March Newsletter

March 2007 Newsletter

Well, you have already received some March news, the “Look up at the sky” segment that included the incredible story of the plane ride and the Lunar Eclipse. Those were two events that occurred in the beginning of the month to fill a newsletter or two…I figure since you know some of the events that have already occurred in March I will share with you some journal entries, take you through a week in my life here in Annai, North Rupununi, in Region #9 of Guyana, and share my thoughts and feelings, those crazy emotions which I have yet been able to fully grasp the meaning of.
Before the depiction of my days in Annai I will first give you some detail of what is going on here. School is coming to a close for the term, which is insane in terms of time flying by- I never realized how fast 13-14 weeks could fly by. They have a week of review and revision (3/12-3/16), a week of exams (3/19-3/23), and a week of marking exams for teachers and the beginning of a venture home for students (3/26-3/30). I will be leaving to go with some of the students back to their village, Nappi, on Wednesday during the week of marking. I am really excited for this trip since I don’t ever really have a chance to see the far out villages that my students come from. This will by far be one of the biggest experiences I feel I will have missed out on when I leave Guyana, but in terms of time and money it just isn’t feasible to get around...Some villages take days to get to, and we only have our weekends. In Nappi, Delphina, one of my favorite third form students, is going to take us hiking to the falls and maybe even cook us pepper pot, which is a local dish I have never tried…I will let you know how it is. All I really know about it is that one of the World Teach Volunteers last year had to shave the legs of the cow they were making it out of…

So….

A week in my life….

Most of us believe that a week begins on Monday, but if the week is to begin in a nice and calm manner that doesn’t start with hurrying off to work, then I would prefer to start it on Sunday as the calendar tells me I should.
Sunday’s in Annai are by far my favorite days because they consist mostly of lounging in a hammock or bed and reading, doing wash, journal writing, spacing out somewhere in my head, reading again, this time maybe a magazine, a textbook, or back to whatever fiction story has me captivated at the moment…Sunday’s for me here are days that I can wander around not doing much of anything, while at the same time feeling completely satisfied at the end of the day.

Journal Entry 3/18/07

“I just make some bread, I beat the crap out of the dough, and now I will let it sit in the sun so the yeast can make it fluffy with carbon dioxide as it undergoes fermentation. I light a cigarette (no, I haven’t quit…yet) and walk out the back to grab a seat in my hammock. It’s squeaking-the brackets need some Soya oil. My clean, well, kind of clean wash is blowing on the line, I need it to dry quick since I have more waiting in the bucket to be rinsed and it looks as though some showers are moving in from the distance. Sunday morning. Another great day to get lost in this world and go wherever my mind takes me.
I lean my head back in the hammock and close my eyes. It’s about 11 a.m., roughly, and I’m already ready for an afternoon siesta. Kirsty has “knicked” my I-Pod again; I can hear Rusted Root playing from their kitchen.
It lightly starts to sprinkle as I stare at my wash, I’m praying it doesn’t pour, otherwise the drying will not move along as rapidly as I would like it to. I get up and start rinsing the second half. Shit-I shouldn’t have added more soap. Now it’s going to take a second rinse. I hate when that happens. I have found that the trick is to add just enough soap where you can legitimately imagine your clothes are actually getting cleaned but more instead of just wet so they can shrink back into shape.
Not only did I have a heaping mound of filth to wash, but also Tulip rolled around in donkey dung, or an equivalent, and I had to wash her too. Ah, my dirty, nasty bitch. Maybe she was trying to eat it (she has been caught on more than one occasion eating different varieties of turds) and ended up so drunk with pleasure that she fell over into it.”

