The Blythlyway in Guyana

Tuesday, October 31, 2006


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.


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.


A Hindu Temple in Canje.


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

Monday, October 30, 2006

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.

Thursday, October 26, 2006


The Veranda at Skeldon at sunset.


The runners return. Beach 63. Looks idylic does it not.


Not chicken pox or small pox or any other disease, just bites from sandflies

Saturday, October 21, 2006

The heat has been seeping beneath my skin these last two days and for the first time I wonder if I will one day simply break under it, while waiting for the rainy season to start. I was so thoroughly overheated yesterday, in the middle of the cloudless, fire hot sky, that I took out the thermometer because I was convinced I had a fever. But my temperature read 97.6 and, since denange fever was out, the only thing I could do was break off a chunk of ice from the side of the freezer, wipe my body down with it, and lay back in the hammock to writhe in the breezeless afternoon, well past the point of being able to transcend my circumstances.
We took our first excursion out of the friendly confines of New Amsterdam on Sunday. After Miriam Adelaide finished with one of the Luther League groups, she met me on the road near the ferry launch (called here the stelling). The stelling is also the area where the buses congregate looking for to fill up with enough passengers to make their trip profitable. Fill-up is perhaps an understatement. For just about every mode of vehicular travel the Guyanese make the utmost effort to maximize the passengers who participate. They are in fact deftly efficient at the energy consumption to distance traveled ratio, at least within the confines of the modes of transportations available to them. For instance it is not at all uncommon to see four people using one bicycle (Father pedaling, Mother side saddle across the bar, older child on the backstand, younger child held on the handlebars by mother or father). It is frankly an amazing display of dexterity, balance, and trust, which makes me wince to think of those pull behind kid carriers with the long orange flag. Safety thorough ability and awareness not armour and size. It should go without saying that nobody, and I mean nobody, wears a helmet on a bicycle here.
Their efficiency, however, is based on necessity not necessarily desire for family unity.
There are still the solitary drivers of private cars, although the number is not high, as usually even private cars are utilized for the novel idea of carrying passengers. If in the United States today there is an average of one and a half cars for every eligible driver (a statistic which continually astounds me), in Guyana I would hazard to guess that the ration is closer to one private car for every one hundred eligible drivers. What the statistic doesn’t show is that, just as in the states, the cars are owned overwhelmingly by those with higher incomes. For the vast majority of Guyanese the price of owning and operating a car which is not used daily for commercial gain, not simply transportation, is completely and utterly beyond their means. More people do use motorcycles and motorbikes. But for most people public transportation is how you move about.
There used to be a network of buses and trams of some type I am told but this is no longer the case. Within town people use cabs. These are small sedans, which are zoned for certain areas, privately and seemingly only individually owned and operated, and ubiquitous here in New Amsterdam. If they were yellow it would look like Manhattan, but they are all different colors. Not all of them, but almost all, have a name or saying emblazoned on the windshield and or back window in neon spray paint. Names: like Moses, Magic Man, True Love, Salvation, or Libra, which are referenced by people and printed in newspapers. As in the bus, known as Jesus Saves, was involved in a head on collision on the Corryentene Highway. Fares are flat rates between points, which are more or less the same depending on the driver. These cars are licensed for five seats, including the drivers. The first time I took one was coming back alone from church in Canje. I waited for a few minutes near a group of people who were also waiting for a car, and then I decided to start walking, as the spot was pretty far down the road, in the countryside, so not that many cars come by. Eventually a car stopped, a girl got out of the front seat and I got in. There were three women in the back. We started and stopped almost as quickly to pick up an older woman. I thought it a good idea to give up the front seat to her and squeezed in the back. Six of us, but it seemed reasonable. A few seconds later, we stopped for a young girl, who jumped into the front sharing the seat with older woman. So much for chivalry I thought. And again a few minutes after that, we stopped and a man and a baby squeezed in on my side. Now we were full, 8 adults and a baby- or at least there wasn’t anybody else to stop for until after we dropped off two of the women in the back. The occupants turned over multiple times, till eventually, after everyone had changed into another person twice and then got out, I was alone in the back till my drop off. We traveled a distance of perhaps five miles. I have also made the same trip completely by myself. And most often you only share with one or two people, but you never know until you’re at you destination.
In order to get out of one town and down the road to another you take a bus, which is also numbered for zones and comes with it’s own unique name/blessing/ macho posturing statement. Two things need definition before I continue. First when I say down the road, I mean down the single lane, narrow, patchwork asphalt that is the only road on the SE coast. Eventually this road ends at a dirt track, which leads to the stelling to Suriname. In every town there is also the back road and eventually the back dam (over which vehicles are hard pressed to cross), but, unless you want to hack through the cane fields or swim the mangrove swamps, you have to take the one road to get anywhere. Secondly a bus here is now a mini-bus slightly larger than a VW bus. They are operated by a driver and by a conductor (usually young men), who shepherds/harangues people in and out of the sliding side door and takes fares. You can get in or out anywhere on the route, and the conductor often is out side drumming up passengers. The buses have four benches besides the front and drivers bench. Part of the middle two benches folds up to provide access to the rest of the seats. Officially they are licensed for fifteen seats including the driver. The newspapers have been filled fairly regularly with stories of accidents involving these buses. Before I ever sat in one I knew that they were overcrowded, driven at excessive speeds, often times with extremely loud music blasting the entire ride, and occasionally driven by intoxicated drivers. From my personal pedestrian and bicycle observations they are the most dangerous, aggressive things on the road besides the huge diesel transport trucks. But everyone uses them for that is the only way to get from town to town.
Quickly after meeting Miriam at the stelling we were hailed by a conductor of a fairly full bus. We told him we would look for another as he was full and he assured us that, as the ferry had just come in, everyone was full. “I wouln’t lie to you about that man.” As I was sure he would never lie to get a foreign passenger, and since the bus was neither overly flashy (some buses are tricked out low-riders) nor overly decrepit (other buses seem destined to fall apart at a good pothole) we jumped on. Or should I say the conductor moved three children around and forced a hole in the first back middle seat upon which we both fit if I sat just so and Miriam turned sideways. As we took off down the road a man in the back called out. “We see how you pack this think, let us not see you drivin too mighty fast.” The Driver assured us that he did not like to drive fast in the slightest. When we passed over the Canje bridge, the driver slowed to let someone throw a coin out the window and over the side. Good luck for his new baby I think. Whereby I noticed that, scrunched in the lap of the woman next to Miriam, there was a small, less than one-week-old baby. I tried to give Miriam more room to give to the mother, but was already abutted against another mother who had a two year old on her lap. There were nineteen adults and four children, if you count the baby. The driver put the lone seat belt in the car on as we left New Amsterdam.
