Sarah in South America

The Last Post

2010-10-25T10:25:00.001-04:00

Do you like it when the Last Post plays? I do, though it makes me sad. Evocation, simplicity, the different experiences recognised and thereby shared. No summaries, only a payment of tribute.

I’m leaving Guyana today. Saying goodbye to Georgetown the gorgeous garbage-garden city, Guyana the land of many waters, and Aishalton the visceral laborious beautiful home. Forgive the plethora of adjectives; they are hard to avoid in a place of such extravagance. My outsider’s impressions were of course never more than that- impressionistic, partial, leaving not much more behind than an aura, a little smoke, a whiff of mangoes or gunpowder. But if you never get the chance to come to Guyana, perhaps these words have carried enough of an aura, enough of a glimpse through a dark glass, to bias your heart a little when you hear the cricket scores, snag your attention when some Amerindians protest their land rights in Brussels, or trigger a vibration when you hear a frog belching its lovesong or catch livestock chewing your laundry. And if you have approached these outsider stories from the inside, thank you for your forbearance in allowing me such freedom to anecdotalise and compartmentalise your vivid world into two thin dimensions. I shall miss your generosity and your punchy plosive late-stressed words (‘charácter’, ‘grandfáther’, ‘vehéemently’) and your culturally intriguing responses.

As I look back over the projects and the newspapers, the politics and the alcoholism and fantastic trainees and spate of young deaths and sewing and singing and writing and planning and all these crazy vivid experiences, I am very struck by how jam-packed our world is with love and hope, chaos and despair. True for Guyana, true for anywhere. We choose by our attentions which we believe matters most. We make our choices by default gradually as we settle into adulthood, and equally gradually as our life goes on the choices begin to make us. As we absorb ourselves in love, or hope, or chaos, or despair, so we are absorbed by them. I am sure I would have assented to this a few years ago, but I’m not sure I knew how to live by it. (I’m not sure I do now).

In his novel ‘The Eighth Day’, Thornton Wilder’s feistiest woman says: “Cities come and go... like the sand castles that children build upon the shore. The human race gets no better. Mankind is vicious, slothful, quarrelsome and self-centred. If I were younger, and you were a free man, we could do something here- here and there. You and I have a certain quality that is rare as teeth in a hen. We work. And we forget ourselves in our work. Most people think they work: they can kill themselves with their diligence. They think they’re building Athens, but they’re only shining their own shoes. When I was young I used to be astonished at how little progress was made in the world... From time to time everyone goes into an ecstasy about the glorious advance of civilisation- the miracle of vaccination, the wonders of the railroad. But the excitement dies down and there we are again- wolves and hyenas, wolves and peacocks... Everything’s hopeless, but we are the slaves of hope”.

I am uncomfortably aware that some of the stories I have told you have been distressing, and a few were downright disheartened. Development work is a minefield, littered with sloppy good intentions, bossy interventions and the exploded limbs of a thousand insane outsiders’ crazy projects. Desolation is sometimes inevitable, but other times it’s just lazy. Hope, on the other hand, is an extremely demanding path to follow. I look back over our time here in some awe at all that has happened to us. I’m glad we weren’t only shining our own shoes (shiny? Hmmm!- pungent, more like...). I particularly marvel at how many profoundly worthwhile people actually shared themselves with us in some significant way.

Despite the real insights in Thornton Wilder’s words, I do not believe that the conclusion he draws is right. Seems to me there are a lot more creatures out there than wolves, hyenas and peacocks. We are not slaves of hope, though we may choose to be its servants. In his “Last Essays”, Georges Bernanos wrote “Hope is a risk that must be run”. I cannot put it better than that. I think what he means is something like this- do not sleepwalk your way unbeknownst into a future that chooses you as victim of its whim. Risk everything. Spend time like the wisely rich spend money. Spend it on something valuable, somewhere unforgettable, with people who matter to you.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Sarah

Falling for Kaiteur

2010-10-23T10:15:00.004-04:00

Our trip to Kaiteur begins at 5a.m. Certainly we are looking unkempt and bedraggled (especially B who returned from two weeks in the wilds of Waiwai country the previous afternoon), but directing us with one dismissive wave to the cargo department seems a little harsh. This turns out to be where the scheduled service goes from. The other three passengers are all going to Mahdia for work. One of the mechanics calls us tourists, which startles me for a second with its aptness. We see so many crazy sights that I forget I’m out of the swing of formal sightseeing. It’s comic and peculiar and refreshing to be a tourist sometimes in a place where you feel at home. As we pass through security I fill in a “Transportation of Offensive Items Form” for my penknife, which puts me in an even better mood. We board only fifteen minutes late, but as we are taxiing two Chinooks arrive to whisk away the President, who cruises past us in two blue sedans. So we are decamped back to the lounge, and make it out half an hour later after an impressive lack of pomp and kerfuffle.

The first falling away is the tarmac. I watch Ogle airstrip’s plate-welded asphalt sink away in disreputable irregularity. It is raining grey and sloppy; perfect weather to be gaining height from.

The second falling away is the capital city. I love flying over Georgetown: it’s so compact and gridded. From up here, it is tropical toytown gorgeous. The sugarcane looks feathery as thistledown, the palm fronds delicate and homely-glamorous. We cross the immensely fat brown Demerara and head for the even fatter and browner Essequibo with its enormous inhabited islands.

The third falling away is Mahdia, the mining community where the little shuttle plane sets down first. This time the runway is crumble-topping, grey under-shoe chewing gum, bubbly at the edges, and seamed like an old man’s face. It falls away as the foothills swell and scarp and promise unspecified drama after hundreds of miles of flat rainforest.

Kaiteur is Guyana’s only national park. What I didn’t expect was that it really does feel like a park; good, well-kept paths, a lovely basic wooden guesthouse almost exactly the same age as me (and showing signs of wear just as I am), and guides who not only know the area and its wildlife but also pick up rubbish and take pride in the place. It’s only about ten minutes walk from the airstrip to the guesthouse, and then another five to the Falls. The sound insinuates itself gradually into your ears as you walk down the hill. You notice it as a realisation that the noise was already there, inside your head.

The fourth and biggest falling away for me (and I suspect for most people) comes when you lie over the edge and follow the eager water into the gorge below. What falls away probably varies a lot, but it’s likely to be the disproportions of your daily life. This waterfall is elemental just as we are. It thunders regardless of everything that matters and everything that doesn’t. It isn’t ABOUT anything- it is what it is, magnificently. The lure to join the water is very, very strong. You wouldn’t need to be suicidal or even sad to take a running jump. The water abandons itself with such freedom over this edge. In the plunge pool below, two layers are visible: a churning bomb explosion smacking up to the surface in almost geometric webbing, with a billowing smoke of thick rich vapour pluming white above it. Spray is driven with a powerful logic- nothing drifts here. Everywhere around the huge bite from the plateau, morpho butterflies rush for the edge. They give the impression of fluttering but their strength is enormous. Like the water, they seem to hurl themselves above Kaiteur Falls because it is the inevitable response; the only right thing to do.

Lie down a good way back. Inch forward over the skin-grating rough rock until your nose is over- far enough over that reaching for the butterflies is clearly unwise. Now turn your face into the sun, into the spray, into the feast of colours in the water. Notice the textures across the water curtain; old man’s combed beard on the east side, long and straggled and grey-white. Then the giant’s huge thick hurl of the body of the Falls, churned like porridge but the colour of iced tea with rum. There is no foam- too much power. To the western side, the beautiful plumed white water, taffeta sheen with globs of chunky gleeful eager water thrown diagonally, outshone by a shower of diamonds separating themselves off and out, catching the sunshine, not falling but leaping. Fill your eyes with all of this, and the hazy rainbows shifting with the spray. Fill your ears with the boom that has no beginning nor end (an ‘ooooooommmmm’), thunder that forgot to stop and has lost the power to, a bomb going off forever. Fill your stomach with the reverberation of rock determined not to be eroded, water like the beat of blood rather than the beat of drums. For days or weeks afterwards, when you close your eyes these will still be there. They wait for pauses in the conversation. They claim your attention with their distant ongoing presence. Some part of your subconscious mind will remain aware of their continuance as long as you exist.

Reckonings

2010-10-19T01:08:00.001-04:00

I remember the first time I heard the words of the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion’s famous ‘Bragge’, written not long before he swung at Tyburn; “the expense is reckoned; the enterprise is begun”. Why does that fire my blood? Why does it ring so thrillingly round my head like a yell down a well? Probably because I’m reflective by nature, both in the nerdy list sense and the meditative one. Reckonings tend to fortify me for the future as well as reconciling me with the past.

Valuation is a skill- necessary, and therefore delegated to experts in most fields; wine, gem mining, art, counterfeiting, training courses, antiques. But placing any kind of sensible value on work done is a task requiring humility, realism and a lot of contrasting opinions. We’re all replaceable, until we believe it, at which point no-one is. Humility is as fleeting as it is delicate. Public recognition is a very bad indicator of actual value, but it’s probably the commonest and certainly one of the most seductive. “Doers of good have their seasons of weakness. They know that there is no spiritual vulgarity equal to that of expecting gratitude and admiration, but they allow themselves to be seduced by the sweet fantasies of self-pity”. Thornton Wilder embarrasses me with his acuity. I am a shocker for taking myself at other people’s valuation, especially when I’m feeling weak.

So if I try to do my own reckoning, to think through what has been valuable about the time in Guyana, it is easiest to start with what has been valuable to me, because I KNOW that to be true. So here are three things I will treasure that have changed in me, and changed me.

* I am learning perseverance: not just persistence, bashing my head off a worthy brick wall, but trying and trying and trying to do or comprehend things in different ways until something actually takes.

* I feel a freedom from belongings and attachments greater than any I have known before. It’s facile to say that possessions own you: wealthy people can maintain a healthy open-handedness (although I wonder how many do). But it feels lovely owning so little to be anxious about, having a home completely bare of trophy or kudos items, and being able to make no statements at all with my appearance except involuntary ones. I wonder how long this freedom will last?

* I am slowly coming to understand how easily my own passion and articulacy and competence can disempower other people. This is a painful lesson, as counterproductiveness tends to be. “If I understand all mysteries and all knowledge... but do not have love, I am nothing”. When I work at maximum efficiency I am most apt to cause damage. Going back to a country where efficiency is an unquestioned virtue, this new and rather fragile seedling is likely to get crushed. It’s my job to see that it doesn’t.

In terms of other people, I cannot measure what has been valuable and to whom. But it helps me to ask myself what will last. The funding bids are Patek Philippes as far as I’m concerned; did I take the opportunity to plant any coconut palms? These are three palm trees that did get planted, and I hope are rooted deep enough to survive.

* While most of the work in Aishalton was ostensibly about passing on knowledge and techniques, the manner in which it was done was the heart of the work: by showing people what is possible and then giving them a chance to practice, I think the skills gained are interwoven with self-esteem and with confidence into a cord that will not be easily unwound.

* But humbling as it was, in Aishalton I came to realise that simple presence is the most valuable gift an outsider can bring. This is what it means to stay- a statement of optimism. Humans dignify mundane and back-breaking concerns only by sharing them. And that is an embarrassing privilege: why should something gain dignity just because a white person does it? My politically correct instincts cavil, but if the gain is genuine, it’s best that I swallow my pride and get hauling that bucket. Just to survive, to live in local conditions, is enough. We have to accept that, we work-focussed idealists, especially on days when we lie in bed sick, or there is no power to charge the laptop, or when a project fizzles into nothing.

* I think people will remember our personalities and our friendship longer than they will any of our work. Ten years ago I would have been too stupid and too success-focussed to value that. But hold a baby, watch someone you love sick or dying, weep for joy or yearning at an airport or a wharf or beside a cold road, and you will know unarguably and profoundly that nothing matters as much as people. What could be more heartening than to be told “you guys will always be in our memories as long as ever”?

And to anyone who asks if I have “made a difference”, an expression endemic to volunteer circles that I am violently allergic to, I guess I would ask them if THEY have. Isn’t a bit patronising to think that you somehow have a miraculous ability to make more of a difference to ‘poor people’ than you would to your friends and neighbours in the country of your birth? I like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s yardstick for making a difference: it has nothing to do with where, a little to do with what, and everything to do with how.

“To laugh often and love much;
to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children;
to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty;
to find the best in others;
to give of one's self;
to leave the world a bit better,whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation;
to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived --
this is to have succeeded”.

Accountability

2010-10-16T09:59:00.003-04:00

Jargon can be deadening. If it ends in ‘-ility’, I notice a lot of eyes begin to glaze over (sustainab-, accountab-, irritab- leading to early sen-). But of course big concepts like this are important. Accountability is a much-loved word in development circles because it makes donors feel safe. It holds together ideals of responsibility, attentiveness, honesty, organisation and relationship. So don’t get me wrong, I’m all for accountability. However.

It’s a salutary experience for a development worker to try to describe what accountability is, and why it matters, to a group of intelligent but semi-literate villagers. Intellectually I agree that accountability is vital. If we are not accountable, it is much harder to distinguish between dishonesty and incompetence. Bad records look like attempted fraud (and embezzlement can be disguised as disorganisation). Without it we get sloppy if we’re lazy, and carried away if we’re idealist. Accountability keeps our feet on the ground. But emotionally, it provokes very different reactions in the requester and the justifier. I see an oily shimmer, a certain oleaginous expression on the faces of funders (and donors in other kinds) that makes me yearn for a good scrub or some strigils. I find myself remembering that expression, later, and questioning their motives. Conversely, on the faces of those accounting for themselves the concentration, obsequiousness and anxiety form an uneasy alliance that is no more reassuring.

Any agency that prides itself on solidarity should be very good at keeping a respectful balance. If the receiver and the giver are both equal in value as humans, accountability should surely work both ways? Just because you the donor are accountable to the Almighty at judgement day doesn’t mean you’ve got no reporting responsibilities in the meantime. It’s an act of profound respect, equality and solidarity to give account of your work, or yourself, to people who are less powerful than you. (It also tends to be illuminating and startling, as any parent who has genuinely tried to give an honest rationale for something unwelcome to a small child will know). To expect them to be accountable to you and not to account to anyone in return may be carelessness, but it’s going to come across as arrogance.

As I tie up loose ends here in Georgetown, I’m spending a lot of time on funding and budgets. And it strikes me afresh that when funders require accountability, they should be examining themselves about what it is that they want exactly. What do they really need to know, and how will they use it? Is the information they are requesting helpful to the recipient in understanding the value of what they are doing with the money? Forms are very deadening if there is no clear reason for them.

Bid-writing, and the report-writing that follows, are so alien to any people who did not grow up hedged about with text. And when they are done, what do they prove? Apparently our Aishalton village library lends out more books than it owns, without fail every single month. Paper is no guarantee of truth, although the lies written on it can be a very useful guide as to what those reporting back THINK the donor wants. Good accountability teaches people about honesty, responsibility and the satisfaction that comes with being organised. It leaves people with a maturer organisation, or a better personal understanding of what it means to work in relationship with strangers, respecting their right to know and your own responsibility to tell the whole truth. Bad accountability is a cheap, inaccurate and inadequate substitute for spending quality, generous listening time with people, actually understanding their reality and then getting valuable feedback from them in a way that teaches everybody something. I see villagers baffled, humiliated, and often failing to get support for the real, valuable, locally-originating initiatives because they can’t articulate their way through the shiny international hoops.

Of course, if what a funder WANTS is a chance to flex their muscles, an abuse of power tidily called ‘keeping people on their toes’, then this is exactly what they will do. A funder like this will be utterly unaccountable in return. How can you tell?- ask them what accountability means and they will give you some dreck about universal standards of good practice (translation- ‘someone else says I can demand this so I haven’t stopped to think about what that means, which suits me nicely thanks’). The questions asked will be the same in Tajikistan, Trinidad, Tamil Nadu, Turkey and Tuvalu. There will be no spaces built into the process for the donor to learn anything. Their structures of accountability will be arbitrary, undiscussable and will maintain the balance of power between giver and receiver exactly as it is.

