that would take foreign bank cards, for the tourist of course, and I was interested in seeing if I could actually simply walk up to a machine and take out cash with my plastic. When you haven’t done that for a while it is pretty amazing when it works again.

Immediately I gave Braks 700 Guyanese for transportation to Georgetown enjoyed the fast river crossing (have to take that boat more often), and then jumped into a Volkswagen bus with everyone else. I rode the whole way with a drum between my legs and my head banging the roof on the bumps, but it was a pretty comfortable ride all told. I knew everyone in the bus, the driver only sped when it was appropriate and the music blasting out of the speakers was at least good. One of the popular songs at the moment came on as we neared Georgetown. Everyone perked up and smiled widely as we all sang loudly with the Chorus. “I’m gonna get on a plane with my baby one day and fly, fly, fly away. I’m gonna get on a plane one day with my baby and fly, fly, fly away.” I’ll admit that the thought made me pretty happy and that for me at least it was also true.

The driver dropped us off at the corner of Regent Street and Camp Street. Congo-Nya had played this corner many times. It is in a busy shopping district and it had provided good money. This is what we were going to do in order to get a feel for what the streets were like, set up on a corner and start playing. We piled up the bags on the concrete and I sat on mine and read the paper becoming the guard of our stuff in the busy street. The band looked around for a few things to sit on: a broken chair, a crate, a plastic packing case, and some cardboard to rest the bass drum on. They set up a stand with handmade crafts, mostly beaded jewelry that they spend off days making. They squeezed over for a woman who obviously was a vendor on the street often. She started to set up her cardboard stands and pulled out underwear, socks and slippers to sell along with all the other little street stands that sell underwear, socks and slippers. A man showed up with two wooden cases filled with watches and some vague plastic items. He opened up and started to set up on the other side of us. At one point he told the band he needed a little more room and the bass player squeezed over, the bags got piled higher up, and I stood up and moved out of the way. Somebody handed me a cowbell and a stick.

Braks took up his shaker, which was made from a calabash tree in his yard, and the band started hitting the drums.

The reaction from the people passing by was pretty incredible. Braks would stand on one side of the sidewalk, facing the band and point occasionally to a box on the street with a slot for money. Men and women would start dancing as they walked by. Braks knew everyone and almost everyone smiled at him and put money in the box as he exhorted. “A donation for Culture, Support Culture.” I stood out front near the street, turned towards Braks my back leaning on a concrete column. A guy named Bunny stood on the other side of him playing a long piece of bamboo. Eventually I got over my shyness and started trying to play the cowbell. I have no idea how to play a cowbell. I felt like I had a pretty good little three beat swinging flourish going there for a while, trying to at least move in time to the music and not make too much noise with my instrument as it was sounding kind of like a dull piece of metal being hit with a chopstick. Actually I was pretty proud of myself; I had never played with a band on the streets before. I was pretty proud that is until later in the day when a guy named Blackie picked up the cowbell and started hitting it with a plastic lighter. Somehow he made the thing sound like the heavy strings of an electric guitar twanging out a surf rock riff, and I again realized that I know nothing.

We played for about two hours, taking a few five-minute breaks in there. The band members are all talented musicians and it amazes me how they can make impressive percussion music for hours without ceasing. Invariably I would loose the beat and drift away. Only to hear them steadily playing onwards on the right note, all the while Braks calling out and shaking the gourd like it held the very spirit inside it.

There are police everywhere on the streets of Georgetown. I don’t think this was the case when we first arrived. Since Christmas the government has been increasing the police presence in the shopping district especially and now that the World Cup is here they are very visible everywhere. There are trucks with about 8-10 machine gun armed young men with a military style jersey and a beret who roll by and jump out in twos to walk the street. These guys don’t really talk to anyone; they just try to look as hard as their weapons. The average age might be 20. There are unarmed constables who walk among the people more or less giving orders. And then a variety of other uniformed ranks of different specialties I guess. At one point there were about six armed men standing around us on the corner watching. The police are not the most respected group in the country. In the last week a family in Miriam’s parish was robbed at night by a group of armed gunmen and when the police finally responded, at 8am the next day, the mother felt that she recognized the voice of one of the police as being that of the bandit who had held a gun to her head while she held onto her baby boy and said she didn’t know where the money was hidden. So it was slightly disconcerting to be surrounded by the men with guns, but Braks didn’t seem to be bothered so I just kept hitting my cowbell and smiling.

Out of the blue the watch seller started agitating the bassist to move over another few inches, for all of us to move over so that he could get his stand flush with a window even though it was standing up perfectly straight as it was. It was quite obvious that we had no room to move without packing up. Braks told him that we couldn’t and wouldn’t move anymore. We had gotten there first and the streets were supposedly free territory. The watch seller appealed to the constables and they stepped up to tell the bassist to move. Braks then stop everything and in a calm, but aggressive way, started telling both the watch seller and the police what he thought of the situation.

I had heard that the government had been clearing the streets in certain areas of vendors, and that there was a system of bribes that vendors paid for the police not to move them. It was not he first time Braks and the watch seller had been down this road and I suddenly understood that this was one of the things Braks meant when he said he was trying to get a feel for the streets. He has been playing for years in Georgetown, at official events, schools, and on the streets, providing just the kind of cultural atmosphere that the government has been saying that the city needed to welcome the tourists. Now he wanted to see what that actually meant. Could he play easily on the streets, showing people he was in town and thereby start the process of finding more jobs or would it be a constant hassle. He has had the hassle before. He wasted no time when this one showed up.

Braks obviously did not like the watch seller very much. He did not appreciate him bringing the police into the affair. He stood in the face of the officer and told him that he was sick of the corruption of the police in the country. He called him “a ten cent police- do anything as long as you get your ten cents.” Then Braks started to really get into and I saw again that he has a pretty serious voice in this county and he is very unafraid to let it sing loud. He can become the fullness of the Rastafarian Warrior and his speech is filled with the prophecy that the bible uses for the denouncement of the ruling corrupt world and the uplifting of the righteousness of truth. The constable and his partner said nothing after a few minutes and then they actually backed off and walked away. I don’t think I have ever seen this happen and it seemed like a good victory. But Braks was too hot to be finished and the watchman did his part keeping it up as well. Without warning, perhaps as fed up with the inaction of words as Jesus became in the temple with the moneychangers, he reached over and tore down part of the watch seller’s stall. Unlike Jesus he didn’t break anything, but it was still a clear violation. He shouted with all his fury: “These streets are free for the peoples use, but you have made of them the paths of robbers.” But he realized that he had gone too far and he walked away to simmer down.

The watch seller went to get the police. The police came back, but nobody had seen anything; it must have been an accident. The police left, the watch seller folded up his cases and locked them and then he left. Braks returned and the band started playing again. Shortly a police vehicle pulled up with the watch seller in it. A woman with a uniform of superior rank got out and very calmly told Braks he would have to leave, he could play somewhere else but not here. Everyone started packing up and Braks was smiling and laughing and shaking his head while occasionally repeating the phrase “the stone that the builders refused, will be the corner stone.”

Later I learned that this woman had given him permission to play at that spot. Something had changed. The vendors on this street now pay money to someone, unofficially of course, and so they should get something for their money. Apparently for the watch seller that meant he was entitled to the space right up to the windowsill and wouldn’t settle for a few inches less.

Braks had gotten the taste of the street that he wanted. Now we would move to another spot and see what the reaction was there. We walked as a long train of drums and bags heading towards the Starbroek Market and the heart of the city. Braks confided in me that he would have to go to the Deputy Mayors office in the next week and get a letter from him giving him permission to play anywhere. He was hoping that it wouldn’t have been necessary. I started the band up singing one of their songs called Harmony needing a little myself to take the edge off the encounter where I was merely an onlooker.

Braks stopped us on a side road one half-block from the market. Everyone threw down their gear and sat on the sidewalk while Braks went to talk to the owner of the building. He had played here before, then gotten kicked out, but it was a new owner so who knew. At least there were no vendors around.

The band bought local juices from a guy with a cooler on wheels. All day we drank these juices, which come in a tied plastic bag. You get a little straw and poke it through the plastic and drink while holding the bag with a certain pinch of the forefingers around the straw and the knot. They are all over Guyana. The juice inside is sometimes pineapple passion fruit, or star fruit cherry, or whatever is plentiful at the time, blended with water and cane sugar. They are cheap. You can buy about four times as much juice for the same price as that which comes in sealed bottles. You just have to trust the vendor and his water supply. I had a loaf of bread in my bag, which I took an occasional bite out of, but nobody ever wanted any when I offered it and I didn’t see anyone eat anything else during the day until dinner. Even though they were playing music for about seven hours. Since my time around the group I’ve gotten the impression that there is one meal a day and then whatever juice or fruit you can find.

The new owner gave the go ahead to Braks and soon the band was at it again. More people here, crowds pressing in, men watching from their permanent spots leaning against the walls, children sitting on the curb right at the feet of the drummers, street people dancing crazily and women smiling as they passed on the way towards market. And all the time money coming into the box. I never saw just how much money was made, but I was surprised at how quick people were to add what they could. Probably 8 out of ten people gave something. I think that one explanation is that in this country people carry loose bills in their pockets. There are only four denominations 20, 100, 500 and 1000. The twenty is virtually worthless by itself (10cents) and very easy to take out and put in the box. Loose change. But people were also genuinely respectful of the band and the music. I got the sense that what they were doing, playing on the street, wasn’t that common, or that if it was this band Congo-Nya was the ones who did it. In the end it was a powerful reminder that small amounts of almost useless money, when given by many hands to one collection, has the potential to make a substantial sum. It certainly was a better paying gig then the school jobs and the Ministry of Education sanctioned those. Here all they had to do was avoid the hassle while they hustled just like everyone else for the money for the day.

What did I do this whole time? Amazingly I was able to just stand and sit and watch the world go by as if I did not exist. That sounds not so amazing, but after you’ve been one of the only people that looks like you walking around in an entire city for awhile it is pretty hard to feel invisible. Being part of the band made me anonymous, at least if I didn’t make any sudden movements. The stiller I sat the better. The taxi drivers who swarm the town didn’t pester me, nobody tried to figure out where I was from and tell me how they had been to New York, nobody even asked me for money. I stood on the street in the busy market area and didn’t have to speak or think twice about guarding my person. And what did I see? One of the most entertaining sights in the world for my money: the constant flow of people of many shades interacting. Just sitting still everything dropped away and I could see more clearly. Could see that human beings are beautiful, as beautiful as the most pristine mountain vista.

. At one point I did get up and go with a friend named Rascal to try to see about getting more copies of a brochure I had made up for the foundation. We ended up traveling around the city to different copy shops and at all of them, including the biggest one in the city, we were told that the machine that was needed to make the copies was broken until Monday. While we were traveling in search of the impossible copies Rascal updated me on the health of his mother. I had heard that she had entered the hospital earlier in the week. It turned out that she was dying. By one of those multiplications of misery his son also entered the hospital this week for an illness. Both of them live in New York. Despite many attempts he has been unable to get a visa from the U.S. state department to visit his dying mother and ailing son. He is too poor to demonstrate the type of assets and ties to Guyana that will assure the U.S. government that he is not a risk to overstay his visa and become a dreaded illegal alien. Rascal is well educated man in his fourties. Governments are not as beautiful as people.

The day ended early for the band because nobody had seen the place we were going to sleep and Braks wanted to settle in there before it got dark. So again we picked up and walked away. We walked down the middle of the streets, a larger group now as another drummer had chanced to join the players, and two singers, who did the school tours but lived in Georgetown had also show up. We were headed to a place that one of the singers had arraigned for us to stay. It wasn’t far to walk and the mood was pretty uplifting as we strolled the streets. I noticed a bank and asked Braks if I should stop and get more money. He pointed to the line that wrapped around the block and told me not to worry about money. As it turned out, even after spending 2,000 on transportation, I would return home with 1,000 guyanese left in my pocket. The trip costing me about 10 US dollars total.

I have stayed in Georgetown a few times now. Usually I stay at a guest house, which for Miriam and I costs 5000 guyanese (25 US) a night. Not a bad rate, but also not a possibility for the band. The only way the trip begins to work financially is if they find free lodging. As it turned out the place we were staying was only about 2 blocks from the guesthouse I usually stayed at. We arrived at it unexpectedly. I was simply happily bouncing down the lane.

In the middle of a block there was a series of non-descript wooden houses stacked on top of each other. Hardly noticeable at first glance, there was a walkway going into the middle of these houses with a framed wooden portal, which served as the entry gate. Next to this portal was a small caged shack where we said hello to someone inside I could not make out, and who apparently was on watch at the gate as well as selling little pieces of packaged and homemade food stuffs. We were waved in and started single file through the portal and down a slanted wooden raised walkway missing a quarter of its slats. As we walked farther into the interior of the block the wooden houses started to rise all around us and within twenty steps we were completely surrounded. A young girl was bathing in a bra and panties using a flexible pipe, which was connected to the main water supply. In order to wash her hair she had to bend her head very close to the drainage ditch, which the wooden walkway ran above. We then entered a maze in a confusing narrowing of walls, windows, doors and roofs which all ran together in the urban palate of gray wood, rusted metal, and green mildew floating atop mud. We turned once right, then left. At a concrete pillar holding up a sagging roof corner we turned right again down a narrowing broken pavement alley. In twenty feet there were some plants that had been potted in an absent section of concrete. It looked like a dead end, but everyone ahead disappeared to the left one after another. When I got to the plants the small narrower alley became visible. It was lined on one side by a pockmarked concrete wall and on the other by a fence made of 20 foot high sections of metal roofing standing on end and nailed in place with bleeding nail heads. It was darker suddenly, and the walkway was slanted so precariously, and so narrow that I had to use the concrete wall to pivot my shoulder on with every other step while being constantly mindful of the jagged metal on my other side. At the end of twenty feet of this there was another vertical sheet of zinc, which formed a gate and once inside the gate we were home.

The ten of us filed in past the gate and stood where we could find room on either a set of wooden stairs leading up to a door, or on parts of a wooden platform on the front and side of a little one room roofed house that stood directly in front of us and filled the rest of the space. While Braks went in to inspect the lodging, the rest of us stood against each other in the enclosed space. All around the zinc roofing fence blocked out all view. The sky was cloudy I think, but almost immediately the sense of a sky, or the openness of the sky ceased to be tangible and instead the gray clouds became instead a type of ceiling. Braks came out and declared the place perfect. Just what he wanted a quiet place where he could escape the bustle of the city.

There was one queen-sized bed, space perhaps for 1 person to sleep next to it on the floor and a space at the foot of the bed, between the bed and a defunct stove, where another person could conceivably curl up. That was what four- five people. Outside maybe a person could sleep on the wooden decking in front of the door if they lay diagonally and maybe another on the side next to the fence. Both of these wooden areas, in fact the entire area were above what appeared to be a swamp. Some other members of the band were skeptical. Braks would have none of it; he was grateful for the free spot and made the necessary gestures of appreciation now. “One night is nothing, if need be I’ll sit out here all night while you all cuddle on the bed.” “We’ll sleep in shifts” his son quickly joked. “Four people could sleep under the bed if it came down to it” Braks said quite seriously. Then he turned to the young man who had provided the place for us and declared that for four or five people it was of “International quality”. Of course there were seven of us but we would figure that out when the time came. Bags and Drums were shrugged off shoulders and people picked out a space to sit, while others started getting buckets to haul water from the girls bathing pipe so we to could wash off some of the days dirt and sweat.

Braks went inside and divided up the day’s money, then handed it out to everyone. Bunny went out to get provisions for that nights meal. Everyone settle in, stripping down to vests (undershirts), or changing into a clean shirt after their turn at the bucket. I washed my face and put some lavender oil on my forehead and at the base of my skull. I noticed a stool in my quick glance inside and pulled it out. It was about 5:00. Everyone sat back and let the night move in. From somewhere a TV was placed on the counter inside the room and turned on. It stayed on throughout the night.

