Pictures 1-3: My house...the walls do not go all the way up, which is actually pretty advantageous when you lock your keys in your room...you just climb up the door, pull yourself over the wall, and carefully find something to climb down on the other side.
Picture 4:
Me and some of the students. We made dinner at our house...the occasion was that two of the girls had a birthday and the other two helped Jess and me do wash down at the well for the first time.
Picture 5:
These are the trucks that we hop on to get to Lethem, which is 90 miles away...it has taken us 2 hours to get there, and it has taken us 14 hours to get there...
Picture 6:
The students have assembly every morning before school starts. They say the school prayer, the national pledge, the thought of the week and sing the song of the week. I taught them "Keep on the Sunny Side" when it was my week to lead assembly!
September 2006: Part I
Greetings from the North Rupununi!!! That is what they call the Region that I live in, well half of it anyways. The other half is, you guessed it, South Rupununi! The North and South Rupununi are separated by the Kanuku Mountains, which I had the pleasure of visiting last weekend…but you will have to wait to hear that until October’s newsletter…which is just around the corner, hopefully. Let me apologize for the lateness on this, I do not always have a computer that I can sit at for any extended period. They also call it the Hinterlands, which has a nice ring to it. ‘Where do you live?’ “Oh, in the Hinterlands.’
(I wrote this out on paper first) It’s roughly 5:15-5:30 a.m. I have no clock, but I have gotten good at telling time by the sky…the sun is just coming up to my right, and above me just to the left the moon is still shining bright and is looking roughly round and full. There is an amazing breeze here every morning; I’m still chilled even with my hoody on. I will cherish this breeze right now because in about 6 hours I will be wishing for it. Early mornings have become my favorite time, next to moonlit walks through the savannah…the morning is so quiet, one by one things start going to sleep as other things begin to open their eyes and yawn, and to hear all this while watching the sunrise over the mountains is a very peaceful and calming way to start my day. I like seeing the stars from my previous day and then watching the sunrise on my new day. I have started doing this recently, waking up pretty early, which is easy when going to bed late for me has become 8:30 p.m. This morning, however, I actually wanted to sleep a little bit longer. I started rousing and saw the sun was coming up, but I slothfully decided I would stay in bed for a bit…but the bats above me, well, they decided differently. Bats are apparently capable of some pretty high-pitched sounds that I was never aware of. I never thought I would have a bat as an alarm clock, nagging at me to get up when I just wanted to leave my mind dreaming for a few more lazy minutes, but sure enough, it complained about whatever it was moaning about for so long that I decided coffee was the next best thing. I bitterly climbed out of my bug net and told that bat to shut up. It’s still crying now. Now that I am up I guess I’ll forgive it and move on with my day.
Jess and I are slowly learning the way of life here in Annai. As I mentioned before, we have no running water, which means our voyages to the well provide water for drinking, bathing (straight out of the bucket nonetheless!), washing dishes, flushing the toilets, brushing our teeth, and any cooking, coffee, or tea. The well is just outside the compound…it is a round, cement platform about 7-8 feet in diameter, and there is roughly a 2x2 square hole cut into the middle of it. You tie your rope TIGHTLY to your bucket (otherwise you will be making a swift jump down that dark square hole to try to fetch your rope and bucket before the well swallows it whole) and you try to 1) throw your bucket in so it lands upside down 2) rest your bucket on the small ledge that’s about 5 feet below the ground surface and try to tip it so it lands on it’s side or upside down, or 3) lower your bucket to just above the surface of the water and give your rope a quick flick of the wrist. I find number 3 the easiest for me. We are actually getting pretty good at it. (Sometimes some of the kids would watch us while they were waiting for us in the beginning, and they would just giggle…they are always giggling…sometimes we are scared that there is something embarrassing hanging off the back of us, but now we know they just giggle…) Once you get your bucket at least halfway full you can then plunge it up and down until it submerges, and then you start pulling it up. Jess and I normally pull up two each, filling one large bucket that we carry up between us and 2 small buckets for each of our free hands. We then have to walk back up the hill. We try our hardest to get all the water back up, but it is inevitable, as we make our way back up the obstacle course of gravel, that some of it ends up on our feet and our legs…We try to split the buckets up so we have enough for drinking, bathing, and dishes, and all that other stuff I mentioned before.
I live in Annai, which I know I have already told you all. If you were to look at a map of the world, and you focused in on the western part of Guyana, you might see Lethem, Surama, or maybe even Annai. Surama is a nearby village of about 200 people. It was here that we hiked up just before sunset and saw the macaws flying. This is one of my favorite moments here so far. I am currently preparing a top ten list for October, so be ready…it should be good. Lethem is a bigger village, you could probably even call it a town. It is from Lethem that you can cross the river and be in Brazil (my trip to Brazil will also be in October’s newsletter…good times!!). This is where Jessica and I first fled after getting to Annai and feeling deserted in the middle of nowhere. We now flee there to try to get our hands on some fruits and vegetables. Annai does not have much in the way of either, and I miss them, as well as every cell in my body, terribly. Anyways, flying in here was amazing…when we started descending you could start seeing all the mountains and hills that these trees were on. So far, the only signs of human existence were on the plane…why then were we descending? A dose of reality set in and I had to ask myself where I was going and what the heck I had gotten myself into. I definitely felt very overwhelmed, even to the point of tears…they were tears of happiness and excitement, as well as a bit of fear. We then started to see groups of housing, thatched roofs of houses in the villages, and everything was very spread out. When the plane landed on the red gravel road, not scary in the slightest bit, no way, not landing on an unpaved road, and they literally threw our bags out on the runway, Jess and I got out on the runway, and the plane took off with J. Sue and Sean, they were headed towards Lethem.