These kind of donors are the goalpost shifters. They require one set of forms and information and then add another as the previous ones have just become obsolete, sorry. They change their minds and their standards and their measuring tools; disappear, reappear and pretend everything is fine; insist on ownership and local people drawing up their own project plans, and then after months of local effort reject them because they’re not right (too old fashioned, too cheap, too expensive, too local, too international; not ‘appropriate’, which seems like a pretty fruity outsider’s oxymoron to me). This is ironic, considering that many of these funds are blood money, acquired by extremely sharp business practice or even directly from colonialism or slavery, and now being offered back (naturally in some vastly reduced proportion) as a conscience-offsetting tool. Seems rather skewed that the donors aren’t the ones on the defensive. But we all have our justifying to do, so here are your completed forms- can we please get on with the actual work now?

Will miss, won't miss, wouldn't have missed for the world

2010-10-08T01:32:00.000-04:00

What do you miss when you leave your home behind? I have enjoyed hearing very different answers to that question from the distinctive subgroups of Guyana’s White Invaders. Gap Year volunteers select their yearnings carefully as a statement of personal identity: “I miss a proper pint of real ale/ cheese and onion crisps/ Wkd”. These are statements of self as much as statements of appetite, and tend to come out loudly and proudly. Few admit to missing their family: it takes a lot of security to announce that at eighteen. Older volunteers rather intriguingly tend to choose a statement of national identity: “I miss marmite/ cheez whiz/ moules frites/ biltong”. The posher expats miss high culture: “good bookshops/ a decent glass of wine/ a top-quality concert”. Their yearnings nearly always seem to include a quantifier.

My own missings have been very different this time round. In China in the mid-90s I was homesick, so whilst marmalade and coffee and grapefruit had me mildly wistful, it was missing family that really twisted my gut. Here, for the most part, I have hankered less. Guyana is itself. Enjoy it while you can. I miss big sensible things like exercise and vegetables (the outcome, I fear, of turning into a big sensible thing). I don’t have many belongings that I love, and even those I do (like my engagement ring) I left behind in England without feeling any threat to my identity.

But as I begin to unwind all the small roots from Guyana, I become aware, stem by stem, of losses that will hurt. Here are some of the things I will miss, won’t miss, and wouldn’t have missed for the world.

Will miss

Aishalton mornings between 6 and 8am. The sunshine is autumnally cool and effulgent. There are tiny droplets on all the flowering grasses. It’s quiet but never silent as people go about their morning tasks, and there is usually laughter floating in the cool fresh air.

The placid, deep smiles of people who have not had any truck with ambition. We carry more tangle in our eyes than we are usually aware of, but it’s only visible by comparison.

Working with our young adult trainees. They remind me joyously why I came here, and the memory of them will keep me wistful that I had to go, even when I am glad to be elsewhere.

Watching Eustace weave- that hypnotic ité green, rustling and dancing itself down into flatness. That is the best Wapishana dance there is.

Knowing and being known by pretty much everyone you meet, every day. A world almost devoid of strangers has a lot less calculation and a lot less hostility in the air. Devoid is the wrong word of course: it’s a fullness, not an emptiness.

The stimulating company of people whose culture is immeasurably different from mine. Trying to learn their language keeps that fascination daily alive.

Having the freedom to choose between a range of interesting work each day, all of it clearly valuable and worth doing. It’s invigorating even when it’s daunting.

The visual vibrancy of Guyana. I remember when I left Yushu and slowly moved out of the Tibetan areas through the Hui Muslim and back into Han China, that sense of dullness and desolation that made my footsteps leaden. Life looked so grey, physically as well as metaphorically. An English November is unlikely to be any more technicolour than I remember.

Won’t miss

The only place I said goodbye to with glee: my pit latrine.

Milk powder. Why?! You’ve got cows: don’t you know how to use them?!

Forro- one of Brazil’s great aural abominations. I never, never, never, never want to hear that relentless 4/4 major-key robotic moronic identical-chord-progression essence of tedium again in my life.

Funding bids. It’s hard to spend so much energy on interventions I don’t really believe in. There are very few people in Aishalton who wouldn’t gain more benefit from skills training than they possibly would from money at this stage (though I’m happy to be bidding with one person who will).

The wildlife usual suspects within my compound (scorpions, monkey spiders, poisonous snakes and centipedes least of all).

The feeling of artificial performance fabrics on my skin. This is how I imagine bacon feels in a Styrofoam breadroll. I am so looking forward to silk dresses, in colours other than beige, to cotton undamped with sweat, and cuffs unadorned with a sticky astringent glue of suncream and mosquito repellent.

Being so po-faced and having no sense of humour. I sometimes regret becoming moulded quite so ponderously into the shadow of my work. Taking life so very seriously isn’t always a virtue. My face actually aches after a good laugh now- my laughter muscles have literally atrophied.

Wouldn’t have missed for the world

Being taught to pick a lock by two tiny giggling nuns. Blues Brothers meets the Sound of Music (with a touch of bhangra thrown in).

The sensory richness of life in the Rupununi. At risk of rhapsodising for hours, I will just mention three examples. The indescribable green of a mango tree heavy with fat sweet mangoes and fat screaming parrots fighting each other for the best. The fireflies that flash back at lightning. The ungainly improbable lollop of a giant anteater brushing its mad feather tail through the dry crackle of savannah grass.

Watching my husband’s incremental transformation from person-with-camera to photographer.

And, in the end, rather to my surprise I find that I would not have missed any of it. Not even the scorpion sting in my sleep, not even the months of illness. Life could not be the beautiful equation it is without every element in poised relation, even the mysterious dark matter. Who knows what we would become, or fail to become, without it.

Balwant Singh Hospital

2010-10-03T17:51:00.002-04:00

We arrive for an appointment at 8am. Sister Calista, sweet and tiny 70-year old nun from tribal North-East India, has been told by an optician that she needs a cataract removed. Georgetown is intimidating to her after the scale and comfortable sociability of Aishalton, so I and another friend accompany her.

Balwant Singh is widely agreed to be Georgetown’s best hospital. Certainly it is the smartest. The bevelled edges of the formica cupboards are painted verdigris; all the pillars and doorframes are in slightly antiqued old gold. The floor is spotless; for the first hour of morning surgery, patients are rigorously shunted out of their chairs so that thorough mopping can take place.

Like most Georgetown hospitals, there are no real appointments. You may be given an appointment time, but in practice everyone arrives together and waits until system or whim allows them in. Why? Why fill your hospital with angry, impatient and bored people when you could at least give them an appointment hour? Our appointment purports to be at 8am. Sister Calista, gentle and slightly out of tempo in the city, is trying hard not to worry. She has fasted as instructed from the previous dinner time. We wait.

There are three women on the nurse’s station. Three heavy-lidded Furies tapping their expensive talons on the desktop, handing papers back and forth with that strange receptionist’s relish of rustling nails and tactile page-turning deliberation. A tall, wealthy-looking man is waiting with his small son for the child’s broken arm to be reassessed. The boy is about five- just young enough still to have that heavy head on a beautiful vulnerable stalk of neck. The cast has been taken off just now. A metal bar protrudes from the elbow on one side, cottonwool from the hole in his arm on the other. At first he is cheerful, but after an hour or so of standing waiting for an x-ray, he is beginning to weep. Finally the Third Fury tells the father that he was supposed to pay first at the cashier. Getting angry now, he sweeps off in search of the cashier. All three Furies watch him miss the window, watch him wander around the open-plan hospital floor bewildered as the child begins to wail. They tap their talons, purse their lips, look on in something between apathy and disdain. Eventually he finds the correct window and pays.

We have ample time to watch this episode, as we ourselves are still waiting for the ophthalmologist. After only an hour and three quarters, we are ushered in. He appears extremely knowledgeable, and makes extremely fast judgements. He asks Calista questions but does not appear to wait for or hear the answers. And he responds at a machine-gun speed that I can follow but only just, with terminology utterly foreign to Sister Calista, and does not pause to see whether she absorbs it. It is like watching a Porsche overtake a penny farthing.

She would have NO idea that he diagnosed retinal bleeding if I had not been there to hear it- and I had to ask him to repeat himself three times. No paperwork is given, and there seems to be no formal procedure of patient information. It’s ‘the doctor knows best’ taken to the extreme (perhaps ‘the doctor won’t bother to explain to you because you don’t need to know’). She is packed back out to the waiting area to have eye drops which will dilate the pupil and allow a more detailed examination. But Fury Number 1 who administers said drops is busy. Upstairs. So, after repeated pleading, we wait 45 minutes before Fury Number 2 condescends to put the eyedrops in, a procedure that takes about a second and a half. After that we have to wait another hour for them to take effect. By now Sister Calista is hungry and weary and dejected, but she hasn’t yet acquired the knack of complaining in her 70 years, so she keeps her eyes shut and waits on the Lord (or the doctor: perhaps here the two are synonymous).

The facilities are good. The doctors are knowledgeable. But the atmosphere is an odorous agglomeration of high-handedness, arrogance and disdain. Why do they feel this is acceptable? My physiotherapy twice a week at Georgetown Public Hospital is conducted amidst peeling paintwork, rusty bicycles in the waiting room, elaborate filigrees of cobweb catching my eye as I lie on my back, and pungent pillows I lie upon (and try not to dwell upon) on my front. But Bernadette treats me as a human just like herself. I have an appointment which is rarely more than half an hour late. It feels like a place for people- with too many people in it, granted, but FOR them in some way. Balwant Singh feels like a medical Harvey Nichols where the ladies on the perfume counter curl their lip and pointedly hide the atomiser. I guess I’ve always found that kind of exclusivity exclusionist and rather repellent, but perhaps that’s intentional. I’m not their desired clientele. I wonder who is? The Furies look as though their dream is of a hospital with no patients at all.

Culture Revitalisation and Amerindian Heritage

2010-09-30T08:47:00.003-04:00

Amerindian Heritage Month draws to a close with some banquets, a few sports days, lots of culture shows and an upsurge in Amerindian issues in the press. All of them aspire to a positive future for Amerindians. What that positive future might be is moot. The government want economic development. Most of the Amerindian communities have never articulated what they want. Up until last year, the motto of Aishalton’s Village Council was ‘Together We Will’. Together we will what? Now, with the Community Development Plan, at least the sentence is complete: the community decided by consensus that ‘together we will build strong healthy families, develop leadership and responsibility, sustain and strengthen cultural activities and develop skills and create opportunities’. The implementation is hard, but at least the plan is there, and came from within, and points in a clear direction.

I received an email from an Aishalton friend the other day, about an essay he is trying to help a student write on how to promote economic development that will protect sustainable livelihoods and traditional culture. This is the question that everyone is asking. It is rare to see the question itself interrogated. In 1969, describing the Orkney Islands, George Mackay Brown wrote: “The notion of progress is not easy to take root in an elemental community; the people are conservative, cling hard to tradition which is their only sure foothold and the ground of all their folk wisdom and art and of the precarious crafts by which they lived... The notion of progress is a cancer that makes an elemental community look better, and induces a false euphoria, while it drains the life out of it remorselessly”. I believe that he is on to something profoundly true here, and that Aishalton must do everything to protect itself against such cancerous ‘progress’. What ‘progress’ are they being offered from the capital? My two best friends in Georgetown, locals completely attuned to life here, were beaten and robbed at gunpoint this week, in daylight in a public place. There is little temptation for Aishalton to replicate Georgetown’s model of development, but what they put in its place is a burgeoning challenge.

Amerindian Heritage Month has been a positive recognition of the place of Amerindians in Guyanese society since its inception in 1995 by President Cheddi Jagan. But how do children learn what is of value in their culture? Certainly not from UN documents about cultural diversity. Not from school, either, or special events in Amerindian Heritage Month, despite the helpful influence all of these may provide. We accrete our identity from daily life, not special occasions. If the most powerful people I see regularly, and the gorgeous vehicle I once got a ride in the pick-up of, and every book, and all my schooling, and all of the people and the things that I admire and envy, and all of the people and things that my parents praise and ponder and aspire to for me, are associated with English and with the outside, I as a child will draw my own conclusions. I am not stupid. And I already know that what adults preach is not what they practice, and I as a child am very perceptive about where their heart really lies.

Economic development cannot pre-empt personal development in Amerindian communities. If you are not proud to be Wapishana or Macushi or Patamona, ‘progress’ will simply entice you to leave. If the education you receive in Georgetown teaches you to leave behind your ‘backward’ self and embrace a ‘real’ 21st century persona, the identity you dump will take some of your soul with it.

The Wapishana are lucky. With a sizeable population of about 7000, and several formidable, well-educated and articulate spokespersons, there is a potential for both the language and the culture to thrive. Adrian Gomes, graduate of Guyana and Leeds Universities, and headteacher of Aishalton Secondary School for eleven years, leaves his job today in order to devote himself fulltime to the revitalisation and strengthening of the Wapishana language. He intends to run literacy classes and tutor training, foster cultural preservation and creative writing, and establish new forms of Wapishana media throughout all seventeen communities of the South Rupununi. I think he might be just in time; for the last decade, many people tell me that Wapishana language and culture have been under grave threat, on the cusp of disappearing as a way of life and becoming a glamour item at special events. You know as well as I that culture is not what we wear or what we do: it is the bedrock of who and what we are. Once it dies, it is unresurrectable. And most languages die not with a bang but a whimper. This century, the world is losing an endangered language every two weeks. They simply fade dingily away, unwept, unhonoured and unsung, taking their worldview with them. Wapishana must not join the corpses.

Georgetown Newsflashes

2010-09-28T08:14:00.008-04:00

Until moving to Geneva in 1995, I had always ignored current affairs with a combination of cynicism and village idiot insouciance. (Maybe it’s also a byproduct of growing up in Belfast during the Troubles, knowing how absurdly the events we were living were being misrepresented by the paper news). Whatever the reason, ever since my brief Economist-reading phase I have felt a trickle of responsibility to keep up with current affairs if I can.

You can therefore imagine my glee when, through no fault of my own, I can’t. Aishalton has no media except the internet, and the Chicken Shed Endurance Test would not encourage anyone to spend longer online than they absolutely have to. However, now I’m in Georgetown my social conscience is developing the familiar nervous twitch. On previous visits I have mainly ignored the papers because I find them so depressing. Not exactly a mature approach. So I decided that each day for a week I would pick one headline from the front page of one of the Guyana dailies. The only criterion of choice is that it must be the first thing that catches my eye. I will, however, also keep track of murders on the same front page, so that I don’t appear to be choosing only the worst.

This is not an analysis; just a snapshot, from a very British perspective.

Sunday September 19th (KAITEUR NEWS)

“MAN CHOPS NEIGHBOUR AS PAYMENT FOR RENTED HORSE”

Garfield Skeete borrowed his neighbour’s horse for $40,000 (that’s two-thirds of a teacher’s monthly salary, or one off-road tyre for a jeep). When he had finished with it, he reneged on the agreement and instead chopped the neighbour with a machete. This gets six column inches: a small-fry story.

Charge- unlawful wounding. (What is ‘lawful wounding’?) Sentence- 6 months. Murders on front page: 2

Monday September 20th (KAITEUR NEWS)

“BABY DUMPED IN LARINE (sic)... COPS TO CHARGE MOTHER”

Kaiteur News is probably not one of Guyana’s finer papers; I do find the poor baby in the latrine all the more poignant for the inattentiveness of this headline. There is something missing metaphorically as well as orthographically. The article itself is a more thoughtful piece on child protection and community responsibility.

Murders on front page: 2

Tuesday September 21st (STABROEK NEWS)

“GUNMEN TERRORISE CORRIVERTON FAMILY DURING HOME INVASION”

Seven armed, masked robbers broke into a businessman’s shop and home, severely assaulted his wife and son and threatened several more people with “big guns”. They escaped on foot with $100,000 (around £350) and some jewellery. The police arrived a few minutes later but were unable to trace them. Seven of them, masked, on foot, vanished without a trace in minutes.