We spent the first few hours talking until dinner had been made. When it was ready everyone got a plate heaped with rice and a side of vegetables and Soya chunks. A group of kids and young women from inside the enclosure came in to get some of the food, which had been prepared knowing that they would come. The kitchen was up the wooden stairs and was the back of the singers girlfriends parents house, I think. It looked like any kitchen anywhere: pots, pans, water bottles, Tupperware, sink, stove, fridge. From the top of the stairs the view expanded out a little. I could see that beyond the fence at the back there ran a wide concrete drainage ditch filled with sludge and water but most likely cleaned in the city push for the World Cup. Across the ditch there was a large warehouse with cemented up windows and barbed wire everywhere. Behind the fence on the side was an empty lot about forty feet across and filled with the remains of half burnt dwellings and overgrown bush. The house with the kitchen blocked the view in one direction entirely and a two-story wall without windows was the vista from the front door of the lodging. There was a door under the stairs, which I was told was the entrance to another dwelling place, but it remained closed while I was there.

Neither Braks nor I left the area all night. The other guys came and went, but I wanted to take in as much of the feeling of the enclosure as possible. Plus I had been out in the open on the streets under the bright sun all day so it felt pretty good to be surrounded. Late in the evening I did go back out the narrow passage and to the concrete pillar, but the view only changed in that I could now see more wooden structures, narrow two story places leaning sideways, and many little garden shed, which turned out to be where people slept.

After dinner I learned that the whole place from the guard cage to the back fence was an illegal squatters tenement. Even the nice kitchen was constantly under threat of being torn down. The police had been there already two times that day looking to harass and get what ever they could from whom every they cornered.

Around the city there are many other areas, which have been declared illegal squats even though often times people have been living in these places for decades without assistance from anyone. For the World Cup the government was putting up large freshly painted white walls and then lettering them with advertisements to hide the eyesores from the tourists. Some of the lots are terribly run down, though often not much worse than the legal lots right next to them. Some of the squatters keep immaculate houses and gardens, though most don’t have room to grow food. I didn’t see any men except those in the band the entire time I was there. It appeared that only women and children inhabited the place.

The group sat talking well into the night, seats shifting, sometimes leaning against the wall, other times on a stool, still again with legs crossed and square on the ground. Actually I moved the most. Everyone else had the ability to sit mostly still in one place on the unpadded wood for hours on end.

At some point people started to drift away. One of the singers had a gig that night. Bunny had found a place where four of them could sleep. One or two just disappeared somewhere for the night. Finally Rascal left to go home and it was just Braks, his son Ras LJ and I. We went inside and closed the door and window and watched replays of the days World Cup Cricket matches. Ras LJ took the floor at the end of the bed, curling up on the hammock that he had brought with him. Braks took a small side of the bed near the door and the bedside near the wall was mine. Before falling asleep Braks said “You don’t snore do you, I can’t stand snoring, If you snore I’m gonna be out the door” I sat outside on the hammock I had brought for a little while trying to take in the night and the solitude. I knew that Braks usually woke up around 2 in the morning and then sat alone outside with his thoughts until dawn. It was the only time he ever got to himself.

Eventually I came inside and tried quietly to crawl over Ras lj and into the corner of the bed without making too much motion to wake Braks. I used the hammock for a pillow and my shirt as a cover from the mosquitoes. It was hot inside that little room, the TV played on, and the single naked bulb shone directly in my eyes unless I coved my head with my hat, but I really didn’t care that much about sleep. Sometimes it is more interesting to stay awake all night long and see how the morning shapes itself from deep inside the dark. So although I did drift off here and there, I mostly tried again to stay still and let everything drop away. Braks got up in the night and disappeared outside leaving the door open. Then the light from our outside ceiling slowly dimmed back on. The dawn from inside the enclosure wasn’t, that morning at least, a stunning revelation of renewal.

The band returned member by member and I got up and sat with everyone again on the gray wooden decking in the gray light coming down from the outside ceiling. No one spoke for a long time. Then the outside ceiling started dropping rain and we all retreated into the room, stacked on top of each other now, legs and arms intertwined except for the space given to Braks, who napped again on his sliver of bed. I got up from my stool in the middle of the entangle to check on the rain and lost my seat. I stood by the door, half in half out, not quite able to take the constantly droning television, but enjoying the cooling wetness of the rain. A clay-mation cartoon of Peter Cotton Tail from the seventies came on the television suddenly and everyone laughed along to the story. I felt like I was 8 again and had gotten up extra early and sat dumb in front of the television while the Nebraska Agricultural report droned on about the price of hogs and soy. And then just when I didn’t think I could take it anymore the cartoons had begun and my sister and brother had joined me for the fun. When the rain stopped we went out into the streets and played all day long.

2007-03-09T13:19:00.000-08:00

The Tutorial Library. Luckily it is decorated with the remains of a parade float and filled with the complete makings for a Steel Drum Band. There is a little cubboard where the students come on Tuesday lunch time to check out books. Sometimes a student will grab a book like "The Illiad" and, despite my attempts at distraction, they take it home as the first book they are going to read for the Library Club. Smaller works are actually a little more manageable. There is a pictorial hardcover on the manufacturing of Bubble Gum that has seen repeat interest. There is the beginning of an understanding of how a book is to be taken off the shelf, and then reshelved if the student is uninteresed. The shelves continue to get disturbed over the mad rush, but as you see the library is small so it doesn't take too much effort to straighten it back again.

2007-03-09T07:35:00.000-08:00

After painting the cement floor of our kitchen this morning, I took a car to Braks lot on the backdam behind Little Rock television station. The band jumped into a mini-bus and fled off to Rose Hall about fourty minutes away. I missed them yesterday. I had thought that the heavy rains would slow them down as much as it did me. But by the time I got to the house after walking through the thick mud that can only be negotiated barefoot, they had already left. Todays show was to a group of 200 13-17 year old students. The stage was twenty three foot high by one and a half foot wide benches pushed up against each other. Somehow four drummers and Braks Running on the things didn't result in a broken leg. One of my favorite current songs the group does is Harmony:
Truely Blessed I pray for the people in the world to get better,
Truely Blessed I pray for the people in the world to get better.
What we need is
Harmony
What we're seeking for
Harmony
What the world needs today
Harmony
It can set I and I free
Harmony
Burn Jealousy
Harmony.

2007-03-02T08:21:00.000-08:00

I’ve always loved alleyways. The narrow passages on the deserted sides of buildings, which sometimes turn out to be blind and other times break open new vision as upon entering a clearing in the middle of a forest. Some of my first memories take place in the alleyway behind a house in NE Minneapolis. Crossing the alley was the quickest way (perhaps the only way) to the other neighborhood children. There were some frogs in boxes I think, and an electric dryer that ran even when the door remained open. If you braced against the sides just right, and didn’t weigh too much, you could do a complete spin. One afternoon a friend and I buried a shoe of mine in the dirt piles of a lot site under construction off the alley. I think it was a game. He would bury my shoe someplace in the lot and then I would look for it. I couldn’t find it and then he forgot where it was buried. In my memory the whole neighborhood came out with shovels and prodded the earth hoping to find the buried treasure of my old sneaker. I don’t think we ever found it.

In my twenties I spent a lot of time in cities exploring the alleys between larger buildings. My favorite nighttime activity was to look for ways to get onto the tops of those buildings. Friends and I would link together fire escapes, window ledges, drainpipes, tight full body squeezes, and desperate mantels up and over the lip to gain the wide vistas that the heights would suddenly reveal. Then we could sit up there for hours unobserved, even as we surveyed all that went on around us. Not many people look up from where they are placing their feet.

The backside of New Amsterdam, really the whole city, the whole country, is a network of alleys. Some are in grid form with roads in various stages of pavement, others dirt footpaths, and occasionally stone rutted wider lanes where the bicycle bounces enough to jar the teeth and make you feel like walking even when the sun beats down hot. Other alleys are lined by thick bush on both sides and only as wide as your outstretched arms. Or again the rivers, blind green walls on the sides, brown pathways forward and back. The question for me is what might be around the bend. What happens when the lane peters out, or the pavement ends, or the bush walls off and must be parted by hand. When will the moment come when the world opens out again and overwhelms with it’s renewed limitless expanse. And who lives there, because somebody always lives in the place, where I am simply passing through.

Most concretely my alley wandering has been concentrated in the backside of New Amsterdam. I get occasional glimpse of other areas of the country, but I travel daily on the grid, which starts with the main road and extends backwards till it ends in bush. Generally the roads are better paved the closer you go to the main road, but actually some roads farther back are in better shape as they get less traffic. The ways between the main parallel roads come in a much wider range of form and there are three large canals to deal with, sometimes there are bridges built for cars, sometimes you must be very gentle while crossing a few old rotting planks spanning the water. There are only sporadic spots where any way is completely free from obstacle, but after six months of riding them in the day and night I’ve gotten a pretty good feel for where to be at any point on the ride. Sometimes that means threading a rise between multiple potholes, other times leaving the road entirely for the grass detour, still again leaving your side of the road to make it past the junked out car which is squarely in the street and has been for eternity. Often all this takes place while cars honk their priority and trucks don’t slow down even when the street is lined with school children. My favorite road by far is the farthest road from the Main Street. It is dirt and the placement of the potholes varies with the rainfall. When it is dry, a hard track is beaten down by bare feet and bicycle tires. It remains visible even in the dark of night, if you give up all sense of sight and don’t so much pedal as float. In the light of the new risen moon it is a thing of beauty, in the breezeless afternoon glare of sun it relaxes frayed nerves, and in the blind dark of a star filled galaxy of night there are few places I’d rather be. The people along the route have gotten used to the white man appearing without a light in their midst and if I stopped to chat with everyone it would be a long time before I got where I was supposedly going.

I try to vary my route in an attempt to see every back alley and so that I remain slightly unpredictable. And there are many connecting side roads, which I have yet to go down. One day I pedaled down a street, which zigged right and then left, strangely deviating from the usual straightness of the connections. Then it ended at a house and all ways forward looked closed. But there was a little side road that went for twenty feet or so and I pushed the bike past that ending onto a sliver of a trail in the chest high grass. Boards spanned low spots of muddied flood. A little girl not out of nappies walked behind me and could not understand my questions. Did the way forward lead back to the road and across the back dam or did it end in a blind spot amidst the burn piles and the gray wooden back lot fences. Was I already on someone else’s land? Should I turn around? The little girl kept pointing a way forward. I followed, but she turned off at a gate smiling. She had shown me the way home. I kept going by feel through the now encroaching grass and it eventually did come out to another side connector and a small wooden bridge let me cross the last deep channel. I was happy to have found my way down the previously unexplored pathway to my destination. I smiled at seeing people again, smiled at the man who held a long cudgel stick in one hand, leaning on it as a staff. Then noticed that the other hand dragged a young girl behind him, wrist bound in his grip, the fingers of her hand blue from the force.
“Ah man you found her hey” another man passing by broke the days stillness.
“Been searching for two days now”
“Don’t let her run off again.”
“She ain’t getting nowhere anymore.”

The girl (daughter? wife?) followed like a stubborn burro dragging against its minding boy, except the boy was bigger than her and there was no choice but to walk forward. That or be urged on by the ever ready cudgel. I tried to breath by remembering the quiet of the grass walled alley just explored, the smile of the little child in nappies.

Everyday normality and I just keep on riding by, even saying hello as I go. The varieties of the story line are so many and I am unable to comprehend even a quarter of the possibilities. How do I get involved? Should I get involved? Silly question white man. Keep riding, other alleyways will open up to other stories. Keep making eye contact, smiling. Sometimes it matters.

We’ve been in Guyana for a little over half a year: have spent over half of the time we shall spend here. The days to our departure tick off in front of us. Things are spinning fast as we get more involved with the people around us. When I started this piece January was still being shaped and February was just a notion in the mind. Trips have been made up a river and numerous times into Georgetown. Tours of schools, church for worship and meeting, football matches, library clubs. Now it is March. You can’t tell by the weather. Besides the minute difference in when the sun comes up and goes down, the days are either marked by increasing rainfall or increasing sunshine, usually a little bit of both. Each day is remarkably like the next. It is perhaps the most foreign thing to me about living here. No way to count the passing of time. Or no way I’ve been schooled in. The world doesn’t shut down, fall off, get buried in snow and then come back to life from under the piles. I feel time most specifically in terms of weeks. Generally we start to understand what might happen in a given week by Sunday afternoon, the next week’s events only revealed truly the next Sunday afternoon. Talk of two Tuesdays from now is met with an indifference, and rightly so- who knows what will happen two Tuesdays from now.

Similarly the past is slippery. If I haven’t been around to play football or visit the market, or say hi to a friend for a week, invariably I get greeted with “ Man you been scarce ain’t been seeing you around for long time. I thought you had gone back.” And there is that truth again. I am going back, leaving the country. Even when they are treading down new alleys in the grid, my feet are not so firmly planted on the ground of Guyana as they were even one month ago.

So maybe I will count in weeks. We have roughly 22 weeks to live daily in Guyana. Well it’s a good number at least. Doesn’t do much for my sense of time, but it's always been an interesting number to me. Two added to two equals four; two multiplied by two also equals four. The number here serving to remind me that time forward is ineffectively measured.

Got to run. This afternoon I pedal to Braks on the back road, the winds are blowing and I will be heading into them. We are heading to a school in Canje to do another performance, we have one every day this week. Tonight there is a community development meeting, which Braks has asked me to attend which might start the process of getting some grant money from a European Union source. The veterans football squad practices tonight as well, luckily my knee is stiff from last nights game and I may be able to beg off running today, we have a full field game under the lights on Friday night and a road game up the Corentene on Sunday. Thursday and Saturday will see me in Tutorial in the morning and at the University in the afternoons, probably should go to the market somewhere in there so that we can continue to make the fresh fruit juices with our new blender. And I have to remember to get water in the morning. Last week is a long time ago, the idea of August uncalculatable. Today has been pretty interesting so far.

2007-02-20T13:11:00.000-08:00

The Sand Hill community. Last week Miriam and I had the pleasure of joining a Lutheran Church work group from Oklahoma as they traveled up river and assisted on the reconstruction of a church. For the whole week we were sleeping outside, fed wonderful food, talked and sang the days away. We worked too, I still have paint on me to prove it. One day a man named Paul and I sang hymns while we balanced on the thin planks and painted the high spots.

2007-02-20T13:03:00.000-08:00

Miriam and I slept in the open air shelter under the rainbow. The primary school is the other building in the picture. Sand Hill on the Demera River is a dock and a big sand hill upon which there is a church, a school, and a few other structures. The sand is white and goes on forever all around. It feels like you are near the ocean but instead you are surrounded by bush. Little foot paths crisscross everywhere from house to hut, to the river, down a sand road, and into a little black water stream where the locals get their water and bath. The bathing glade is serene and everyday a dip in its waters was renewing.

2007-02-20T12:58:00.000-08:00

roof work and painting the cross.

I got to paint the high parts of the church because i was willig to balance on the planks that the community members strapped up for scaffolding. climbing comes in handy again.

2007-02-20T12:52:00.000-08:00

Big hats and sunscreen, plus a little bit of paint, covers the skin from the sun.

2007-02-20T12:46:00.000-08:00

We all loaded onto the boat to leave and while we were waiting the school children sang us a song or two. It was a good moment; the men from Oklahoma listening to the children.

2007-02-20T12:39:00.000-08:00

Sand hills church pre-restoration. While the church was without a pastor for around twenty years the building fell into disrepair. The congregation kept meeting in the school house and thought that the church would eventually fall over. Last year they got a pastor again and work started on the restoration. These are new roofs already put on by the community. The oklahoma group gutted the floors and relaid them as well as the siding on the front, and remade the windows. We got one coat of paint on the whole thing an then our time was up. We held a service in the church as the sun was going down on the last night we spent in sand hills. The community came out in high fashion. It was great and then we left. Now they have to finish the job they started and continue to use the church and the school to provide support for the entire river community.

2007-02-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

Last week Transfiguration Church in Betsy Ground, Canje opened to the public a play park. It was made by the Men's Group of Transfiguration Parish with funds raised by the church and a local donor. There are very few playgrounds for children in New Amsterdam. Betsy Ground in particular presents very few safe environments for children to play in. It is a stark contrast to the many, many jungle gyms and public playgrounds that I had so much fun on as a youth. I particularly liked the monkey bars. Miriam holds a reading group for the children of Betsy Ground twice a week which is open to the public and reads non-religious texts( this is important as the area is majority Hindu). After they have read for awhile the children get to go outside and play on the park. It is a fabulous project for the church to have spent energy and money on. It really makes the whole neighborhood much more of a place for children. Miriam is in the background of this picture helping serve the celebration meal.