The one piece of advice we had gotten about taking the bus was to be sure to sit in the middle, because it was safer. Presumably they meant that there was more padding, in the form of people around you, in the event of an accident. Luckily then, I guess, this is where we found ourselves seated. And I must say that, regardless of potential crash safety, being in the middle is the way to ride. You actually feel cushioned by your fellow travelers; more secure because you are unable to move or more important, unable to be moved by the sporadic contortions of the moving vehicle. The crush of humanity is comforting, like chickens roosting close together through the dark night. Equally important to the increased sense of security being in the middle is the fact that you can’t see a bloody thing that is happening on the road ahead. Since I had, by entering the vehicle, given up my ability to drive and control the situation, it calmed me immeasurably to not have to watch the vehicles coming head on swerve out of the way at the last second. All I need was a stewardess to bring by some ginger ale. Instead I sat back in the little nest created for me, tickled the chin of the two year old, and tried to catch a glimpse of the surrounding countryside.
In truth the ride was quite safe; the drivers were respectful of human life, didn’t play any music and only tromped on the accelerator on occasions when I am sure it was absolutely necessary. Of course I couldn’t see a thing, but I assume that this is what was going on and ignorance is truly often bliss. In fact, compared to a few of the white knuckled, gut clenching, close my eyes in the face of imminent impact rides I have had with Pastor Roy on the road running late on Sunday from one service to the next, I enjoyed myself immeasurably. At one point everyone asked our permission to drive down a side road to drop the new baby off at its doorstep. Once we figured out what they were asking we of course assented. I don’t think anyone else in the vehicle had any choice, but we are foreigners so we get asked these things. We drove off the road on one of the many dirt tracks, weaving through bumps and ruts slowly past one room stilted houses and larger as well, till we came to the babies house where a whole extended family (more people than could possibly fit in the house I hope) was waiting outside with smiles and cries of joy at this new member of the household. Welcome, always it’s welcome here. We arrived at the Lutheran retreat compound about a half-hour after dark. We were the last ones to be unloaded and the driver and conductor asked us to be sure to pray for them on the road.
Corriverton has much less population density than New Amsterdam. The area of the country had also, in general, been more economically active in the last decade. One of the major sugar production facilities is located just a few miles from the Lutheran compound. There is also a greater disparity between those with and those without. At nights, not long after sundown the road becomes very quiet, even lonely. Brian and Kristen, two Americans who have been living in Guyana invited us to this part of the country. We had the pleasure of meeting Kristen at our missionary training session in Chicago. She has been in the Peace Corps in Guyana for the last few years and has a wide-ranging knowledge of the country as a geographic whole. Brian was the first intern in Guyana in the same program, which Miriam is now engaged. Subsequent to finishing his intern year here and returning to finish school he returned to Guyana to take his first Pastoral call in Skeldon. Brian and Kristen grew up very close to each other in Wisconsin, dated, broke up and then twice found that they were unexpectedly place in the same country on the other side of the world through different organizations. They were recently married and now are here for another three years, Brian as the Pastor of four churches and Kristen responsible for running the retreat center in Skeldon. They are a wonderful resource for us as well as burgeoning friends.
They live in the main house in the Lutheran Compound in Skeldon. Compound is a fairly accurate description. There are two large bunkhouses, a large central building with a dinning hall and meeting rooms, a church and two houses. The grounds are fenced and gated and there is full time security. One month before Brian initially moved in his soon to be house was robbed substantially. Everything is well groomed, spaced and locked down. You don’t really go out on the road an hour after dark. They have a magnificent veranda on their main upper floor, which overlooks the road from a set back position. It has a glimmer of a view of the river and Suriname behind it. While we stayed with them we spent a good portion of our time sitting on this veranda, talking and watching the activity around us. Lutheran groups from around Guyana use the space, including for a large youth camp, and international groups come and stay when they are doing short-term aide work or spiritual exploration. We had the place to our selves the two nights we were there. The breeze is wonderful off both the river and the Atlantic. The first night was among the best nights of sleep I’ve gotten since our arrival.
Brian and Kristen are runners. Miriam and Kristen kept each other sane during training by running together and it was a large part of how they developed a closer friendship. So they all planned to go running on the beach early the next morning. Beach 63, so named because of it’s proximity to village 63, we had heard was the place were people up and down the coast came on weekends and especially Easter Monday to gather and fly kites. I decided I would get up with them, take a cup of coffee, and have a relaxing sunrise at the beach while they sweated.
We arrived at the beach during a low tide, parked the car and they were off. I decided not to take the car keys from Brian and started walking down the beach. Instantly there was a small swarming of us all by sand flies, but they passed as everyone else took off running. I wandered towards the water, where flags on poles were marking the depth. The Hindus fly triangular red flags on sticks in their yards and temples and here also on the beach. The sun was just starting to make it through the clouds. My coffee was hot and for the first time it made sense that my coffee should be hot. Everything was quite lovely.
Before I could reach the water, the sand flies got pretty bad. Especially I thought in an area of damp, low lying sand. I retreated from the water, slapping them off me and headed for the first wooden stand of benches that I could, thinking that up off the ground the sand flies would get blown away and I could sit in peace. The bleachers are ten benches high with a wooden back to provide shade in the afternoon. They look out towards the sea. It felt like I could easily sit still there for an hour or so and enjoy the peace of the morning. The sand flies had calmed down, as I had thought they would, the moment I stepped onto the wood. Over to the side in the sand a stray dog was running in circles, laying down once everyone in awhile quietly for a few moments, and then thrashing it’s head about in the sand, getting up and running about in circles again, trying to keep ahead of the sand flies. It looked a little insane and I felt both sorry for it and lad that I had escaped up the bleachers.
For about ten minutes everything was beautiful.