Murders on front page: 2

Wednesday September 22nd (STABROEK NEWS)

“GOV’T REJECTS INT’L CALLS FOR ‘PHANTOM SQUAD’ PROBE”

The government has rejected calls by Canada and the UK for independent investigation into reported human rights abuses, including murders by members of the armed forces. In response to the UNHRC’s call, the government’s official response was “Guyana considers these recommendations... one-sided, misinformed and prejudicial”. This story gets almost a full page.

Murders on front page: 0.

Thursday September 23nd (STABROEK NEWS)

“COPS NAB SUSPECT WITH BAG OF GUNS- SAVAGELY BITTEN IN THE PROCESS”

Police were responding to a domestic violence call when they recognised two “known characters” on one bicycle and ordered them to stop. When they did not, a policeman kicked the bicycle, and all three officers attempted to apprehend the suspects on the ground. One escaped completely, with HIS bag of guns: the other savagely bit two policemen before being brought under control. At first I thought ‘nab’ a strange word for a headline, but on reflection, full marks to the leader writer for choosing a verb smacking of luck and farce. Not an incident I would have selected to illustrate a triumph of policing.

Murders on front page: 0.

Friday September 24th (STABROEK NEWS)

“FAMILY FACES ABUSE ALLEGATIONS AFTER CANCER PATIENT’S DEATH- AUTOPSY ORDERED”

Sandra Alli died on 13th September. Her friend Sharon is accusing Sandra’s mother and brothers with whom she lived of persistent physical abuse. The first half of the article is vague and alleges nothing, until suddenly this quotation appears: “I did not observe a dark red blotch on her right arm”, says the officer investigating Sharon’s allegations, “but noticed that her left arm appeared to be broken, as well as her neck appeared to be broken”. Only at this point do we discover that the dead woman also made extensive allegations of abuse. She died in hospital three days later. The certificate shows cause of death as “terminal cancer”.

Autopsy: today. Murders on front page: 1

Saturday September 25th (STABROEK NEWS)

“WE APOLOGISE- SINGHS SAY RACIST REMARKS MADE OUT OF FRUSTRATION”

Several headlines that I swithered over this week have focussed on a wealthy Georgetown business couple who have had a series of Amerindian maids. Interestingly, the entire furore has blown up around their racist remarks, not their actions. The occasion for these remarks was having their Amerindian maid removed from their home by officials responding to reports that she was imprisoned. Earlier this week the Singhs complained about the support being given to their maid by the Ministries of Labour and Amerindian Affairs (“they should not be paying her they should be locking her up”, said Cynthia). Within the week, a previous allegation against the couple of what appears to qualify technically as human trafficking has come to light. No prosecution is in train.

Murders on front page: 0

Three days out of seven with no headline murders is, in my limited experience, a good week (although sadly there are plenty on the inner pages). There are so many factors at play here, not least the acquired tone of the press, and more generally, the scurrilous sensationalism of newspapers. I’ve had this conversation with friends on three continents, and all bemoan the fact that ugly news sells papers. I can’t find any solidly based research that draws correlations between reportage and crime rates, and I’m not sure I’d trust it if I could. But the atmosphere in which we nurture a nation is surely not immune to the noxious gases released into it by the daily press? Every nation’s papers declare “This is our normality- this is real- this is what matters in the world”. Even if they’re wrong, are we sure that we are immune?

My Penarth friend used to sigh despairingly about the classic big banner headline in the Penarth Times- “GOAT EATS WASHING”. But reading the papers here for a week has left me feeling as though I am precariously balanced on a tectonic fault line. It is not the individual crimes so much as the missing framework of response. It is only in comparison that I can understand how ordered life in Britain is for most people (not all): our relatively high trust in the police, the outcry if social services fail a vulnerable individual, the accountability of politicians and public figures, and the unconscious substructure of regulations, safety nets, structure, order. It makes Britain look like a gleaming super-health-and-safety-conscious fairground in comparison to Guyana’s Jurassic Park. Please don’t think I am saying that Britain has a low crime rate (which it doesn’t), and that our social services or police always succeed (which they don’t). But it is a matter of degree, and nothing makes me as conscious of it as reading Georgetown’s newspapers.

What does this do to Georgetown society’s morale? What does it do to the capital city’s self-identity? Is it better to avoid the newspapers and risk missing the pulse of your city? Or reading from the bitter beginning to the bitter end and fighting the tug between despair, anger, blame and even shame as you try and get on with your busy life? Maybe your skin thickens as a sort of social evolution. I have noticed here in Georgetown a recurring abnegation of responsibility that strikes me forcibly in all kinds of conversations and I wonder if this news-vomit, this violent regurgitation, contributes to it. A kind of ‘disassociate or migrate’? I used to get frustrated with the recurring phrase “this is Guyana”- it sounds so defeatist. But maybe it’s a survival tactic, a refusal to inhale. The ability of Georgetowners to remain positive, creative and resilient in the face of all this strikes me as extremely impressive.

Godfrey

2010-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

My first encounter with Godfrey was the morning after reaching Aishalton. We arrived in the middle of huge centenary celebrations commemorating Father Cary Elwes’ arrival in the Deep South Rupununi. There was Culture Show mania in the air, and where Culture Shows are, there Godfrey will be also. He had written several songs (music, and lyrics in both English and Wapishana) celebrating the occasion. These songs follow the zeitgeist of Rupununi roads- they flow with the contours, get caught up abruptly crossing a creek here and there, and meander off-road whenever it feels easier or more pleasant to do so. He has a strikingly good ear for a melody, and isn’t in the least confined by musical conventions such as a fixed time signature. He isn’t even restricted to singing a song with exactly the same tune or rhythm each time through. Which works perfectly well for a soloist, but is a little challenging for the choir, whose rehearsals take on a kind of chewing-gum bewilderment. He plays the guitar well, and the keyboard uniquely. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard ‘Amazing Grace’ played in 3/4 on the ‘auto tunes’ setting, and simultaneously in 4/4 in generous fistfuls of chords over the top? It’s a memorable experience.

Godfrey was also my first Wapishana teacher. He follows the old and trusty pedagogical method of drilling (endless repetition), but offset with startlingly complex digressions. We might learn words for fruit, for example, giving us ‘suzu’ (banana), and then Godfrey would teach us ‘suzu suzu’, literally ‘banana banana’ but actually the fork-tailed flycatcher... although Godfrey does not know the English for fork-tailed flycatcher, so a considerable portion of the lesson is spent in a describe-the-bird guessing game. We then get caught up in an exhaustive list of small brown Rupununi birds for which we now know the Wapishana but not the English. Or what the bird looks like precisely. Or what it sounds like. Let’s hope they’re mostly onomatopoeic. We never did get further than three fruits.

Both of these incarnations could be profoundly annoying, but in practice they are rather loveable because they so clearly spring from enthusiasm and the desire to create. Godfrey does everything with all of himself. It’s physically perceptible. He holds his head at a permanently engaged angle- tilted slightly to the side and back, like a walking sunbather or an expectant baby bird. Everything is wide open; his eyes, his smile, the gap between his teeth. He cannot sing or play quietly. There is a sparking and a glitter about him. If he were a Viking, he’d be called ‘Godfrey the Vigorous’.

Godfrey is not reliable in the normal usage of the word. This affects his character as a teacher; after sitting sweltering in the community centre for a few hazy afternoons, the Wapishana classes drifted off to nothing. He has recently left his stable job at the hospital, after decades, only three years before he would have qualified for a full pension. Most people scoff at that, accuse him of having no foresight, of being injudicious. I suspect that the opposite is true: I think he has taken a hard look at the future and made some big changes. He has been ill lately, and perhaps that has sharpened his focus on how he wants to spend the years he has left, and it’s not at work. I have always rated reliability highly, probably because I myself am reliable to a fault, but with Godfrey, what is reliable is his verve, his creative flux. Sure, he’d be a terrible manager, but so what? If we lose the odd beat per bar and a few words for fruit in the sparky eclectic hotpotch of a Godfrey creation, it’s probably worth the sacrifice.

Liar liar pants on fire

2010-09-22T11:56:00.002-04:00

The other day, a lawyer called me a liar. Of course it was a joke (in self-defence at my casting nasturtiums at the integrity of the law profession), but it echoed an ongoing writing struggle that I don’t think I’ve talked about.

In choosing four Amerindians to write about for each week of Amerindian heritage month, I have begun and aborted many descriptions. First, take out the people who might read it and mind. Next, take out the venal, the drunk and the corrupt. Last, take out anyone about whom I have negative impressions on a slim acquaintance because, in my experience, it’s extremely easy to be unfair about people you don’t admire.

I slightly fear the resultant Dharma bunny accumulation. I do not want to glorify Amerindians in the way that so many people idolise Tibetans. Having lived in a 97% Tibetan town for a year, I will vouch for it that people are just people, and I believe that every city, town and village on the planet has its fair spectrum of inspiration, aspiration, ugliness and violence.

However, this is only the first, and easier, portion of the conundrum. The second is political. Guyana is, yes, a small society. On the coast everyone knows everyone, and even legitimate or verifiable criticism tends to go down like a chilli sandwich at an acid reflux convention. Double it if you’re a foreigner. Innocent of this at first, in the interior, on the one instance where I spoke unguardedly it blew up in my face like a blunderbuss stuffed with broken glass and rusty nails. I’m still picking the bits out. This limits not just freedom of speech but trust. And I can’t tell you about it.

So how can I sharpen the focus on what it is I’m not telling? I’ll give an illustration from that year on the Tibetan Plateau. The college president there is a grease of a man, who keeps his eyes half-shut to prevent their barrenness leaking into his permanent half-smile. A heavy gambler with a beautiful, silent, forbearing, unmanned wife. A heavy drinker whose favourite food is the gristly tendons from a goat’s back hock. A man who allegedly stole the whole of the college’s caterpillar fungus crop- he certainly rebuilt his house on the proceeds of something. One does not have altercations with this man; seabirds don’t have altercations with oilspills. The nearest I came was when I found a notice on a lamp-post downtown proclaiming that I would be staying for the whole of the summer vacation to give lessons in Business English to anyone who could pay (him, naturally, not me). As a VSO I was forbidden (and would also have refused) to give lessons for profit, even had I been lunatic enough to sacrifice my six weeks of hard-earned oxygen-rich air down in Xi’an. So VSO, bless them, had the altercation on my behalf. He was a significant player in that experience. My sister Ruth once accidentally made a cake with no flour in it: that’s pretty much what you’d get if I described that year without him in it.

But to a certain extent that is what I have been doing in Guyana. I have four people-descriptions tucked away that I would dearly love to load but know I never will. Cathartic to write, but Guyana will not forgive me if I make them public. Of course the contrast is partly due to the fact that almost no-one from the Tibet year can read English. But it is more than that. I think Guyana is extremely touchy about its dirty linen. Coming from a Britain where we practically compete with slagging each other off as a nation, it’s easy to fall foul of a sensitivity that is uncustomary to us. And I suspect there’s a kind of inverted disingenuous snobbery in the way a powerful country denigrates itself. I think I’ve learnt my lesson (a year ago I would have told you the Tibetan college president’s name!).

So self-censorship has run through the whole of 2009 and 2010. At one point, I actually started keeping a record of ‘the stories I didn’t write’. I look back through it now, and wonder with some amazement whether I have given any kind of genuinely evocative representation at all when I see the giant characters, the extraordinary frustrations, the pertinent and unnecessary obstructions that I have never described. It’s like expecting you to understand the dynamics of the Cinderella story with no ugly sisters and a curfew.

What is left? The truth, two-fifths of the truth and nothing but the truth.

Immaculata

2010-09-20T01:43:00.001-04:00

Immaculata is 15 years old, middle daughter in a family of five children. You’ll have guessed from the name that the family is Catholic. She does not speak. This is not the result of any throat injury or vocal disability- she laughs when she is happy and giggles when she is unsure. I think it is her choice never to make loud noises, only soft ones. The restraints seem to be mental rather than physical, but no-one knows the cause.

This is a warm and close-knit family. They have developed a rudimentary sign language, but it is a blunt instrument. No-one communicates with her in any detail. This means that whilst she can read and write, it is impossible to tell how well. Whilst she understands some Wapishana, of course she does not speak it. (I asked the thoughtless question “Can you speak Wapishana?” and suddenly realised it should have been rather “Do you understand Wapishana?”, or “If you spoke, would you speak it?”). In the time that I have known her she has never volunteered communication to anyone, although she seems willingly responsive, either by signs or occasionally by writing. Does communication really exist if one never frames the question, never chooses the topic? Which leads me to wonder whether Immaculata is unreachable by choice, and if so, why.

Throughout primary school, her mother tells me, the other children were not gentle. So she decided to take her out of schooling at 12. Since then, she has lived at home and helped with the housework and the tending of children. The CRS course is her first engagement with a world wider than family and church since finishing primary school. My sister is a teaching assistant in the UK, and expectations are heavy upon them to observe and understand each child’s learning style and find ways to support them. Here there are no learning disability specialists, so no-one has ever looked into Immaculata’s situation. I do not even know if it is a “condition”. She is clearly intelligent; she keeps up easily with her fellow trainees, all of whom are secondary graduates. Her attention span is very good. She seems happy and quite untroubled. If it is a refusal to speak, refusal itself seems out of character. She has a subtle but distinct aura of openness, interest, of something like hope.

At first she is very wary of me. This manifests itself both audibly (her giggles increase and rise in pitch) and physically (if I come closer she moves behind someone). Before entering the training course she has never touched a computer. She learns at a similar pace to everyone else, faster than some because her concentration is better. Her weaving and shooting also improve more quickly than average. I think as a teacher I have an intuition for whether a person is extending themselves: I get the impression that she is not. By the end she is much more comfortable in the group environment, giggles rarely, and is completely relaxed around me.

I hope that her parents are very proud to see her running a powerpoint presentation at the closing ceremony, and to see her receive her completion certificate. She takes it very much in her stride. I wonder if another person will ever really know her. I wonder whether that is an impoverishment, or whether her solitude is a gift from herself to herself. Her whole being is a smiling secret.

Eustace

2010-09-13T10:08:00.000-04:00

Eustace is not a noticeable man. That is the first impression. I must have seen him around before last July, but the first time I really noticed him was when he slaughtered James in a bike race. It was the heats for the Deep South Games 2009. James is six foot two, was riding a titanium mountain bike, and had done the extraordinary Raid Pyrenean (a time-limited monster ride that overlaps with the Tour de France route over 21 mountain passes, not least the two most famous killers, Tourmalet and Aubisque) the previous summer. Eustace is five foot one and was riding a heavy Brazilian road bike in welly boots. He rode quietly across the finish line without a glimmer of triumph, leaving the competition considerably in his wake and whomphing like manatees.

If Leonie’s most striking feature is that smile that wells out of the centre of herself, Eustace’s most striking attribute is his spectroscopic capability. The kind of skills testosterone-ridden young men gain on expensive SAS-run survival courses are the quotidian ground of his life. At Deep South Games time we can all marvel at how fast he climbs the bare trunk of an ité tree, how quickly he lights fire from cotton, how beautifully he weaves a basket at speed, how perfectly forms an arrow from discarded scraps. For the rest of the year these are his daily occupations, not competition skills. The long bike rides in the breathless furnace of a savannah dry season afternoon, shooting fish with an arrow made on the creek bank, finding unexpected pawpaws and quickly weaving a basket to carry them home in, shinning up a coconut palm using a ripped palm leave twisted into a figure of eight round his feet, with a sharpened machete shoved in the back of his trousers. Confident that he will not fall.

It is not that Eustace is unusually quiet, or bad with words. But I have rarely met someone to whom words are so dispensable. He uses them competently, like a foreigner who is pretty good with chopsticks, but the effect is of a skill learnt, not an integral part of his personality. If he thought about it, I guess he would judge words as a pretty poor medium of communication. But I don’t think he’d find that train of thought interesting. Eustace teaches weaving and archery on our young adult training course. Some of the students complain that he does not explain. I do not want to interfere with his equilibrium by articulating the scope of what he is teaching. Besides, it cannot be pinned down like that. He is bringing himself into the course; other people can bring explanations. He is also one of the community development plan team, where he listens and judges and intervenes only at need. He is on the village council, where I suspect he is equally laconic and equally valued.