2007-02-11T12:25:00.000-08:00

Transfiguration Church and it's brand new play park in Betsy Ground, Canje.

2007-02-11T12:17:00.000-08:00

Miriam at the opening celebration for the Play Park at Tranfiguration Church Betsy Ground.

2007-02-11T12:13:00.000-08:00

First session of the Drama and Shortstory Workshop at the University of Guyana - Berbice campus. Actually have the use of the Auditorium, which has a small stage. Yes this is the Auditorium, and yes that is the stage.

2007-02-10T07:20:00.000-08:00

Notice
Voluntary Activities on the University of Guyana Berbice Campus.

THE CHESS CLUB
3-6 on Thursdays in the Cafeteria.

DRAMA AND SHORTSTORY WRITING WORKSHOP
2-6 on Saturdays. Check with security for the classroom location.

These activities will be coordinated by Mr. J. Arthur Blyth.

J. Arthur Blyth is the author of six plays for the stage, two film scripts, a novel and numerous short stories. His plays have been produced in Philadelphia, Washington, and New Mexico in the United States. He also directs for the theater and is the director of Blythlyway Productions. Blythlyway Productions Company is comprised of international actors and has staged four World Premier full lenght plays including: DIRT ON A SIMPLE WHITE DRESS and DAILY WE COMMUTE OUR SENTENCE.

What's going on?

The intention is to gather a group of students and community members together who are interested in developing new Drama. Writers, Actors, and anyone interested in the stage is invited to start attending weekly seesions. Those interested in short story writing are also encouraged to attend as one of the primary focuses will be the use of dialogue in the written form.

ALL ARE WELCOME TO THESE FREE ACTIVITIES.

2007-02-10T07:13:00.000-08:00

Congo-Nya on stage.

2007-02-10T07:04:00.000-08:00

This is the photo I would use for an album cover. Emblazen Conga-Nya across the top.

2007-02-10T06:56:00.000-08:00

Two singers join the group half way through the show. They sing songs with lyrics which include the following:
Can we do it, Yes We Can.
Can we do it, You know we can.
Can we do it, Yes we can.
We all are one.

and

Do you give to the poor?
When ever I can afford.
Do you carry you brother's burdens?
When it is overload.
Do you take your neighbor's own?
I never did so.
Alright you qualify, So GO.
Which is I think a fairly good invitation to humanity.

2007-02-10T06:52:00.000-08:00

St. Theresa Primary school. The children are impressed.

2007-02-10T06:43:00.000-08:00

I spent the last week visiting primary and secondary schools with the Congo-Nya Cultural Foundation. They perform shows using the hand made drums seen here. Braks is the leader of the group and his son is the leader of the band (he is the second from the left). It was an impressive week of teaching children and quite a lot of fun.

2007-02-03T05:38:00.000-08:00

The old New Amsterdam Hospital.

2007-02-03T05:34:00.000-08:00

Four horses.

2007-02-03T05:27:00.000-08:00

The football field behind the Prison Officers club and near Scott's School ground. I started playing with the New Amsterdam Veterans Squad last week. I just make the grade as I turned 35 in the last year. They play tournaments and practise twice a week on a full field with goals. Once I started running and shooting at full goals again it is hard to want to play on the small field. I am trying to figure out how to both play in the Standpipe pick up games and with the veterans team.

2007-02-03T05:17:00.000-08:00

Brak's Kitchen. One of the best times to talk to Brak is in his kitchen in the afternoon. The house usually is less crowded and the kitchen is off the flow of foot traffic. It is all open to the air. In the dry seasons he cooks outside around the corner. Two propane burners, a blender, and a cooler. There is no running water in the house and the electric current is spliced off of the nearest (and last) pole on the grid. Sometimes there is no water outside at the stand pipe for a few days. Occasionally the power company sends workers out to cut the spliced lines. It is a really welcoming place, full of grace and surrounded by growing vegetables.

2007-02-03T05:09:00.000-08:00

Joe's Bar. You can see the whole place in this picture. Except the window sills through which people lean in from the outside and become inside. Joe was a detective in the police force for 15 years. Game of dominos anyone?

2007-01-19T12:55:00.000-08:00

I bought a new pair of football boots in the first week of the New Year. Since my toes were spilling out of the rips in the sides of my running shoes, I felt it was time to put a little money into my renewed athletic endeavors. After playing one game my feet have been raw and bloody for a week and I have realized that I need to break in these “new skin” (as the footballers call out when you walk onto the field with shiny shoes) or break my feet. For, even though these football games are informal, everyone takes every day’s match extremely seriously. Once everyone is on the pitch and the game starts there is no leaving the game because of blisters. The game ends, often well after dark, only when the last goal is scored. I mean there are guys that go into hard tackles barefoot in the middle of cleats- feels kind of silly to let down the team and walk off the field because the boots are rubbing wrong. Out with the old, in with the new. Happy New Year indeed, mind the sore spots.

Miriam Adelaide and I are attempting to return to a more sustainable weekly level of activity after the frenetic pace of the month of December. She is starting to spend time at the office again and that, combined with church council meetings in the early evenings, means that I have the house and the kitchen table (my office) to be alone in again for long stretches of time to write and read. Or at least that is the idea. Being in Guyana has a way of turning your plans into convoluted non-linear confusion, which work themselves out, but never how you thought they might. It’s a bit like… well life, but in an ongoing, constant, regenerative cycle which feels about an hour long at times and leaves me out of breath and staring into space, unlike those celebrations which look back at the course of a year and provoke a chuckle for the ridiculous miracle of how you have come to be where you are.

We were issued a 3-month visa upon entering the country. It expired some time ago so we have been technically illegally residing in Guyana. We are illegal aliens. Our paper work is in process, don’t get me wrong, we are trying to put everything right by the law. We have a letter, which states that we can apply for a new visa to take us until August. The letter was issued fairly quickly after our written request to the ministry of home affairs; I believe it took only about two months to reach us. This is actually a pretty quick response on the scale of governmental responses. I know a man who has been waiting to hear about his qualified high skilled workers Canadian visa for 6 months and after looking at a website was comfortingly told that 80% of applications are processed within 24 months. And we are already in the country. He and his family wait daily for more information, which will dictate the course of their lives. Do they stay or do they go now?

In order to get our visa approved we have to get a medical certificate, which states that our chest x-ray is clear, our stool shows no parasites and our blood carries no venereal diseases. At first we thought we were going to have to travel to Georgetown to find a lab for this work, but then we found out that one of Miriam’s Parishioners is a receptionist at a respectable lab here in New Amsterdam. There are of course no appointments- anywhere. The first time we showed up we were X-rayed and sent home with the negatives. The technician wasn’t in so we should return the next week for the other two tests. I dropped the large negatives on the road, while riding the bike home, as I waved at a fruit vendor and avoided a pothole. Luckily nothing ran over them and they missed the puddle- eventually I am sure someone will certify that we are clear: they looked good to me.

We returned to the clinic. As the technician was drawing my blood, with an impressively sterile looking needle, I learned that he was the son-in-law of a Lutheran Pastor upriver. After a short spell in the waiting area (next to a guy with metal sticking out of his shin after reconstructive surgery, apparently the hospital sends people to this clinic for X-rays) the tech asked to see me in the other room. He started asking me personal questions. I inferred that something was amiss with the blood test. Eventually he told me that we had both tested positive for syphilis. I suggested that Miriam perhaps should hear the news.

We were uncertain what to do next. It seemed very unlikely that either of us actually had the disease, and I suppose some righteous indignation or blank refusal to accept the results as valid would have been appropriate for a Pastor and their spouse. But…instead we were on our way to a Doctor that the tech recommended to speak on the matter further. The technician was extremely professional; he assured Miriam that everything was confidential. However, as we left the lab we observed that in the future medical testing should perhaps be separate from congregational members and Pastor’s son-in-laws.

After a few minutes with the Doctor, in a small two room office in an unmarked backside of a building, we could have gone straight on to the pharmacy, picked up vials of some absurdly strong penicillin cocktail and enough hypodermic needles to stick each other 8 times each - in daily alternating checks of course. We followed our rule of shopping, a corollary of which pertains to medical situations- before you start sticking each other with needles, stop, breathe, walk out of the office and talk it over for a little spell.

We also remembered we have other resources at our disposal. Pastor Dick is a gynecologist, and an American missionary living in Georgetown with whom we have exchanged pleasant conversation. With-in a hour of leaving the office we realized that we had had a barrage of medical tests before coming to Guyana in the first place, wouldn’t they have said something if we both had syphilis. Dick, of course, told us to get another test and he recommended a lab in Georgetown. Plus he said there were a lot of steps we should take before we started sticking ourselves with needles, which is, I think, really good advice in general. We were not completely excited about having to go get another test in Georgetown; the process would take the better part of a day. But until we did, and got a non-reactive result, we were now illegal aliens carrying a communicable disease. We realized that because of Miriam’s schedule we could either go the very next day or in two weeks. We decided on the next day. And we did relax when the next test turned out negative for both of us. Now we don’t have syphilis. Lucky for us. And we can get our visas. Or at least we can go to the next step of collating all of our paperwork and bring it to the ministry of health, which means going back to the New Amsterdam lab and asking for the stool sample results to be written on a separate sheet of paper from the positive STD test (we are playing rock, paper, scissors for the dubious honor of doing that task.) Oh, and get someone to read a chest x-ray. Then with any luck everything will go smooth in Georgetown and it will only take a day of queuing through government offices to get our visas. We are preparing to spend the night.

* * *

As I was hanging out the laundry today to dry on the line, a young mother and her child came to the gate. The standard practice in Guyana is walk up to the gate and shout out “Inside” until someone pokes their head out to see what the ruckus is all about. So following protocol the woman stood and said “Hello, Inside”. I asked her to come into the yard, while I finished hanging up a few shirts that were draped on my shoulder dripping wet, and then turned around to see what was what. I didn’t think I recognized the two, but it’s best to assume that they know me from somewhere. The mother asked if I could help her with the child with some money. I was unprepared today; thinking I was going to spend the day alone inside the house writing. I asked her to come into the house for a second while I thought of what I could give them. They followed me inside through the back door. I gave the little boy a copy of a Dr. Suess book. Picked it randomly from a pile on the couch. “Green eggs and Ham”- didn’t really catch that until after they had left. Then I gave her the remaining eggs in the fridge and some tangerines hanging in a bag. We didn’t have any prepared food in the house and I stood at the open fridge trying to decide if I should give her some beans or perhaps the remainder of a pineapple. In the middle of this the next-door neighbor woman came in a huff up to the front door. She asked to see me outside privately, where she told me that I wasn’t to let people like these into my house. I had broken protocol. I think it would have been proper to have them stand at the door, or maybe better the gate, while I did the searching. I said I knew, apologized to the neighbor, thanked her and she left. I saw her later in the day and she said nothing so I guess she is not mad at me, though at the time I was concerned that I had shamed the neighborhood or some such ridiculousness (or that she knew something more about these two hungry, crafty, dangerous? strangers than I did- I try not to think that way but it creeps in and I might as well admit it). I returned to the kitchen and put the pitiful eggs and tangerines in a bag and told the mother that was all I could do that day. One book, three eggs and four tangerines. I of course had money upstairs, but couldn’t get myself to leave them and get it, or thought I shouldn’t. Protocol, which we have decided on - don’t give out money at the house. Yet I could see this young mother looking at the contents of my refrigerator with need. Most likely this is why you are supposed to ask them to stay outside the gate. To be spared the feeling of discomfort that arises when you see your humble possessions become grand and overflowing in the eyes of someone without. I palmed the little boys head with a friendly touch and told him to have fun reading his book. “ I do not like green eggs and Ham. I do not like them Sam I am.”

A few nights ago, just as Miriam and I were sitting down for dinner another stranger came to the gate and asked for ‘Inside’. Turned out that she was a member of the mostly defunct Lutheran church next door to our house. The church still going on, still meeting weekly: without a pastor, with walls falling apart, glass missing from the windows, standing water all around. She had made us two elaborately embroidered pillowcases. We asked her if she would join us for diner and she hesitatingly agreed “just for a little moment”. Over dinner we learned of her life four streets away. Of her husbands death two years ago. How she has four boys in the house age 12-26. How they all live on her husbands pension supplemented by the occasionally work the older boys could find and her own needlework. She had almost left the country last year (gone ‘Outside’, they literally say), to start working as an embroiderer for someone in Barbados, when she had been informed that the person who she was going to be working for would have charged her more in living expenses (on credit of course) than they would have paid her and slowly she would have been trapped in the proverbial sweatshop. She had decided not to go. She was a great baker of breads and pies she said and was thinking that she would start to increase their income by baking a few items for the market each day. It was a long enjoyable dinner; she ate with great care, like my Grandma Smith- food on her plate long after Miriam and I had finished eating. Before she left I managed to put the left-overs (wonderfully named ‘Put- forwards’ here) in a container along with some candy canes and a Christmas stocking with money hidden inside. It was the 12th day of Christmas, our last gift exchange. Was it correct to put money in the stocking, proper protocal we wondered? Should we have even given money? She has since returned with a nice potted plant, a type of herb for cooking, as well as some yellow water coconuts. I saw her on the street and she teased me that she was plotting to bring by some more fruits, but didn’t want to let me in on the plot. Strange things we worry about, while others extend everything they have to offer even as they don’t know what the next day will bring.

A friend of ours has been married and living with her husband for over thirty years. In the last months they decided that he would go ‘outside’ to work in order to continue to support the family. His visa was suddenly, unexpectedly approved when he went to the capital to check on its status, and when that happens you go immediately. He boarded a plane the next day. She traveled to the airport to see him before he left the country, but the car she was riding in broke down and she missed his flight. Most likely they will not see each other for at least two years.

A parishioner of Miriam’s had us over for lunch last week, wherein she served an impressive feast of international fare. It was the most complicated meal we have eaten at someone else’s home, except perhaps the Christmas dinner we ate at Judy’s next door with the other American missionaries. We sat to eat it with her five grandchildren who live in the house with her and her husband, as well as at least one of their own children. I sit in the pew next to these granddaughters of hers in one of the worship services on Sunday morning. Sat down by accident on the first Sunday and found myself surrounded by little girls; I had chosen their pew. Now I hold the book with them and make them laugh with my singing. They help me get through service with their fidgeting and we make sly faces at each other. The grandparents built the house over the course of fifteen years when ever they could put away enough of his cane-cutters salary to construct the next wall. The other girl’s parents are living in other places, working and sending money back or unable to take care of their own children because they don’t have stable living conditions. One of their daughters is in the United States. Her mother can’t get a visa for a visit (mainly because the U.S. State department thinks, broadly, that since they are poor it wouldn’t just be a visit). The daughter is afraid to come back to Guyana, because she fears the crime targeted towards the returning Diaspora, and although she has proper papers she doesn’t trust that she will be allowed to re-enter the United States. They haven’t seen each other since she left twenty years ago.

In the market last Saturday, at Samuels stall I started talking to an elderly woman who I had exchanged pleasantries with a few times. We stood in the hustle of the shoppers holding hands and she told me that her grandson has just died. He went into the hospital with pneumonia and they not only cracked open his chest but sliced apart his abdomen as well. She saw him leave the operating theater with blood soaked bandages and blood coming out of his nose and then he died. It’s not exactly an isolated incident. I’ve heard about more wrongful deaths in the last half year than I’ve heard about in my entire life. We lamented together in the crowd. But her presence and bearing led me to ask about her other grandchildren. She would be putting her love into those even more now. And alternating between our acknowledgement of the inequality of suffering, we spoke of my brother and how that same week he had just had the first baby in the next generation of my family. Death and life accepted as accompanying each other, neither taking the sorrow from one nor removing the joy. I saw her yesterday in the market and we walked out together talking about the continuing world. Her daughter, whose child had recently died, had just had a little girl.