We finally made it to the compound a few hours later, and after seeing our living situation for the first time, and seeing how secluded we were from everything else, how no one was even up on Bina Hill yet (this is what they call the hill where the school is and this Institute (I think the institute it is set up by the British), and we had no idea what to do in that moment. The guy who helped us get up to Bina Hill left and we both felt a little stressed out. We were tired, hot, sweaty, frustrated, confused, feeling out of our element, and both probably wishing we could snap our fingers and be at home in the U.S. in our nice and comfortable beds. All of a sudden it started pouring rain, and the only thing that we could think to do was throw on our suits and run outside and bathe in the rain (this conveniently saves you a trip to the well too). We felt so refreshed with higher spirits after that shower in the warm rain, and so we decided to venture out to explore our surroundings…. Here is the journal entry I wrote after our escapade into the wild, down that dark, rust-red, long gravel road….
8/22/2006
-Nighttime now…Jessica and I just had the scariest walk of our lives. After experiencing a bit of stage 2 (this is a stage of culture shock), we decided to go on a walk. It was nearing dusk, if you could call it dusk here, probably more like sunset to complete darkness, and we choose to go out exploring. When we left on a whim we had no idea where we were going or how long we would be gone. Thank God we thought to grab our headlamps, otherwise I think we might still be at Rock View Lodge right now. So we went out and walked and talked and just looked around at how beautiful this place is and we saw the village next to Rock View up ahead, so we just decided to go get some nice, cold beer. Walking down the road to Rock View we saw such a beautiful sunset behind the mountains-you would have thought then that our sensibility would have set in-how were we going to get home? But no, we didn’t think that far ahead, obviously still in stage 1. So we got some beers and ran in to Dillon again (this local guy) and he told us he couldn’t believe that we had walked all the way there. Maybe it was then that we realized that we would have to walk back in the dark, but I don’t think so because we still proceeded to have one beer, and yet one more. We bought a bottle of rum (which tastes more like whiskey than rum…El Dorado) and thought we could walk home and then just sip on some rum…Yeah. Before we even got out of the gates of Rock View we realized how dark it was and that we had a long walk ahead of us. Ten minutes into our walk terror had already struck us, but we just did our best to hide it from one another and walked faster than we might have walked ever before in our lives and with more determination to reach our destination than I have only felt in other situations where terror and fear were the only things I was feeling. I said a prayer, which I tend to save only for moments like these, but I said it because the only thing Jess and I could do was keep walking, and after that our fate was in the hands of some higher power that could choose to watch over us, which was what I was so desperately begging for. We kept track in slots of ten minutes, we reached the 10-minute mark, the 20-minute mark, 30 minutes…still not home and the Foot and Mouth building at the end of the long road to the compound had still not come into sight. There was a storm rolling in, at first it was paper lighting, which was at one time beautiful to see the mountains all lit up and, at the other time it was freaky because you felt like you were in some horror film and the boogie man was about to jump out at any second. We would see ahead of us in the distance reflecting eyes, what is was, we had no idea. Donkeys. Those damn donkeys. As long as it was only donkeys I suppose I should be happy. Finally we saw the building we had anxiously been waiting to see when we were only 5 minutes away form the ranch. I never thought Foot and Mouth Disease (that was what the building used to be used for) could make me so happy. We finally got back to the compound and just in time too, because literally about 5 minutes later it started to rain. Halfway through our walk the paper lightening turned into streak lightening and with those headlamps on our heads I was not quite sure if we had just made ourselves more of a target or not. My guess is that free electrons on your head might give you a little more exposure than you had ever hoped for. So we made it back safe and sound. We hated our place only hours before and returned to find our safe haven. And this all occurred before 8 p.m. We now lay in our safety net, which keeps bugs out, as well as the boogieman.
I hope everyone is doing well and keepin’ on the sunny side! I am doing really well, I really love it here. There was some stress in the beginning, but we now have a place to call home and we are really beginning to make it feel like our home. We made some crafts, have big furniture building plans out of scrap wood, and have nice places to sit and chill. I always feel like there is so much that `I want to do here, but the days are going so fast. We have not had electricity in a long time, so our days end at about 6:30. You can’t do much in the dark for long without the bugs attacking you. Part II: Life on Bina Hill and first weeks of school.,..Until next time…
I am going to try to send some pictures over email soon…there is trouble with the computer situation…not many that `I have access too….By the way, sorry this is late.
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