There is a quietness in his face that would be easy to mistake for gentleness. I don’t think it is. I think it is peace. I think that he has chosen a life in which there are no ambitions, and few nagging worries, tugs of loyalty or twisted feelings, and is enjoying the fruit of that choice without vanity and without drama. Eustace is one of the most impressive men I have ever met, but I suspect he would be astonished and baffled to hear that, and I’m not sure it would be welcome. He neither knows nor cares whether he impresses. That is the taproot of his dignity.

Social gyaffs and social gaffes

2010-09-11T09:25:00.006-04:00

I have had the great good fortune to make friends by accident. Two Georgetown photographers who found James’ blog tripped across mine too, and gradually through comments and chats we became friends- rather like the imaginary friends children have. Mind you, I was never 100% sure that they weren’t actually Greek girls or Canadian schoolboys or Kyrgyz herdsmen taking the piss out of me.

Strange, then, to arrange to meet up in Georgetown. I was curiously nervous, because I am very open in my blog and I had never realised until it came to the crunch how much that is a product of being so far from everyone who reads it. I suddenly observe, planning to meet these two, that I have rather laid my life out like cold cuts on a platter, and it’s very out of character for me to profligate my privacy so.

I needn’t have worried. Their balance of warmth and decorum is unimpeachable - Mr Roast Pork almost steps backwards as he shakes my hand. In Guyana, they tell me, if a married man is seen out with another woman, murmuring indubitably follows. But surely the three of us out together acts as a kind of mutual chaperone? No, it’s just as bad, because I’m out without my husband. The fact that he is 500 miles away does not excuse me. This makes me rather uncomfortable- I’m not used to being forward, rash and risqué simply by stepping out of the door with Other Men, especially not in my usual Guyana nunny bag-lady clothes. It’s funny but inhibiting. I find myself taking shallower breaths. My personality is testing the confines of a corset.

I knew already that Georgetown is a small and therefore self-absorbed (gossipy) society. But it had not crossed my mind that adults in Guyana might be less free than they are in the UK. It’s not a visible constraint- you wouldn’t know it unless someone tells you. I am fascinated and puzzled. I mean, one man, one woman, dodgy nightclub and lots of booze, yes- that might raise a few eyebrows. But three people aged 29 or over having a beer in daylight in full public view? My sister used to laugh at my gaucheness when I came to London and stiffened over kissing people on the cheek, but I feel positively touchy-feely in this context. We went out to gyaff- I spent the first half-hour fretting that I would gaffe.

I soon forgot my self-consciousness, though. I never thought when I was gradually, carefully building trust and friendships with Amerindians in the interior, that it would simultaneously deepen friendships with people reading my venting, ranting and pontificating too. Long-term friends far away email to say they feel they know me much better now. And I would never have met Mr Cult Leader and Mr Roast Pork if it weren’t for my blog: that seems very clear. Here, it isn’t really on for a husband and wife to have separate friends. Mr Cult Leader was saying that he and his wife do, but it was stated as a matter of pride, of distinctiveness, not the matter of course it would be among my UK friends. I think we would see only having the same friends as a danger for a couple, not a positive. Here it’s ever so slightly radical.

Which gets me to wondering if this causes society to polarise- between respectable people who carry an Edith Wharton constraint with them, and lairy men who shout the most explicit ‘compliments’/ insults / suggestions at me on the street. Does the one feed the other? I asked if that means that men have mainly male friends, then, and women mainly female. On the whole that seems to be true. And there is an expectation that your parents will know your friends. It suddenly strikes me how very vulgar expats must appear here- what coarse social manners they must display, and how sleazy they must seem. But I, insanely decorous all my life, would hate to have sex restricting my choice of friends. I’m not very good at the girly girl stuff. And doing everything as a couple would be stifling. I think James and I feel enriched by our souls’ very different feeding troughs.

We talk about the brain drain, possibly the only strong kinship between Guyana and Northern Ireland where I grew up. Both men state very positively that the drivers of migration are women. Considering the discussion we had had already about Georgetown’s goldfish bowl of gossip, and noting that it is the husbands and not the wives I am meeting, I can imagine myself finding this self-absorbed society restrictive: perhaps that is a motivating factor for Guyanese women too. Well-paid jobs are not plentiful, and I don’t know what the statistics say on equity in the workplace but with Guyana’s birth rates and motherhood demographics (high expectation to start popping early, girls), it can’t be a feminist’s paradise. Roast Pork and Cult Leader say that they would not leave Guyana, although only time will tell whether their wives take the same view...

Those are the things they say. Then, of course, there are all the things they don’t say. They inhabit a complex multicultural cocktail of an atmosphere profoundly unlike the rarefied monocultural clarity of the Aishalton oxygen I am used to. There are no references to gaffes in my blog. They don’t fish for compliments on their generosity in sticking their necks out to entertain me. They don’t elucidate how extraordinarily ignorant I am of the country I’ve spent the past two years in, although they do introduce me to Dave Martins’ weekly column so that I can discover this for myself. I have since learnt that the correct expression for my cultural numptyhood is that “I don’t know all the fine fine”- I don’t understand the myriad nuances of Georgetown culture, and by extension (since this is the bulk of the population) Guyana, at all. And there is the whole different ambience in which we talk. I hear a definitiveness, a crispness, a kind of vaunting and hyperbole and fizz in their speech that is partly capital city and partly distinctively Guyanese. It’s a friendly and enjoyably baffling evening. The fact that I am tantalised rather than humiliated by my ignorance is a testament to something- Guyanese hospitality? Online friendships? Or just that they are goodhearted guys?

There’s a distancing pleasure in watching old friends gyaff. They comment crisply and with aspersion on each other’s increasingly elaborate retelling of old anecdotes. They scoff and mock and laugh like an old married couple, with some deliberate irony and some less deliberate. I think the fact that marriages are different in this culture means that the line of friendship falls differently too. There’s an almost deliberate play on yin-yang that I haven’t experienced since my early twenties. Gyaffing isn’t just a different word for chatting; it is actually a perceptibly different activity. Great fun, but like any new language, it would take time to absorb into oneself. I’ve been wondering lately what this blog is for. Maybe it’s the nearest I’ve ever got to a proper gyaff.

Climate Control

2010-09-07T17:00:00.002-04:00

Through the bars on my window I stare for hours at a mango tree. My Aishalton eyes know this to be a mangy city tree, but it is visually pleasing notwithstanding. Its bark is brownish grey, coated with a flakey undercoat of moss the colour of a furry, diseased tongue. By craning my neck at a creaky breaky angle, I can see a fat, split knot identical to one of the gargoyles on New College’s south wall. It hefts its ugly chin at me, squab and swarthy. Its expression is part grumpy comedian, part dungeonmaster.

As counterpoint to my solid ailments I’m also getting variations on the vapours. It makes me feel rather Victorian. For example, I’m allergic to insect bites, so I over-use the air conditioning. Thus my toes are frozen, and my brain bemused by the indoor British climate, complete with gargoyles, absurdly vying with a gleaming mango tree framed against a deep tropical sky four feet away.

Every half hour or so, a new creature will sample the tree’s hospitality. First, a slim green lizard slides silkily upward, pulsing. He too cranes his neck, flaunting a flexibility unavailable to the larger species. Second, a hummingbird thrills its few assessing seconds before rejecting the mango tree’s paucity and passing by. The next visitor is a gecko, darting distinctively, bulgy-eyed, ungraceful but charming. And finally a kiskadee stomps over, raucous and extrovert, chewing its beaky cud.

It feels so like an airlock that I struggle to believe in the ever-present heat awaiting me out there. I struggle to believe that I am free to leave. I feel like a junior Chinese philosopher who is in trouble with his Master for squandering this mango tree’s existential potential by wasting time casting aspersions at ugly gargoyles and whinging about his unrepentantly crumbling physiology. I wish I could draw.

Leonie

2010-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

I have never seen a smile suffuse a person so radiantly as Leonie’s does.

The first time I met Leonie, I had been in Aishalton for about three weeks. We were still living in the Village Guesthouse (Mosquito Optimum Breeding Biohazard Zone of the Western Hemisphere). I was two weeks into fulltime secondary school teaching, jumping straight in with no preparation a month into term. It was hot- PLEEENTY plenty hot. I was sweaty, stressy and smelly. I had not smiled, myself, for some days.

I was invited along to observe the women’s sewing and leadership training. Twelve women were learning to use Singer 974s, Leonie among them. Back then I struggled to distinguish faces. Every woman is a similar height, all have dark brown eyes, all have long black hair, almost always worn up. Most are between 4ft 7 and 5ft, and most women over thirty are comfortably girthed with huggable rolls. Distinguishing features are subtle, compounded by the fact that everyone over sixty relinquishes their name to the ubiquitous, affectionate ‘ko’oko’- ‘Granny’.

They were learning about empowerment and the Johari window that day (that’s a self-analysis tool invented, I’m sorry to say, by two Americans called Joe and Harry who thought “Johari” sounded classier). Intending only to observe, I was startled to be called up to the blackboard and asked (told!) to “present something”. Now that I know how inured Aishaltoners are to outsiders coming in to talk, and never to listen, I can understand the reasoning behind this. At the time I was caught unprepared. So I said something about different kinds of power, gave some examples, and then set them a task to do in pairs. I can look back and freeze-frame their faces in my memory’s eye: Alison looking terrified, Gloria shellshocked, Anastasia shutter-faced. How lovely it would be to replay that scene now, friends and neighbours! How much laughter and banter there would be. I think some confidences shared, too.

Anyway, nervous and tense, I looked round and round again, seeking a chink in the armadillo armour separating me from these women. I can be an intimidating person, I know it to my cost, and worst of all when I’m nervous. I looked for a way in, for a break in the clouds, for a pair I could call upon to speak first. And I caught Leonie’s eye, and she smiled all over her round, pretty, well-used face, and her eyes gleamed like water catching sunlight. She quenched everything else in the room. I completely forgot to be nervous, she and her partner kicked us off and the rest was plain sailing.

Leonie bakes for a living. She runs a little mud booth called ‘Fingers’, where on Sundays (and Wednesdays and Fridays if you’re lucky) you can buy fresh bread, salara (kind of bread-swiss-roll stuffed with sweet dyed coconut), burgers, buns, and sometimes meat-and-farine or a portion of curry. On Fingers days she is usually up by 3am cooking in her homemade wood-fired oven. She is also a seamstress and makes uniforms and other clothes, mainly for family. She farms on her small plot, a few hour’s walk away, several days each week. Her youngest child is now 11, and I suspect she has been bringing up children for about twenty-five years.

I try to introduce a little grit to my description- I search for a moment in our eighteen-month acquaintance which shows Leonie in a less sunny light. She talks little. Fingers is not always open when she says it will be. That is all the grit I can find. Fairy godmothers are all very well: Leonie is the real thing. SHE makes the dress, then prepares the wonderful meal, creates the carriage and dazzles the handsome prince into being in the right place at the right time. She smiles like the sun coming up, and lo and behold, it does.

It is Leonie’s birthday next week. I know this because, last year, we arrived at the shop unbeknownst and were given a free meal because it was her birthday. I expostulated ineffectually with my mouth full- and later asked did she ALWAYS make her own birthday cake? She smiled her amazing smile and said yes, of course, as if the question was a joke. I asked further, has she NEVER been given a birthday cake? No. One of my saddest specific regrets about leaving early was being foiled in my plan of arriving at Leonie’s on 18th September with a home-baked cake and a balloon. But the cake, of course, would be very temporary. The smile is perennial.

Amerindian Heritage Month

2010-09-01T08:06:00.004-04:00

How can you generalise about humans? I am often staggered by how unfeasibly different even family members can be. Generalisations about races went out with the Ark (as did all races- except the Chosen People, and a few lucky bestial couples, along with of course a lot of very smug fish who have harked back to it ever since as the Great Piscine Renaissance).

Nevertheless, there are some things I’ve noticed about ‘Amerindians’ as a group which fascinate me. To celebrate Amerindian Heritage Month, which starts today, I should like to start by mentioning some of those observations. Then each Monday I will attempt a ‘portrait’ of one of the Wapishana people I have got to know in Aishalton.

When I arrived in Guyana, I was told that Amerindians are shy. I believe this impression comes from two things: in my experience, Amerindians talk less than Guyana’s other populations, and I have found them to be reticent with strangers. The first Amerindian I met completed most of a seven-hour jeep journey without speaking to me, and would not make eye contact, let alone return my smiles. I thought I must have either gaffed horribly, or repulsed her with some malodorous foulness or other. The following day she came up beaming and threw her arms round me. I don’t believe it’s shyness so much as an instinctive, uncalculated caution. The vast majority of the Amerindians I have met have been both very friendly and very private. It’s a warm yet respectful combination.

Sorry, I know it’s a cliché, but they are happier. This might be due to the fact (from my experience, I believe it to be fact) that people in developing countries, especially in rural areas (I suspect it isn’t true in the capitals), are brilliant at getting enjoyment out of a life whenever nothing is going actively wrong, where many of us developed country people seem to be expecting something to be going actively right in order to be happy. Maybe that is part of the reason why they are also widely perceived as passive: maybe their passivity is connected to their skill at contentment, and to sacrifice the one is to threaten the other.

We are formed by our language: of course the Wapishana language has shaped the consciousness of people in Aishalton. My teacher told me that the word “wapichan” means “slow and methodical” and the word “macushi” means quick, so a Wapishana will do a slow, laborious, thorough job where a Macushi will finish faster but less finely. All those gorgeous details, such as the word for face meaning literally ‘the savannah of the eyes’ and solar eclipse being rendered as ‘sun death’, create a mind-map uniquely contoured to suit life here. Having a small vocabulary also affects the way you view the world: grouping things differently, relying on words less. It makes it difficult to teach here, and to write up group documents with any kind of consensus.

Wapishanas have an immediacy of the mind which is lost to those of us who have learned detachment. They are either out or in. When they read a novel or a poem, the writer IS the protagonist. My trainees could not detach themselves to do a task purely as an example: at the Training Centre we did an exercise to teach spreadsheets, where the trainees called out scores for themselves in various personality traits. The spreadsheet training was swept away as people got thoroughly enthralled by the content. I’ve seen it in all sorts of fields, that incapacity to think in the abstract. In a way, I think it’s really good that we Westerners are able to look at ourselves as consumers, as audience, as targets for an advertising campaign- can see how the writer is trying to manipulate us at the same time as we read his message. But it sucks away our spontaneity. Our capacity for enthralment is stunted.

How much of this is cultural and how much socialisation cannot be disentangled. These are my impressions; I wouldn’t claim them to be diagnoses.

Amerindians are one of the great romanticised ethnic groups in the modern world, along with Tibetans and a few others. In a way, they are blessed by their isolation, and the fact that an outsider cannot “become” an Amerindian. The Dalai Lama does not encourage converts to Tibetan Buddhism. He points out that we are born into a culture and religion or world view and it’s probably as well to stay there. But he gets stuck with a lot of post-modernist Tibetan Buddhists (memorably termed “dharma bunnies” by a rather scurrilous friend of mine in Xining) who shop for the peace and harmony and try to ignore the sky burial, the occasional fat-cat Rimpoches and the status quo feudalism that come with it.

Perhaps because outsiders cannot buy in, perhaps simply from isolation, most Amerindians (unless they have lived on the coast) are unused to presenting themselves; either to impress, or to be understood. Ask a villager “what do you do?” and you will probably get a blank stare in return. The 1001 questions that determine job, status, abilities, social level and background are utterly meaningless here. I and most of my British friends probably don’t consider ourselves vain, but we have been packaging ourselves in increasingly sophisticated wrappings since our eleven plus or first SATs, or whenever the world first held up its yardstick and raised a sardonic eyebrow. Amerindians in the interior don’t do this. The outcome is that the careless or biassed bystander will confirm their prejudice that Amerindians are unimpressive, and will entirely misunderstand them. And I’m not entirely sure that anyone cares. I sincerely hope that they continue not to give a tinker’s cuss. What happens when Amerindians move to the coast, though?- that’s when the misunderstandings become dangerous.