Judy, our next-door neighbor, had to perform another funeral for a suicide in the last week. Young men and women kill themselves at an alarming rate. They take poison. Often times they give poison to their children first and then take it themselves. Life is less uncertain than death to some it appears.

The government has dramatically changed the tax structure in the New Year. It is fairly chaotic in markets and at stores currently. Lots of arguments about prices. Nobody is sure if they are being cheated or not, nor who exactly is receiving the benefits. People with the least amount of money are the first to be adversely effected. It promises to be a rough transition. The opposition party has called for a national shut down to protest the government’s policies. It is hard to judge how likely it is to happen. People wake up every day unsure what the price of bread will be, or building materials for that next wall.

* * *

Last night, after teaching reading in the afternoon amidst the chaos of the school, I sat in Braks garden with his son and two other members of Conca Nya. They showed me more plants that I have never heard of before and I tasted more leaves and fruits and nuts. All the while 5-10 year old children were carrying old paint cans full of water they had gotten out of a broken pipe in a trench. They carried it, set it down to rest, picked it up again and walked on coconut husks and planks through the mud- only to return again for another load while the water was running. The men picked coconuts from high overhead using long poles, or scrambling up the trunk barefoot and shirtless forty feet off the ground. One man stood over the pile and chopped off the husks and cracked the shells with brisk, seamless motions of his sharp cutlass driven into the fruit cradled in his open palm. A slip would mean no fingers, but a slip was out of the question. Out of one of the coconuts came a fully developed heart, which is how the seed starts to feed itself. Apparently it is fairly rare to open one up fresh and they said it was a good sign. They gave half of it to me. The heart was spongy and super sweet, unlike anything I had had before.

I sat in Braks’ kitchen as he prepared food on a propane single burner. Occasionally a child prompted by his mother would come into the kitchen and ask for something to eat. Braks would give them an option of a papaya or a tangerine. The house filled slowly with neighborhood children of all ages, some watching a movie in the living room, some sitting in the dirt floor enclosed porch playing goatskin drums and singing, some continuing to collect water. Braks’ standpipe was working that afternoon suddenly; it hadn’t run for four days. We filled every available vessel and brought them into the kitchen. I wandered among the groups.

Two boys outside, who I had talked to before, taken pictures with, given magazines and books to hold in their own hands, asked me for money. Then the younger one asked me for a bike. I asked them how it had been that morning when the rains had come down hard for a long time. Our yard had been flooded, the streets standing water traps to leap over, the trench at Braks’ house overflowing into the garden and nearly swamping the little wooden bridge. I wondered if they had been under a zinc roof like I had been, and had the tremendous noise made the same impression on them as it had made on me. Their eyes opened wide when we talked about the sound. One said it had been cold. In a very clear, calculated voice the older of the two boys, maybe 11, said that if he had two tires and a chain he would have a bike. I asked him what he meant and we translated the size of the tires needed- I said I would see what I could do though I wasn’t promising anything. The younger one (maybe 6), sensing that something was going on, asked me for money again. I told him I needed ideas, plans. At the time I was washing off an elaborately carved sign depicting Guyana, it had become caked with mud and was lying on its side on the dirt outside the back door. I asked if they would make sure the sign stayed upright. I showed them a piece of wood I was going to carry home. It was an unfinished throwaway cutting from a sawmill- a thin piece of good hardwood, with a handle in the middle. They asked me what it was for. I said I was thinking of cutting it in half and carving one side into a sword with an enclosed handle, and the other into a cane.

The power started ebbing out and the water stopped flowing. I sat in the light of a single bulb singing for an hour with them; the drums were now the only entertainment. I got up to leave and in the dark outside my flip-flop got sucked down into the mud with a miss-step on a slippery plank and the break of the toe strap, which I had been waiting for, came. I went to look for the long stick I was thinking of carrying home and found that the boys had decided it was interesting after-all. Good for them. I’m not really a wood carver anyway, don’t need a sword anymore and thankfully not yet a cane; besides I doubt I could have managed the ride home. I negotiated the wooden bridge only plunging into the trench on the last step, not quite correct in my guess at where land started again. I pedaled home with one bare foot through the mud paths and then onto the darkened streets. The whole ride home, while trying to avoid those potholes that were known to me, I caught only flirtative glimpses of guessed at obstacles on the road ahead in the sporadic illumination of oncoming life. So I did what everyone can: I sang.

Never get weary yet
Never get weary yet
Never get weary yet
Been struggling down this road for a mighty long time but we
Never get weary yet

2007-01-03T08:45:00.000-08:00

I'm a sucker for burros

2007-01-03T08:38:00.000-08:00

The trench outside Braks Gate and the view down the road. It is in good condition in this photo, actually drains amazingly well, but if it rains with any consistancy it becomes mud pretty quickly.

2007-01-03T08:29:00.000-08:00

The water carriers outside Braks front gate. Braks has water in the house and a standpipe outside. Electricity and water stop at this road. The children carry it over to their houses. After I took the picture, the eldest boy told me that I had to ask permission to take pictures. I apologized and said he was correct. The children made me take a few more pictures of them so they could decide upon how they would front the camera.

2007-01-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

Braks at the front gate. While the passageway is open for the neighborhood to use, the gate is necessary so the cows, sheep, goats, burros and horses don't come it and eat all the good produce. The country of Guyana is free range. So alot wanders by in the course of a day.

2007-01-03T08:14:00.000-08:00

Cultivation in the front. The time just after Christmas is a short dry spell and time to put in the seedlings. The guy with his hands in the dirt and rich manure was preaching pretty good too. W've got to humble ourselves. Take off our shoes and walk on the dirt.

2007-01-03T08:07:00.000-08:00

The back of Braks Lot heading towards his son's house. Nice arugala growing on the side.

2007-01-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

Palm tree removal. The arborist climbs up the trunk of the palm and attatches a rope to the high point. Then he nails in a board to stand on. From the board he chops the trunk with a cutlass until he thinks it might fall. Then he joins the men on the ground and they all pull in one quick motion. Not only did the top not hit any power lines or fences, nobody was injured either. It was fairly impressive.

2006-12-31T07:10:00.000-08:00

During the week before Christmas this year in Guyana I bought my first piece of Jesus art. It was among the many things that were new to me in this Christmas season where the rains come down hard (the snow just melt before it hit the ground I was told in consolation), BBQ chicken with potato salad and watermelon are standard holiday fare (if you close your eyes it smells like the Fourth of July), and on Christmas Eve everyone walks the streets which have been transformed into a county fair of picture booths, carnival games, and of course last minute shopping. I have found myself alternatively missing family, friends and traditions during this holiday time and feeling warmly embraced by those new friends and communities (and their tropical traditions) which I have found myself surrounded by here in Guyana. And in between the suspension of disbelief that it is Christmas time at all.

I have met two painters now in New Amsterdam. Besides the sign painters (who are amazing in their ability to block razor edge letters free-hand and whose work adorns the sides of the Canje Bridge and the donated cement benches of the Esplanade) there is very little representational painting or drawing visible on the streets. There isn’t even any real graffiti except left over political campaign slogans- Vote AFC For Change Not Race. While there are problems with graffiti, I will admit to feeling a certain comfort in seeing the expressions of individuality thrown up, brightly splashed and mingled with the more pedestrian grid work of blacktop streets, concrete and glass which are the primary colors of most cities. In Chicago, while attending two weeks of training for this year, I walked around the streets of Hyde Park and was consistently caught off guard by lovely, random silhouetted stencils on walls and sidewalks. One in particular, on a broken expanse of concrete nearly made me cry for the way this anonymous artist had captured the landscape of my thoughts as I prepared to leave friends, family, familiarity. In a standard sized panel of concrete sidewalk, otherwise entirely shattered by cracks, there was a Black Hand print with all the markings of an individual palm. Under it, on the next panel of concrete, which was completely smooth and clear, and cut from it, by the line separating the poured stability, there were the words in small lower case – im afraid ill be alone. There is plenty of random color here in Guyana, the roads are anything but orderly, the buildings their own individualities, yet I missed seeing how people represented their world with their own images- not merely the photographs of advertised dreams.

One day, months ago now, I noticed an image in my own neighborhood of Stanleytown. Up on the second floor of a seemingly abandoned wooden house on the main road there was a board where a window used to be and it practically cried out it’s color in contrast to the graying wood. I didn’t even recognize that there were figures on the panel until after a number of passings on the bike in the following weeks. Then suddenly they were clear as day. It was a painting of two women dancing. I hadn’t made it out because the image was sideways and slightly abstract, but now it provided me a hint of company every time I passed it’s merry-making. Eventually I asked somebody on the street, in view of the painting, if they knew anything about who had made it. The teenage boys I asked at first were wary of my interest in it or them (most likely due to the fairly brisk illegal, yet completely open, trade being plied on this particular corner). Then they were dismissive of it, as it was just a part of their daily view and as such no more unusual than the palm trees. I think they also wanted to reassure me that it hadn’t been done without permission of the owner of the house; presumably my ilk should care about that I suppose. When they began to understand that I liked the painting and was asking about the painter, they didn’t know much but directed me generally to some clothing booths on Pitt Street where they thought someone would know more. In another week I randomly picked a man in a booth selling t-shirts and he both knew who the artist was and that I had been asking about him. Unfortunately he didn’t know exactly lived (somewhere over the Canje Bridge he thought), but he did say that the man, named Stephan, was occasionally on the street outside the market selling his paintings. And then one day he was there and he had heard I was asking about him. We spoke for a while amid his paintings of life in Guyana. I see him often now and have noticed that his paintings are upon the walls of many of the businesses of New Amsterdam and in some of the homes as well. He is amazingly prolific in his monopoly. And of course he knows Braks the head of Conco-Nya, they have worked on plays together in the past. Maybe if things go I can get him to do some scenery painting for a project. For Miriam Adelaide’s birthday I bought from him a portrait of a mother suckling a newborn. It is a beautiful painting and hangs by the back door; we see it every time we come down the stairs.

Now you could argue, I suppose if so inclined to view the world through a certain lens, that this first painting I bought was a version of the Madonna and Child. I don’t need or care to argue the point, but I think you will see when I describe the second painting I have purchased here in Guyana why I say that it is truly my first Jesus Art.

The painters name is on the painting, but I know him as Jolly. The first time I meet him was when I bought rat poison from him inside the market at a little folding table containing various pellets of different shapes, sizes and wild colors all tied up in twos and threes within torn pieces of plastic bag. He asked me what one I wanted. I had no idea what type of poison I was supposed to use, said as much, and asked for his advice. I think he was impressed that I would say I knew nothing about something, as well as surprised at my ignorance of something so basic. He grabbed two blue ones, told me how to use them, and we exchanged greetings whenever I saw him around town after that. For I have never seen him at the poison stand again, but more often in front of the entrance selling watches or sunglasses, etc or simply sitting watching the flow of traffic on the street. He was standing there when I bought the picture from Stephan and he approved of the purchase saying, “When I first see that picture it mak me skin grow. Mak me skin grow Man.” Which was somehow exactly how I felt.

One day in early December the usual market side entrance was closed off and foot traffic was directed through the main part or the first grand building. I usually avoid this entrance unless I want to sneak into the market through the tight rows of clothing stalls inside. The market has been under repair since we arrived, so occasionally this detour has popped up. Instead of parking my bike in among the racks of bikes I have to pick out a secluded spot inside the market itself, between stalls or against a post- out of the way, but in the middle of everything. As I walked in I noticed that a different artist had hung up some paintings on the wooden walls leading in. They were all biblical scenes. I looked at them cursorily and went in to do the shopping. On the way out I looked a little more closely. One in particular was pretty good. It depicted the Luke 10:42 story of Jesus in the home of Mary and Martha. I knew this not because of my biblical prowess, but because it was written just like that on bottom of the painting. The details of the robes and dressing gowns were good work and the depth of the painting was fairly impressive, but I couldn’t imagine buying it. It just didn’t even occur to me that I would. I would have safely walked away tucking it away in my mind into the category of Jesus Art, which is I think a close cousin to Black Velvet Elvis Pictures.

Then Jolly was standing next to me, although at this point I didn’t know his name. We exchanged greetings and looked back at the paintings. It became apparent to me that he was the artist, though I don’t think he said so outright. I told him I like the Mary and Martha piece. “Everyone like that one Man.” I stated what I had inferred- you’re the artist. He smiled. Not shyly exactly for he is far too big a presence in the street to be even slightly demure, but his pride was printed in a way that only replicated the more vulnerable original etching he held back inside his breast as if worried the air might corrode it. And then without another word for me he suddenly spoke of his seven years spent in prison in payment for hacking the arm off of a man with a cutlass during an argument. How while he was inside we somehow got a hold of a picture book of biblical stories. How when he saw them it made his skin grow. He taught himself to draw there in prison and these paintings we what it had come out as in the end. I told him I was interested in the Mary and Martha painting and inquired about the price. He was asking 5,000 Guyanese dollars (25 US). I told him I was interested, but that it would take a few weeks to get the money together, maybe before Christmas, if it was still available, I would be able to buy it.

I saw Jolly occasionally in the next two weeks. Once I saw him in a verbal altercation with another man, which Jolly pushed in volume, posture and increased ferocity until the other man waked away. I never saw the paintings again displayed; they were just there for that day apparently.

A week before Christmas I saw him on the way to buy our vegetables and I asked him how I could arrange to get the painting as I had the money ready. He gave me his phone number and thus I learned his call name. He said he would give it to me for 4,000.

I bought a phone card to use to call our family in the states on Christmas. I used a little portion of it to call Jolly a few days before Christmas as our landline can’t be used for calling local cell phones without a card. He answered the phone and we arranged to meet at the market in an hour. “So what time is it now” about twenty to twelve “So I’ll see you at noon then” No more like 12:30 “Good, Good Perfect.”

I took a car over to the market as it was threatening rain and I didn’t want to damage the painting carrying it home on the bike. When I arrived Jolly was at the front of the market. His bike was parked slightly off to the side of the busy entrance- its specially welded front basket stand was down and it held a big box. He was standing on one side of a table bartering with three women who were interested in the rabbits sitting on top of the table. I said hello to Jolly who didn’t recognize me at first as I had just shaved my head and beard- my standard solstice shedding. We exchanged conspiratorial smiles. I had fooled him. (In the Rastafarian culture this long hair to baldhead transition is fairly common – mostly having to do with being forcibly shaved against their religious beliefs when they are in prison.). He asked if I would wait a few minutes and I stepped back to observe. At this moment I noticed that under the rabbits, beneath a clear sheet of vinyl and serving as the actual table for the bartering, the painting was laying face up. The three rabbits obscured Mary, Martha and Jesus equally.

I stood taking it all in for the next five minutes the sale took, then the second five minutes that it took to get to the same point in the sale after Jolly had run off for a box to put the rabbits in. The three young Indian women, two in fairly traditional saris, wanted the price to go down. Jolly, a fully locked Rasta in a camo jacket and camo shorts hanging below his knees, tried to explain that they weren’t his rabbits. He didn’t know anything about rabbits, but the big man rabbit in the box just sold for 4,000 and these three he had to sell for three thousand. In the end everyone was happy, the rabbits were boxed up and money exchanged hands. Before he could turn to me a woman in the crowd of people milling around on the busy market street shouted out to Jolly that she wanted a man. “I already sold that one in the box, but I can bring you a man tomorrow if you want one.” “Bring me a MAN.” Jolly caught on quicker than I did, but a half step behind the crowd. “I need a MAN’ the crowd shouting out with her now. “I bring you a man RABBIT, otherwise you on you own.”

At this point Jolly took the vinyl off of the painting. I handed him 5,000 “As we agreed at first” I insisted. And I was now the proud owner- guess I’m gonna have to find somewhere to hang it.

We stood together in the middle of the crowd pushing past in all directions and watched the world for a few minutes. I was about to leave when he indicated he wanted to say something more.

He began with his own inner sense of worth. His faith all tied to it. And then told me he had just had sex with a young woman right before I called that morning. Just like that. No – I was laying in bed- but straight to what he had actually done. Exactly like when he told me he had cut off another man’s arm. I wasn’t sure where anything was going, but I continued to listen, leaning into hear his words over the market din. “I was just telling her how I hoped luck be with me that day. How I need to hustle up sometin good for Christmas. And the phone ring with you.” Unfortunately I still hold on to the semblance of control I can have on a situation, mainly by choosing how I make myself available to the world. So I said I had to run that day. Needed to get home I think I said. But sometime here in the future, Jolly wants to have me come around to see his home. Can’t imagine turning him down.

