The Blythlyway in Guyana

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

The Chaos wall on thanksgiving in our downstairs. Every place I move into I place a map of the area on the center of a blank wall and then slowly start to add pieces of paper.


Miriam in the Crabwood creek area.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006


On the way into town there is an old ferris wheel rusting away. It's two remaining seats are permantly locked into that wonderful, hoped for position at the top, where your view is wide and the seperation from the ground most complete. It is always quite a wonderful site for the eyes and imagination. On this morning I finally got a chance to take a proper picture. Rainbows are very frequent here in Guyana.


I usually don't take pictures during the service but I found this one hard to resist. The blessing of the children.


Harvest Sunday at Transfiguration Church in Betsy Ground, Canje. The church gets decorated with tall fresh sugar cane and flowers. Congregation members bring in fresh fruits and vegetables to decorate the alter and to sell for church donation following the service. The harvest Festival in the Guyanese Lutheran Church is a wonderful holiday which has translated a northern hemisphere harvest festival (largely dropped much to my dismay from the ELCA) into a yearly festival of harvest in which the bounty of nature and all of creation is celebrated. It just happens that the cane is harvested at this time of year and that the begining of the coming rainy season effectively makes this also a Harvest time though certainly not fall. In the evening we held the Harvest concert which featured songs and skits and plays performed by the members of all three churches to a packed house. It was hilarious and moving. A wonderful time for people of all ages to gather and perform for each other and give thanks. A time to recongnize that it is not through our individual work alone that we live from day-to-day and year-to-year.

Friday, November 10, 2006


Plantains stacked in the back of a transport after being loaded at the overnight Starbroek Market.

As the afternoon breeze clears the sun’s heat from the interior of our house it brings with it the subdued traces of Sunday’s exhaling humanity. An electric saw issues its final whine for the house being slowly built on off days. Tepid calls come from children tiredly clinging to each other trying to halt the dusk. A rhythmic grating of bicycle tire on fender, as two men, hands at their sides, feet barely moving on the pedals, float the dirt lane. Over it all irregularly broken reggae tones drift in from a nearby neighborhood. The weekly sanctioned human sounds mix with the never changing daily ritual of the birds. A Kiskadee, not quite as proud as in the morning, yells at the fly it cannot catch. Roosters start presuming the demise of the sun in competitive circles (our rooster- Pretentious- has found the beginnings of his adolescent voice this week). The ever surprising clatter from the flock of parrots flying overhead on the second leg of their daily commute from the trees on the banks of the Berbice river to the cane fields of Canje creek and back again. When the wind blows away from the house the music fades and, though the coconut palms continue their long limbed dance, they are suddenly unaccompanied in their heavily shadowed groove and sway in tranquil silence. But fear not for the Palm’s rhythm. The music will come back. It always starts up again. Now built upon by another quick beat from the opposite neighborhood, then added to further by a more distant under beat (foolishly Omp Pah Pah like in it’s remove), till the heart alters it’s systolic to match time and for a minute it seems that the voices of the parents calling their children have taken back on a shrill severity in annoyance at the disturbance. It is Sunday though and the dictates of the day seem to suppress some volume, or at least the ear has become less attuned to the noise after it’s weekend battering. For there is no such communal cease-fire on Saturday.

Electronic speaker systems are everywhere in Guyana and like everything else they come in one variety- in this case large. Actually the individual speakers are fairly standard size, two feet by three. But here, for some inexplicable reason, they come by the dozen and are rented with frequency and ease, which is astonishing for an economy which lacks for many basic items. On any given night, but most likely on Friday or Saturday, it is common to see a set of these unceremoniously stacked on the pavement on the side of the main road playing music at a volume which is amazing. And people flock to the sound. Crowds fill the street all standing inside the range of the deafening music. We are not even yet in the holiday season, where, I am told, on Christmas Eve the streets are lined with competing stacks of speakers, vibrating the ground and disturbing your inner-ear equilibrium as if in an earthquake. I shall be interested in that version of “Silent Night”.

