Rainy Season Fun

Not too many new interesting things have happened in my life recently. Rainy season began in March and is still in full swing here. The other day it rained so hard, the sidewalks flooded and children were forced to hop gingerly around the school on the heels of their shoes to avoid soaking their socks. On Friday, it poured so hard that I couldn't be heard above the roar of the rain on the corrugated metal roof. And still the storms keep coming. As a result, there has been a lot of lightning. Since the power grid here can't handle lightning strikes, they shut off the power every time there's a thunderstorm. There have been a lot of thunderstorms the past few nights, so I've been going without power a lot. Instead, I wander around the house with my headlamp on. It certainly makes cooking interesting. Caroline and I do it by candlelight. Occasionally, since Caroline does not have a headlamp, she will ask me to look at things or stand next to her if she needs more light. I am a walking street lamp.

In addition to the blackouts, the rainy season has brought fire ants and, if it is possible, even more termites. The table in my bedroom has an ever-growing pile of sawdust under it. I have tried getting rid of the termites with Baygon, a terrible-smelling insecticide, but to no avail. I guess I just have to live with them. Also, I detest the use of insecticides, which has made it easier to give up the fight.

The ants have been even more terrible. Yesterday Caroline and I got home from school to find that the jar of peanut butter we left on the counter was totally engulfed in ants. Really. I took a picture of it. The whole outside of the jar was a mass of red ants. Running from the jar to the window was a highway of them. It was most inconvenient to cook last night, as fire ants always assume that it is you getting in their way. When you make them angry, they bite you, sometimes leaving small blood blisters. This in addition to the blackout last night made trying to get dinner an experience. I did what I could to lure them outside, but it wasn't enough. I would have actually condoned the use of Baygon on those nasty little brutes, but the night before last Caroline used the last of it on a cockroach.

Sunday May 16, 2010

This morning as I was walking across the street to the internet café to check my email, a small group of people, three little boys holding pieces of wood and two men, were standing on the edge of the road. When I looked down, I noticed that they were all standing around caiman, which at first I thought was alive, but which had clearly been beaten over the head. The men explained that the boys had killed it when they found it down in the trench by my house, the trench I’ve repeatedly had to stand on the edge of to fix our water pipe. I asked the boys if I could take their picture with it. They were standing at a cautious distance from the dead caiman and only hesitantly shuffled a few inches closer before doing their best tough-guy poses. I showed the boys the pictures I had taken, the smallest peeping timidly at the camera screen. It was difficult to see the picture in the sunlight.

The caiman was about five feet long with a dark gray-brown back and tan belly. Though its legs were short and squat, it was clear that its muscular tail had been very powerful. I asked the men what they were going to do with the dead animal. One of them rolled it onto its back with his foot and jiggled its stomach with his toe. He said that most of the caiman would not be used for anything, but that people would eat parts of it “from here to here,” he said, indicating with his foot an area just behind its hind legs to the tip of the tail.

The men warned me to stay out of the trench from now on. I told them not to worry and left to check my email. On my way home, the creature was still on its back on the side of the road, but no one was standing near it anymore. I stopped to get a better look and noticed that someone had stuck a stick in its cloaca. I thought this was a rather undignified way to treat it, but I did not remove the stick. Someone was shouting at me from a distance, offering me some of the meat, which I declined. A short while later, someone went out and dragged the caiman away, probably to butcher it.

A few weeks ago a 9-foot-long caiman was caught in a village outside of New Amsterdam, right next to Bohemia Primary School. I heard about it through a teacher at BHS, whose yard it was found in. She said the meat had been used to make a curry and that caiman tastes a bit like chicken, but tougher. Finding an animal like that is not too common around here, so it seems to create a bit of a stir. I will probably hear about this one on Monday at work.

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Today I noticed that no one had, in fact, butchered the caiman. The (attempted) disposal method was to burn the body on the side of the road. It smells terrible. Still, the biologist side of me wants to go over and visually dissect it. I'm sad they had to kill the caiman, but it makes sense for a lot of reasons--the major one being safety. It's not as if there are animal control officers around here who could have released it into a better habitat.

In other news, there is a bird family which has taken up residence in the wall of one of my classrooms. Here is the baby sleeping (finally). It likes to interrupt.

Spring Break!