Monday through Friday are just about the same thing. I wake up at about 5:30-6 a.m. with the sunrise and crawl out from underneath my bug net. Bleary-eyed I turn on the pot of water to make some coffee-Nescafe instant coffee and powdered milk…is there a better way to start the day? Sometimes I take a morning walk with my best friend I-Pod and my dog Tulip, other times I read or write in my journal, or maybe pull together some last minute details on a lesson-it depends on the morning.
The school bell rings (a hand held bell, not the type you are thinking of from your school days…I guess depending on your age ) for assembly at 8:15, and first period starts at 8:30. Every day my schedule is different. Monday’s and Friday’s are my busiest in terms of having classes and Tuesday is my least, with only 3 periods to teach. The other 5 periods of Tuesday are spent lesson planning and probably writing out notes for fifth form. We have one break at 10:15 until 10:30. Then we have another break, a lunch break, at 12:15 until 1:05. The last bell rings at 2:15, we reconvene again for assembly, and the students are dismissed at roughly 2:30.
Depending on what day it is, I get home between 2:31-4 p.m. Sometimes we run up to Rock View in order to check the post by 4 p.m. to retrieve letters that have been sent to Singapore before reaching Guyana, or else we read for the afternoon in our hammocks. Dinner talk/preparations begin at about 5, and by 6 we are normally eating or making some sort of concoction out of things we manage to scrounge up as a group. Beans, rice, chapattis (flour and water), roti (flour, water, sugar, salt, baking powder), beans again, and hopefully some sort of vegetable, mostly being okra, bora, or green cabbage, or if we are really lucky, a pumpkin to make pumpkin curry with…mmm…Did I mention beans? Hopefully the lights come on while we are cooking, but more often than not they do not get turned on until 7 p.m., which is after we have cooked and the sun has gone down.
Once the lights go on we normally go back to reading or do whatever it is that we might need to do for school. Kirsty and I decided the other night to pretend we were rock stars shooting a video and found that banging two lids to pots together make a fun yet deafeningly annoying instrument we called the symbols. We started in the kitchen and eventually found a dance floor/stage outside on the steps of the canteen. We danced to Salt-n-Pepa’s “None of your business” and “Shoop”, as well as a little Black Eyed Peas…Needless to say, I think we drove everyone within earshot of our clanging lids crazy, and I think Jess and Grace were more than happy to make their way over to the school to photocopy their exams. It was fun though; we released some stored up energy.

Things I think of between here and there….

For those that know me well, you will understand how good this is for me…for those of you that don’t know me that well, well, you’re about to…

Journal entry 3/25/07

“It is Sunday and I am barricaded within the cement walls of my house all by myself and I love it. I was supposed to go to Aranaputa with the girls, but I didn’t want to. I felt like I just needed the place to myself today, I needed a bit of quiet alone time. I have been reading back over my journal from March and there are so many entries where I mention something about going home, and to be honest with myself, it’s exactly what I am thinking of right now. I don’t want to go home today, or even tomorrow for that matter, but I am getting anxious to get home. I think coming here to Guyana to do this has been a very positive experience for me, and I am excited to go home and apply to the Western life of mine all the things I feel I have learnt here this year.
So what exactly have I learned? Well, I have definitely learned that I love spending time by myself just doing random things, whatever it is my mind feels like doing in a moment. If there is anything that I think is the most important quality I have realized about myself, it is this. I have always been such a social butterfly, unable to sit for more than one second by myself without hearing voices through a phone, a TV (even if I am not watching it), or able to even sit, I was always on the run. I am not running anymore, and I am rather happy with that. When I do get home I want to be less of the screwball I was before I left…
…I can’t wait to have my own apartment again, and not let myself be so busy that every single day I have something to do, somewhere to go. I want to stay at my apartment and lose myself in it, much in the way that I do on the weekends here.
I want to start saving my money instead of squandering it away on things I shouldn’t and save for things and experiences I really want…A foreign adventure with my mother, trips around my own astoundingly beautiful country, a farewell to my debt, money in the bank to head off to graduate school with…
These are things that make me anxious to get home (although I left some of the more personal thoughts out…). I want to become a better cook and have gatherings with my family and friends, I want to watch good quality films that make me think, as well as read books of the same. I want to learn about so many things in the world around me, about people and cultures, about government and religion, about Earth and space, the biology to the physics. And I want to write it all down. Everything I see and do I want to write down and keep track of the experience and my corresponding thoughts. I want be more in tune with my body, and I want to take better care of it seeing as I only get one in this life, and I like this life.
Probably having so much time to sit and think about these things is what makes me keep saying I want to go home-it’s because I am excited to see myself and how I respond to life back in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world after this experience. Plus, it seems like I see so many people able to move from here to there, and it makes me feel stuck on Bina Hill, unable to trek too far away into a place that has so much life to discover. Even though life here seems pretty easy, which I can’t say that it isn’t, it’s the monotony of it all that can drive me into a frenzy.
Sometimes I feel like I spend my days with students that don’t really care about the world around them, or what even can feel like themselves for that matter (why I let these ones stand out to me I don’t know why because there are many students that are gifted and very hardworking). (In the next few paragraphs when I say “they” I am only referring to those students that I see as being this neglectful of their future…In no way do I mean all the students or their parents or the whole of Guyanese people.) Maybe these students just scare me because I fear for what will happen to Guyana, especially the Rupununi, in the next 5-10 years if they don’t pull it together…the youth that is. They seem so lazy sometimes, like they can’t and don’t even want to care for themselves. They don’t want to do anything for themselves-not even make food. They just expect everyone else to do things for them. Seeing this makes me realize that maybe this area is too dependent on volunteers, which has been mentioned to me but I did not see it as so at the time. Each volunteer probably comes in with some form of pity or another towards the people, the students, and then we end up feeling bad and the students have figured it all out…and therefore they play the “poor me” and end up getting too many things handed to them with minimal effort on their part. And now they have become a product of their environment. The nurturing aspect has led them to take things for granted.
So what would happen if all 6 of the volunteers at this school left at the end of this year no more were to return? I ask them this sometimes. “Who will teach you?” I say. They have to take responsibility for their own people, for their land, for their futures. They cannot expect somebody else to do it without being exploited and having their land raped. They have to learn about certain things for their own subsistence, they have to learn so they don’t get outsmarted by the CEO of the next lumbering company that wants to do business here. “We will pave the road for you, and you can pay us with your trees.”
To someone who doesn’t know or is unable to think about what he really means because they haven’t been taught or haven’t learned how to think, this might sound like a fantastic idea, but who benefits? Don’t you think a paved road would make it easier for the CEO’s trucks to come and collect the lumber and haul it out with all it’s biomass over a smooth and freshly laid road? However, the person who has been taught to think, and is able to do it critically, might stop and weigh the pros and cons and would be able to ask the villain just the right questions to show (s)he is not a foo and that (s)he is educated and able to make wise decisions since (s)he has learned to assess a situation and is able to predict some of the results.
It’s even harder to see the students, especially the male students, which have strong personalities and are in a real position to make decisions for this land and the people that occupy it, but instead are pissing time away being cool and lazy. They are seemingly oblivious to what their future holds as I watch their emulation of characters like Eminem and 50 Cent, which worries me that these potential leaders are going to make some serious mistakes that will result in the loss of the land and suppression/oppression of the people. All because they didn’t understand the power available to the encroaching world to exert its force because they were too busy doing nothing for themselves except taking it all for granted. And believe me, I know I am not above this way of thinking, or unthinking I should say, because I myself was one of these time pissers. I just hope they can it together before the damage has been done. And then I stop and wonder if it’s not already too late. Damage may be already done that has not yet materialized; however, I would never want to let myself think that it was too late. Sometimes damage can be reversed, and if it can’t then it can at least be slowed or halted. I fell that the present generation of students at this school, and all the schools in this country for that matter, are going to be largely responsible for positive progress in Guyana for Guyanese people, especially preservation of each unique Amerindian culture in the nation…