Then the sand flies found me.

Gradually at first, then increasing to a swarm so that I could do nothing but get up and move. ON the ground I started moving fast, slapping and shaking all the while. They coated my feet and arms and I made a dash for the water, eventually plunging in up to my knees in my pants. This way my feet were safe, and the wind moved them to my backside only. I attempted to ignore them by adopting my best Buda Repose and staring out to sea. It worked for a while and I almost didn’t feel the bites on my arms. Then stringed creatures, half fish – half snake, started unburying themselves from the sand and skidding on top of the muddied water around me. A large thing splashed nearby. I realized I was not the Buddha and sand flies were still biting me.
So I broke and ran down the beach in circles, cursing and flailing at the flies. I stopped short of trying to bury my head in the sand. I headed towards another bleacher and it was a little better up in the air again. My skin was starting to show evidence of being bitten. My feet were now almost uniformly red and swollen except where my sandal straps covered the flesh. The flies found me again and chased me off. I realized that I had at least a half an hour until the runners returned. I didn’t have the keys to the car. The beach was lined with fields and palm grooves and fenced off. The road we came in on was now fairly far away and I wasn’t sure what relief it offered. The water was not something people swam in I was told, pollution of creatures I wasn’t sure which. To put it mildly I felt trapped there waiting for the death by 1,000 cuts. I even went so far as to wish I had gone running! I went to the water and back to the benches. At one point I accepted my fate and stood in the water with my arms inside my shirtsleeves and tried to remove myself as far from my body as possible.
By the time they returned I was in a pretty good mood. Even took a picture or two as they came gallivanting gaily down the beach. But there was no hiding the bites on my body. For the rest of the day I got a small little taste of how people react to a diseased body. Unfortunately the Guyanese are used to seeing diseased bodies so there was very little noticeable reaction. At one point we were sitting in a bank and I was playing with a young boys head and I realized that if we had been in the states the mother would have never let me touch him. It took me a good half-day to return to feeling connected to myself physically again. Miraculously I never itched any of the bites and now four days later there is very little evidence that I had been bitten at all except the usual multitude of mosquito bites. But at one point I had At Least 1,000 little red splotches on my body where a bug had taken some of my blood.
We spent that day in the market and on the road, going through some of the motions of a normal day off for the two of them. We shared many stories. At one point an American Doctor, who was visiting the country co-ordinating the work of his Lutheran church from Oklahoma, swung by and we listened to some of the accounts of a seventy year old man who had been coming to Guyana for ten years now, learning and sharing his talents and passions. A friend of ours from Holden Village is a member of his church. His brother lived in Holden Village for many years. What a small, extraordinarily exhaustive, massive world.
In the late afternoon we headed to the sugar estate. Brian and Kristen through fortuitous meetings and conversation had been invited to become members of the managers club of the estate. The Primary benefit being the use of a swimming pool! So in the heat of the day we drove through the gate and onto the estate. Suddenly I felt transported to colonial days. The openness of the space without the normal crush of people and the feeling that I had been removed from the rest of the country; an oasis of Private privilege. Well-groomed and manicured lawns and flowering shade trees. I kept expecting to see English gentlemen standing by with pipes in their mouths talking about that months production figures. And in the middle of it all a pool with a diving platform.
Getting out of the car the paint started to peel and I noticed that the decorative water fountain wasn’t working any longer. The life guard (a middle aged Indian man) was asleep in the men’s changing room. Brian and he exchanged greetings and the lifeguard shook the sleep out of his eyes and took up his position in the poolside chair. Nobody else really used the pool at all, at least not on weekdays, except a Canadian Presbyterian Pastor and his wife who arrived as we were about to leave. Everybody started swimming laps while I dove off the platform a few times and sat soaking in both the cold water and the surroundings. The lawns had just been cut. The grass had been raked into hundreds of symmetrically spaced mounds about 2 ft high and three feet in diameter; somebody else would pick it up tomorrow. It was the most precise organized thing I had seen in two months. It was weird, really weird.
I borrowed Brian's goggles and started swimming underwater. I only really enjoy swimming if I am underwater and have goggles on. I was reminded of the hours I used to spend at the public pool in Columbus, OH between the ages of 10-13. The pleasure of diving in the eight-foot deep section again and again for little rocks or nickels that I would throw in. Could I pick up 5, 6, 7 as they floated to the bottom amid the dozens of other bodies, arms and legs flashing the underwater light around me. The goggles and the pressure of the water isolating me and narrowing the focus of my existence at least for the space of each dive between the chaos of splashing people and the confusion of growing up.
I started doing dead man floats with my eyes closed trying to relax the tightness of the muscles in my neck and my assaulted skin. I would float, lungs full of air, and then exhale slowly allowing myself to sink till my feet touch the bottom of this also eight-foot deep pool, then push up and get another breath to repeat the cycle. While sinking once, I realized that I had goggles on and I opened my eyes as my feet touched the bottom. I spread my feet into a balanced stance of some unknown martial art. I was rooted to the ground; at once settled and filled with renewed stability. I moved my arms fluidly in front of my eyes and they were without spots, both weightless and yet as tangible against the water as they had been lost inside my shirt hiding in the open air.