Hello again, everyone. I apologize for my extended hiatus. Last term was a doozy for me. It began with me drinking contaminated water and getting so sick I ended up spending a day in the emergency room of the New Amsterdam hospital with an IV. Luckily, Caroline was an excellent nurse and probably prevented me from getting even more seriously ill. The only thing I was grateful for from the whole episode was that it gave me the opportunity to get an inside look at a Guyanese hospital. All in all, this experience, though educational, was not the least bit fun and I do not recommend it to anyone. It had a tremendous impact on both Caroline and me. When Caroline refers to that period of time solely as “the time you were sick,” she doesn’t need to clarify.

Shortly after I recovered, each of the graduate schools I had applied to took turns denying me. Then, I was squashed by a massive workload. I was given three new classes to teach halfway through the term when I was struggling to get caught up with the classes I had missed due to my illness. I was not happy. And that is all the more I am going to say about that.

When Easter Term mercifully ended, my friend Nathan came down to visit. Caroline, John (another WorldTeach volunteer), Nathan, and I traveled around Guyana for the two weeks of break. Our first stop was Georgetown. We stayed at a homey little place called the Rima Guesthouse, which was only a few short blocks from most of the sights of the city. Caroline, John, and I showed Nathan the botanical gardens, the zoo, the national art gallery, and our favorite destination: Giftland. Giftland is probably the only shop in Georgetown where you can buy anything you need from shaving cream to DJ equipment. We also ate at one of the largest, brightest, and most glittery restaurants in town, The New Thriving Chinese Restaurant.

After Georgetown, the four of us took a taxi down to Linden. Linden is mostly known in Guyana as a mining town. One of the first things you see when you enter the town is what look like large towers belching out gray smoke, but the smoke is actually bauxite dust. Due to the timber and mining industries, much of the land in the area has been stripped of large trees. What remains are hills of white sand covered in shrubs. Hidden on the outskirts of all of this, beyond the markets, beyond the mines and the hospital compound, on the bank of Demerara River is the Watooka Guest House. The colonial guesthouse was built by the Demerara Bauxite Company in the 40s, but it is now owned by the government. The large white wooden structure is surrounded by green lawns and coconut palms. Notable people like British royalty and Guyana’s former president, Cheddi Jagan, have stayed there. Now I can proudly add my own name to that list.

When we arrived at the Watooka, the only people there were the hostess, the cook, and a cleaning lady. There were no other guests. We were given a suite that had a mini fridge, air conditioning, and even hot running water! One of our windows overlooked the Demerara and two massive mango trees. It all seemed too good to be true, however the emptiness of the hotel gave us all the distinct feeling we were in the shining. Later, a couple more guests, an Englishman and an Irishman, stopped by. Nathan and I met them in the bar where they bought us a couple beers. They told us that no one stays at the Watooka for vacations anymore—the only reason to be there is if you’re just stopping through on your way to the interior.

Before leaving Linden, we visited one of the Blue Lakes, which are holes created by mining. Even though we were there on an overcast day, the water was strikingly turquoise. For this reason, we suspected chemicals left over from mining had given the water its unique shade of blue. The debate over whether or not it is safe to swim in the lakes because of the chemicals did not stop us from wading in.

After Linden, we went back to New Amsterdam for Easter. Not much happened there. I showed Nathan the school where I teach. The four of us played with the children at the orphanage and flew some kites with them. On Easter Monday, traditionally everyone goes out to 63 Beach to fly kites. Like we expected, most of the region was out there when we arrived by minibus. The kites were flying so thickly, they looked like swarms of mosquitoes.

Finally, we took the advice of the men in the bar at the Watooka and booked a trip to the Amerindian community of Surama. To get to Surama, we got seats on a charter bus with a route running from Georgetown to the border of Brazil on the Linden-Lethem highway. The bus left from a bakery/bar/hotel/internet café/Interserv bus terminal called Jerries at about 9PM during a rainstorm. The trip was slow going, not only because we had to stop and get out every couple of hours at police checkpoints, but because after Linden, the highway is no longer paved. It becomes a curvy, narrow, pothole-ridden red dirt road. I awoke at dawn to the intermittent blasts of the bus’s horn and was annoyed with the driver until I realized he was honking in order to warn anyone who might be on the other side of the curve. If we were to meet anyone on the road, in order to avoid a collision, one of the vehicles would have to pull over to allow the other to pass. At about 8 that morning we all had to get off the bus to take a ferry across the Essequibo River. Finally, at 10, a full thirteen hours after we began our trip, the bus dropped us off at the intersection of the Linden Highway and the road to Surama and continued south to Brazil.