Since we don’t live directly in New Amsterdam, I have been mostly simply fascinated by the sociological aspects of the speakers and the gatherings. We also don’t tend to do much on Saturday nights. We get up pretty early on Sunday and Miriam is usually responsible for significant portions of three services if not preaching at all of them. It is a mixed blessing as Saturday night is the definitive evening for things to happen in Guyana. Some of these things I would like to participate in, like the Standpipe yearly festival, or the overnight cricket match starting at 3 pm and going till 4 am. But many more events are of a nightclub variety to which I don’t feel exceptionally drawn. It is convenient to be able to tell an acquaintance that we can’t make the Saturday evening “Ladies wear your hot pants and heels” event due to a prior commitment (though in this case I did make an attempt to convince Miriam that there was certain to be some sort of prize for a Pastor in high heels and hot-pants. In the end we decided it wasn’t culturally appropriate and unfortunately missed the ‘grand event’. More on women as sexual objects in the specific context of Guyanese society some other time perhaps). We usually simply get a taste of the power of these sound systems when we walk or ride through town early in the evening as things are just getting started.

But in the last few weeks, the rum shop at the end of our street has been slowly building up it’s ‘presence’ on the street on Saturday afternoons. The first day the wall of sound suddenly hit us in the early afternoon. It was fairly easy to overlook for a few hours. Then I left the house to go away from the music as it was starting to break me down with its constant bumping. Upon my return it was still going strong. So I went straight into the belly of the beast in an attempt to ascertain if there was an event that night, and if so when it might end. Also I figured if I blew out my eardrums by close proximity to the speakers when I returned to the relative distance of the house I would be oblivious to the music. Instead of a crowd I found four people, all the owner’s family, sitting around in the middle of music coming from the standard ten stack of speakers. I had a drink; this also numbs the brain a little and makes the music seem more acceptable. I tried to speak to the people, all of whom I know from multiple conversations, but it was actually impossible to make yourself heard above the noise, just smile and keep the beat. I left after a fairly impressive length of time and the crowd had not increased. They shut down before eight that night a mere seven hours of heart thumping music courtesy of our neighbors. It appears that this was a test run for it has happened every Saturday night since that first time and last night it went till a little past ten o’clock.

Now I have lived in big cities in America. I want to be clear that this isn’t simply loud music coming from the block or a car with an expansive sense of mobile dance party. Yesterday was about ten hours straight of music at a volume, which would be found at the quiet end of a major nightclub, except it was our dinning, room and we had no finger on the button. We have learned that last year the rum shop, or disco as our neighbor calls it, played music at least as loudly until two in the morning most nights of the week. For some reason they stopped. I certainly hope they don’t start again. The city ordinance calls for 10 O’clock to be the shut down time unless you have the proper permits. Perhaps they will continue to follow this rule on Saturday nights, but there is no reason that they have to as far as I can see. It’s enough to make a man who enjoys his quiet a little nervy.

Friday nights are slightly more subdued and more my pace. Sure if you travel the main road in New Amsterdam after eight there will be hundreds of teenagers to adults walking down the road. They congregate outside at whichever bar is pumping out sound or perhaps in front of a newly opened music store, which is letting everyone know of its existence with the ubiquitous ten stack of speakers in the road. And if your driving you will have to inch along through the crowd as it spills over most of the street if not blocking it entirely. But most of this does shut down by ten; Saturday morning is still a work day for many in Guyana. If these spontaneous gatherings happened sporadically I would probably think that they were wonderful, community supported events. But they happen all the time and the more I look the more it becomes clear that one segment of the population is holding the rest hostage to it’s idea of a good time.

What strikes my American eyes about these scenes is that there is no police presence at all and yet things are fairly safe. There is crime of course, but statistically I would be surprised if it was all that much different than American crime rates for similar population densities. It is not the instances of crime which are as surprising, perhaps starting, as the realization that the people on the street control the street. In every city in America that I have been to in the last four years, whenever two or three are gathered (well I exaggerate, maybe two or three hundred) there is likely to be a cordon of police watching over the crowd. No you cannot go down that street. No the park is closed. Even often to the point of: Disperse or you shall be arrested. Policing in the States is preventative. I would argue that it is excessively preventative at the current time in our republic and in the process our individual and collective liberty is being eroded. But importantly the police in the States do prevent the breaking of laws.