Unfortunately I couldn’t breath.
So I headed to the surface.

I repeated this breathless landing on the bottom of the pool a number of times till I couldn’t restrain myself from laughing aloud and swimming over to tell Miriam about this amazing, hilarious activity that was restoring my sanity. Eventually we headed back to their house and spent the rest of the night eating dinner (Kristen made calzones and the change in cuisine was astounding) and talking late into the evening breeze. It was hotter that evening and the bites had some sort of effect on me so I couldn’t sleep and ended up watching TV in the middle of the night in silence. The Indian channel had subtitles so I watched one of Bollywood’s finest till I could attempt to sleep again. The next morning we all drove back to New Amsterdam in their car, as Brian tapes a television discussion and bible study with Pastor Roy and another Pastor every Tuesday.
Brian was given a church to pastor in the first week of his internship as a 24-year-old seminary student. Within the first week a young member of the congregation died. Currently he is the Pastor of four churches, one of which is made up of the children that nobody else wants and a few elderly women. Kristen lived for the first 6 months of her Peace Corps service in a house with 12 other Guyanese where there was no space except that which you could create in your mind. The only water was brought upstairs in buckets from outside. For two years she taught young children and worked at a health clinic in a town where one out of six people were living and dying with HIV/AIDS. She has witnessed a person killed in a machete fight from ten feet away. They are returning to Guyana newly married to work at least another three years here. We are amazed and lucky to call them our friends and Miriam’s colleagues.
Everyday life in Guyana is for me a mixture of intense, immediately observable physical interactions. Sometimes I rush to embrace them in all their flawed glory, excited at learning more of the place, and at other times I only want to remove myself from them as quickly as possible, feeling trapped and eaten. But I am lucky for today I can sit in my house, on a morning in which the sky has broken open and the clouds still cover up the suns heat, listen to the Brandenburg Concerto and write down my thoughts on paper. I’ll only be interrupted by watching the chickens run by and talking to my neighbors.

Thursday, October 19, 2006


Dinner at Pastor Roy and Alice's house on Alice's Birthday. It is always a pleasure to spend time with them alone and we stayed up talking on their veranda for quite a long time. Miriam eventually put an end to it but she managed to make it to 10:30. Pastor Roy and I could stay up quite late talking, he is a night owl like myself. We have gotten into some interesting discussions and he has an extreme wealth of knowledge of the world.


An old bible which has been decorated by the dedicated chewing of wood ants. A number of the books in the New Amsterdam Library are similarly decorated by these creatures. Though the library tends to only have books that are delicately laced not quite as completely fringed as this book here.


A dubious looking fruit? It has half inch green spikes all over it's exterior. But after you peel it and boil it (so that the extremely glue like substance that leaks out of it goes away) -It is very tasty breaded and fried (you would swear it was fried fish) or in a delicous special curry (which we don't yet know how to make.)

Wednesday, October 11, 2006


One of the many tree frogs that live in our house. We have a little thriving colony which hides under the flooring( which is a linoleum slightly heavier that wallpaper and not glued down.) Occassionally they make a little croak but we have gotten used to that. I think that they, along with the cameleons, eat many of the bugs including the cockroaches, so we are most content with their presence. If you surprise them, in the middle of the day after being out for awhile or in the middle of the night, they are cavorting all over the place, on the walls, the furniture, and in this case trying to hide on the top of a glass.


Another one of the many creatures which occupy the house with us. Origionally we thought this was a bat as it was flying around in the house late at night. When it landed however it's real beauty and amazing cryptic coloring became apparent, especially against the blue of our new curtains.


One my favorite new activities is eating the plentiful sugar cane. You either get lucky and have someone give you a section from their own plot or you buy a long five foot section from a street vendor (it costs 120 Guyanese or around 75 cents US). Chop that up into managable sections, around this size pictured here, then put it in the fridge if you can wait that long so that it gets cold. The first step in eating it is to remove the green husk. You can do this with a knife, but really it is much more fun to do with your teeth. It takes a little while to figure out how to do it and not break something, but eventually there is this side bite with the canines that splinters it and then you pull with the front teeth till you can grip it with your hand and hopefully tear it the entire length. It really is faster than a knife and you don't waste as much of the precious interior. Plus you can eat it in front of other people and they don't laugh at you. You only have to be careful around the joints, which are much harder.