That evening we went Christmas caroling with one of Miriam’s Churches through the village known as Cane Field. It started out kind of rocky. Nobody but the four of us showed up at first. Probably because it was raining and the whole area was in a blackout. But Pastor Roy knew that one woman in particular had made treats for the carolers so we started out for her house. In the dark that only happens in blackout and in a slight mist we sang Oh, Come, Oh, Come, Emmanuel. Oh, come, blest Dayspring, come and cheer Our spirits by your advent here. A candle was lit inside. We were ushered into the house, more candles lit, and we sat down to sing another carol as she dished out the channa (chick peas with spices) and tea.

Encouraged by our reception we swung back to the church and picked up a straggler or two and headed to another home where we were greeted at the door before we could even get to the end of the first verse of Hark the Herald Angel Sings. We were greeted with our first taste of black cake, a type of fruitcake, kind of, except the fruit is chopped really fine and soaked in rum. It’s name and color coming from the caramelized sugar and rum that is a major ingredient. Hers was just out of the oven.

Further emboldened Pastor Roy disappeared and we set off on foot with about 10-15 of us mostly kids singing our way back to the church in the still blackout and continued drizzle of the silent night. Once we arrived at church Pastor Roy was waiting for us with a large flat bed truck he had procured from somewhere. All of us carolers jumped up on the back, taking care to avoid the holes in the floorboards and really started to belt it out as we rolled down the back roads: mud puddles and ditches rocking he boat as we sailed between members houses. We sang steady for about an hour this way till the rain picked up again and we stopped for another round of snacks and tea to warm us in the 90-degree night.

When we loaded back up the truck wouldn’t start. We tried to push it back and forth in the muddy turn around at the end of the lane, but nothing doing. So we mustered the troops and pushed the truck through the mud puddles now and finally to some cement, eventually leaving it in front of the house where we first started singing. Again on foot we continued for another hour, got fed again, and tried to keep our feet out of the big puddles in the dark back streets. Pastor Roy got the truck started and returned it after two hours of work and we waited in front of the church for him to return with his station wagon so we could all pile in (about ten of us) and head to the last stop. I feel asleep in a chair outside this house till everyone called it a night around 11:30 and we got a ride home.

It was all supposed to happen again the next night, but serious rain kept Miriam and I at home. The wind howled and waves hit the house in steady twenty-minute intervals for five hours. Alice, Pastor Roy’s wife, said by phone that we should stay at home. We sat quietly playing dominos together on the kitchen table. It was our first night of nothing to do for a while. The week had already seen the four hour Christmas concert one night, and the five hour Christmas social another night (where in Pastor Roy handed out gifts to over 50 kids off an individually named list) I was feeling perhaps excessively connected to the parishioners of the church and I think we sang Oh Come All Ye Faithful forty times. It was good to get a break. Amazingly Pastor Roy found carolers waiting for him that night and they kept it up until 10:00 when another blackout hit and the rain really started.

On Saturday we made bullas- the Swedish sweet bread of my families tradition. It was our second batch and we were handing them out to neighbors and friends as quick as we could make them but not quick enough to guarantee ourselves a big enough personal stash (of course in days to come we received more Black Cake than was believable, luckily if you keep it soaked in rum it lasts for months). In this simple act of baking with Miriam, the stretching of dough, the scent of cardamom, the pie pans laid out on every surface waiting to go into the oven, in this tradition of mine transplanted to the tropics I felt the first stirring of Christmas and the connection to family that I had been missing.

Christmas Eve Day started with services in the morning, as it was a Sunday this year. Miriam led and preached her first complete solo service, then we met up with the third church for a readings and carols service in the small all wooden countryside church of Betsy Ground where I always feel so at home. At one point I really got behind the building chorus of Oh, Come let us Adore Him and by the time it was over I knew it had been my last heartfelt carol for the season. I would be faking all those to come.

After we returned from the service Miriam spent the day working in final preparations for the Christmas morning service which was to start at 6 am the next day (in those moments of early morning church I just work on keeping my posture good in the pews and marvel at my spouses ability to string sentences together from the pulpit while my brain tries to catch on to the fact that I’m upright). I took the afternoon to spin on the bike and stop in at the houses and gathering places of friends. The rains had made a mess of the dirt road at the back dam and I pushed the bike along in the slop not trusting myself to pedal through it without spinning out. How does the world look when you travel in mud on foot every time you leave your house?

I had seen Braks providentially on the road earlier that morning while in the car with Miriam and got the chance to introduce the two of them. When I got to Braks house he was excited by the meeting. I’m pretty sure he trusted me before hand, but getting a chance to see Miriam and get a sense of who she was built our relationship up that much more. I offered a ceremonial swig out of the pewter flask my sister Heather and Joshua her husband gave me for officiating their wedding. We had even found a single lonely bottle of Scotch on a market shelf ( it just happened that it was the same type that Miriam’s Mother and Gordon share with us before celebration dinners). And these elements coming together, the flask from my sister with the Celtic design, the scotch of family, combined with my Scottish ancestry on my fathers side, made me feel I was creating a genuine Christmas tradition in carrying it around and offering it to my friends. Braks of course turned it down as he doesn’t drink, but the gesture counted. I sat around for an hour or so as people came and went – many back in the neighborhood on vacation for abroad, but I didn’t have it in me this day to sit for long so I said my goodbyes and pedaled over to the basketball court where I had heard that the Standpipe crew were setting up for that nights big party.

The main basketball court in New Amsterdam is right in front of the library. Two days earlier I had been running a game there when I took a accidental elbow to the head and had to cut the game short because I figured that a bleeding head wound in a foreign country indicated a quick trip home to asses the situation before potential loss of consciousness. It turned out to be very minor but I got some great looks on the ride home. The last time I played football I had been told that the elders of the neighborhood wouldn’t let the Standpipe crew have their annual party on the football pitch as they normally did so they decided to move it to the basketball court which was a little more removed from houses in that it didn’t have houses actually ringing it. After seeing and feeling the size of the sound system and the fact that the music was still going strong when we woke up for church at 5 am, I can’t say that I blamed the elders for their decision. When I arrived stacks that bounced off of each other to lift the sound higher surrounded the basketball court. Two bars had been set up on either side of the court and lining the fences there were palm fronds, which created a wall. Because I had just gotten my shave the guys at the front looked at me funny as I walked up and two of them moved out asking me what exactly it was that I wanted. When they got closed and I said hello to these guys, one of whom I play football with, they broke up laughing at my change. “Man you look like a real white man now” “Boys' gonna start traveling in AC pretty soon.” I walked around talking to people, broke in their bar by buying a milk stout and refusing change for the 1,000 bill – insisting that it was for good luck. First 1,000 of the night. So they shared out a few more milk stouts and I passed the flask around. “Man that scotch burn” This from guys that drink straight rum like it is water. People started playing basketball amidst the speakers, which moved you sideways if you stayed in one spot for too long (everyone there was male -I forget sometimes after being here for a little while that the segregation of the sexes is so totally complete and so different from my experiences in the States). I left to get my shoes, but by the time I got back the game had stopped. Somebody made a comment about me bleeding last time I was on the court (if I haven’t made it clear already when ever anything happens to Miriam and I just about everyone knows about it no matter how few were around to see). I watched some cards for a while in a corner where money was held in bundles folded and placed between the toes. I could figure out what game they were playing and since they dealt in a different direction that I did I realized I didn’t have a prayer. Time to move on. Things weren’t even gonna start till 11 or later and it was only 4 in the afternoon.

I swung by the market and saw Z. Ally the moneychanger who I hadn’t seen for almost a month. I struggled trying to figure out how I should extend Christmas to this Muslim man who had shown me hospitality during the Ramadan. I weakly told him that he should come over for dinner that week, all the while trying to figure out how I could find a night free for it. But it’s more complicated that me inviting as I am the guest here and my invitation only made him talk about how he wished he could have me over to his house but he was sorry that he couldn’t because the ally he lived on was flooded and filled with garbage and sewage and things got into your skin if you walked through the water. I should have invited him to the Christmas social where the church could have fed him in the same way his mosque fed me one night, but sadly I, the Pastor's Wife, hadn’t thought of it. I was wrapped up in the activities of the church and had separated the congregation out of society and concerned myself more with trying to get through the days instead of looking out and extending my holidays to the other. "You are worrried and distracted by many things, few things are necessary" I left feeling disappointed in my lack of understanding of this religion that I am involved with even when the messages are dropped on my head.

When I got home Miriam was still working so I slipped over to the corner Rum shop. I have switched my allegiances away from the rum shop across the street and over to a little wooden shack a few blocks away. It is about 10ft X 20ft, with a counter, stools and one perpetually set domino table padded with cardboard so the sounds of the tiles slamming down doesn’t rifle through the place. They don’t play music at ear shattering volume, the crowd is older, and I’ve slowly worked my way in by the occasional drink in the quiet of early evenings and one well-placed later night session with the proprietor and two regulars. The place was more crowed that usual, but I grabbed seat at the domino table in the corner and Joe poured a 1/3 bottle of white rum out for me on the house- Merry Christmas. I drank a little and watched the end of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon with everyone in the bar jumping the actor’s lines. Then played a few games of dominos and insisted some one finish the rum with me. I can safely say that the amount of liqueur that the men in this culture put away in one sitting is only equaled by the consumption I saw once in the Ukraine. And over the holidays it is simply astounding, not good or to be admired, but astounding that so many members of a society are deep, deep in the jar for days at a time. I don’t mean to imply that Joe’s place is a den of Debauchery. It’s a good upstanding working man’s drinking spot where the walls are filled with prayers and the regulars come for the talk as much as the drink. But that said I can’t begin to keep up and have to leave fairly quickly if I plan on doing anything at all with the rest of my day. So with that in mind I shared a pour of the scotch out to Joe and wished everyone a Merry Christmas.

Miriam and I went back out on the road a little after 9 that night, walking into New Amsterdam because we had been told that is what everyone did on Christmas Eve. It was dark and quiet enough through Stanleytown that it started to seem like it would be better to bike through the graveyard then walk, but almost as soon as we got into N.A. the people appeared and after a few blocks a road barricade announced the beginning of the serious crowd.

Usually crowds are interesting because you can blend into the masses and watch everyone else around you, equally observed yet invisible. This is hard to do when you are the only white faces in a crowd of tens of thousands of people. I felt fairly obtrusive. Yet welcome and a part of the street celebration. We turned off the main road onto Pitt Street. This normally crowded street with dark tight shops on both sides was now transformed into booths of games of chance and photo ops for Santa Claus. The shops were lit up inside and appeared incredibly cavernous. Two men did an inelegant pickpocket routine around us and the night and crowd felt so merry that it was natural t simply pull them closer, give their arms a little squeeze and mumble in their ears. “alright, alright, nothing there.” We stopped in at Pastor Roy’s and walked with him as he headed out for a last minute shopping excursion for Alice’s present. The back road was quiet and nothing happening yet at the basketball court, but we stopped in and said hello to Roland and the Stand Pipe crew. They understood of course that we couldn’t stay (there was that 6 am service after all) but also weren’t able to completely grasp that I couldn’t leave town for an extended period on Christmas day to go watch a football match across the river. It was a good reminder of the distance I cannot cover to become a true member of the Stand Pipe crew. Their music was audible throughout the entire city until 6 the next morning, but when we finally got home our ears were too full to hear much of anything.

Christmas day itself was notable mostly for the pepper pot. Pastor Roy and Alice gave us our first taste of this traditional dish of meet made with Cassava casreep and other spices. Then again for dinner as Samuel from the market stopped by to drop off a container of his wife’s special mixture. Mostly though we crashed after the morning services. Didn’t even open our gifts until we awoke from a nap. The few minutes we spoke to our family on the phone broke the world open for me and I wished for to be in their embrace.

Boxing day, or Pastors Christmas as I now call it, found us over at our neighbor Judy’s house with Brian and Kristen and Dick, all of the Guyanese Missionaries, for an American Christmas dinner of turkey, cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes. The hours speed by as we talked with freedom of the beauty and trials of the holidays and mission abroad.

Mostly we slept for two days after that. Tonight we went to what we sincerely hope is our last Christmas social, the New Amsterdam Canje Christian Council- an ecumenical gathering of all the local pastors, priests and spouses. It’s hard to believe that I will go to these events now. I get serious Pastor’s wife credit for attending- I think it was like a graduate level seminar. And I even managed to enjoy singing another round of carols. I am writing now late in the night as the extremely loud music from somewhere is keeping me up. I suspect it shall continue till New Years Day- three nights from now. Miriam has three sermons to give in three different services in the span of two days. Including a special Guyanese traditional Old Years Night service that goes until midnight which she gets to lead having never see before- as well as her first ever wedding ceremony the next afternoon on New Years Day. I will dutifully be in attendance, sitting with good posture and eyes riveted to the spot of attention, even if they are slightly glazed over from these many services. As Carmalita, one of Miriam’s parishioners says: Miriam is the strong one- I’m soft “like chicken.”

“You are worried and distracted by many things, few things are necessary.”

2006-12-19T07:22:00.000-08:00

Before they go on stage.

2006-12-19T06:39:00.000-08:00

Well I think I am offically a Pastor's Spouse now as I have directed my first Christmas Play. Angels, Shepards, Wise men Oh my. It was at times hilarious. Merry Christmas

2006-12-19T06:24:00.000-08:00

The Bethal Choir singing during the Christmas Program.

2006-12-19T05:58:00.000-08:00

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”.

2006-12-01T09:05:00.000-08:00

We got to spend a night in the house on top of the hill. The night before we stayed at a Parsonage in Georgetown on Sheriff Street, which is where all the clubs are. So one night the whole place was locked up and metal bars on everything and the next wide open windows and porches. A welcome change.

2006-12-01T08:59:00.000-08:00

My first game of chess in Guyana.

2006-12-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

The public transportation to Bartica. Though technically it isn't public since every individual mode of transportation is privately owned and comes with it's own name (Cool Breeze, To Blessed to be Stressed, etc.). In order to get to Bartica from New Amsterdam without owning a car you get to the N.A. Ferry and take that boat across the Berbice River. Then take a Mini-bus to the Starbroek Market in Georgetown. Board a thirty person open boat which takes you across the Demerara river. Another Mini-Bus drive gets you to Parika. Here you get onto a one of these boats pictured here with fifteen others and travel up the Essiquibo river for over an hour. Both times we split the travel into two days. Even just half the journey takes about four or five hours if you are lucky. Each time you change a mode of transportation you often have to wait until that vehicle fills up. So Mini-buses can take a good half hour to fill. And depending on the day or the time of day the boat fills immediately, slowly, or interminably long. Amazingly enough everyone is given and actually wears a life preserver on the smaller open boats. The tree pictures is a mature Paw-paw which gives large fruit the shape of acorn squash exept larger. They are sort of a cross between a melon and a squash. Pretty tasty. Balkaran gave us one off of his tree.

2006-12-01T08:27:00.000-08:00

Sitting on the Veranda looking out over the Essiquibo river at Bartica. Bartica was a beautiful change from the other parts of Guyana that we have seen. Besides being an small Peninsula which sticks out in the confluence of three major rivers, it also has hills which expand the views and forest accessible by a quick walk. The breeze was fantastic at night. We wished we had been able to go up one of the rivers further with Balkaran as he has a wealth of knowledge of the area. But he was booked up and we could only stay so long.

2006-12-01T08:20:00.000-08:00

We stayed at the Yellow House owned by Balakaran and his wife in Bartica. There are two sea walls in this picture. The outer was created by the Dutch sometime in the mid 1600's. The inner wall was created by the British in the 1700's. Bartica and the area around the Essiquibo River is one of the first areas where the Dutch set up settlements.

2006-12-01T08:15:00.000-08:00

Sitting on the old sea wall in Bartica.

