The Grand Finale...

July 2007 Newsletter

I am sure you have never heard this out of me before, but man, it is crazy how fast a year can go. It’s hard to believe that I am home sitting in my mother’s house, typing on her computer, lights and computer on into the wee hours of the night. I have gained the ability to stuff my face with any vegetable, or multiple other foodstuffs I want, with pretty much any variety of seasoning I chose to douse it with at any time I chose to do it. It is 12:11 a.m. in the morning and I don’t consider it the middle of the night, I do not feel mosquitoes attempting to make me their dinner, torrential rain is not falling on my zinc roof that must have a leak in order to explain the wetness my bed achieves on these very nights (I realize this fragment might suggest that my wetting the bed might be explanation B as I try to make a determination, but I assure you this is not the case), I am not afraid the snake that lived in the shower is going to snuggle up with me in the night under my bug net, not to mention feeling like a shower, especially a warm one, is no longer a luxury in the first place. There is no fear that the centipede I wore inside my pant leg for a single second, which was way too long for me, is going to make an appearance in my day.
I miss that place so much. Here I could only wish to go a long bike ride where I didn’t have to dodge people, to go on a run where I could see macaws and hear their pissed off calls they made to each other around dinner time, to go on a nighttime bike ride that often resulted in forgetting to bring my headlamp, which left me fearing for my life come the ride home. Not to mention all the people I realized I had grown so attached to, despite our differences. I am all around missing a lifestyle that we seem to be trying to move so far away from for God knows why…
So I will thank you all now, and I will thank you again in closing, for giving me the chance to have this opportunity. I don’t want to sound like an actress that just won an Oscar, but I don’t see another way around it. I will give my appreciatory speech at the end, but I just wanted to warn you about the cheese to come. I figure you have already read a little of it, but this is the big mamma of cheese sessions, so just brace yourselves…But I will tell you some stories that I hope you can enjoy before this turns in to a tear session.

The Final Week

So, it goes without saying that this was a hard week in terms of to realizing that this was the moment I thought I had been waiting for since the day I landed in this strange and foreign land of Guyana. I remember waking up one morning mad at myself for ever wishing one second away, for wishing that I could just go home. There were too many days where I lived in my future, and on this morning I wished all those days could come back to me and I could live them all over again in a way that I could feel I had appreciated every waking second of this experience at hand. But obviously while I was in Guyana I did not have access to the means it would take to invent and construct a time machine, so in the end I had to live with it. Besides, an invention of that sort would take me just a little more than a year…So, what could I do? Well, I could fully immerse myself into living in these last few moments and looking around at all of the things I was going to miss. These things are so numerous, but I thought for the story’s sake I would mention a few…
Alma and her smiling, funny, and adorable daughter Claude. Jess, Kirsty, and Grace. All of my students, and yes, despite my troublesome few, I will miss them all. The lack of walls and windows, the snake that never left my mind as I bathed, and saying “bathed” instead of “shower”. Getting woken up in the early hours of the dawn to someone clapping or knocking incessantly as they yelled “Inside?” through the windows. Trying to cook dinner before the sun went down so the bugs didn’t eat me alive, riding my crappy but wonderful bike “The Green Machine” to scrounge up some vegetables before 4:00, either at Rock View or the Bina Hill garden, which made for a very sweaty ride. Riding to Rock View and Oasis on Friday’s to definitely get some Nova Schinn beers and maybe some cutters. Running away from the sun at 5:30ish in order to catch a nice sunset on the way back at 6ish all the while listening to the macaws screech because they are pissed off that evolution gave them monogamous genes. Hearing people call me “Miss” as they tell me not to stress myself, walking though the savannah during the dry season during a full moon that makes the white-sanded spots glow, lying in my hammock as I read a book, doing wash in a bucket that I will hang on a line so it will hopefully dry before the rain falls while I listen to my recently charged i-POD that I am able to play due to the fact that the generator was working the night previous. Hearing “please for a ___________”, or “Miss, you sharin’?” as well as to hearing dogs beat the shit out of each other right outside my window during mating season. Going to the shop with the same shopping list we have had since we moved there, minus some rice maybe if we were able to score some farine the week before…. And I can’t forget Tulip, my beloved, starving little dog with a heart of gold…The list could go on forever.
But for now I will humor you with the very first entry I wrote in my journal during my first days of living this experience…

Journal entry: August 5, 2006
I really don’t even know how to start explaining all this. Coming in was so beautiful. I have never seen so many trees in my life, all the rivers, all the green. I couldn’t wait to get off the plane see what the air smelled like. When we landed in the tiny airport we were the only jetliner, let alone the only plane there. We got off on the runway and walked into the tiny airport that was smaller than a 7-11 back at home. 26 Americans (actually 24 and 2 Canadians). Once we got though “customs” it was busy, busy at 8 on this morning. People were yelling, trying to get us to pay GUY$100 to carry our bags. We loaded up our bags on a big truck and hopped aboard a big minibus, which actually wasn’t big and didn’t seem much of a bus. It was hot, hot, hot. It was crazy to start driving through Guyana seeing as I have never seen a place like this before. All the houses are on stilts and some of them such broken down shacks it was hard to believe that people actually lived in them. Everyone was walking on the streets and almost getting hit by the passing cars, I kept clinching my fists in fear of the body that might soon fly through the windshield.
There were wild dogs running all over the place, the roads are hardly paved, and the passing of the cars is madness incomparable to Chicago’s traffic. Honking every 2 seconds. There are people with boards nailed together to provide a roadside stand to sell their goods.
We arrived at Cyril Potter Teaching College exhausted 45 minutes later. They call it the “school compound” and we stayed on the second floor of the dorms. It was a wonder how the second floor’s floorboards held the 27 of us with all its holes and shortcomings. There wasn’t a real window in the whole place, just glass luevres. There were 6 showers we all shared with the cockroaches, the frogs, the beetles, and species of Class Insecta I have never before seen. There were no toilet seats and the only way to flush them most of the time was to dump a bucket of water into the bowl. I wonder what I had really gotten myself in to. I just hope I can find the strength in me somewhere to keep patient and flexible throughout all these challenges I am about to face in the upcoming year. Sometimes I stop and wonder if I fully realize the magnitude of what I have gotten myself into…I just have to try and understand even when I don’t understand.”