The Cleaner Vacuum

2010-08-26T20:17:00.001-04:00

Half-woken in the small hours by torrential rain, I fumble with the mosquito net to get up and cover the laptop with waterproofing. Entangled moth-like and feebly struggling, it comes to me that I am in Georgetown, not Aishalton, and I fall back exhausted. I’m insulated now, and have no need of Ortleib bags. Cause for thankfulness, a sensible person would think.

It’s strange, shifting environments so utterly, so suddenly. I was told by a proper hippy when I left China that the soul travels at walking pace. I think it might be true. I’m just about reaching Lethem tonight. My id should reach Georgetown around 19th September at 1pm. I’ll let you know her impressions of the journey when she catches up with me.

Here I am, cleaner but in a vacuum. Here, I am cleaner but in a vacuum. Similar statements, telling different truths. I read Annie Dillard and I am not sure she helps. Illuminates, maybe. “All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind- the culture- has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel.” Words seem too blunt; words seem to blunt the raw gusting force of abandoning a home without ceremony. The richness of Aishalton laps at the edge of my mind in multifarious motley. It claims me in my dreams, and wakes me up bereft. Don’t get me wrong. I stank. I was shattered. I cursed the blaring Brazilian music pounding deep like mining drills at 2am. I worried constantly, especially since the scorpion in the bed, the snake in the shower, the monkey spider sent from heaven above plummeting towards the bedroom, and the man who got the back of his skull ripped off by a jaguar.

And yet. It is so REAL. So vibrant in its stinks. So viciously close to the unpeopled world. I want to say it is real like a child’s drawing is real, which is the nearest I can get to its strange dimensionality with my sand bucket and shovel.

Words fail me. I fail them. What remains is the attempt to finish the sandcastle I’ve been building, knowing it’s a feeble likeness, and knowing it will wash away, but rushing nevertheless to give you a representation of Aishalton’s fascinating, isolated, unique immediacy before the tide comes in.

'The Contest', by Thomas Williams

2010-08-24T16:20:00.004-04:00

Thomas is Aishalton's best carpenter, and a multi-talented man.

At dusk he came,
Young, shiny black and fleshy strong.
He lingered awhile,
Staring arrogantly,
Balefully eyeing the old front gate, there.
But an oath
With a stone
Trailed him down the rocky rutted way.

A monstrous shadow blocked the gateway;
Flashing beams pinpointed him,
And raining missiles did not miss him.
Then the challenging bellow
And weighty footfalls
Like the slowly receding tide
Gradually faded down the misty roadway.

At grey dawn,
Ah, my dears!
The slip bars no guard now,
But forlornly laid, like slain soldiers
In the gateway.
Surely, in the most sleepy hours
The stubborn young bull had returned.
Wreaked havoc with the gate,
Cropped the lusty grass,
Seasoned with thyme.
Then before first light
Made his getaway.

Thereafter, in an afternoon
Or many afternoons,
Leisurely, he idled past.
Maliciously, in long sideways glances,
Looked at the hated reinforced front gate,
Biding his time,
Calculating his next move,
For sure, that’s for sure.

The young one,
Hidden under the giant mango tree,
Immobile on the ancient rock,
Whispered desperately, “At the gate- the bull!”
Through the door I flew,
Hatred brimming,
“Death”, I’m thinking
Shouting crazily “Stone him, stone
The wretched bull”.
But already, shoving like the express train,
He was distant on the plain.

Then again,
In the small dark hours,
When sleep was most deep and dreams pleasant,
While roosters everywhere
Flapped and crooned wakefully,
The blunted index poked the ribs,
Then hoarsely she muttered “Cows”.
Lazy movement,
Serious munching, just outside.
Surely, most impolite.

The final assault had come.
The rogue had returned.
I looked at the barb.
I looked at the “x”.
Neither was disturbed.
Where had he made his gate?

Dreamlike,
The young ruffian
Sneaked around the wall.
Instantly spotting me, he charged.
Lightning he was,
Pushing, twisting,
Snorting angrily,
He forged through- then bolted.
And the bars?
Oh, how they cracked, ear-splitting cracked,
And loudly broke,
Real fast. In an instant/ in a flash.
All twisted in the dust
On a fresh dark moon.

The bull?
He had come and was gone.

A Diary of Departure

2010-08-22T18:21:00.005-04:00

Like a whirlwind, it’s over. My life in Aishalton has ended. In less than a week I have travelled a road that reminds me of grief. My departure felt like a rupture. As I write I recognise wryly how melodramatic that sounds. I think illness makes all misfortune strike us disproportionately.

The short version is this: in May, I came down with a nasty infection of the back which I had once as a child. Heavy antibiotics didn’t cure it, and it flared up again, so I came to Georgetown in June for treatment. A third time it attacked, at the beginning of August, and by the time I finished yet another hefty wallop of two simultaneous antibiotics, I barely had stamina left to stagger up to the training centre. So when the fourth flare-up began, we talked it through and accepted that I am no longer strong enough to recover in Aishalton. I am so weak now that every Tom, Dick and Harry ailment is felling me. My back needs cured, but I’m also risking malaria, dengue and who knows what by trying to soldier on. Workaholic- yes: hero or masochist- no!

The longer version? Here is a little diary of my last week. I wish I could have said goodbye to Aishalton, my home, in a less peremptory fashion.

Monday
Went up to the centre at 7:30, first time since last Mon. Got through an hour, then started blacking out. Had to hang on to the blackboard. Then had to sit down, which kills my back. Bailed out at 9:30. Fever. Got home and lay down. Don’t think I can do this any more. I am going to have to bite the bitter bullet, and find a way to leave.

Wednesday
B and Father Varghese online chatting about possible charter. He is stuck in town and needs to get back- I am stuck here and need to get out. Kills lots of birds with one stone. Half of me says “Yes!” and the other half cries “No!”. How can I go, right in the middle of everything? But how can I stay, harried by pain and worry just like that bullock I can see in the mango grove, harried by dogs while it waits for the slaughter?

Thursday
Charter booked. Saturday lunchtime. Can’t get my head round it. Can’t believe I’m going just like that. Abrupt. But keep feeling flashes of relief, too. It’s out of my hands now. No more agonising. Alea Jacta Est. I’m so grateful for the flight. Jesuit generosity has never been so timely.

Friday
My last night. Videoed a stunning sunset, said goodbye to my literature students and trainees who were playing volleyball, preparing for the Deep South Games next week. Went out to the latrine late. There was just one firefly. Just one generator running. Just one ‘Moo’, and not a single star.

Saturday
Goodbyes. People brought little gifts of their belongings- a locally made woven picture that looks just like my house, two beautiful seed necklaces that must have been hard to part with. Some women had found time to make me something: Psalm 23 painted on a cotton cloth, my favourite snacks for the journey. I hadn’t expected tears from anyone except myself. There were quite a lot of tears. The only goodbye I didn’t regret was to my pit latrine. That I will not miss, never. At the airstrip some people were waiting, and there were speeches and gifts and a Wapishana song written hurriedly for me.

Flying out. Big, wrenching sobs, the kind a child cries. As their faces disappeared I was almost wailing: this is not something I do. Too sudden. That’s what I keep thinking. So much of our psyche there (yes, I did type ‘here’ unconsciously and have to change it) is formed by the difficulty of travel. It’s a part of our identity, that two-stage long-haul. I feel like MacDuff, from the womb untimely ripp’d. The flight was loud but calming. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me when I saw the sun sailing strangely through the trees, passing like a silver disk below the canopy. For hundreds of miles the rainforest is flooded, and the sun was perfectly cast in the invisible water, travelling along with the plane like an impossible dazzling shadow.

So here I am, sucked out of Aishalton by some unseen hoover and deposited in Georgetown, amidst all the comforts except the home-made, and all the luxuries except the smiles of home friends. I close my eyes and I see Aishalton: some part of my mind still thinks I live there. I wonder for how many days it will remain as ‘home’ in my mind? I won’t know until suddenly it isn’t any more. ‘A few more moons...’, as Chief Seathl reminds me. Flux is the order of things.

Now it’s Sunday, and I lie on a comfortable bed in the Jesuit House in Georgetown, waiting to see a doctor tomorrow. Allowing for medical exigencies, our plan at the moment is to stay in Guyana until November. James has a list of photographs untaken that haunts his dreams and will pack out his days. I have a mountain of tasks to complete, conversations to finish by Skype, bids to see through and reports to help people draft in Amerindian cyberspace. The reflecting can come later. Before any of that, it’s rest and medication, rest and medication, the soothing hum of air-conditioning and the kindnesses of Bob and Malcolm.

Insulation

2010-08-18T16:38:00.001-04:00

Insulation from the natural world is unnatural.

I look round my house for a wall I can’t see daylight through. Not that it matters, since a few feet higher up there is a gap the whole way round large enough for any bird, snake or modest-sized rodent to sashay through, wherever the roof meets the walls. And anything can climb in through the roof thatch too. Our friend Edgar told us a story of dashing out of a friend’s home for a leak at midnight and being bolted out of an ité-roofed house. He was dressed only in a sheet. A little the worse for liquor, he decided to climb through the ité. Halfway through the solemn drunken care of his manoeuvrings he fell abruptly and got perfectly jammed, like Pooh plugged into Rabbit’s front door. I cannot but smile at the thought of his stout dignified personage, neatly clipped moustache, smartly tucked toga, bulging from the absorbent twiglet thatch like a candle from a cake.

Artificial insulation makes sense for warmth. We love hermetic sealing, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad. But perfect insulation leaves us unable to breathe. We become like Jill Masterson in Goldfinger, one of the shortest tenures of any Bond girl. She is painted all over in gold, which suffocates her because her skin can’t breathe. Is it a coincidence that here in the land of unsealing ceilings, I’ve never seen a child with eczema?

I tape up all my food boxes to keep the cockroaches out, but that’s unnatural too. Cockroaches remind us that we are part of the food chain. Funny, how outraged people are to be eaten by lions when in the end they will be thoroughly munched by the much humbler earthworm. I guess it’s the patience of the worm that reconciles us. Tibetan sky burial is the final refusal of insulation; welcoming the humility of death by being chopped into pieces and set out for the vultures. Cremation is the other end of the spectrum, thumbing the nose at death’s ravaging worms. But perhaps insulation is one of the reasons we city-dwellers have so lost our humility in the face of nature. It has given us delusions of control.

I know when I return to Britain I will struggle with the fact that I can’t hear the weather. That when I open the shutters there is no breeze because the window frames are full of glass, not air. That I can live in t-shirts whatever the season because every building has an artificial climate. I wonder when we’ll admit that climate control in our houses and cars implicates us in climate change in our oceans and weather? Nevertheless, I still yearn for it sometimes. A solid wall with no micro-views between the bricks. Food containers that contain only dead ingredients. Insulation in all its forms to keep the encroaching predators at bay.

Training People not to get Trafficked

2010-08-12T11:21:00.015-04:00

It’s an intriguing remit: “Train young adults so they don’t get trafficked”. The funding comes from CRS (the Catholic Relief Service) and there aren’t many restrictions. We have to train 90 young adults over two years so that they don’t get trafficked. Subject areas given were “computer literacy, basic business management and entrepreneurship (e.g. bookkeeping), and career guidance. The training program will also include social and sporting events, and work with traditional leaders on organizing cultural activities (e.g. education in traditional rites like ant stinging, walks through forest to learn traditional value of flora and fauna) to help build social cohesion among youth and to increase pride in their heritage and culture”. We’re in the savannah so don’t have much forest to walk through, but I like the principle. Configurations of trainees, content, logistics, length and standards are left up to us.

How can you prevent someone from being trafficked? You can’t, of course- only the person themselves can. But you can inform them of the kinds of trafficking that exist here, and give them greater confidence and new skills, and educate them about their human and labour rights. The big problem in this area is that if you ‘Just Say No’ to labour exploitation, both here and nearby over the border in Brazil, you can ‘Just Say No’ to working at all. Most of the mining, logging, ranching and domestic work that constitutes the entire range of options for our young adults is somewhere on the spectrum of labour exploitation. We may be able to help them not to be trafficked into sex work, or held at gunpoint on a ranch, but we can’t give them all lovely ethical office jobs instead because there are about 15 of those jobs in 500 square miles, and their incumbents tend to stay in them for a loooooooooong time.

Our trainees are a delight to work with. Rumour tells me that we have a couple of Bad Boys, a couple of slackers, the village genius and the village dunce. In fact we have a committed, punctual, thoughtful, increasingly skilful group of valuable people, future leaders that the village can be proud of. Sure, there was a very deliberate creation of atmosphere in the first week, but that creativity and perseverance can only be maintained if it comes from the inside. Each day they note down what they have learnt, and there is a fascinating breadth in what people value. Wapishana weaving, knowing how to switch off a computer properly instead of with the power button, speaking clearly in front of the group, hitting the target with your arrow for the first time, creating tables in Word, finding out about labour rights, mapping the people who matter in your life.

I love watching them absorbed in their tasks. Bennis, silent and attentive, not to be hurried and yet unharried. Maria, the girl everyone loves, beaming with every new fact gained. Cyrus, a little ahead and a little aloof, diminuendoing as the social whirl crescendos. Leah, Miss Success Story, quick and nimble in mind and body and speech. Elroy, the class Jester, throwing himself from the lifeboat to gain attention. Immaculata, who does not speak, and laughs except when she is glad. Derek, always alert, infrequent smile glinting like watery sunshine. Marlyn, ducking her head every time I ask a question, suddenly producing perfect Portuguese pronunciation in front of them all. Ron, our Morph, giggling furiously as he jumps from “j” to “h” to “y” to “u” in our Giant Jumping Computer Keyboard game. Elizabeth, reserved and observant and fiercely self-critical. Hezron, everyone’s friend, ready to create and to mend. And Kristel, the verve girl, twice as awake as most humans, glittering with life.

I am so proud of them. Perhaps my illness is making me sentimental. But they are so modest, and for the most part their burgeoning skills are so undeveloped that they have no idea how vastly capable they are. I read somewhere that there is such a strong culture of entitlement in the U.S. that you can find whole college classes where every young person expects to be famous, to be Somebody, and won’t work in a dead-end job even for a little while because they are ‘worth better’. In that respect, globalisation seems to be holding up her greedy cheating mirror once again. We have a culture of unentitlement. People in the interior so often seem to accept and internalise the judgment that they are ‘backward’. Seems to me that it’s the judgement that’s backwards. These twelve young adults are most decidedly going forwards, and I am loving sailing along in their wake.

Tears on the Ité

2010-08-08T17:51:00.002-04:00

The rains continue with vim. I lean out the shutters, watching the drips forming on each stiff discrete stem of ité palm like tears on eyelashes, dropping whitely down, steady and soft and rounded. However hard the rain is falling out there, my thatch weeps its quiet tears evenly, elegantly, separating out each drop.

A speech therapist told me ten years ago that the throat is the victim of tears in each human body. It bears the brunt of our tensions, our fears, our stressful careers and our unshed tears. That was one of the nails in the coffin of the unmourned corpse of my teaching career. I just don’t have the throat for it.

On what shall I blame this permanent ache in my throat, then? Laryngitis, sympathy with the rain, vocal strain from running my training course, unshed tears, my mind’s revolt against illness?

The Six Joys of Rainy Season

2010-07-22T17:34:00.001-04:00

A cowpat that got perfectly imprinted by a chicken’s foot, then melted into batter consistency by a rainstorm, and finally dried out again. Now it’s a perfect fossilised artefact to admire on the way to the latrine hut.

The absence of our most hated house guests: scorpions and poisonous centipedes. My nerves are soothed by the parade of days without their evil poised pincers.