2006-12-01T08:08:00.000-08:00

After Balkaran had picked us up in his boat, and while we were in the middle of the river on the way to Bartica, this fish jumped into Miriam's arms. She is actually pointing to the bruise she got from it not her muscles. Balkaran thought it was good luck.

2006-11-22T15:37:00.000-08:00

The Chaos wall on thanksgiving in our downstairs. Every place I move into I place a map of the area on the center of a blank wall and then slowly start to add pieces of paper.

2006-11-22T15:32:00.000-08:00

Miriam in the Crabwood creek area.

2006-11-14T06:45:00.000-08:00

On the way into town there is an old ferris wheel rusting away. It's two remaining seats are permantly locked into that wonderful, hoped for position at the top, where your view is wide and the seperation from the ground most complete. It is always quite a wonderful site for the eyes and imagination. On this morning I finally got a chance to take a proper picture. Rainbows are very frequent here in Guyana.

2006-11-14T06:41:00.000-08:00

I usually don't take pictures during the service but I found this one hard to resist. The blessing of the children.

2006-11-14T06:24:00.000-08:00

Harvest Sunday at Transfiguration Church in Betsy Ground, Canje. The church gets decorated with tall fresh sugar cane and flowers. Congregation members bring in fresh fruits and vegetables to decorate the alter and to sell for church donation following the service. The harvest Festival in the Guyanese Lutheran Church is a wonderful holiday which has translated a northern hemisphere harvest festival (largely dropped much to my dismay from the ELCA) into a yearly festival of harvest in which the bounty of nature and all of creation is celebrated. It just happens that the cane is harvested at this time of year and that the begining of the coming rainy season effectively makes this also a Harvest time though certainly not fall. In the evening we held the Harvest concert which featured songs and skits and plays performed by the members of all three churches to a packed house. It was hilarious and moving. A wonderful time for people of all ages to gather and perform for each other and give thanks. A time to recongnize that it is not through our individual work alone that we live from day-to-day and year-to-year.

2006-11-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

Plantains stacked in the back of a transport after being loaded at the overnight Starbroek Market.

2006-11-10T06:57:00.000-08:00

As the afternoon breeze clears the sun’s heat from the interior of our house it brings with it the subdued traces of Sunday’s exhaling humanity. An electric saw issues its final whine for the house being slowly built on off days. Tepid calls come from children tiredly clinging to each other trying to halt the dusk. A rhythmic grating of bicycle tire on fender, as two men, hands at their sides, feet barely moving on the pedals, float the dirt lane. Over it all irregularly broken reggae tones drift in from a nearby neighborhood. The weekly sanctioned human sounds mix with the never changing daily ritual of the birds. A Kiskadee, not quite as proud as in the morning, yells at the fly it cannot catch. Roosters start presuming the demise of the sun in competitive circles (our rooster- Pretentious- has found the beginnings of his adolescent voice this week). The ever surprising clatter from the flock of parrots flying overhead on the second leg of their daily commute from the trees on the banks of the Berbice river to the cane fields of Canje creek and back again. When the wind blows away from the house the music fades and, though the coconut palms continue their long limbed dance, they are suddenly unaccompanied in their heavily shadowed groove and sway in tranquil silence. But fear not for the Palm’s rhythm. The music will come back. It always starts up again. Now built upon by another quick beat from the opposite neighborhood, then added to further by a more distant under beat (foolishly Omp Pah Pah like in it’s remove), till the heart alters it’s systolic to match time and for a minute it seems that the voices of the parents calling their children have taken back on a shrill severity in annoyance at the disturbance. It is Sunday though and the dictates of the day seem to suppress some volume, or at least the ear has become less attuned to the noise after it’s weekend battering. For there is no such communal cease-fire on Saturday.

Electronic speaker systems are everywhere in Guyana and like everything else they come in one variety- in this case large. Actually the individual speakers are fairly standard size, two feet by three. But here, for some inexplicable reason, they come by the dozen and are rented with frequency and ease, which is astonishing for an economy which lacks for many basic items. On any given night, but most likely on Friday or Saturday, it is common to see a set of these unceremoniously stacked on the pavement on the side of the main road playing music at a volume which is amazing. And people flock to the sound. Crowds fill the street all standing inside the range of the deafening music. We are not even yet in the holiday season, where, I am told, on Christmas Eve the streets are lined with competing stacks of speakers, vibrating the ground and disturbing your inner-ear equilibrium as if in an earthquake. I shall be interested in that version of “Silent Night”.

Since we don’t live directly in New Amsterdam, I have been mostly simply fascinated by the sociological aspects of the speakers and the gatherings. We also don’t tend to do much on Saturday nights. We get up pretty early on Sunday and Miriam is usually responsible for significant portions of three services if not preaching at all of them. It is a mixed blessing as Saturday night is the definitive evening for things to happen in Guyana. Some of these things I would like to participate in, like the Standpipe yearly festival, or the overnight cricket match starting at 3 pm and going till 4 am. But many more events are of a nightclub variety to which I don’t feel exceptionally drawn. It is convenient to be able to tell an acquaintance that we can’t make the Saturday evening “Ladies wear your hot pants and heels” event due to a prior commitment (though in this case I did make an attempt to convince Miriam that there was certain to be some sort of prize for a Pastor in high heels and hot-pants. In the end we decided it wasn’t culturally appropriate and unfortunately missed the ‘grand event’. More on women as sexual objects in the specific context of Guyanese society some other time perhaps). We usually simply get a taste of the power of these sound systems when we walk or ride through town early in the evening as things are just getting started.

But in the last few weeks, the rum shop at the end of our street has been slowly building up it’s ‘presence’ on the street on Saturday afternoons. The first day the wall of sound suddenly hit us in the early afternoon. It was fairly easy to overlook for a few hours. Then I left the house to go away from the music as it was starting to break me down with its constant bumping. Upon my return it was still going strong. So I went straight into the belly of the beast in an attempt to ascertain if there was an event that night, and if so when it might end. Also I figured if I blew out my eardrums by close proximity to the speakers when I returned to the relative distance of the house I would be oblivious to the music. Instead of a crowd I found four people, all the owner’s family, sitting around in the middle of music coming from the standard ten stack of speakers. I had a drink; this also numbs the brain a little and makes the music seem more acceptable. I tried to speak to the people, all of whom I know from multiple conversations, but it was actually impossible to make yourself heard above the noise, just smile and keep the beat. I left after a fairly impressive length of time and the crowd had not increased. They shut down before eight that night a mere seven hours of heart thumping music courtesy of our neighbors. It appears that this was a test run for it has happened every Saturday night since that first time and last night it went till a little past ten o’clock.

Now I have lived in big cities in America. I want to be clear that this isn’t simply loud music coming from the block or a car with an expansive sense of mobile dance party. Yesterday was about ten hours straight of music at a volume, which would be found at the quiet end of a major nightclub, except it was our dinning, room and we had no finger on the button. We have learned that last year the rum shop, or disco as our neighbor calls it, played music at least as loudly until two in the morning most nights of the week. For some reason they stopped. I certainly hope they don’t start again. The city ordinance calls for 10 O’clock to be the shut down time unless you have the proper permits. Perhaps they will continue to follow this rule on Saturday nights, but there is no reason that they have to as far as I can see. It’s enough to make a man who enjoys his quiet a little nervy.

Friday nights are slightly more subdued and more my pace. Sure if you travel the main road in New Amsterdam after eight there will be hundreds of teenagers to adults walking down the road. They congregate outside at whichever bar is pumping out sound or perhaps in front of a newly opened music store, which is letting everyone know of its existence with the ubiquitous ten stack of speakers in the road. And if your driving you will have to inch along through the crowd as it spills over most of the street if not blocking it entirely. But most of this does shut down by ten; Saturday morning is still a work day for many in Guyana. If these spontaneous gatherings happened sporadically I would probably think that they were wonderful, community supported events. But they happen all the time and the more I look the more it becomes clear that one segment of the population is holding the rest hostage to it’s idea of a good time.

What strikes my American eyes about these scenes is that there is no police presence at all and yet things are fairly safe. There is crime of course, but statistically I would be surprised if it was all that much different than American crime rates for similar population densities. It is not the instances of crime which are as surprising, perhaps starting, as the realization that the people on the street control the street. In every city in America that I have been to in the last four years, whenever two or three are gathered (well I exaggerate, maybe two or three hundred) there is likely to be a cordon of police watching over the crowd. No you cannot go down that street. No the park is closed. Even often to the point of: Disperse or you shall be arrested. Policing in the States is preventative. I would argue that it is excessively preventative at the current time in our republic and in the process our individual and collective liberty is being eroded. But importantly the police in the States do prevent the breaking of laws.

Guyanese policing on the other hand is reactive. Maybe. Except that nobody I’ve talked to would recommend calling the police if something were to happen. Unfortunately one result is that music is regularly played at disturbingly high volumes and people like my older neighbors can do nothing about it except develop a remarkable ability to block it out of existence and go on with their lives. The police are simply an institution whose loyalties are suspect to many and/or whose abilities are not considered competent. Laws seem arbitrarily enforced if at all. For instance there are no working traffic lights in the entire country. I have seen two stop lines on the pavement (no signs to course). Traffic has a whole set of unwritten rules, but the main one seems to be: Honk to let people know that you are about to run them over. Yet there are one way street- unmarked of course- and if in my ignorance I pedal down one, not simply one person, but often up to three separate people in one block will tell me I’m going the wrong way- on a bicycle. Why this rule is more important than say not passing in the face of multiple cars of oncoming traffic, I am not sure. But traffic flows, people don’t get run over (not every day at least), and the ‘rules’ are ‘enforced’ collectively. Except when people break them, nobody is around to make an arrest or give out a traffic ticket. On the rare occasion when someone is pulled over by what seems like the lone squad car in New Amsterdam, a crowd gathers and people start to heckle. Or the Army arrives with multiple men in the back of a pickup truck with weapons and nobody really sticks around to say anything.

I was therefore not surprised last Friday, while standing at a gas station in the capital around midnight, at the response of the two men I was driving with to my inquiry about why we were now seemingly killing time in a random place (we didn’t even buy gas) instead of getting on the road and back to the ferry dock to wait for the dawn embark “The police shift changes at twelve thirty. Since the police don’t like it when you transport goods in a mini-van which is licensed to transport people, if we wait till one o’clock there will be no police on the main road to see us going by.” It was the first I had heard of either the law or the police shift change, but, as my options were rather limited, patience made sense to me. I bought a bottle of water and continued to talk to Samuel about his life leading up to the moment he implicated me in the illegal transportation of plantains, pineapples and cassavas.

But perhaps I should back track.

For a number of weeks now I have been talking to Samuel, my New Amsterdam vendor of roots and tree fruits, about how and where he got the food items I was buying. I had learned from him that every Friday he left the market after dark, went to somewhere (where exactly I never got clearly), and purchased all the goods that he would sell for the next week. He returned from the journey by dawn, in time to set up for the major Saturday morning market. Since food sources are important to me and as this seemed like a good opportunity to see more of the country we slowly worked out a day when I could accompany him on his Friday night venture. I thought I might get a chance to see some farmland, pineapple growing on trees (they do grow on trees right?) and other bucolic pastorals. We agree to meet at eight pm at the ferry dock where we would cross the Berbice River and take the road that headed towards Georgetown, the capital. It would be my first time back across the river since our arrival.

It was after dark when the driver dropped me at the ferry terminal. I had left Holy Cross church in Canje (where we have been rehearsing a play for this years Harvest program) in a rush worried that I would hold Samuel back I if we missed the eight thirty ferry. Instead I milled around for an hour waiting for Samuel to turn up and wondered if I could hold out until the ten PM ferry, which was our back up plan. The road around the ferry dock is lined with shops selling food and beverages as people sometimes have to wait for hours for the much in demand and not exactly on schedule only way across the river. It’s a wide dead end alley with wooden shacks lining the road, cars and buses waiting in the middle and at this hour a small amount of foot traffic. I wandered over to a small wooden table under an awning, lit by a single bulb, around which a fluxuating group of men were playing poker. Exploring I crossed the street and got a juice at one of the stands. Then went inside the walk on entrance to the ferry. People watched me with interest as I moved around, not sure what I was up to; white man walking alone at night. Inside the gate there was a waiting area with benches filled with women and children all zombied towards a television overhead. The poker game was infinitely more interesting so I went out to watch that again. Eventually I had to urinate. I moved off to the side, enough out of the street to be discrete and yet enough in the street to not be too tempting a target and stood with my back half turned, one eye on the job the other as a lookout. Who needs public toilets after all?

The poker game started to dishevel towards recriminations and shouts of abuse so I moved away from it and stood near an older man who was the driver of a taxi. We surveyed the street unspeaking. He made a comment about the slowness of the night. We talked taxi driver shop for a few minutes and I was again glad that I had driven a hack for a while when I was younger as it permanently attuned my senses to the universality of the search for fares. Eventually he asked if I was going to Georgetown, both assuming it with his voice and a trifle surprised it seemed that I would be headed that way at this hour. I told him about Samuel and the purpose of my trip. Of course he knew Samuel and we felt even more at ease with each other. Before we could speak further a mini-bus pulled up and Samuel got out. The taxi driver yelled out to him. I waved, said goodbye to the driver, hurried to the ferry company fence, and opened the gate that had closed behind Samuel and the mini-bus with calm that I was supposed to just walk right in past the man who was standing there guarding it. I was apparently as nobody stopped me and I was allowed to greet Samuel with a handshake. We removed a seat from middle of the Mini-bus and then drove onto the ferry.

Ferryboats are remarkably similar in every place that I’ve been to, at least over a certain size. Once on the boat I could have been in Seattle or New York or leaving the coast of France for Ireland or crossing the Danube River. The cement and mysterious pipes going to nowhere covered with a thick layer of paint. The ancient film of grease, perspiration and mist over everything and spreading to you the moment you board. One major difference is this is no drive on one way and drive off the other car ferry. Instead everyone drives on and backs up into this or that spot and jockeys to get the nose of their vehicle past the baskets of fruit that are being stacked up to make the crossing so that upon docking they can be as close to the first out of the gate as possible. For concessions there are a few men selling hand ties baggies of nuts or fried plantains. They have a plastic soda bottle hung around their necks filled with a homemade mango sour dipping sauce that they will pour over the plantains if you want it. I stood at the side watching the surprising nearness of the water as we pulled out. It seemed that the water was flowing in the wrong direction, high tide perhaps. Samuel offered me the front passenger seat as he was sitting in the first back bench, but I crawled into a bench behind him to be less obtrusive. He leaned against the window and I lay on my back, feet in the air propped against the opposite window frame, and rested my eyes. I would remain on this seat alternatively in a prone or upright position for the next two hours as we crossed the river and then drove to Georgetown. Samuels partner, whose name I never was told, was a man slightly older than Samuel. He did all the driving.

We picked up occasional passengers and I took note of the novelty of the streetlights and the similarity of the four styles of houses distributed throughout this part of the country. Sometimes two or three streets lined the road then cane field. Sometimes towns spread out around the road in blobs. We passed a few gatherings at rum shops spilling out into the street with music and dancing. In Buxton there was a large audience seated on risers gathered into a sprawling square underneath the frame of a wooden building. Two young men stood face-to-face, inches from each other, mouths exchanging sharp words as older men refereed. A poetry slam, or verse session, rap down, wonder what they call it here? We completed most of the ride in silence except for the occasional call from a passenger that his stop was coming up.

Georgetown surrounded the mini-bus suddenly: lights on everywhere, roads going in all directions, cross streets with actual traffic fighting in each direction and thousands of people splayed out on the streets in the hour before midnight. The distant memory of walking these streets with Miriam in the first days of our blissfully ignorant arrival conflicted with the accounts of newspapers and friends about the dangers of the being in the crowd here in the capital. We drove near the front of the Starbroek Market where people were rushing in and out of mini-buses as if it was rush hour. The market is centered around a block wide wooden building and the streets around it match the maze of its interior by constructing walls out of zinc and roofs out of blankets and tarps so that there are alleys inside alleys inside buildings inside alleys. Vendors still lined the streets with whatever wares they could put on a stand. People were setting up their sidewalk spaces not closing them down.