Guyanese policing on the other hand is reactive. Maybe. Except that nobody I’ve talked to would recommend calling the police if something were to happen. Unfortunately one result is that music is regularly played at disturbingly high volumes and people like my older neighbors can do nothing about it except develop a remarkable ability to block it out of existence and go on with their lives. The police are simply an institution whose loyalties are suspect to many and/or whose abilities are not considered competent. Laws seem arbitrarily enforced if at all. For instance there are no working traffic lights in the entire country. I have seen two stop lines on the pavement (no signs to course). Traffic has a whole set of unwritten rules, but the main one seems to be: Honk to let people know that you are about to run them over. Yet there are one way street- unmarked of course- and if in my ignorance I pedal down one, not simply one person, but often up to three separate people in one block will tell me I’m going the wrong way- on a bicycle. Why this rule is more important than say not passing in the face of multiple cars of oncoming traffic, I am not sure. But traffic flows, people don’t get run over (not every day at least), and the ‘rules’ are ‘enforced’ collectively. Except when people break them, nobody is around to make an arrest or give out a traffic ticket. On the rare occasion when someone is pulled over by what seems like the lone squad car in New Amsterdam, a crowd gathers and people start to heckle. Or the Army arrives with multiple men in the back of a pickup truck with weapons and nobody really sticks around to say anything.

I was therefore not surprised last Friday, while standing at a gas station in the capital around midnight, at the response of the two men I was driving with to my inquiry about why we were now seemingly killing time in a random place (we didn’t even buy gas) instead of getting on the road and back to the ferry dock to wait for the dawn embark “The police shift changes at twelve thirty. Since the police don’t like it when you transport goods in a mini-van which is licensed to transport people, if we wait till one o’clock there will be no police on the main road to see us going by.” It was the first I had heard of either the law or the police shift change, but, as my options were rather limited, patience made sense to me. I bought a bottle of water and continued to talk to Samuel about his life leading up to the moment he implicated me in the illegal transportation of plantains, pineapples and cassavas.

But perhaps I should back track.

For a number of weeks now I have been talking to Samuel, my New Amsterdam vendor of roots and tree fruits, about how and where he got the food items I was buying. I had learned from him that every Friday he left the market after dark, went to somewhere (where exactly I never got clearly), and purchased all the goods that he would sell for the next week. He returned from the journey by dawn, in time to set up for the major Saturday morning market. Since food sources are important to me and as this seemed like a good opportunity to see more of the country we slowly worked out a day when I could accompany him on his Friday night venture. I thought I might get a chance to see some farmland, pineapple growing on trees (they do grow on trees right?) and other bucolic pastorals. We agree to meet at eight pm at the ferry dock where we would cross the Berbice River and take the road that headed towards Georgetown, the capital. It would be my first time back across the river since our arrival.

It was after dark when the driver dropped me at the ferry terminal. I had left Holy Cross church in Canje (where we have been rehearsing a play for this years Harvest program) in a rush worried that I would hold Samuel back I if we missed the eight thirty ferry. Instead I milled around for an hour waiting for Samuel to turn up and wondered if I could hold out until the ten PM ferry, which was our back up plan. The road around the ferry dock is lined with shops selling food and beverages as people sometimes have to wait for hours for the much in demand and not exactly on schedule only way across the river. It’s a wide dead end alley with wooden shacks lining the road, cars and buses waiting in the middle and at this hour a small amount of foot traffic. I wandered over to a small wooden table under an awning, lit by a single bulb, around which a fluxuating group of men were playing poker. Exploring I crossed the street and got a juice at one of the stands. Then went inside the walk on entrance to the ferry. People watched me with interest as I moved around, not sure what I was up to; white man walking alone at night. Inside the gate there was a waiting area with benches filled with women and children all zombied towards a television overhead. The poker game was infinitely more interesting so I went out to watch that again. Eventually I had to urinate. I moved off to the side, enough out of the street to be discrete and yet enough in the street to not be too tempting a target and stood with my back half turned, one eye on the job the other as a lookout. Who needs public toilets after all?

The poker game started to dishevel towards recriminations and shouts of abuse so I moved away from it and stood near an older man who was the driver of a taxi. We surveyed the street unspeaking. He made a comment about the slowness of the night. We talked taxi driver shop for a few minutes and I was again glad that I had driven a hack for a while when I was younger as it permanently attuned my senses to the universality of the search for fares. Eventually he asked if I was going to Georgetown, both assuming it with his voice and a trifle surprised it seemed that I would be headed that way at this hour. I told him about Samuel and the purpose of my trip. Of course he knew Samuel and we felt even more at ease with each other. Before we could speak further a mini-bus pulled up and Samuel got out. The taxi driver yelled out to him. I waved, said goodbye to the driver, hurried to the ferry company fence, and opened the gate that had closed behind Samuel and the mini-bus with calm that I was supposed to just walk right in past the man who was standing there guarding it. I was apparently as nobody stopped me and I was allowed to greet Samuel with a handshake. We removed a seat from middle of the Mini-bus and then drove onto the ferry.