After you peel it, then you can attempt to bite off a chunk of the fiberous interior which is basically pure liquid sugar. If you don't bite it off quickly the juice runs down your face and everywhere, like in this picture(it's an outdoor food, kind of like watermelon). After chewing it and sucking all the juice out you spit out the fiberous left-overs. When I eat it I feel like a cross between a gorilla chomping complacently on a stick of bamboo and a kid sucking on a lolly pop. It is delicious and a perfect treat on a hot sunny day. As an added benefit your teeth feel squeeky clean after eating it, like you've brushed your teeth and flossed. Miriam doesn't believe that it is good for your teeth because it has so much sugar, but as for me I believe.

Monday, October 09, 2006


Sunset from atop the Canje River Bridge. This river is a small tributary of the Berbice River. The bridge represents the only hill in the area. So it is good for viewing the sunset as well as catching some speed on the downhill, except there is a very large bump on either exit. The Canje Parish Congregations are across this river from New Amsterdam so we travel this bridge quite often. It is also one of the few permanent upright (ie non-floating ) bridges in Guyana


The Stand Pipe football pitch. Game sizes range from four on four to 20 plus players.


The chickens get loosed on the yard. Our rooster named Pretentious is the Black and White. The larger Hen we named Nightshade. The pictured smaller hen is Francis, we are waiting upon it's behavor to decide if it should be sainted or not. Unpictured is Amber who is well amber colored. We shall see if they can evade the Mongoose.

Saturday, October 07, 2006


The overwelming afternoon light distorts this image of me and the newly occupied chicken coup.

Friday, October 06, 2006

One of my Favorite lines of poetry begins: The days run away like the wild horses over the hills…
I often find myself shaking my head and smiling while, in amazed exhale, I breathe out this line at the end of a stretch of time, which has stampeded past with so much intensity and chance that I am barely able to catch it at all. The expression allows me not to worry that everything has past me bye, but simply to release the rare sights and sounds I have glimpsed to mix with the light in my minds eye and let the dust settle where it will. Something will come of it; change has already happened.
The whirlwind of days continued here in Guyana this last weekend. The sky has kept its moisture to itself and people seem both emboldened, enlivened by the constant sunshine, yet also slightly distrustful, as if afraid of bad portents to come. It may storm at any minute, but then it never does; the clouds pass over, the sun keeps shining; it’s pre-occupying, or at least it is for me. I have always been slightly unhinged waiting for a storm to come. Have always been sensitive to the change in atmospheric pressure perhaps. Or, perhaps I have been on too many mountain tops while the storms gather and close with their nearing lightning strikes. If indeed “It will be rain tonight.” Then “Let it come down.”