We spent two nights at the Surama Ecolodge, but it felt more like a week. On our first day, we were taken on a short walk through the jungle by our guide, an Amerindian man named Milner. From the main shelter at the “lodge” we looked at monkeys through a telescope. Then, during a rainstorm, Milner took us for a walk through the village, which was two miles away. The first night we were given cabins, called benabs, to stay in, which overlooked the Pakaraima Mountains. In the morning, Milner led us up to an overlook on a mountain on the opposite side of the village from the lodge. He told us that from where we stood to the savanna where the village lay was a greater elevation than Kaieteur Falls. At the top we could hear the eerie call of howler monkeys. In the afternoon, we hiked down to where we would spend the night, the shelter by the canoe landing on the Burro-Burro River. Caroline, Nathan, and I played in the river during a rainstorm. Our guide told us it would be safe as long as we put a stick in the water first to scare the piranhas away. That night we fell asleep in hammocks to the sound of howler monkeys. In the morning, before leaving, we were taken on a canoe ride on the river. I got to see wild toucans, macaws, and a funny little rodent called an agouti.

The day we left, we were driven back to the Linden Highway and advised to be on the lookout for the bus back. Apparently sometimes, if you don’t flag it down, the driver forgets to stop. We were told it would pick us up at noon, but true to form, it did not arrive until 2:30. When we were finally picked up, another WorldTeach volunteer and a few Peace Corps and VSO acquaintances happened to be on the bus. Owing to the good weather, the ride back took only ten hours instead of thirteen. We arrived in Georgetown at about 1 AM and crashed at the house of our field director, Zoe.

That was only a little over a week ago, but it feels like an eternity. The final term of this school year, called August Term or Promotion Term, began on Monday. So far, nothing terrible has happened. I get the feeling this term will fly by. As of today, I only have 88 days until I return home. I’m on the lookout for a job when I return back to the States, so let me know if anything turns up.

Getting Back into the Swing of Things

Well, alackaday, as Kerouac would say. The earth has gone a little further around the sun, and Christmas break has come and gone. Though it’s only been a week since I’ve been back in Guyana, I miss everyone at home very much already.

This last term was probably the toughest four months I have ever experienced. The first three weeks of class were a circus—the school did not know I was coming until the day before I arrived; I had no teaching schedule and nothing to do but sit most of the time. On a couple of occasions, I taught lessons with no more than forty-five minutes of warning to prepare. In one instance, I showed up ready to teach a class only to find out Caroline had also been assigned to teach it. When the dust had finally settled at around midterm, I had been given 367 students between the ages of 12 and 16 to teach at least one of five topics. The topics I now teach are as follows: 4th form human and social biology, 3rd and 4th form biology, 3rd form chemistry, and 2nd form integrated science. Depending on the class, I see the students for up to three 35 minute periods per week. With as many as fifteen different topics on the students’ timetables, I feel lucky I’m given any time at all.

In the Guyanese school system, the students are divided into classes of about forty. Each class is given a number, a letter, and a classroom. The number is the level of the class and, for the first three years of secondary school, the letter is arbitrarily assigned. At this stage, all of the students take the same classes. When the students reach their fourth year of secondary school, they are split off into “streams” according to what their job aspirations are. The letter assigned to their class is the first letter of the name of their stream. At Berbice High School, the streams the students choose from are agriculture, arts, business, general, science, and technical. At this point, their lessons become more specialized to their streams.

On top of my teaching duties, I have also been made a form teacher, which is basically a homeroom teacher. The class I have been assigned is 5T, which is to say, the fifth form technical students. My general duties are to take attendance every morning and afternoon, give announcements, keep the students’ records updated, and make sure they keep their classroom clean. 5T is generally a good group of kids, though sometimes I swear they are trying to give me gray hairs at the age of 23.

After a rocky beginning last term, I expected to start this year off feeling energized and ready for anything. Unfortunately, the past week has gone by more slowly than I expected. Shortly before I left the US, I learned that due to personal reasons Moses had to return home for the remainder of the year, leaving Caroline and me with a vacancy in New Amsterdam. Late Wednesday night and into Thursday morning, she and I were attacked by an unexpected case of food poisoning. We were forced by our stomachs to stay totally bedridden for the rest of the day. It was the first time either of us had been sick since we came to the country.

Still, the setbacks have only been minor. Things will get better once I get back into my routine. Despite my love of snow, I also find it heartening that at the beginning of January I do not have to wake up before light to scrape a thick layer of ice off my windshield before creeping cautiously off to work. Things in Guyana aren’t so bad after all.