Ferryboats are remarkably similar in every place that I’ve been to, at least over a certain size. Once on the boat I could have been in Seattle or New York or leaving the coast of France for Ireland or crossing the Danube River. The cement and mysterious pipes going to nowhere covered with a thick layer of paint. The ancient film of grease, perspiration and mist over everything and spreading to you the moment you board. One major difference is this is no drive on one way and drive off the other car ferry. Instead everyone drives on and backs up into this or that spot and jockeys to get the nose of their vehicle past the baskets of fruit that are being stacked up to make the crossing so that upon docking they can be as close to the first out of the gate as possible. For concessions there are a few men selling hand ties baggies of nuts or fried plantains. They have a plastic soda bottle hung around their necks filled with a homemade mango sour dipping sauce that they will pour over the plantains if you want it. I stood at the side watching the surprising nearness of the water as we pulled out. It seemed that the water was flowing in the wrong direction, high tide perhaps. Samuel offered me the front passenger seat as he was sitting in the first back bench, but I crawled into a bench behind him to be less obtrusive. He leaned against the window and I lay on my back, feet in the air propped against the opposite window frame, and rested my eyes. I would remain on this seat alternatively in a prone or upright position for the next two hours as we crossed the river and then drove to Georgetown. Samuels partner, whose name I never was told, was a man slightly older than Samuel. He did all the driving.

We picked up occasional passengers and I took note of the novelty of the streetlights and the similarity of the four styles of houses distributed throughout this part of the country. Sometimes two or three streets lined the road then cane field. Sometimes towns spread out around the road in blobs. We passed a few gatherings at rum shops spilling out into the street with music and dancing. In Buxton there was a large audience seated on risers gathered into a sprawling square underneath the frame of a wooden building. Two young men stood face-to-face, inches from each other, mouths exchanging sharp words as older men refereed. A poetry slam, or verse session, rap down, wonder what they call it here? We completed most of the ride in silence except for the occasional call from a passenger that his stop was coming up.

Georgetown surrounded the mini-bus suddenly: lights on everywhere, roads going in all directions, cross streets with actual traffic fighting in each direction and thousands of people splayed out on the streets in the hour before midnight. The distant memory of walking these streets with Miriam in the first days of our blissfully ignorant arrival conflicted with the accounts of newspapers and friends about the dangers of the being in the crowd here in the capital. We drove near the front of the Starbroek Market where people were rushing in and out of mini-buses as if it was rush hour. The market is centered around a block wide wooden building and the streets around it match the maze of its interior by constructing walls out of zinc and roofs out of blankets and tarps so that there are alleys inside alleys inside buildings inside alleys. Vendors still lined the streets with whatever wares they could put on a stand. People were setting up their sidewalk spaces not closing them down.

With a quick turn off the main road and after a short maneuvering through people sitting around piles of fruit, we arrived at our destination. The overnight buyers market on the backside of the Starbroek market. A large empty parking lot was where our food came from. Less than a square block, the back half of a square block perhaps. Where over the years a community of farmers and vendors has developed. The farmers set out their goods in large quantity with a proud and stoic dignity. The calm anxiety of people who are selling food that they have grown, selling with no shame, no trumped up sham of the medicine tonic man who has only what nobody needs, yet always conscious of the fact that the wares get worse from the moment they are picked. But walking in he midst of these buyers and sellers of produce, indistinguishable from them at first in fact, is another community of Georgetown. For the backside of the Starbroek market is the congregation place for the capitals junkies whose blotter of choice is cocaine and marijuana mixed together and smoked in fat white cigarillos, which burn with the spark of a welders torch. The eye gets accustomed to the scene gradually and eventually is able to pick out the farmer squatting on the ground near a mound of watermelons from the man who is dragging around a flattened cardboard box looking too frantically for a place to flop down. But it takes a few minutes to see clearly, as it is very warm and dark, so that it seems normal for most people to be in various states of undress and the dirt from the earth is easily confused with the soil of human waste.

We got out of the car and went over to a man with a large truck full of pineapples who was seated on a low rough stool near a pile of unladed packing crates. Samuel introduced me to the farmer whose pineapples we have been enjoying more than any other pineapples I have ever eaten. I took a seat on the packing crates up off the pavement as Samuel assured me it was safe and said he was going to start his rounds. I sat there speaking to the man about his farm. Learned that pineapples do not in fact grow on trees. Learned that he had increased the size of his fathers acreage which he had inherited, that he had recovered from the sever flooding of 2005 during which every inch of his land was under at least two feet of water. I was glad for the little farming I have done or been around so I could ask questions about his methods and land. While we were speaking a bare chested, hugely muscular man strutted back and forth occasionally within reach on the street nearby, fire flashing in his mouth and in his eyes. And a older woman who was a vendor yelled curses at another less fit addict who was trying to sleep under her tarp. No one really paid any attention to them so I tried not to as well. Everything was generally very calm.