By Friday afternoon I had really gotten my stride in the middle of the third repetition of my introduction to Shakespeare/Macbeth. I left the school with a great sense of accomplishment like I had actually taught something to teenagers and they hadn’t completely shunned me. It being Friday I made my way to the neighborhood where I play football as the heat of the day drained off into the tranquility that is the hour before dusk.
The neighborhood is called Stand Pipe, though it is pronounced more like Stan pie. It is not written anywhere, not on any of the municipal street signs that demarcate neighborhood borders. In fact the area has a few different names written up on signs as you enter from opposite sides: Nursetown, Haverford. But I have learned that Stand Pipe is a well-recognized name in New Amsterdam. Earlier in the week a few students in my younger class shyly asked me in their formal way: “Excuse me sir. Sir, Do you play football at Stand Pipe Field?” I replied that I did and they though it very funny. I have gathered in a different context that the name refers to the pipe that comes directly up from a septic tank to a toilet. Another town is called Sheet Anchor- again pronounced more like Chitonka.
The entrance to the neighborhood is at a crossroad where I had attended a block party a few weeks back. The crossroad is a broken section of pavement leading slightly uphill as you enter. Every Car has to slow down to a crawl to make it over the impediments. On a bike there is a little path in the dirt, which winds through the asphalt and gets you up or down in single file. Straight in is the main road with houses lining both sides, yards fenced full of life: animals, children, flowering plants. A left takes you into side streets and eventually with a few twists and turns to the football pitch hidden in the back. The right turn becomes a single-track dirt path through a green road-less section, with houses on one side but not the other. Often there are a lot of children and dogs cavorting around, while older residents sit out in the cool afternoon on a large downed log or on one of the porches. Eventually this area takes you back out to a main road. While it is more direct, I biked it once and, even without the mother dog which attacked me for almost running over her less than week old pup, I wouldn’t recommend anything but walking as you cross several streams half-forded by boards and uneven terrain all around.
In the middle of this cross road, slightly off to the side in the green area, is a large U shaped set of benches. Each bench holds up to 7 people or so, and they are high enough up that there is a lower rail for your feet. There are posts, which can accommodate a tarp above the benches, but during the dry season, at least, the canopy is left off. Every time I have gone to Stand Pipe, there have been people on these benches, sometimes only a few, sometimes they are packed solid. You have to go past this parade grounds to get into the neighborhood. I sat at it during the block party for a little while and, especially at that moment, it felt like an exalted place. Usually I kind of nod and wave as I pass on the way to football, for mostly the faces are only slightly recognizable to me.
On this Friday the benches are full and a number of other people, including Roland, are standing around in the street. So I pulled to a stop. No football today I quickly gathered, and then a lot of other less clear talk. This is how it normally is when I am in a group of Guyanese who are speaking amongst themselves and even when they speak to me. I make out bits and pieces of the dialogue, but not much at first because I really don’t speak Guyanese at all fluently. The only thing I really understood was that there was no football and that they at some point were going to set up for a big yearly festival at the main New Amsterdam public grounds called the Esplanade. I almost left and went back home, but since I was there and since Miriam was out till later that night, I realized I didn’t really have anything in particular to do. So I asked if I could help in anyway and Roland replied with the universal- “more hands, less work.” Now all I had to do was wait around until something happened. I moved over to the side and said hello to the one or two people that I knew on the benches, and then kind of leaned against the post, not quiet able to make the bold move of sitting down. I leaned for a while, maybe half an hour, kind of easing myself into the group, trying to become like the post and thus normalize my presence to everyone. In New Orleans penal code I believe it’s called “leaning against a post with intent to fall”. Except I wasn’t drunk, just nervous. Eventually someone got up and left, Roland had taken off some time ago, but I got the sense he would return sooner or later. Before I could let myself decide to just go home and read, I sat down. Of course nobody paid the slightest attention. It’s just hard not to feel like a complete unwanted freak sometimes when you are: the only person who looks like yourself, obviously have not grown up in the neighborhood like everyone else, and you can’t really understand what everyone is saying.
Once I was seated I started to relax and eventually almost was able to follow most of the conversation, at least if I picked one conversation to follow. The group is entirely male, ranging from early twenties to mid- forties and at least three quarter are heavily dreadlocked Rastafarians. Among other things you can tell their age based on the complexity of their dreads. The twenty year olds have either short or medium length dreads, the thirty-year olds -the beautiful long strands that stack up under pillowed caps, and the older guys- huge piles of hair which cannot be contained except by wrapping it stacked high in the air like an enlarged turban. Of course this is just generalization, like everybody some are more conscious about how they look and style themselves more. But I think that since it is still against school rules for boys to have long hair that the Rastafarians only start growing their dreads after they are out of school. I’m sure there are many other factors of which I am completely unaware, not the least of which is their individual adherence to the Biblical passage, which is one of the bases for the dreads in the first place. Suffice it to say that I am in a group made up primarily of Rastafarians. The others go almost completely clean shaven, head and face, though cornrows seem like they are a growing trend.
There are a few great things about the arrangement of sitting on these benches at the entrance to the neighborhood. For one thing everyone sees everyone, and there is a communal aspect that only repetitive greeting and acknowledgement can accomplish. There are also long stretches where nobody says anything and nobody walks by and a large group of men simply sit in silence while the sun gets lower in the sky. It is also a perfect place for telling stories: very little distraction and a captive audience. There are also some awful things about the arrangement. It is entirely male and when ever a woman walks by who is not know to be attached to someone, the woman gets all sorts of talk and noises in her direction. This is prevalent in Guyana, especially a kissing or sucking sound. It is very embarrassing for me to sit near, as it is like the noise I make to greet unknown dogs. Miriam gets it all the time. The Rastafarians don’t seem to make the noises, but the eyes often say just as much. Unequivocally I can say that it is demeaning and wrong and societies have to figure out how to make it unacceptable. I go out of my way to avoid anything but a smile and greeting of the day and then avert my eyes entirely from just about every woman I see on the streets. This of course is ridiculous as well, but unfortunately there is little happy medium. Occasionally I ask men I am sitting with, wherever I have been in the world, if they actually think the women will respond to the noises. I don’t get much, but laughs and shrugs and usually I just don’t have the place to say anything at all. Women either learn to ignore it, or develop an ability to give just as good as they get. Which in the end is really still problematic due to the societal normalization of this as a starting point for conversation between men and women. Secondly the arrangement of men sitting around idle at any time of day is a fairly accurate sign of how much unemployment there is, especially in the Afro-Guyanese community. And of course unfortunately often the loudest guy, with the most obscene stories, gets to hold court.
But, as the sun faded completely and the number of the group dwindled down, at one point, right near dusk, I felt that I was in the closest thing to my peer group as I have been in Guyana. Only five people remained and they were all roughly my age. Roland and I sat next to each other for a while and spoke of the happenings of our week. Another guy named James told me about his musical career and how he has traveled around the world playing and singing his love. It is almost like I have friends. And in those two hours I have learned much about the weekend to come, by not rushing away I have found my self a part of something about to happen- even as I am unsure about what exactly it will be.