All I can hope when I leave here is that I have taught some of them enough to understand the great responsibility that lies before them in their future, whether they use this knowledge now or if they retain it until they realize what I was trying to say in my ranting and raving about standing up for themselves, about preserving their environment, about learning the language and customs of their ancestors.


Biblical Rain

The rainy season has started, or so I think. I am told that this is just the beginning, but man, does it RAIN here. Hard. And for extended periods. One day Jess and I came home to a flooded house where one would wonder if we even had a roof or louvres in our windows. All my papers were wet, my bed was wet, my books were wet, and just about every inch of our floor throughout the whole house was wet. The front of our house gets flooded out with about 5+ inches of water, so in order to get just over to Grace and Kirsty’s house we got a board and made a makeshift bridge to carry us from one front stoop to the other. Unless I remember to bring in my hammock when it rains my days of hammocking are just about over it seems. Our solution to this is that we are going to get hammock hooks and hang them in the house, even though I prefer the bed since the flies, along with the ants, are starting to take over the world. Grace and Kirsty went to the Cricket World Cup in Georgetown at the end of the month. They brought back a blow up boat, which is normally used in pool settings, however, in our case will be used to explore the vast and flooded savannahs surrounding us soon enough. We are going to reinforce the bottom of the boat with duct tape just to err on the side of caution.

I hear a plane…hopefully that means that the package my mom sent a month and a half ago will be arriving, although I doubt it. Everyday that I go to check my hopes are shattered when Josephine tells my packages have not yet arrived.

Our break started early, 3 days early I think due to the World Cup. Why school had to be shut down, especially all the way out here, is beyond me. This is one of the problems with the ministry of Education here. To compensate for this week an extra week has been added on to the August term, however, our plane tickets are booked for our return trip home already and cannot be changed without a fee, so we are going to miss the last week of school. This next term is the shortest being only 12 weeks, and 3 of those weeks are not even teaching weeks as I explained in the beginning of this newsletter. How time flies…

We have Easter break from March 30th - April 15th.
I will tell you all about it in the next newsletter. Until then-Peace out.