It was early for this market, things didn’t really get started until four am, and the farmers just came to claim a spot. Samuel came early because of the ferry schedule and the distance. I was glad for the quiet, the few bare bulbs that some farmers strung from the back of their trucks, the noiseless bare feet of the junkies as well as some of the farmers. I got up and walked the fifty feet back to the mini-van through men stacking large heavy shelled pumpkins, which they threw into place with no concern for bruising. I was going to get into the back to take a little rest from the stimulation, but the driver said they were going to start loading any minute so I joined him in the front seat. In front of us, on the ground and in the back of a flatbed, were huge 70lb bunches of plantains. They were next to a crumbling cement wall with the words Septic Tank Disposal written in large red letters. I couldn’t tell if the septic disposal site was right there or if it was simply the business office of the company. Next to the wall was a large metal structure, which was heaped with garbage. On the left side of the car men, and a few women, lay dead out on the bare cement. A man moved from the crowded front of the street to the more open back space pushing a two wheeled cart which was encased in glass and held three lit candles illuminating his small portion of pastries for sale. It floated like a shrine through the produce piles enthralling me until what could have been a crazed Hindu Holy man walked through my line of vision. His hair was stacked and tied on top of his head. His eyes flamed with vision, and a single flip flop hung on for life to which ever foot would take it, as he searched for his place to lay down, now unable to find peace since he had claimed a spot with his flatten cardboard and forgotten where it was he had staked. Two feral dogs greeted each other happily like lost friends, while a man skulked away cursing the other who had turned him out from underneath his taxi tire. He circled the entire lot screaming at an amazing pitch his disapproval of having his rest disturbed. No one paid him any mind.

Samuel reappeared, nervous till he saw me in the car. “Here you are man. I was worried you got bored and left.” I assured him that I was not. I mentioned that I might like to take a walk around the block if we had time. “Not safe out there. I never walk out there, only drive in and drive out.” Out there was a free for all, unlike the stability of the communities of the backside lot. A lone policewoman unarmed and without even a radio, strolled about the place in a long black skirt. Observing, simply observing. The Driver said there was an old popular Guyanese song about the people who lived in the back of the market entitled ‘Mr. Odds n Ends’. Samuel spoke of their distance from the world even as two started loading the mini-bus with that days purchases. He spoke of them as they were standing next to him throwing great weights of fruit into the vehicle, which shuddered with each new load. One of the men had been a classmate of his at school. They finished loading, took their payment and disappeared to the darkest corner of the lot as we pulled out to start the trip home.

Except we stopped at that gas station and milled about for another hour waiting for the police shift to change. In the stillness of that hour Samuel detailed to me how he had started his business almost 30 years ago. How he used to exhaust himself driving this route three times a week by himself. He opened himself up further by telling me details of the struggles of his last ten years and how he almost succumbed to them. It was a clear example of the thinness of the line which separates communities of citizens from communities of pariahs. We sat together under a potted fern on the half curb, sucking on mints to stay awake as the driver rested his eyes now in the mini-van parked out of view from the street. I had to go to the bathroom again, which is you can tell one of my week points- this need to relieve my bladder so often. ‘Right around the back there is a place.’ I squeezed past eternally parked, broken down cars and through rusting metal barrels to a cement enclosed area open to the sky. The ground had a thick, urine, mildew carpet which I tried my best not to disturb.

The shocks of the mini-van creaked with every unevenness of the pavement, which is to say they never stopped complaining under their load of 2,000 lbs of plantains, 1,000 lbs of cassavas, pineapples, passion fruit, and two beautiful watermelon that Samuel had picked up at the last minute. ‘One for you, one for me. Both I got for free. A pretty good life isn’t it.’ The three of us sat in front together. Since I was the smallest I squeezed into the middle, though Samuel tried to give me the window seat, and I tired to keep my knee away from the stick shift. The road was almost entirely empty now, the villages quiet, houses shuttered up. We passed back through the town of Buxton and I asked if this place was dangerous for them. Every tourist guide will say to avoid it (how you do this since it is on the only road I do not know). The paper talks of the Buxton gang often or the Bandits of Buxton (it’s almost charming somehow that they call the criminal element bandits. Add to it that the bandits have control over the back swamp area, uncharted deep bush the police don’t tend to want to go into, and it is hard not to conjure up images of Robin hood.) Buxton is also a center of Guyanese African history and I cannot start to read how this most recent chapter is being written.