We held a farewell party/fundraiser the night before Jess and I were to leave. It was a big, fun party. Some of our students were there. We played Bingo and danced, danced, danced. It was so much fun, but when the end of the night quickly approached it was all I could do not to break down. A big group of us got a ride back up to the school and I quickly had to walk into the house because I was about to lose it. And I did. The flood of emotions I felt poured over me, and there was no controlling the intensity of the flow. I wanted to feel the sadness. Feeling it let me realize how rich this experience had been and how much I was going to miss it.

The next morning we were finishing up on packing and some students were in the house. There was a very intense few minutes. I was in my room trying to find a way to pack up my bows and arrows and all of a sudden I hear sobbing in the other room. Some students started crying, which made Jess break down and then the breakdowns moved as a chain reaction through the house. It really was intense. I still had to pack my bags, run up to Bina Hill, and finish cleaning when all I really wanted to do was collapse on the floor and cradle my sadness as I cried. But I couldn’t. I had stuff to do and I had to be strong. So we all pulled it together. We had no choice but to clear the house of students just so we could finish. When the minibus came to get us the waterworks turned on again. It was another intense moment, but I let myself feel this one as I bid my students farewell. Some were very, very hard to say goodbye to. That’s the thing with life though-if you are going to have these kinds of experiences you will inevitably have to say goodbye at some bittersweet point, as hard as it is.

Home sweet home

While I can’t say it felt sweet, I was home. I thought I would be more excited, but I wasn’t. I wanted to go back to Annai. I met my mom in NYC and we stayed for a few days, which was nice, but as soon as I arrived in Chicago a gloomy feeling overcame me that still hasn’t receded. I have felt this sense of loser-dom since the day I came home due to the fact that I am broke, I have no job, and I live at home with my mom. I hope these feelings soon cease to exist in my mind, but in the meantime, I am just trying to figure out what to do with them.
I was reading my first journal entry about the first days in Guyana, and let me tell you, I found myself laughing out loud as I recounted a year where I was challenged, I was let down, I was brought up, I was able to give myself room to think for once, and I opened myself up to an experience I felt so compelled to tell you about through these newsletters.
I miss it. I miss the people. I miss the simpleness. I wish that everyone could have seen what I saw, but I know despite how much I write about it and try to paint a picture I could never be the artist Mother Nature is, I could never convey the people in a light that would justify who they really are. This isn’t the type of thing, no matter how great of a vocabulary I could ever achieve, that could be put into words, that could be made real on paper. I think I made a positive impact on my students and I succeeded in doing what I hoped I would when I first left. Of course, I am walking away feeling enriched by them in a way that far exceeds what I was able to give them. My life was impacted by them in a way that I could only hope was equivalent to what I was able to give to my students, although I severely doubt it.
So now what to do? Well, I want to rest. I want to have some time to reflect on what I saw, what I learned, and how this experience has changed me. I know I learned about differences and how they are beautiful. Mass production no longer is appealing (if it ever really was). Sometimes I feel like globalization is going to make a monotonous world void of individuality and paved over with Starbucks, McDonalds, and Hollywood homes. “You paved paradise and put up a parking lot” is the song I think of when I say this. I have realized that while I have learned so much, I learned that I know nothing at all. I suppose channel 11 knew what they were talking about in that commercial that said, “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” It is very true. Instead of coming out of this with answers, I came out with a million more questions. Where are we heading? Why do people think they have no control over the big issues that the world is dealing with? When are we all going to stand up and preserve ourselves instead of being shaped into square boxes that sit in square boxes (thanks Dan Bern)?

This is the end…

I could not have had this experience without all of you that supported me. I want to thank you from the depths of my soul and shower you with gratitude for helping me on this path my mom especially. What she has done for me in the past year, and continues doing on this day, I only hope I can repay her for. Without her, none of this would have been possible. It was an incredible journey that I have heard so many people say they with they could do…I come out of this feeling like I can do anything, and so can everyone else. You have to follow your dreams, no matter how scary they may seem. We only have one life as far as we know and we have to live it for ourselves doing what makes us happy, what makes us feel right.
I hope you have enjoyed reading these newsletters as much as I enjoyed writing them. Right now tears are coming to my eyes knowing that this is the last one and I am about to finish it…From this moment on I can only hope my memory can hang on to so many moments and feelings and thoughts I have experienced in the past year. I hope you have been able to live with me and learn with me through this newsletter. I hope we can all find peace within us and around us, and I hope that each and every person on this world can come together and feel empowered to make the changes that need to be made.

“Change happens not by trying to make yourself change, but by becoming conscious of what’s not working.”
Shakti Gawain

Thank You!!!
THE END