Flowering grasses effervescing into life, thriving on what everyone else resents.

Resentful horses bringing their beautiful foal to my back door for shelter. I mistook it for a big dog in the cool wet morning light. It tries to gambol with four left hooves. It is covered in erratic fur, and its tail flares out like fluff from a giant thistle, already expert at fly-frustrating.

Being cool. To my delight, it drops to 21 degrees in the middle of the night.

A certain calm. As the rains fall and the creeks rise, weeks go by with no vehicles able to cross the Rupununi. The well-connected who can arrange a pick-up on the other side can cross by boat. But it’s complex and wet, and the mud is yuckily toe-sucky as you squelch and wade to board. The outcome for the Deep South is far less traffic. Villages look inwards. A peaceful languor prevails, with the odd frantic burst of farming when the time and rain is right. The peace rises with the lack of miners, and multiplies with the outflux of minors when school closes. There’s a quietude in the air that isn’t normally there.

Perpetuity

2010-07-20T15:33:00.003-04:00

Since I came of age, I have not been good at belonging to anything except my family. I think that might be why I have twice chosen to live in places where I can never blend in. It’s an ambivalent experience. I never sympathised with celebrities until I went to live in rural China, and discovered first-hand the cold, comprehensive, dissective intensity of the public eye. The notion of a private life pretty much disappeared. Aishalton is much gentler than that, and we feel quite at home, but acceptance does not mean absorption.

What is different here is that I sometimes suffer from delusions of belonging. This taunts me. I am in Aishalton but not of it, in the Catholic community but not of it. Last year I worked on an article about paid development workers that I wanted to call “In the (third) world but not of it” (the editor changed the title). I wrote about the smugness of the Poverty Expert, the outsider whose sense of self-worth is profoundly enhanced by their own ‘heroism’ in giving up the comforts of home and living in ‘solidarity’ with the poor. Never mind that their take on solidarity bears a closer resemblance to a crusade than a cuddle, and that they crash and crunch dynamically through the eggshells in their full suit of armour, gloriously sure of the rightness of their cause, unaware of all the imperceptible cracks and rips shooting outwards from their inexorable passage. In some cases their gaze is so devoutly fixed on Development that they lose sight of people altogether.

I recently received a brilliant comment by Nikhil Ramkarran on “The Glamour of Glacé Cherries”, which I shall quote here in case you missed it:

I would argue (in our defence) that the attitude towards foreigners, while not necessarily justifiable, is understandable.It is all too regular for us to be sold on some spectacular plan towards which we invest much, not necessarily financially but in other ways, only to be disappointed when midway through, political expediency in the home country causes said promissors to regretfully, and with much effusive apologies, disappear leaving us investors bereft.

Then there are the myriad "consultants" who show up from home country as beneficiaries of huge "grants" which home country annnounce in their press, to great fanfare, that they are giving to us poor nations.The consultants tell us how to solve a particular problem, collect their cheque (which are, of course, available to consultants from home country and not locals) and then disappear leaving yet another unimplemented plan. Little or none of the grant money is, of course, made available to locals.I do apologise for the rant on your blog. I am not trying to justify the attitude foreigners working in Georgetown experience, but too often it seems that while the word "colonial" may have been taken out of the vernacular the attitude remains.

I’ve included it in full both because I could not hope to express it better, and because it is a completely authentic, Guyanese response. Unsurprisingly, it takes me back very strongly to writing ‘Expatriology’ [http://sarahbroscombe.blogspot.com/2009/10/expatriology.html] last summer.

I am white, British, descendant of the Imperialists who milked Guyana and many other countries dry in the past, and keep whole nations imprisoned in a deeply unjust and self-perpetuating structure now and for the foreseeable future. Is my presence here anomalous? Should I simply go away and leave Aishalton to it? That’s a cop-out of course; a child’s pendulum swing of self-righteous dudgeon.

What I would love to see, and what I hear with relish in the capital, is Guyana adopting the BOALUDODO Principle- Bog Off And Let Us Do Our Development Ourselves. That would be the best outcome for the whole country, without a doubt. But who will go and live in Aishalton, to build up skills, education and livelihoods there? (The flipside of that question is “why am I not in Accrington?”!)

My worst days are the days when I am convinced that it is all useless. I suppose this is an occupational hazard of ‘meaningful’ jobs. If the answer to ‘why am I here?’ is ‘to pay the mortgage’, an existential crisis isn’t really called for every time doubt creeps, strolls or bulldozes in.

Back in Aishalton I have slipped back into manifestly worthwhile work: training young adults in computers, helping the Nursery School implement their hot meal programme, and supporting the ongoing activities of the community development plan in whatever ways I can. I am a member of a lot of teams, and we treat each other not as equals (our experiences and skills are wildly, almost comically different) so much as valued partners. There is no grandioseness about it.

I had a lot of faith in this kind of development when I came out to Guyana. Now I am coming closer and closer to the belief that the whole Development Project is morally bankrupt. Few thinking people in developed countries labour under the delusion that their governments give aid out of real concern. However, most of us have quite a lot of faith in the work done by big NGOs like Oxfam (who have recently moved out of Guyana and I would be most intrigued to know why). But when you come to Georgetown from the interior and happen upon an event like the World Cup in a fairly expat café and look round the room at the well-fed faces, the lovely clothes, the posh sunglasses and sleek laptops and nice watches, and walk past the long row of wide-bottomed air-conditioned four wheel drives bulging into the roadway outside, thoughts of the colonial period swell like bubbles, and inside those iridescent walls the whole development phenomenon looks rounded and complete, a self-perpetuating cosy world of postings and projects and prestige and protection, like a child’s snowstorm that returns to exactly the same state however hard you shake it.

Recuperation from what?

2010-07-07T11:43:00.002-04:00

The drudgery of illness ate up May. A sluggardly recovery ate up June. Now I find myself lurching unbeknownst into July. I have just finished a month of medical care and recuperation in Georgetown. That sounds soothing. But my body is stuffed with medicines and food and drink and vitamins. My head is stuffed with books, TV, experiences: freak shows and gangsters and hospitals and Ayn Rand and ghosts and terrible R&B on huge flatscreens and Guyanese murders and development cynicism and Series Five of ‘24’, all gulped down half-digested. I know this is the standard variety and layeredness of distractions available to most people for every waking moment of their lives, but it comes as a rude shock after five months of solid Aishalton. World Cup matches and palaver, ever-intensifying thriller cliffhangers, wikipedia to answer every idle query, novels laying out their inventions end on end, enough to reach the moon and make it back before bedtime. How is one to survive it? I am bursting, exploding, ripping at the seams with too much stimulation.

Salesmen in all their guises (peddlers of dreams or discontent or tat) would be delighted with me, stuffing myself with diversions until I am utterly distracted. They get to us young so that we can’t conceive of any other reality (half an hour of pre-Christmas advertising proves that); so that we can’t even fall asleep without accessories. To quote the Grinch, “And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the noise! noise! Noise! NOISE!” I understand afresh what it means to say that I cannot hear myself think. My head feels like a computer that has been set to process too many commands at once. It doesn’t shut down: it suspends, and stays stuck. Where is the open space to live in the midst of it all? And how many of us can avoid being enticed away from the search? I wonder if that is what Kierkegaard means when he says that purity of heart is to will one thing.

The Glamour of Glacé Cherries is upon me

2010-06-28T10:18:00.000-04:00

Amongst the eclectic accretion of books gracing the walls of Georgetown’s Jesuit presbytery is a splendid junky paperback called “Don’t Stop the Carnival” by Herman Wouk. I wish I was called Herman (Hermione?) Wouk. It must be very freeing.

This paperback is fronted with a wonderful retro-glam 1970’s photograph of a cocktail (glacé cherries! with Fresh Slices of Orange! in a champagne glass! caressed by harlot-red long nails! who could resist the delicious frisson of sin?). It proclaims itself “spiced with sex and tragedy”. An author with a moniker like Herman Wouk can gleefully cast his pearls with éclat into a pigswill plot. Glittering mischievously, almost buried in the gleeful mêlée of characters and plot twists, are some imaginative and sensible social theories.

This one is my favourite: “The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he [sic] is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no-one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun”.

It’s thought-provoking. Once I have got over my 21st century post-feminist itch at the lordly, rather colonialist reverberation of it, I wonder if he’s right. I ponder its relevance to Guyana.

He goes on immediately to burst another bubble: “The white people charging hopefully around the island hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before”.

Over the last couple of weeks I have talked to several friends doing development work in Georgetown. My envy at their communications and resources and networking opportunities was quickly superseded by sympathy. The dogs are in their mangers. Where cooperation could be increasing their impact, competitiveness and territorialism are building distrust instead. There is a whiff of hostility in the air. We white people may not be hammering up hotels and laying out marinas, but how different do our new, 'developmental' projects look to Guyanese? There are some excellent, professional, committed, sincere white people working in Georgetown, but to my surprise many of them envy me, living and working at ‘the grassroots’, far from the partitioned and thinly suspicious air of Georgetown. Not being treated as ‘merely a passing plague’. Not even, I dare to think, being viewed that way by my community.

How humbling, to have the rug tugged out from under the sensible shoes of Development by a cocktail-hour comic thriller! I admire and envy Herman Wouk’s disregard. I think he got a great deal of cheeky enjoyment out of writing an airport paperback with a stronger theoretical underpinning than the nihilistic dullities provided by many post-doctoral battery bantams. National curriculum designers all over the globe should be patting him on the back for writing a truly differentiated novel. He invites you to ponder, or not, because he doesn’t give a toss either way. He gets away with it because it’s utterly non-sanctimonious. What a refreshing challenge!

To create your future, or let it create you?

2010-06-12T16:27:00.001-04:00

I grew up in a TV-free house as a cultured cultural weirdo. Despite this, I absorbed a little bit of When You Wish Upon a Star-ness from a 70’s Britain of anomalies. How the universe manages to exhale Maggie Thatcher and Disney in the same breath without needing some kind of metaphysical Heimlich manoeuvre I’ll never know, but somehow it does. The future was a rosy series of beckoning successes, especially for swots. I would reach out and pluck the results I needed, a fabulous life partner, a good job and some satisfying avocations from the garden of life. ‘I can show you the world, shining, shimmering, splendid...’ I don’t think I was abnormally responsible in expecting to take quite a lot of control of my future, or abnormally lucky in expecting it to be pretty good on the whole.

Here attitudes to the future are a lot more tentative, for many good reasons. Last October, I wrote about a Community Development Plan I was hoping to work through with Aishalton Village Council (http://sarahbroscombe.blogspot.com/2009/10/planning-planning-for-community.html). Last Sunday we at last brought to birth a plan that has been a tidy nine months in gestation.

The pregnancy analogy is apt. The lack of control. The constant worry and anticipation. The effort needed at every stage. The careful adjustment of everything over a period of months, but combined with a sense of powerlessness about this creature that is forming itself out of nothing. And not least, the knowledge that the ‘end’ of the whole arduous process is not an end at all, but the beginning of a journey which will take on a life of its own, whilst still unapologetically taking over yours.

My own role in the planning process has oscillated wildly, from the ideal of detached benevolent facilitator through basic skills tutor to nagging Little Red Hen. I have been asked to intervene and keep out, train and facilitate and watch and stay away. Individuals on the steering group have ranged between conscientious, absent, brilliant, unreliable, dominant, baffled and drunk. I have made facilitation resources with fishing net, clothes pegs, backwards sticky tape, chopped-up clear pockets, scrubbed kebab spikes, old packing boxes and an overstretched imagination. I have felt excited, thrilled, frustrated, rejected, despairing, involved, implicated and alienated, sometimes several of them at once.

In the end, this is what happened. On 1st March we had a launch event. That was a riot. About 120 people turned up. I cannot be sure exactly how many came for the free snacks, but I have no qualms about bribery at an event that exists to capture attention and generate enthusiasm. What matters is that when they came in, they engaged with it all. The constituencies we identified right back in October were pegged on the wall, and B photographed people displaying which constituencies they belong to, creating a gorgeous poster. To our delight, someone from every single constituency was at the launch. We had to add an extra flipchart to the giant draw-it-yourself poster introducing the vision, to accommodate all the different ideas. The problem tree burgeoned with leaves.

Young and old alike crowded round the jigsaw puzzle, and listened to the beginner’s guide to chess and strategic thinking. The good things and opportunities represented by really yummy cakes, spicy doughballs and beef patties received their fair share of attention but no more. We ended late because the jigsaw group didn’t want to leave until they completed it!

The momentum carried through pretty well to the Vision day on 22nd March. Five different groups met, under trees and in benabs, at bars and shops and churches. All of them visualised the future they want for Aishalton five years from now, and through discussion came up with their most important elements. There were seven in total; better education for all, improved infrastructure and power, good health and prosperity, building positively on Wapishana culture, good and enjoyable new activities, better land use and taking advantage of local resources.

I knew the next stage would be the hardest, but I did not dare to expect such a reflective, self-critical outcome. In three larger groups this time, we met on 26th April to identify the obstacles that prevent Aishalton from reaching its best potential. Fourteen big obstacles were identified, and if an outsider came in and said those things they would get lynched! Out of the mouths of Aishalton’s villagers came the following insights. “Disrespect, negativity and selfishness are harming the way we work together. Disheartened by bad infrastructure, we don’t manage our skills and resources to the full. We neglect our elders. Leaders at all levels are not building trust through good example. We neglect community education, and undervalue schooling. Medical understaffing and our inadequate diet and hygiene are affecting health. We are not taking enough responsibility for our land, water and produce. We are not building pride in Wapishana culture. Abuse and neglect in the family is damaging individuals. Poverty is preventing some people from improving their opportunities. Alcohol abuse and drunkenness are damaging families, work and community. Bureaucracy and political channels block our progress. Negative influences and lack of opportunities are reducing young people’s interest. Religious disagreements hinder cooperation.” Coming from an NGO, a priest or a politician, this would be an unwelcome and devastating critique. Coming from the inside, I would say that this level of self-knowledge, and willingness to analyse, offer a lot of hope for the future.

After this marathon, our Solutions meeting on 31st May was a relief. One big group met in the Community Centre. Low brick walls and slim tree trunks support a neat ité thatch, providing a cool and semi-enclosed space for public meetings, and the rest of the time sheltering cows and horses with extremely poor bladder control- they retreat into the Community Centre from the wildest storms, and moo, poo and chew the night away. Then a couple of hours before each community event, a few middle-aged ladies are sent round with brooms to remove the evidence. Meetings always start with tidy benches, clean floors and air mysteriously full of dung-motes, a not unpleasant earthy ambience.

We used the problems generated a month earlier to seek out wider solutions that would apply to all of them, coming up with strategic directions which will act as a rudder for the Village Council over the coming five years. We chose four; developing skills & creating opportunities, building strong, healthy families, sustaining & strengthening cultural activities, and developing leadership & responsibility. At the end we invited anyone from this session to be involved with turning these into an Action Plan for the coming year.

And now at last we had reached the final hurdle. On 6th June, a group of about 20 of us, with plenty of Village Councillors and steering group members, met in the Council Office to decide where to start. Participants selected which of the four directions they felt most passionate about, and we divided into four groups accordingly. Each group had a large collection of ideas from the other stages, as well as their own new ideas generated on the spot. From these they picked eight do-able actions and chose a logical order in which to do them for the coming year. Some are simple but clearly necessary; establish responsibility for proper garbage disposal, organise workshops for people interested in kitchen gardening, establish a body to seek funds for needy students. Others are more visionary; run video shows dealing with domestic problems, focus group to develop cotton weaving in Aishalton, consult youth group about what leadership training they need. At the end of the meeting, each group went out clutching their A4 implementation plans for each action in the first quarter, looking apprehensive, worrying about buy-in and success, suddenly holding tangible responsibility in their hands. The following day, lying in my hammock, I could hear voices drifting over from the quarterly Public Meeting, Aishalton’s main democratic forum, explaining the CDP and reading out the strategic directions. No-one called me over to explain anything. It belongs to the Council now. Where it will take them is anyone’s guess. It might fail. It might vanish. It might get eroded into a series of ad hoc activities. Or it might bring about a gradual shift in villagers’ sense of control, a trickle of confidence when facing outsiders with opinions about Aishalton’s development, a greater engagement with their future, and determination to do what they can to make it better.