They laughed and said Buxton wasn’t in the least bit of a worry to them. They are both African. Samuel continued by casually pointing out how divided, literally, the countryside was between Indian and African. This side of the road Indian, That side African. Those streets there lead to African villages, those street here lead to Indian villages. I started probing deeper into the political, social divide based upon my limited reading and time spent observing the country. At one point I said how lucky I thought Miriam and I were about being able to talk with Pastor Roy her supervisor. “Because though he is Indian he is extremely dark skinned and he has traveled the world and been the blackest person in the room, so his perspective is wide.’ All of which I think is true and his opinion is one that I respect greatly, but as soon as I said it I was aware of being the young foreign white man sitting on the jump seat between two suddenly quiet African Guyanese men. I am completely and utterly unable to grasp the situation in this country that I am only visiting for a short time, completely ignorant about its racial issues and feeling at that moment like I should shut up before I made more of a presumptuous fool out of myself. They rescued me by turning the conversation to cricket. Something else I don’t know the slightest thing about, but which is after all only a game not life itself (again I show my ignorance to any Guyanese person who is reading this).

Slowly we started saying less and less. The silence stretches lengthening in the conversation until the conversation stopped altogether. Samuel drifted off to sleep. Our bodies relaxed in the tight confines of the front seat and by doing so we supported each other; instead of holding ourselves apart we leaned against the other. My mind wandered over the evening as the houses dropped away and the headlights showed only the pavement in front of us and the blurred green of the bush on both sides. We could have been driving on any deserted road in the middle of the night as I have done so many times in my life. I came back to full consciousness and the driver, noting the change spoke in a soft voice. ‘Had a little nap’ I told him how much I liked driving at night. ‘Much better than the daytime I think’ I mentioned that it was meditative almost. ‘Yes, it is good for that’. Just as long as it wasn’t too meditative I joked. ‘Yes, it’s best to not remove yourself entirely’.

We rode the rest of the way in silence. Samuel woke up as we got to the ferry dock. We waited for another hour in the last moments of the night. As we crossed the river dawn broke. I sat upstairs alone on a wooden bench. My vision was awash in the verdant green bush surrounding the wide swath of the churning chocolate river, which was flowing in the right direction now under an opening sky. I was far removed from the backside of the Starbroek market. Cars would be honking and fighting for space, food would be hurriedly exchanged by it’s first pair of hands of the day, and Mr. Odds n Ends would still lay half naked and unmoving directly on the pavement. The bustling messiness of existence, the uncomfortable noise of humanity can be washed away either by turning into the flow of the river of life or by withdrawing into our own individual eddies.

Today, as I finish writing, the clouds obscure the hour by blocking the sun, and rain falls in sudden bursts every half hour- nothing serious yet, but the house is cooler and the breeze is strong. The roosters are crowing confusedly, a hammer is beating on metal in the distance, and I’m listening to Serbian Gypsy Songs of Weddings and Funerals. Adding my own Ohm Pa Pa to the patter of rain on the zinc roof and the still present, but subdued rhythms of reggae, which waft in and out of hearing blown by the wind of this now Thursday morning. The days and nights have been countryside quiet since starting this piece on Sunday afternoon. Tommorrow brings the weekend again and the possibility for increased amplification. With effort I will try not to feel as though my space is being invaded by the inconsiderate actions of others. I will attempt to keep myself from increasing the thickness of my walls to keep others out and try to remember that many others have no walls at all. But if the music on Saturday goes past ten I cannot say I will be serene.

Saturday, November 04, 2006


Me and a friend from the market at the Pitt street Cafe


A cafe on the second floor overlooking Pitt street, New Amsterdam. This is the road that leads away from the market. It is usually fairly busy with activity, but as it was a wednsday afternoon things are pretty calm. I like to buy the paper and sit up here sometimes in the afternoon glancing over the railing occasionally to the passerbys below.


Front yard of a house in the back damn area of New Amsterdam


Miriam in the road outside the house while the cows investigate a newly piled mound of dirt. Dirt is constantly brought into yards to fill the low spots where the water floods. It is a small continual building up of the land to make it higher than the neighbors. Keeping up with the Jones. The cows are always on the look out for something cool to flop in.