It turns out that there is a field nearby where someone will be setting up lights for tonight to have a bunch of friendly matches in preparation for a tournament on Sat. night. After it has been dark for a while we head over. The field is at the Prison Officer’s Sporting Club, which I gather is the place where the Prison Officers perhaps are housed but at least gather in off work time and perhaps on. It is located across from the New Amsterdam Prison. The Prison itself is an all-wooden structure, which doesn’t look much bigger than the average secondary school. A large wooden wall with barbed wire surrounds it so it’s hard to see much. The street, which runs between the Prison and the Club, has three large tree trunks, which are sometimes pulled into the road at staggered intervals to slow down traffic. We enter through a gate and what appears to be the patio of a Rum shop, then through another gate and onto the field. There are about forty people grouped around a small football pitch. Men are putting up lights, one is already working and half the field is lit in those strange stadium shadows. I sit with Roland and a few others off to one side. A few boys kick around a ball, eventually James joins up with some younger kids and they play a little 3 on 3 keep away. Nothing seems like it is happening anytime soon and I consider getting up to kick the ball around. Gradually it becomes apparent that two teams are warming up. They have uniforms and do organized calisthenics. I settle in the grass ready to watch some five on five football, kind of relieved that my time at playing organized sports has long past- time for others to be displayed under the lights. Two games are played, with half times and switching sides, even a referee. The field is starting to fill with people, men and women, spectators. I realize that I am now sitting with a distinct group of people; I feel the little white boy in a sea of Rastafarians on one side of the field and the crowd has grown to over four hundred. Through overhearing conversation and talking to Roland I gather that the Stand Pipe team will play the last game of the night.
It is getting late and Miriam and I have a standing worry time set at Nine O’clock, three hours after dark, if nothing is heard from either of us. There is no way the game will even start by then, so I decide to go home ostensibly to get my cleats. I pedal across town quickly, excitedly grab my stuff, kiss Miriam, and pedal back. I’m not even sure if I will play or if I can or if anyone wants me to or if I even want to. But buy the ticket take the ride.
The prison officers club that I return to is a strange mix of stereotypically organized clean shaven disciplinarian men who are running the football matches and a crowd of men and women at the front rum shop on the second floor. As I return and make my way to the field, a man hails me and asks in excited eager tones wither I am looking for Bam-Bam, which after a bit of confusion turns out to be sex. I smile politely and tell him I am just there for the football. Entering the field, the second match is almost over and again the crowd has grown. As I make my way over to the side where Stand Pipe is sitting a young man hails me with “Sir Arthur”, which means I most likely taught him Shakespeare that afternoon. I am getting nervous as time drags on during the third game. I have laced up my boot and suddenly I realize that I might not be wanted by Roland to play at all. I am embarrassed by the thought and desperate to cover myself, as well as unable to sit still, I go around the field to where an old woman is selling bottles of beer and I buy two thinking to have them on hand if I am not to play. A sort of insurance policy, which says well, see I have a beer, didn’t expect to play at all. But she opens them before I can stop her so now I walk back through the people with two open bottles. Someone hails me and it is my next-door neighbor. I get an uneasy feeling, like everyone in New Amsterdam is watching this match. When I get back I offer Roland one of the beers to which he of course says he’ll have one after the game. Which was why I got the second one in the first place, but I tell him that it got opened accidentally and he takes it, passing it on to someone else and he says that it’s ok he will get one back later. So it is kind of the gesture that I meant it to be, although it is a little off; everything is becoming a little off. I take a sip of my beer and then spill the rest.
Suddenly it is the last game and Roland leans back and asks if I’m ready. Out I go into the lights, onto the pitch with more people standing around watching me than I’ve had in almost twenty years. As Roland and I enter the pitch and a few others start to come on, half of the crowd it seems is yelling out to Roland “Captain, Captain, pick me , pick me.” It is a jest as the team is already established but it is a startling echo of the esteem that people hold in him. Now the Stand Pipe team, unlike everyone else, has no uniform (they in fact will not play in the organized tournament because it costs money to enter). But it gets decided that we shall wear white. I have on green. Someone in the crowd literally takes the white shirt off of his back and hands it to me. The game starts. We don’t get a chance to kick around a ball or anything.
I would like to say that I played excellently, even scored a goal perhaps, or even that I played adequately. Unfortunately this is no the case. It was now 10:30 and I had been up all day, teaching Shakespeare for christ’s sake, there were a lot of people watching, the lights made me unable to see clearly, the football pitch was even and fast and actually had grass and boundary lines, unlike anything I had played on recently. Everybody, even Roland, was a bit nervous. But those are just excuses, the truth is I was terrible. Running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off; frantic like a baby burro who has lost it’s mother. Too excitable for my own good and the other team was well organized. Had in fact actually played as a team before. I got subbed out in the first half. But not until after one horrendous moment when the ball came towards me and for some unknown reason I stuck out my foot and missed it entirely- a lame little failed poke, tentative and extremely un-coordinated. Stumbling and stupid under the lights while a town looked on.
I was sure I was done, had failed. I even took off my cleats. Half-time came and nobody said anything. Second half came and somebody told me to get ready: I came in as a sub, played ok, ran around a lot, pressured the ball, got tired fast and took myself out. Again kind of dejected. Mumbling to myself and to the men and women of Stand Pipe who were watching, who I had let down- “didn’t have much to give today. Kind of terrible.” Sorry, Sorry. Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa. As I came off one of the men who had been sitting on the benches around dusk, Brian, exclaimed loudly something repetitively, of which I only caught a little. “White man is working out there. Don’t care what you say, the white man was working.” The game got over quickly and everyone dispersed just as fast. Roland, who was dejected and down, barely lifted his eyes as he came off the field, but made sure to say goodbye to me a few minutes later with the same grace and joy in his eyes with which her always said hello and goodbye.
Right before I left, some guys walked by smiling and said something to which I vaguely responded that I played poorly. One of them turned to me and said “yeah you caused them to lose, Mr. CIA. That’s right, we know you CIA.” And walked away with a hard cold stare. Even the woman who I bought the beer from, and who had made me promise to return the bottles, was gone. It was a long ride home through town in a strange foreign land.
I didn’t sleep well that night. Kept replaying that stumbling attempt at a kick- haven’t felt so uncoordinated in a long time. And the jeering faces were all I saw of the crowd.
The next morning, after going to the market, I headed over to the Esplanade where I thought I had heard Roland would be starting to set up for the festival around 10 AM. He was there and so were most of the players and much of the bench sitters. I was a little afraid they would be ashamed to be seen with me, but I got the warmest greeting I had ever gotten from James and Brian and then Roland when I found him on the other side of the fair grounds. The Rastafarians sometimes greet each other by meeting hands together palm up, fingers interlaced and, though they had never done this towards me before, they all came to me like this now. We all laughed about how bad we had played, how the lights were hard to see under, how everything had not gone our way. I was immensely relieved to say the least.
They were starting to do the days cooking for the festival. They had four or five fires and oil drum grills started. Huge woks were crackling with oil and food was being prepped all over the place. I said that I could cook and how could I help, which they thought kind of funny, but after they gave me a knife to humor me, they realized that I could actually use it. I was a prep cook for two hours, and then had to leave. I promised that I’d come back with Miriam to see the beginning of the festival, but that we would have to leave early because Miriam was preaching three times in the morning.
Miriam and I returned to the Esplanade around 5:30. The group was at the gate doing some last minute breaking and sawing of a lock to let some cars in and out. I introduced Miriam to Roland. With a solemnity that surprised me, he spoke to her about how good it was to spread the Word. I cannot say enough how much of an impression it made on me that this leader of the Rastafarian neighborhood in this foreign country of Guyana thought that what Miriam does when she preaches in church on Sunday is a good, important thing. I was as proud as I had been humbled the night before.
We toured the area. They had set up a little county fair, with booths of food, and carnival games, a bar, and a huge concert size sound system. A dance would start after 9, which would go until after 3 AM with live music. I introduced Miriam to some of the people. The place was full of kids running around, men and women enjoying the evening together. The football tournament had been called off due to the festival, another mysterious sign of the organizational clout of Roland and his group. Somehow or other I am acceptable to this group, to this neighborhood called Stand Pipe.