With a quick turn off the main road and after a short maneuvering through people sitting around piles of fruit, we arrived at our destination. The overnight buyers market on the backside of the Starbroek market. A large empty parking lot was where our food came from. Less than a square block, the back half of a square block perhaps. Where over the years a community of farmers and vendors has developed. The farmers set out their goods in large quantity with a proud and stoic dignity. The calm anxiety of people who are selling food that they have grown, selling with no shame, no trumped up sham of the medicine tonic man who has only what nobody needs, yet always conscious of the fact that the wares get worse from the moment they are picked. But walking in he midst of these buyers and sellers of produce, indistinguishable from them at first in fact, is another community of Georgetown. For the backside of the Starbroek market is the congregation place for the capitals junkies whose blotter of choice is cocaine and marijuana mixed together and smoked in fat white cigarillos, which burn with the spark of a welders torch. The eye gets accustomed to the scene gradually and eventually is able to pick out the farmer squatting on the ground near a mound of watermelons from the man who is dragging around a flattened cardboard box looking too frantically for a place to flop down. But it takes a few minutes to see clearly, as it is very warm and dark, so that it seems normal for most people to be in various states of undress and the dirt from the earth is easily confused with the soil of human waste.

We got out of the car and went over to a man with a large truck full of pineapples who was seated on a low rough stool near a pile of unladed packing crates. Samuel introduced me to the farmer whose pineapples we have been enjoying more than any other pineapples I have ever eaten. I took a seat on the packing crates up off the pavement as Samuel assured me it was safe and said he was going to start his rounds. I sat there speaking to the man about his farm. Learned that pineapples do not in fact grow on trees. Learned that he had increased the size of his fathers acreage which he had inherited, that he had recovered from the sever flooding of 2005 during which every inch of his land was under at least two feet of water. I was glad for the little farming I have done or been around so I could ask questions about his methods and land. While we were speaking a bare chested, hugely muscular man strutted back and forth occasionally within reach on the street nearby, fire flashing in his mouth and in his eyes. And a older woman who was a vendor yelled curses at another less fit addict who was trying to sleep under her tarp. No one really paid any attention to them so I tried not to as well. Everything was generally very calm.

It was early for this market, things didn’t really get started until four am, and the farmers just came to claim a spot. Samuel came early because of the ferry schedule and the distance. I was glad for the quiet, the few bare bulbs that some farmers strung from the back of their trucks, the noiseless bare feet of the junkies as well as some of the farmers. I got up and walked the fifty feet back to the mini-van through men stacking large heavy shelled pumpkins, which they threw into place with no concern for bruising. I was going to get into the back to take a little rest from the stimulation, but the driver said they were going to start loading any minute so I joined him in the front seat. In front of us, on the ground and in the back of a flatbed, were huge 70lb bunches of plantains. They were next to a crumbling cement wall with the words Septic Tank Disposal written in large red letters. I couldn’t tell if the septic disposal site was right there or if it was simply the business office of the company. Next to the wall was a large metal structure, which was heaped with garbage. On the left side of the car men, and a few women, lay dead out on the bare cement. A man moved from the crowded front of the street to the more open back space pushing a two wheeled cart which was encased in glass and held three lit candles illuminating his small portion of pastries for sale. It floated like a shrine through the produce piles enthralling me until what could have been a crazed Hindu Holy man walked through my line of vision. His hair was stacked and tied on top of his head. His eyes flamed with vision, and a single flip flop hung on for life to which ever foot would take it, as he searched for his place to lay down, now unable to find peace since he had claimed a spot with his flatten cardboard and forgotten where it was he had staked. Two feral dogs greeted each other happily like lost friends, while a man skulked away cursing the other who had turned him out from underneath his taxi tire. He circled the entire lot screaming at an amazing pitch his disapproval of having his rest disturbed. No one paid him any mind.

Samuel reappeared, nervous till he saw me in the car. “Here you are man. I was worried you got bored and left.” I assured him that I was not. I mentioned that I might like to take a walk around the block if we had time. “Not safe out there. I never walk out there, only drive in and drive out.” Out there was a free for all, unlike the stability of the communities of the backside lot. A lone policewoman unarmed and without even a radio, strolled about the place in a long black skirt. Observing, simply observing. The Driver said there was an old popular Guyanese song about the people who lived in the back of the market entitled ‘Mr. Odds n Ends’. Samuel spoke of their distance from the world even as two started loading the mini-bus with that days purchases. He spoke of them as they were standing next to him throwing great weights of fruit into the vehicle, which shuddered with each new load. One of the men had been a classmate of his at school. They finished loading, took their payment and disappeared to the darkest corner of the lot as we pulled out to start the trip home.

Except we stopped at that gas station and milled about for another hour waiting for the police shift to change. In the stillness of that hour Samuel detailed to me how he had started his business almost 30 years ago. How he used to exhaust himself driving this route three times a week by himself. He opened himself up further by telling me details of the struggles of his last ten years and how he almost succumbed to them. It was a clear example of the thinness of the line which separates communities of citizens from communities of pariahs. We sat together under a potted fern on the half curb, sucking on mints to stay awake as the driver rested his eyes now in the mini-van parked out of view from the street. I had to go to the bathroom again, which is you can tell one of my week points- this need to relieve my bladder so often. ‘Right around the back there is a place.’ I squeezed past eternally parked, broken down cars and through rusting metal barrels to a cement enclosed area open to the sky. The ground had a thick, urine, mildew carpet which I tried my best not to disturb.

The shocks of the mini-van creaked with every unevenness of the pavement, which is to say they never stopped complaining under their load of 2,000 lbs of plantains, 1,000 lbs of cassavas, pineapples, passion fruit, and two beautiful watermelon that Samuel had picked up at the last minute. ‘One for you, one for me. Both I got for free. A pretty good life isn’t it.’ The three of us sat in front together. Since I was the smallest I squeezed into the middle, though Samuel tried to give me the window seat, and I tired to keep my knee away from the stick shift. The road was almost entirely empty now, the villages quiet, houses shuttered up. We passed back through the town of Buxton and I asked if this place was dangerous for them. Every tourist guide will say to avoid it (how you do this since it is on the only road I do not know). The paper talks of the Buxton gang often or the Bandits of Buxton (it’s almost charming somehow that they call the criminal element bandits. Add to it that the bandits have control over the back swamp area, uncharted deep bush the police don’t tend to want to go into, and it is hard not to conjure up images of Robin hood.) Buxton is also a center of Guyanese African history and I cannot start to read how this most recent chapter is being written.

They laughed and said Buxton wasn’t in the least bit of a worry to them. They are both African. Samuel continued by casually pointing out how divided, literally, the countryside was between Indian and African. This side of the road Indian, That side African. Those streets there lead to African villages, those street here lead to Indian villages. I started probing deeper into the political, social divide based upon my limited reading and time spent observing the country. At one point I said how lucky I thought Miriam and I were about being able to talk with Pastor Roy her supervisor. “Because though he is Indian he is extremely dark skinned and he has traveled the world and been the blackest person in the room, so his perspective is wide.’ All of which I think is true and his opinion is one that I respect greatly, but as soon as I said it I was aware of being the young foreign white man sitting on the jump seat between two suddenly quiet African Guyanese men. I am completely and utterly unable to grasp the situation in this country that I am only visiting for a short time, completely ignorant about its racial issues and feeling at that moment like I should shut up before I made more of a presumptuous fool out of myself. They rescued me by turning the conversation to cricket. Something else I don’t know the slightest thing about, but which is after all only a game not life itself (again I show my ignorance to any Guyanese person who is reading this).

Slowly we started saying less and less. The silence stretches lengthening in the conversation until the conversation stopped altogether. Samuel drifted off to sleep. Our bodies relaxed in the tight confines of the front seat and by doing so we supported each other; instead of holding ourselves apart we leaned against the other. My mind wandered over the evening as the houses dropped away and the headlights showed only the pavement in front of us and the blurred green of the bush on both sides. We could have been driving on any deserted road in the middle of the night as I have done so many times in my life. I came back to full consciousness and the driver, noting the change spoke in a soft voice. ‘Had a little nap’ I told him how much I liked driving at night. ‘Much better than the daytime I think’ I mentioned that it was meditative almost. ‘Yes, it is good for that’. Just as long as it wasn’t too meditative I joked. ‘Yes, it’s best to not remove yourself entirely’.

We rode the rest of the way in silence. Samuel woke up as we got to the ferry dock. We waited for another hour in the last moments of the night. As we crossed the river dawn broke. I sat upstairs alone on a wooden bench. My vision was awash in the verdant green bush surrounding the wide swath of the churning chocolate river, which was flowing in the right direction now under an opening sky. I was far removed from the backside of the Starbroek market. Cars would be honking and fighting for space, food would be hurriedly exchanged by it’s first pair of hands of the day, and Mr. Odds n Ends would still lay half naked and unmoving directly on the pavement. The bustling messiness of existence, the uncomfortable noise of humanity can be washed away either by turning into the flow of the river of life or by withdrawing into our own individual eddies.

Today, as I finish writing, the clouds obscure the hour by blocking the sun, and rain falls in sudden bursts every half hour- nothing serious yet, but the house is cooler and the breeze is strong. The roosters are crowing confusedly, a hammer is beating on metal in the distance, and I’m listening to Serbian Gypsy Songs of Weddings and Funerals. Adding my own Ohm Pa Pa to the patter of rain on the zinc roof and the still present, but subdued rhythms of reggae, which waft in and out of hearing blown by the wind of this now Thursday morning. The days and nights have been countryside quiet since starting this piece on Sunday afternoon. Tommorrow brings the weekend again and the possibility for increased amplification. With effort I will try not to feel as though my space is being invaded by the inconsiderate actions of others. I will attempt to keep myself from increasing the thickness of my walls to keep others out and try to remember that many others have no walls at all. But if the music on Saturday goes past ten I cannot say I will be serene.

2006-11-04T05:52:00.000-08:00

Me and a friend from the market at the Pitt street Cafe

2006-11-04T05:45:00.000-08:00

A cafe on the second floor overlooking Pitt street, New Amsterdam. This is the road that leads away from the market. It is usually fairly busy with activity, but as it was a wednsday afternoon things are pretty calm. I like to buy the paper and sit up here sometimes in the afternoon glancing over the railing occasionally to the passerbys below.

2006-11-04T05:39:00.000-08:00

Front yard of a house in the back damn area of New Amsterdam

2006-11-04T05:29:00.000-08:00

Miriam in the road outside the house while the cows investigate a newly piled mound of dirt. Dirt is constantly brought into yards to fill the low spots where the water floods. It is a small continual building up of the land to make it higher than the neighbors. Keeping up with the Jones. The cows are always on the look out for something cool to flop in.

2006-10-31T05:44:00.000-08:00

The stall of Lene the woman who I buy above ground vegetables, melons, bannanas and mangos. She is the woman on the right. Her stall is outside the back of the main building and next to the entrance to the fish and poultry building. This picture was taken from the stairs leading to the upstairs of the main building.

2006-10-31T05:28:00.000-08:00

When I stop to try to take pictures of the temples in the crowded streets, I got waved down by these boys shouting to me "White Boy take my picture, take my picture."
I get called white boy all the time when someone wants to get my attention and usually it is with a similar level of excitement as with these boys. The Festival of lights represents the return of light into the world from the darkest night. Unfortunately here in Guyana it can also be read with some racial implications which are given credibility by the ancient stories from India about the seperation of the Aryan and Dravidian races. All traditions have their unique histories of much good and much evil. Hopefully we can acknowledge the unsavory aspects of our pasts and continue to move forward to messages of a more unifing nature.

2006-10-31T05:16:00.000-08:00

A Hindu Temple in Canje.

2006-10-31T05:12:00.000-08:00

Oil lamps light the path to a Hindu temple in Canje on the night of Diwali the festival of lights.