Launch, Vision, Obstacles, Strategy, Actions. All those months of work for a series of small planned activities, fragile and for the most part unresourced. Why is it worth it? I have to return to the pregnancy analogy. It’s worth it because there is nothing more important. It’s worth it because the independence of something you had a hand in creating has far more potential for greatness than it ever would have if it stayed in you. It’s worth it because there can be nothing more humbling, more thrilling, more demeaning, more infuriating and more glorious than conceiving of something alive, independent, and then letting it go and create a future in which you will be incidental. Let’s face it, all you parents, writers, inventors, Dr Frankensteins and erstwhile creators out there, we have to feel lucky that we were in at the beginning, that we generated something, because from the minute you let it go, and you must let it go, it’s you that is on your own.

Just another day in Paradise

2010-06-02T12:34:00.000-04:00

My first sight every morning as I swing open the shutters is the timbers of the unfinished community centre. Its new occupant is a dog who thinks he’s a wolf. Every time the oxyacetylene cylinder that thinks it’s a church bell rings, he raises his snout and howls long and mournful. His pitch is high and not at all tuneful, but he definitely has illusions. Florence Foster-Jenkins in dog’s clothing.

Rainy season is entering the protein-breathing stage. Every inhalation is populated by tiny flies, especially in the kitchen. They gleam like dust motes in the sunshine, but dustmotes don’t itch when they land. Cooking is an increasing challenge as they multiply exponentially around fresh food. What with holding my breath for the flies, blocking my nose for the rubbish bag (which festers roisterously in rainy season) and closing my eyes for the onions, I’m heading for sensory blackout in there.

The okra are thriving in the sporadic rain. Sliced and sautéed as low as they will go with mountains of garlic, they are a good consolation prize for the scarcity of meat and fish. Unfortunately garlic has recently sold out in all the shops. How will I cope?

Most of the ground in central Aishalton is now spongy and porous, like walking in fresh tofu. Footwear is a difficult choice. Flipflops are the most practical but maximise the bites, and the claggiest slimiest mud between the toes is only pleasurable to the under tens, especially those who don’t do laundry. ‘Waterproof’ boots aren’t, except that when the water comes in over the top it can’t make its escape.

Every track is pooling in the ruts, so the grass on either side is getting steadily more and more worn. The frogs have endless evocative twilight moments to burp out their love songs. The cattle egrets are flocking here now that we are officially one big marsh. Watch their complex arabesques and you will be forgiven for believing the dance is for beauty, or for you. But look closer, shorten your focus a foot in front, and you will see that the dragonfly is leading the chase, and the egret is dancing for his dinner.

A storm in the west times itself at sundown. Sheet lightning as usual. Its heavy cumulonimbii crowd in to quench the sunset, which in defiance dyes the lightning instead. I watch and marvel at ten minutes of perfect pink sheet lightning, whilst in the foreground the fireflies shimmy and wink in the papaya tree.

My last sound at night is the cow trying to break in. She bashes on the door rhythmically with her horns, increasing in speed and anthropomorphic regularity as the lightning gets closer. It is almost impossible to believe that it isn’t a person knocking. Yesterday she made it in, through the three bolts. B staggered into the hall at 2:30am to find a massive brindled rump extending from dining table to front doorstep. It’s not restful, sleeping in a house so attractive to bovine keraunophobes. When I’m sleeping alone in the house, listening to the horses scream, and half the fauna of Aishalton trying to creep, bash, slide, fly, hammer or crawl their way into my home, I hardly sleep at all. In the morning I will go out to find horse hoofprints deeply embedded in the mat an inch from the door, cowpats under every window shutter, and the last of the lilies cropped short by the sheep.

The one thing I can never, ever hope to convey to you is this. The powerful, often unseductive ordinariness of all of these things. It isn’t romantic. It isn’t exotic. It’s as real and as boring and exactly as rich in potential as your morning commute to work. Which of course has all the possibilities of an Awfully Big Adventure, especially for the philosopher and the Pollyanna!

Legacies

2010-05-28T10:06:00.000-04:00

Last time I was in an international airport I spent several hours facing the following poster:

“You never actually own a Patek Philippe.
You merely look after it for the next generation”

I think that’s clever. First, because it justifies spending a small but fairly new car on something that tells you the time. Second, because it implies that it’s not even FOR you; buying yourself this opulent item is an act of generosity to your beloved child. Third, it’s an investment not a luxury, thus whisking it out of the frivolous class and straight into the prudent. Fourth, it gives you delusions of dynastic grandeur. And fifth and grandest of all, merely by buying this item, you are moving yourself into the social stratum that ponders legacies. And all this without mentioning watches, money, children, class, value, materials, build quality or price.

The reason it struck me so was a conversation I had had in Maruranau just a week or two previous. I will try to set the scene. B and I are driving around the Deep South on the Quest of the Holy Sewing Project. We have had a hot and spine-frottingly uncomfortable morning. We stop in with Adrian the Headteacher’s parents, even though we have barely met them, just because we want a break from stiff and awkward conversations. Adrian’s dad welcomes us like old friends, seating us on sawn-off log stools. He sends a man up a tree to fetch coconuts. He climbs using a figure of eight loop of cloth twisted round his feet, which he jumps up the trunk. The machete tucked down his back doesn’t seem to bother him. He lowers a huge bunch of coconuts. Adrian’s dad slices the top off and passes them on to be drunk, one, two, three each. The young green coconuts have only a thin, eggwhite-soft meat. He hatchets them in half and we scrape that out with a spoon.

We sit chatting of Aishalton, the Deep South Games, education and home. He tells us he has been preparing the ground for a full year now to plant a whole new set of coconut palms. He digs a hole 3 foot square by three foot deep, and fills it with compost. Watering regularly through the dry months, he keeps compressing and composting, compressing and composting. He fences to prevent the pigs scoffing all the compost. The crucial decision comes around May, when he must judge whether the rainy season is really set in. Plant too early and the coconut palm will die from insufficient water. Too late and it will not have a chance to mature as it needs to before the next dry season kills it off altogether.

His house is built for impermanence: mud brick and wood and thatch. Why would he collect money? The nearest bank is 6 rough and expensive hours away. The Guyanese dollar is a soft currency and few would bank on its worth. What expensive possessions would survive here? Electrics quickly die from the damp. Jewellery seems rather pointless when one is constantly grubby and scruffy and clothes never get clean. If it’s mouldable, rustable, or has any problems coping with heat, water, insects or being stomped on, forget it.

So he plants these coconut palms as the legacy for his grandchildren. It’s simple but genius. Doesn’t need replanting every few years, doesn’t need tending, isn’t susceptible to any of the listed attritions, and gives food, drink, shelter and roofing. When it comes to the crunch, which is more use? Somehow Adrian’s dad and his coconut palms make absolute nonsense of Patek Philippe.

Taking the Temperature

2010-05-18T12:29:00.000-04:00

Confined to bed, out of reading matter, bored with crosswords, I read back over last year’s blog. The freshness of everything is as astonishing to me now as the smells and sounds were then. I cannot imagine noticing those vapours, those occurences, those stimuli now. They are the stuff of life.

I smell like everyone else. I remember in China being told that foreigners smell milky (the scrunkle in the nose suggested ‘sour-milky’). Now my pillow is pestilential, my hammock fetid. A combination of diet, handwashed clothes and sweat makes us all equal (a peppery, cupboardy, purple-green smell), as well as encouraging us not to sit or stand too close. When I arrived I never thought to analyse why people here don’t hug much...

The sounds I no longer hear are flocks of parrots screeching and fighting through the mango trees, the mid-volume lesson content of other teachers over the half-walls, the silent vowels at the end of Wapishana words that must nevertheless be shaped correctly. The fat cowpat that splats in the night no longer wakes me, though the screaming midnight horses still shape my nightmares.

And my CARELESSNESS! Imagine putting my hand on a surface without looking first! Imagine putting on a shoe without shaking first, and then looking! Imagine not checking the shower mug before plunging it into the water! Or wrapping a towel around myself without looking closely at it! Imagine standing outside my house in flipflops, without socks, in the red ants’ kingdom! B leapt a mile the other night, when in the middle of dinner a plummeting lizard landed squarely in his lap (they often fall from the roof in the throes of passion), but neither of us jump at all any more if they don’t actually land ON us. I think I remember actually crying the first time a lizard pooed on me in my hammock. Over-reaction. Now I just curse lightly.

I can tell the difference between 22 and 23 degrees without looking at the thermometer. Our temperature range in the shade is 10 degrees altogether, maximum, all year round, (this month only 5) so you become more attuned to the small differences. The humidity is a greater factor in how the heat feels than the actual temperature- humid days here feel moody, as though they have a persistent low fever.

Reading about those people I first met last year is so strange, now. I talk about them as if they aren’t quite real. Ivy is Ivy, not An Amerindian Archetype. The Sisters, wonderful as always, nevertheless have their foibles. Ashley remains my sunshine, but primary school is tracing the first frowns of impending womanhood on her face. She wants to be whiter, now. I hope that’s not my influence.

There are people who remember so vividly the self-important joy of young adulthood that they will always make great youth workers. There are people who retain so clearly the eureka moment of gaining new understanding that they will always make great teachers. I am the opposite of these. For facts I have a good memory, but I am a complete amnesiac of states. I slough off all my past incarnations so thoroughly that I cannot ever reclothe myself in them again. When I remember myself four years old, it is a pedantic, over-educated, justice-obsessed traveller looking out through those eyes at the stolen toy or the syrup on toast or the piano. I am an anachronism inside my own head.

Daily life weaves a fabric around us that becomes a second skin. Like skin, we tend to ignore it unless it lets us down. I am grateful to feel so acculturated, but I must simultaneously admit to missing the exoticism, the gorgeous novelty of it all. But the vital stuff of life is not adventure but le pain quotidien, the daily cassava bread.

The Rupununi Rodeo

2010-05-12T12:25:00.001-04:00

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/jmbroscombe/LethemRodeo2010#

The Rupununi Rodeo is a paradox- two parallel events, opposite in atmosphere. Viewing it through a month’s distance, some great pictures and memories, and the rape of a foreigner, I can’t work out whether the two are yin-yang or oxymoronic.

On the one hand is the rodeo itself. This is not a smart stadium event, where professional sportsmen compete in fancy gear. It is a home-grown gathering from the ranches. Farmhands and cowboys are showing off the practical and dangerous skills that create their livelihoods. For 362 days of the year, these skills are for money, and capture, and subsistence, and are performed without spectators or applause. Then suddenly, they are for entertainment. It’s not an exact fit. It’s rather like holding an appendectomy competition between surgeons in an opera house- fascinating, but clearly not a fair contest in any real sense. You aren’t comparing like with like. Here in Lethem, there is nothing even faintly groomed about it. The bulls are uncoached and genuinely unpredictable. They are penned into a small stockade and get increasingly restless and disturbed as the day progresses. Occasionally, one will stroll out noncholantly and make the rider a laughing stock. Others rush the fence, clearly aching to gore the audience as well as the rider.

The best thing for me is recognising so many of the participants. We have been in Dadanawa many times and several of the finest rodeo riders are familiar faces. The classiest riders are those who don’t care about winning. Some of their most amazing feats are in the stockade, getting the animals into the pens, before they ever reach the arena. Paul Sinthill’s ability to steer a bull by flicking its tail, and his assurance round panicking horses, is at least as breathtaking as his feats in the ring. The last event of the day is the bull-lassoing. Paul does a neat job, but when his rope breaks and loses him the event, he throws back his head in laughter. He jogs back to the stockade, bare feet comfortable in the hot sand, face full of enjoyment. He’s a cowboy, not a sports personality. Nothing hangs on this as it does in a real round-up. The applause is like being given a medal for breathing. He is modest because the only thing he is pitting himself against is the bull, and vaqueros do not vaunt around bulls.

There is an innocence about the whole daytime proceedings. It is an uncomplicated pleasure to watch the horsewomanship of the ranchers’ stylish daughters, and the watermelon- and cassava bread- eating contests; the yin and yang of wet and dry. The rampaging ‘ever-vicious bulls’, as the MC dignifies them, rush the fence enough to thrill, but rarely enough to terrify. The baking sun smites the splintering wooden stands and punch-drunk punters alike.

The darker side is the night festival, a gigantic piss-up without the usual social constraints. I don’t suppose many people at the Oktoberfest notice the security detail much, or feel thankful for their subduing influence. To most of the after-hours Rodeo boozers, it’s just a rough-edged Friday night blur of unglamorous excess lasting three days. But take away the killjoys and who is to discourage rape and a little dark corner stabbing here and there? The Brazilian funfair at nights has a rickety, mustachioed unattractiveness that is less gigolo and more sleazy thug. And there is a hangover effect too. On the final day, fortified (or fooled) by a bloodstream full of stale alcohol, an American volunteer is arrested for offensive behaviour, first inciting a bull as none of the good vaqueros did, and then insulting the policeman trying to restrain him. Sullen, uncooked-pastry British teenage girls roam in glued supercilious huddles of eight or more, hangovers visibly worsening as rodeo reaches its conclusion and the sun finishes cooking the Rupununi lobsters.

And yet, despite this, the Rupununi Rodeo felt homely in the best sort of way. Somehow it made me feel very accepted, sitting with Cheryl from Dadanawa on the stands watching the world and his drunk granddad go by, while B perched on rickety fences risking sunburn and goring for good photos. Perhaps without the piss-up it wouldn’t be a real Rupununi Bacchanalia. Disorderliness is a defining characteristic of this place: the winding trails, the sporadicity, the vanishing past and unreal future.

Water, water, everywhere

2010-05-07T12:30:00.000-04:00

Last year, we fretted as rainy season prevaricated. The wells dropped, the rains flirted and then hightailed it over the border to the ‘proper’ Amazon. Drought is too strong a word- we did have small floods and an unfordable Rupununi, but it was ‘enough’, not ‘plenty’. These are our two words for quantity here. “You got enough mosquitoes?” (frankly, one would be enough, so yes, I have enough mosquitoes). “Ple-e-e-enty plenty mangoes, they wastin’ in the yard”. So last year was not plenty plenty rain- not even one plenty. When we sang the song at school, “The coming of the May rains, the coming of the June rains, the coming of the July rains”, it sounded like a prayer.

Not this year. If last year’s rainy season was Hamlet, this year’s is Tybalt. Damn hasty. The May rains came in March. The August crop of mangoes is coming in now. Women tell me with glee that soon the air will be thick with kaboura flies, the Reepicheeps of the thorough biters. They speak with relish of flying ants, of “plenty mosquitoes” with gleeful emphasis. Trips to the well are disorientating: if I lose myself in the rhythm of hauling, when I come back to myself with a jolt I think I’m at the wrong well. It’s too wide and too reachable to be ours. The water is more than seven times as deep as it was in January. The worst drinking water shortage, ironically, comes when the wells get flooded. The water table runneth over; then it's a land table. Nor any drop to drink. Then the well becomes a Venetian street in Acqua Alta. Then we’ll start drinking the rainwater (if we can keep the cow slobber out of it).

It seems to me that the Wapishana language had two choices to make: a million words for rain, or just one. They have gone for the minimalist option- ‘wun(u)’ is used to mean water, rain, drinking water, a drink, and water levels in a creek or river.

Up to now, every time I comment on the rain, there is a chorus of knowing “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” jeers. I suspect by the coming of the July rains, we’ll have had the true experience of “ple-e-e-e-nty wun(u)” this time around. In a really heavy rainy season, the savannah ‘flood-up’ so badly that the ‘road’ is navigable only by boat, and whole plains are lake-bound as far as the eye can see. Vehicles trying to follow the line of the road get ‘stuck-up’ and only expert tractors or excessive patience can achieve anything.