But that was just half of the weekend.

Don’t worry this part won’t be as long.

On Sunday morning we awoke at our early hour and were at the corner to be picked up by 6:15 AM (no mean feat for me in and of itself). Miriam preached well, each time shaping her sermon differently and delivering it with controlled passion and grace. During her sermon I heard that we cannot carry our burdens alone, that we are a part of a wider community which helps us life our troubles, and whose troubles we ease by our helping hand. And that we can do this thankfully by the grace of god sharing our brokenness. Amen to all that. At one point during each service I chanted aloud with the congregation part of Psalm 116- My eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling- and though I had not felt delivered from those afflictions on this weekend, saying the words made me realize that not alone did my feet stumble and not alone did the tears well up when I heard but many years ago someone else’s did as well.
By noon I was exhausted and I didn’t even preach. We slept in the hammock after a quick lunch then headed back out to Canje for Miriam’s teaching confirmation class and a women’s group meeting where my presence was requested because they were going to make a local type of food Euphemistically called Chicken’s Feet. By 4:30 I was in the small back room of Transfiguration church with 7 or 8 women and one teenage boy rolling out a dough made of chickpea flour, flour, peppers, and garlic- the exact proportions of which I could never get them to tell me. The ladies were impressed with my ability with the rolling pin and when Miriam arrived I had detailed notes with diagrams that they all found hilarious.
With very little warning, right during the middle of cooking in fact, we were whisked outside into the dark of the country and taken down the dirt road to a congregation member's home, all the while competing with a herd of cattle for the use of the road. Turned out that this woman’s neighbor was having a wedding celebration and she wanted to take us over to see something of a Hindu celebration. Her mother, who is Hindu, asked us if we would eat the food, as she had a son who had turned Christian and would not now eat Hindu wedding food considering it not sanctified. We assured her that we would most definitely eat the food.
So we crashed the Hindu wedding, where we were welcomed like next-door neighbors even when they thought that we had just come in off the streets alone. They piled up huge quantities of delicious curries onto large plates made out of giant lily pads and we stuffed ourselves trying our best to be somewhat civilized eating rice and curry with our fingers. They are of course remarkably neat about the whole thing. After a while I got the technique down, but still we got a lot of hot pepper juice on our lips as the blistering and swelling attested to the next morning. To me, being the man and all, they gave an especially massive portion. When do you decide that you have eaten enough not to be offensive? Is it offensive to throw any of it away in the first place? Well best to just eat it all to be safe. It was also really fabulously good, so pay the consequences in the morning and keep eating. A few minutes after we finished eating and had washed up the elder brother of the groom took us aside and led us into a back room where he introduced his wife and proceeded to explain that they had been married 3 years and as he said “still didn’t have any children. Her face was on the floor. Somewhere in there he asked for a blessing.
Luckily Miriam is the Pastor, so I can just stand there dumbfounded while she tries to figure out something to say to this shy woman and her husband. Or maybe I was supposed to say something as well- what could I say in this extremely complex multi-cultural situation. I wished them blessings. How woefully inadequate words can be, yet it is so important that we try to give them to each other. The downtrodden eyes of the woman stay with me. How we fail one another. How I failed her.
Not that I had much time to reflect as ten seconds later everyone wanted us to dance. We all twisted our hands to the Hindu music and then I jumped around doing a jig, finally going so far as to twirl Miriam around. Two songs, shake hands all around, get handed huge bags of food to take away, then out the door and back to the church.
We labored into bed a few hours later.
Monday we lay around in a stupor as the curry got itself out of me as fast as it could. Oh and I went with pastor Roy and picked up some chickens from a congregation member who lived in the country. We have three hens and a rooster now in the back yard.
The days run away like the wild horses over the hills…
Indeed.

Luckily I got to teach an improptu session on similes to 11 year olds on Tuesday.

When I mention to a long time resident of New Amsterdam how it seems to me that the sky threatens constantly, but then does not deliver on the promise; I am told that it will rain in November.