2006-10-30T07:02:00.000-08:00

Epiphytes abound in Guyana. They are also called “Air plants”: it’s such a lovely name for something so solid and yet seemingly impossible. I had never heard of such a thing before and didn’t really believe it was possible even when I read about them in A NeoTropical Companion by John Krichner (an indispensable introduction to the animals, plants and ecosystems of the new world tropics or where we live presently, not to mention a reminder that the science of biology has kept moving forward even if I last studied it in 1989). But then I started seeing these air plants everywhere and my amazement only increased. Not that I haven’t been surrounded by the phenomenon all my life, since lichens, mildews, and mosses also fall into this category, but in S. America the climate enables the epiphytes to reach new heights; large plants not microbes sprout up on top of everything. The seeds of these plants are transported on the wind or in the belly of a bird, then fall from the sky sometimes with accompanying glue. Remarkably they stick to tree limbs, fence posts, and even thin rubber coated telephone wires. They shoot forth roots and stems and leaves, no matter the seeming unsuitability of their newfound host. In some cases the epiphyte creates enough of a root system that it builds up it’s own soil base fifty feet off the ground and then it starts to collect and provide water and nutrients for both itself and it’s host tree. Large trees can hold hundreds of these air plants on their limbs, an ever expanding handing garden weeded only by the monkeys as they travel over the branches; Trees of life upon Tree of Life. Other times the epiphyte strangles the host and it alone remains to grow up over the skeleton of what was there before it ever landed. If I didn’t clean off the branches of the Guava tree in the front yard it would soon succumb to the vines of these air plants, for every three weeks there are a new half dozen seeds that have sprouted on it’s limbs from out of nothing. On the other hand, when I see one hanging lonely from an electrical wire I wish it the best of luck.
The New Amsterdam market is a daily carnival of people, food and merchandise (and, like today, the occasional bull, which snuck in for a quick munch before being collectively chased and batted, with sticks and old boards, out of the place). I started going to the market twice a week only to shop for the vegetables and fruits that we would eat during the course of a week. It was a good task as it kept me focused enough to go in and not get completely bewildered and overwhelmed (because my first few more wide open trips were frankly wonderful, but exhausting). I quickly started relationships with two particular vendors with large stall in the back of the market. I would walk around the outside of the various market buildings on the way in so I could avoid walking through the hoards of vendors shouting out to me constantly: ‘What you shoppin?!”, White boy shoppin!?.”, “Shoppin, you shoppin for!?” and their occasional tugging on my arm to slow me down to purvey the goods I assume. Then, with bags full, I can walk back through the interior and have a ready excuse for not buying anything else. “No sorry, I already bought (insert pro-offered vegetable, fruit, rat poison, cow head, mouth still gaping for air catfish, etc.)” raise the bag and keep moving, unless I actually see something interesting- you know, different from the norm. I eventually added two other vendors to the routine and I can now get just about everything we want without thinking about prices very much or quality. I decided to trust these vendors, their prices and their goods, and they trust that I will buy from them with regularity. They are happy to see me, let me know what is especially good, and give me extra when they don’t think they will be able to sell it by the end of the day. I am excited to go up to each person and their stall and talk with them about their days and lives and not haggle about prices. Because the prices are extremely cheap for produce no matter whom I would go to so it is not actually worth it in for me to find the best “deal”. For instance I bought six beautiful mangos today for 100$ Guyanese (about 50 cents US). Now I could possibly have found 10 for the same price if I had tried as it is mango season and they are everywhere. But the monetary savings is not worth the use of the time I could spend talking to people and building relationships. Nor is it worth the possible detrimental interactions that going to another vendor and haggling opens up.
One day Lene (my above ground vegetable, melon and banana seller) didn’t have any lettuce. So I on the way out I asked around for it and eventually a woman responded positively with a smile and pulled out a few heads, threw them in a bag without saying a price at all and thrust it into my hand. Were I with my vendors, whatever price they say I take, if I want the product. Even if it were not my vendor, I usually would just hand over the requested amount. But I was tired and slightly pissy on this day, so when she said two hundred dollars I was a little taken aback. I had gotten almost twice as much for half that price before. I mistakenly said as much aloud. A few times. She continued to insist that it was two hundred. I pushed the bag back at her and only held one hundred in my hand. Finally she reached in the bag, took out a tiny baby head (roughly five leaves, merely a symbol), threw it back on her stand, pushed the bag back to me and took the one hundred dollar bill. Classic bartering and I was right. I won; I got the lettuce for the correct price. But she was affronted that I thought she was cheating me (or acting that way at least) and I was annoyed at her being affronted (she was wrong). We had finished the transaction in silence and I walked away while she pretended I didn’t exist. It didn’t feel to me like I had saved anything at all; the 50 cents was for me inconsequential, might not have been so unimportant to her, and in any case it was a poor substitute for our smiles. I stick to my vendors now, unless my mood is one of openness and interest in the lives of others and their stories.
But I have found that increasingly I am coming to the market as much to explore as to shop now that the shopping has become less foreign and unpredictable (though don’t get me wrong, about every other week somebody has something which I have never seen before). I’ve been to the market four times this last week, twice doing nothing but walking around exploring every nook and cranny and talking to who ever will talk to me. Putting the seeds into the air to see where they will land.
In front of the market, as I wind my way along the perpetually crowded street- where the buses and cars inch forward in one direction only through the bikes and people who are going every-which way carrying every-which thing- I will invariably be approached by a money changer, perhaps a few in a row. They are men of all ages, size and race with large stacks of bills in their hands, all eager to help me change my foreign currency into Guyanese dollars. At first this was disconcerting, not only because the piles of money are so large (it took me awhile to get into my head that the biggest bill in Guyana is the 1,000 and it is worth about 5$ US), but also because I had been told and read in the paper how it was an extremely bad idea to be seen in the crowded street even suggesting that I was trading money; I would hurry by and quickly dismiss them with barely a look. It began to beg the question why, here in the middle of the country, would I need to exchange money (I haven’t had any foreign currency since the first day in the capital when we exchanged the few hundred US we brought with us at a bank). And further, there aren’t even that many foreigners around, how can it possibly be necessary or even remotely profitable for all these men to be doing this job. Then it dawned on me that it was not I specifically and alone, the American that the moneychangers were approaching. In large crowds in a foreign place it is hard for me to not take everything very personally: everyone is watching me I assume and, though this is based in some reality, I often take it too far and it is only in moments of revelation that I realize that the whole thing isn’t set up to either serve my needs or trick me into doing something stupid. In fact, the moneychangers exist because large quantities of foreign currency is either sent here by Guyanese living and working abroad or brought here with them when they return or visit.
I have already burned the paper this week (in our bi-weekly garbage/brush inferno) but there was an article which gave some recently reported numbers for ex-patriot money sent to S. America from abroad. If, as an example, the Dominican Republic has gotten 2.5 billion dollars in loans/grants from international development organizations in the last ten years (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, etc.), during that same time period 18 billion dollars has been sent back by individuals from overseas (i.e. not simply America). Multiply that out around Latin America and we are talking about a huge amount of money earned outside of the home country. In fact when I first deigned to talk to a moneychanger about why he was there he quite simply said “Were it not for money sent in from abroad Guyana wouldn’t work.” I think he meant that quite literally for not only do people live off the money sent to them, but many of the meager jobs that do exist in Guyana are dependent on outside capital. The other side of this unfortunately is that a large portion of the population, those who could really benefit the country by remaining here in Guyana, leave for greener pastures. After seeing the state of the schools, the near lack of public support for anything, the sorry state of infrastructure, etc. I can’t say that I blame the ones that flee when an opportunity arises. And lest we start to complain about the amount of money being drained from our own country and sent away to other shores, it is also worthwhile to note that only about 10% of money earned by immigrants goes back to the their home countries. In California, immigrants add one hundred and twenty billion dollars to the local economy and send away twelve billion. It makes infinite sense really for countries with very large religious populations (not simply Christian) to be tithing exactly10% of their earned wealth back to the poorer countries where they were born.
One afternoon I started to cycle around town. Left the house with no destination and no time to be done with my wanderings. Far from aimless I held the meditation upon my lips that I should talk to someone about theater in New Amsterdam. I took one side road, then another, circled around the Esplanade, almost went up to the heights of the Canje bridge, and then finally, unsuccessful, I pedaled by the market to pick up a Starbroek newspaper. There are three dailies in Guyana. One is a more or less an official government paper, the other was known for sensationalism but is now delving into news, and the 3rd is the Starbroek News. I find it to be fairly interesting to read two or three times a week for local, regional and some international news. It is impossible to find any other paper in New Amsterdam, which is good in some ways as it focuses me here in Guyana, and bad in other ways because I have a fairly old addiction to reading a major international paper a few times a week. I always get this paper from a guy at the front of the market, even though people sell it from little roadside crates in various places all over town. I parked my bike and dug out the money, while a moneychanger lurked nearby. He wanted to help me buy the paper, or change money, or would I like gold, silver, jewelry- “this bracelet on my arm is good silver and given to me by a friend to sell if someone were to express interest”. It is at these moments that I like it that the vendor knows me: knows I will buy the Starbroek, is ready to hand it to me before I am ready with the money. I did my best to ignore the moneychanger; brushed him off pretty well in fact, easy and nice. Then I stood near the bike for a minute, undecided about if I was done for the day or not. The street was quieter than usual, it was late in the day and almost everyone else had headed home. I lingered in the spot where normally I would have felt harassed. The moneychanger glanced over once or twice. I almost started a conversation, he almost started one, but we turned away from each other. Suddenly he was at my side and I was glad to talk; we had eased into something comfortable to both of us. He spoke quickly, scattered, yet driven, and I was interested in catching up to his speech. When I mentioned theater to him it lit up his eyes (or at least after a few attempts at talking about theater he understood me when I said drama). He did drama. Or had done drama. It was exactly what he had been wanting to get started doing again. Everything was at it was supposed to be, Inshalla. We spoke for a half hour there on the road. He was ready to start getting a production together- he insisted that he would cast it, as he knew all the right people. I tried to pull in the reigns by saying we actually needed to talk about what it was that we wanted to do. Then we got onto talking about football. He loved, in fact lived for football. We were supposed to meet; perhaps I was a messenger sent from God. We left each other that time talking with the intention of meeting sometime in the next week, Wednesday perhaps. But he was nervous about the length of time till we would see each other; one week after all was a long time, a lot could happen in between then and now. I call him Z. Ally. He turns fifty in December.
A few days later I dawdled in the market after I did the shopping. Decided I would see all of it that day, eyes open, what I came across I would engage. Upstairs, in the main building, there are textile shops: a few tailors (little booths with a solitary man or woman behind a machine framed by the window counter), women’s boutiques with formal wear and braziers hanging over bare wooden crates, a children’s shop with toys and clothing but no children. Everyone moves slowly up here as the heat gets trapped inside the roof and the air is still; the dust suspends itself in mid-air, going nowhere as long as you walking through it do not disturb. It’s not a very crowded place, feels semi-deserted compared to the bustle below, and has a muted quietness to it which is very calming: the shrill calls of vendors downstairs aged and mellowed by trickling up through the heavy wooden planking of the floor, the slight clacking of a turning sewing machine making rhythm for your own feet as you walk down the wide open center aisle. If there were a coffee shop or café I would spend time in it every week.
I went into the one men’s shop, which was decorated with Rasta design, and looked at the shirts, which some distant day in the future might be purchased by someone and taken down from their tortured racking. The proprietor and I exchanged a few words as he showed me some of the undershirts that I inquired about. He calmly brought out some books from behind the counter, gave me two and said he had just the person for me to meet. I casually said that Wednesday afternoons were often free for me. He was free as well on Wednesdays as the market closed after a half-day. I gave him my phone number. He said he would call. His name is Uncle and he would turn 30 within the next week.
I saw Z. Ally on the way out of the market that day. He wanted to see me on Monday of the next week. I told him I might stop by the market that day. Even though I knew that I was going to be out of town. They also teach you never to tell anyone that you are going to be away from your house. Especially when you have already broken a primary rule, which told me not to say where it was that I lived. It’s all very confusing this issue of trust and I sometimes find myself lying to shelter us from these people we do not know, yet who open themselves up to us so readily. That night I started reading the books that Uncle had given me and in one I found a literary lecture which actually quoted at length from the exact last four books I had been reading here in Guyana while trying to catch up on my Guyanese/West Indian literature. It was published in 1973, by the Official Organ of the National History and Arts Council of Guyana, when the now opposition party was the ruling party. It was as woefully outdated as I was behind in my knowledge; it was a startling, amazing, perfect fit. And yet it was a sad statement on the state of the country. There exists no current addition of this journal, at least none that I have seen, and the library doesn’t carry much in the way of literature published post 1980. Time stopped somewhere and, like the dust on that second floor, nobody seems to want to stir it up very much, as if too much has now accumulated and to tackle the task might only lead to suffocation and not a refreshing cleansing of the house.

“This is sort of frustrating, but one of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people.”
Anne Lamott from Plan B Further Thoughts on Faith

“Contact had occurred and there could now be no escape”
V.S. Naipaul from An Area of Darkness

Somewhere in between these two quotations lies a fairly accurate description of what it is like for me to schedule my time in Guyana. On the one hand if I wake up everyday and let the people I meet (the people who show up) and the circumstances of the day (for instance if it is raining-delay everything by two hours)-let these dictate the course of that day it can be remarkable how exactly right everything fits together, uncanny even. On the other hand people do schedule things days in advance and then when the time comes weither or not the event will take place or the person will show up is predicated upon a delicate mathematical formula of many variables, which in my ignorance of the culture I would call “Complete and Utter Randomness Theory”. Added to this is that people often schedule me for something without really asking me if I can make it or not (I think this is due to a combination of excitement at the chance to engage with a stranger and wonderful hospitality which tries to include me in it’s activities.) Often times then I am either waiting around for something to happen that won’t or brought somewhere to a “meeting” that I didn’t know was going to happen, nor what it is about and my part in it, until I am on the scene (teaching at school is like this everyday). But it is hard to explain theoretically. It will perhaps be clearer if I tell you how it worked last week.
On Wednesday I went to the market in the morning and on the way out saw Z. Ally. There was no mention of why we hadn’t seen each other on Monday. It was as if our conversation had never happened. Just as interestingly what that he had scheduled me to come with him at 5:00 that very day to a football field somewhere to start coaching this team that he and I were now going to coach. He had no idea he was going to see me that day. I remembered that he liked football, had even spoken of wanting to have his own team to coach. But we were talking about getting together over coffee and talking about theater. Plus I had a rehearsal for a church play that I had been scheduled to go to at 6:00 that night and I doubted if I could do both. He insisted it would work. He would come by at 4 and it would be OK. I demurred, and then said I would meet him, he could come by my house no less (because I’m still in the stage where every chance I can get for someone to take me somewhere new I jump on- and I forget rules easily). I got home and almost instantly got a call from Uncle saying he wanted to come get me at 4:30 and he had set up a meeting with the guy he wanted to whom he wanted to introduce me. I said I couldn’t manage it. He was disappointed. I suggested the next day at the same time and he agreed easily, not even having to bother checking with the other guy. We hung up. Then I waited for Z. Ally. He didn’t show up. I wished I had told Uncle to come by as I was starting to see how tenuous scheduling something in advance could be, he probably wouldn’t come by the next day either. I left for my rehearsal and half of the people where actually there and it went fairly well.
Thursday morning I was supposed to be in school all day teaching. On Tuesday the two teachers I work with had both made specific plans for me and them to work with certain classes on Thursday and then after school would be the first meeting of the Drama Club that I have ostensibly been starting for the past four weeks. When I arrived at school both teachers were absent that day, one for sickness the other for some official business, which I guess she didn’t know about on Tuesday (and I don’t mean that flippantly, two days is forever at that school). The Drama club meeting was canceled once again because somebody hadn’t talked to somebody else about something (to say I have no idea what is going on would be an understatement). So I had a free day to myself again, fine by me. The kids would sit without teachers for that day, staring into space or maybe working on questions written on the board until the inevitable breakdown into chaos throughout the whole building, teachers or no, which provokes the random screaming of teachers and slapping of hands with rulers and other general attempts by tyrants to regain control of slaves. I had tried to be available, but was not up to facing this prospect with no lesson plan and no sense of schedule for the day. I am an American after all.
A few hours later Uncle stopped by our house. I had kind of told him where we lived, but I wasn’t supposed to be home. Yet because of the canceled school there I sat. I invited him in while I finished my tea, offered him something to drink as well, and we talked for a few moments but I noticed he was distracted. He suggested we leave to go meet the guy that he was to introduce me to, settle in there and not have to move again. We left in hurry and with a greater sense of purpose than was proper for two people who had just met up fairly randomly. He took me on a bike ride to the back dam area of New Amsterdam, where the houses stop being made out of concrete, then stop being stilted and eventually are compounds of low to the ground wooden structures, which look like they have always been there or that they have grown up straight out of the earth. Everything was surrounded by green life and the children stared up at me from the ditches where they were entertaining themselves, half naked and surprised to see the apparition that I was. The man we were going to meet wasn’t home. I sat down with the man’s son and another Rastafarian near a small shack at the back of the property, neither inside nor outside just wooden slats, which on one side were fences and on the other side walls. Uncle went to look for the man and it was ridiculously natural for me to remain behind, unbuttoning my shirt to let my skin show to the breeze. Uncle came back empty handed and we waited. I was conscious of needing to be in Canje at 6:00 for men’s fellowship at one of the churches. The man named Braks came home and we sat in his drawing room inside of another outbuilding made of upright wooden slats. The inside was as neatly put together as the main room of my grandmother’s apartment - except for the single bare bulb hanging exposed as the only light source as the sun went down. He pulled out old playbills from shows he had done. He gave me the only copy of one of his plays, hand typed and yellowed on flaking legal sized paper held together with a safety pin. I kept reminding myself that I was sitting in the chair of a fifty year old Rastafarian Playwright and Poet as people began filtering in and out past the bare bulb, each one stopping short in surprise upon first seeing me, but Braks treating my presence so naturally that they assumed I belonged. I was conscious later of having been less formally respectful than I would have thought I would have been. A deep and easy comfort somehow instantly settled upon me: where, as like in my Grandmother Blyth’s house, I felt that anything could be said and talked about with interest and respect given to the person who was speaking, yet contradictions and arguments would be given in passionate reply. I decided that the church function would have to do without me that night. And as I would find out later that night that meeting took place at an entirely different location unbeknownst to me and had I left one good thing for the promise of something supposed to be I would have pedaled in the dark to wait for nobody.
Friday afternoon I was going to do some computer work at the internet cafe, go straight from there to play football and then straight again to attend rehearsal in Canje at 6:00. It was a fairly tight schedule but I thought I could get everything in I wanted to get in. As soon as I got to the Internet café the power went out. I decided not to go home, but pedal around, go for a spin as they say. Three streets later Z. Ally came riding by on his bike. We both laughed at how Wednesday didn’t work out. We rode together through the streets, talking about trying to find a space in which to put a performance on, he may be a good source for spaces. He invited me to come with him to the mosque to break the daily fast during this month of Ramadan. I was very interested, but had that rehearsal scheduled. We parted and I went and sat outside the church for an hour in the dark waiting for nobody to show up. Seemed like a bad mistake to go to the thing that was scheduled and not do the thing that was presented.
And so it goes. How do I choose where to be guided and where to stick to schedule? It’s both the amazing beauty of the culture and the hair pulling irritability of it.
I participated in a lot of worship that weekend, perhaps because of my need for guidance or perhaps because I am after all a missionary in Guyana. It is a country where on Saturday night we can drive out to Canje and witness the massing of people on the streets, and lights strung up, and in oil lamps at the Temples for the Annual Hindu celebration of Diwali or the Festival of lights. Where if I try to stop in the midst of the crowd and take a picture, the children shout out with excitement “White Boy take my picture, take my picture.” Then on Sunday go to three Christian services in the morning in the same neighborhoods. Ending the evening at the central mosque (because I pedaled by the market and saw Z. Ally who again invited me on the spur of the moment), where I was given wonderful food to eat and then had three more hours of prayer- all after the sun went down. I couldn’t help but thinking once, while on my knees in genuflection, that the Prophet Mohammed was thinking when he introduced regular specific worship five times a day- cause then he would know where to find people.
Roots are growing, soil is collecting and Miriam and I are most certainly being well fed. I only hope I can give some nutrients back to our hosts. Perhaps it is better after all to just concentrate on meeting those who show up and not feel trapped because contact was supposed to have been made.

2006-10-26T06:11:00.000-07:00

The Veranda at Skeldon at sunset.