Nights in bed listening to the soughing of the rain in the ite thatch are like nights at sea. In a heavy downfall a fine spray spatters on to the bed, diffused through the netting (there is no such thing as 100% inside here). The finest rain falls like snow; drifting, settling, shrugging at gravity before accepting downwardness. Nothing is to be seen except a shifting in the air, a trick of the eyeballs. Next comes the steady gentle rainfall; a low murmur of continuous sound, comforting, like the hiss of a wood stove. The patter rain is heavier, making paper-tickling noises as it hits the roof leaves. Then come the distinctest stages, splatter and batter. The final stage is the roar. At their loudest, the drops re-merge into one sound as they did at their quietest.

The ancient Israelites believed that heaven was above a giant reservoir of water, hovering over the sky. It feels like that here. If you’re inside, don’t try and put out buckets: get your valuables waterproofed, and then hunker down and wait for it to stop. If you are caught out, hope your coloured clothes don’t run. Be grateful for your nose which creates a little breathing umbrella for your face. Forget seeing; your eyes are brim-full of water. It hasn’t knocked me over yet, but I did once feel as though I was drowning. Suddenly the Wapishana single word for ‘rain’ and ‘water’ makes complete sense. When heaven’s giant water balloon bursts, it’s watering, not raining. It’s a single drop a whole world big.

Sewing up the Sewing Project

2010-05-04T13:49:00.000-04:00

On 12th October last year, I wrote about a sewing project which was bequeathed to me by default. There was an update on 15th December. This weekend, we spent the last of the money and finished the project, holding a “How to Run a Sewing Centre” seminar at Dadanawa Ranch for women from seven villages in the South Rupununi.

The setting: a little universe of frontier self-sufficiency. Dadanawa has a scruffy grandeur all its own. A dignity of dirt and hard work. It’s not Amerindian, but its acceptance is earned and ungrudging. Set up in 1865, around the turn of the last century it was the biggest ranch in the world. Many Amerindians work at Dadanawa, and many times I have been surprised to hear stories from older friends in Aishalton who broke in some tough horseback years here in their leathery youth. It smells strong, musty and slightly rank- cowhorn dust, bat excreta, cow blood, skins, wood dust, ancient plumbing and a miasma of droppings. The blend is not unpleasant, evoking the musk of an old, strong ox. Evocative, but of somebody else’s more laborious life, emanating the kind of history that never gets written down. It’s Annie Proulx rather than Oklahoma. Everything has been repaired. Everything- the walls, the kitchen pots, the ancient landrovers, the vintage English cisterns, the short band radio. I love the place. It is everything I’m not. The welcome here is thorough but undemonstrative- its one kinship with Yorkshire. There is no power and they are having water problems, so we are asked to bathe in the river.

The women: wildly different, but hiding it under culturally identical layers of reserve. The ones I haven’t met before are quietest. Their ages range from 22 to 66, their confidence from zero to buoyant, their skills from excellent to beginner. Half have mis-read the letter, and expect to be practising cutting fabric and using an electric machine. The other half want organisational training, but some struggle to write and none do mental arithmetic easily. The most skilled women have met many times through training courses in exotic distant urban centres like Lethem. Others have gained confidence through church work or cooking for the school hot meal programmes. Some barely open their mouths at all. I think it is fair to say that Amerindians are cautious about new people. I cannot always distinguish it from suspicion. I try very hard here to be gentle and encouraging. It’s hard not be overpowering: I feel like a bottle of chilli sauce trying to act like milk. My skin colour is intimidating, and my education, and my identity as a teacher, and my fluent English.

The seminar: minimalist. We are unusually well-resourced for here: there is a school exercise book and pen for each woman, a flipchart which B rigs ingeniously from a beam with string, some marker pens and one handout with enough copies for everyone. We work hard on pricing: add up the cost of materials, don’t forget thread and incidentals, add on some labour cost for the sewer, add on a small margin for the centre to save for spare parts etc. Find out prices of equivalent (usually Brazilian) items from the few local vendors, and price below. Use this to help you set labour cost. We also talk about accountability, and sustainability, and having fun. With all of my jobs here, I have found a general disregard of morale in planning, and of style in conveying information. Unlike most trainees, Amerindians have an admirable, yewlike boredom threshold. But like everyone, they enjoy engaging delivery, participation, and memorable, hilarious activities. They are just too polite and too realistic to demand it.

The highlight: our fashion show. I asked each village to bring samples from their centre. I am staggered at the range they have brought. Painted tablecloths, school uniforms, patterned skirts, embroidered children’s dresses, perfectly waistbanded men’s trousers. I brought a few props- hats, sunglasses, necklaces, and a little make-up. I have picked out songs I think they might like for the catwalk- although it’s more of an oxwalk. One woman dresses as a man, another as a schoolboy. Each woman chooses her song. For a brief magic two hours, it doesn’t rain. We plug my laptop into the jeep stereo, turn on the headlights in lieu of floodlights, and down the stairs they come, to B.B King and Macy Grey, Mika and Basement Jaxx. We finish with Queen hollering “We Will Rock You”. They all sashay down the steps one last time, boogieing as our cheers and clapping make a tiny blip in the vast silent presence of a black savannah night.

Watominap Wapichan Da'u

2010-04-12T16:24:00.000-04:00

Time is divided into past, present and future, yes?

If you could divide time however you liked, how would you split it? BC and AD is an ideological slant on history, not a fact of time. A mother can see her life in epochs: before children and after children. Losing a person precious to us can rush us out the other side of the looking glass. But all of these examples are linear.

The Wapishana language divides time into real (naa) and unreal (nii). When you hear ‘naa’ you can be sure it’s about the present. When you hear ‘nii’ it can refer to any other time, past or future. This grammatical fact socks me between the eyes. It’s my babelfish, illuminating various incidents in my time here with a sudden startling clarity. (Feel free to accuse me of over-interpretation- that’s what happens when you trust philosophy to an imaginary fish from a geek book).

Why did the village council not begin preparing our house while we were back in England for Sue’s funeral- why did they wait till we came back? Because in March we were ‘naa’, but the moment we left we became ‘nii’- “they are coming back nii”. Written history is an illusion, because all history is ‘nii’- unreal. Maybe that’s why Wapishanas are not rushing around busily capturing everything in living memory on paper. History is a slippery fish, make no mistake about that. Most Wapishana can’t write or read their mother tongue, and very few seem to mind.

We have crossed the Brazilian border to attend a language course in Boa Vista. We travel there by a surfaced road that appears out of the ether at the border. The abrupt contrast is very, very weird. It is peculiar to see it é-thatched houses by a tarmac road beneath power lines. A cultural joke that doesn’t translate.

Ten of us come together to study Wapishana- priests (Father Horie is from Japan, Paul from South India, Varghese from North India, Eddy from Nicaragua, André from South Brazil, Vanildo and Sergio from the North), a Brazilian nun and two Brazilian laywomen who work in Amazonia, and me. The course is run by a Canadian priest called Ronald McDonell (not surprisingly he calls himself Ronaldo!), with three Wapishanas for speaking practice.

Over these days I am constantly reminded of trying to learn Tibetan in Yushu a decade ago. The Wapishana language barely exists in written form. The first answer from native speakers to most of my ‘why’ questions is “That’s just the way it is”. If I keep pressing, the native speakers will rack their brains for an answer, and if they still can’t decide why, they will make something up. The really refreshing thing about having a foreigner running the Boa Vista course is that he structures it so it resembles language learning as I understand it. There are dialogues to practice. We learn all the pronouns systematically. We write vocab cards. We don’t spend an entire afternoon, as we did in Aishalton, learning the Wapishana for numerous small brown birds, none of which can be translated. Add in an extra complication: our native speaker teachers are Portuguese Wapishana, so can’t explain in English. Their writing conventions are also different, with quite big spelling changes, and two different letters to the alphabet. One of my fellow participants says to me ‘They should have agreed spelling rules on both sides of the border’. Who is ‘they’? The Academie Wapishanaise?

Wapishana is fragile. There is a striking disparity between the fluency of people my age (i.e grandparents), and school-age children. Ronaldo gives out a language questionnaire to indigenous teachers to use in their communities for assessing linguistic robustness: most of them are so incongruous for Aishalton that they sound facetious. Is the language used for education? (Caribbean-wide exams guarantee that it never will be). Are public documents and roadsigns in it? (Roadsigns? We might need roads first!) Are there media in it? (No electricity, no reliable access to paper or ink, no salaries for DJs!) Is the Wapishana population small or large? (Small) Do they have economic power? (Don’t make me laugh. They barely have cassava power).
At first I feel quite panicky, but then I wonder, does this matter? If something is valuable, I think generally we Westerners immediately start working out how to preserve it. Video the wedding. Bury the ashes. Pass on the Patek Philippe watch. Frame, memorise, dry, varnish, freeze, collect, pickle, distil, and most of all, write it down.

Ronaldo says that language is important because it is the key to a group’s heart. But what if they voluntarily have a change of heart, and swap their language for a bigger, shinier one? My instinct is to start frantically scribbling down folk stories, get out the Dictaphone and run around the village elders preserving their memories. But who is to say that my instinct is useful? When we pride ourselves on ‘preserving’, what if we are actually dessicating? I suppose there is a place for frogs in formaldehyde, but they certainly have none of their charm left.

So in the end, I accept that we are learning Wapishana because we want to say to our communities, “What a great language! How proud you must be of it! Listen to how stilted and comic I sound compared with your expertise!”. And because we believe that understanding the forms in which people express themselves helps us to understand more deeply what they mean. Any grander claims, of preservation and future generations blah blah blah, run the risk of neo-colonialism of a particularly British (or perhaps I should say English?) intellectual character. Languages are chasm-builders at least as much as they are bridges. We’re choosing to have a go at bridge-building, that’s all.

Dastardly and Muttley

2010-04-08T08:40:00.000-04:00

People pay hundreds of pounds for an off-road course like this one.

The journey from Aishalton to Lethem is 100 miles. They call it a road, but for most of the journey it is a collection of winding tracks, out of which you choose by guesswork. The first 40 miles to Dadanawa are mainly deep in sand, with a few short rubbly stretches and a few even shorter hard-packed. The next sixty miles vary more: rocky stretches, stream and river crossings, deep deep sand, narrow tracks through scrub. The fastest I have ever done it in a jeep is 4 hours, the slowest 6 hours by truck. A tractor takes more than 12. Motorbikes vary more than any other form: a confident (rash?) biker can do it quicker than the fastest jeep. We take seven and a half hours. B has Dastardly’s helmet and Muttley’s evil chuckle. I have the adrenalin slime of half-naked fear.

I guess being the rider is like an egg and spoon race, with the added complication that the egg is behind you. You must balance speed and stability with safety. Wife, camera and laptop all depend on your equilibrium. The responsibility messes with your head whilst the wife’s not insubstantial girth messes with your steering.

Riding it pillion is like the catatonia in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”. You can watch it coming but you are utterly helpless. You hold your mouth open after the first few tooth-clashes and tongue-bites. That's a dusty thirsty old business. For stability you stay centre, so hours are spent gazing at the fetching soft back of the husband’s neck. All you can see over the shoulder is a vortex 6 inches square of treacherous sand or rocks; much the same view you get in the airborne seconds it takes you to hit the ground falling from a mountain bike.

Intense, concentrated tension every moment for seven hours. You cannot afford to get the balance wrong as there are long, long stretches between villages. No guarantee that anyone will pass. No AA or RAC. No phones or mobile reception. It’s all very committing.

Dastardly and Muttley save the day. In contrast, I am Scooby Doo at his most cowardly, his most saggy-jowly, his most slobbery slobby doggy.

D-Man

2010-04-02T09:35:00.000-04:00

His face is smooth but there is a deep frown line etched between his eyebrows. He is short, stocky, and looks strong. The sideways-but-backwards baseball cap á la Puff Daddy gives his face a vulnerable, yearning look.

We meet in an Aishalton bar during a birthday party. (When I say ‘bar’, they have no beer left, or coke, or fruit juice, so it’s Guyanese vodka with the Brazilian version of Tesco value cola, or nothing. We are sitting outside on the concrete-floor-under-zinc that passes for a veranda- it would pass rather more successfully for a veranda in dim light, without the dangling fluorescent light-bulb). He asks me what age I am. When I say 38 he tells me I look well for it. There isn’t the slightest come-on emanating. I guess he is younger than me by several years, but when he says 18 I cannot even begin to mask my incredulity.

He tells his story in circles; just a few facts, related over and over again. He talks for nearly an hour, with mainly nods and smiles from me. The occasional directive question elicits that he is from Achiwib, his mother Amerindian and his father “a- like him (pointing at a miner)- a nigger person”.

He tells me that the black guy he arrived with works with him at the mines. That he calls him D-man, not Damian, but that “I no vex with he” because he doesn’t mean any offence. He explains this so very often that I conclude that he is in fact ‘vexed’, but wants to be magnanimous. He is not really anything, he says- not Amerindian. “You a white, I a brown, not really Amerindian but not a nigger person”. Over and over again he tells me “I lef school at 12 to help my mum and dad”. He says that he is not religious- “I go to church one-one time” but that he believes in helping his family. About halfway through he begins to repeat that his problem is “I no have ID cyard”. He bewails this at length.

What is the problem really? It’s not the ID card- when I explore that, concerned, it emerges that he simply missed the closing date, and has been told to apply again next year. He has two interpretations for every event in his past: his own generosity, and misfortune. Over and over again he frowns and asks “Y’understan me?”, waiting for affirmation before speaking again. I give the affirmation whether I understand or not, because I sense he is pleading for something and I’m not sure what it is. Listening to his circular utterances is like trying to decipher a lost language from one crackly tape recording. Repeatedly he seeks my validation. I get a picture of the world inside his head that is tiny, bewildering, fogged, and beset by threats. We have very little shared language, but the impression is strong that he is not waving but drowning. It seems that mourning over his lost education has been disconnected from any realism about what qualifications he might have come out with. I think he feels so helpless and trapped that his only hope is to trust his sacrificed opportunities as proof of his worth.

D-man seems a good man. The ethic of helping his family to bring up his younger brothers and sisters drives him, or at least so he presents himself. He holds himself up to scrutiny to complete strangers, pleading “Here are the facts. Am I worth anything? Please tell me if I am worth anything.” Despite his slightly ridiculous cap and his hour of repeated sentences, he makes me want to cry. An hour with D-man is a more illuminating and nuanced introduction to poverty, disempowerment and marginalisation than any sociology textbook.

Raising Wapishana Women’s Voices for International Women’s Day

2010-03-08T17:34:00.000-04:00

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/jmbroscombe/InternationalWomenSDayAishalton#

“An’ I am a woman yes,
It’s the whole day a workin’,
Takin’ care of ma family man, aha, mmhmm,
Can’t get time to scratch ma head man,
If you see how I sweatin’,
Start ma work since the day began Ooii!”

One by one they step forward, as Nurse Leslyn and I sing their verse. Alzira utterly natural with her warishi slung heavy on her forehead, machete in each hand, serene and toothlessly smiling. Dorothy getting a huge laugh for “Don’t you tell me ah robbin’!” with her sinister sunglasses and wads of trader’s cash. Mary in nurse’s costume, enthusiastically miming blood-letting. Miss Joan as the mother, with real borrowed baby as prop. Alison in apron and ‘sanitary hat’ (chef’s) throwing her hands up to shield herself against “da fire I facin’.” We finish with the verse above, as all the women step forward and demonstrate their alleged faint-heartedness and exhaustion with aplomb, verve and gleaming grins.

This is the 99th year of International Women’s Day. It’s my first. I’m not sure I even knew it existed. In Vietnam, Bulgaria, China and Russia it’s a national holiday. I suppose I never feel the need for feminine solidarity in Britain.

Here I do. I know women work hard everywhere. But ZOWEE they work hard here. And by ‘woman’ I mean every female over eleven years old who is spending more than a third of her waking hours on housework. Little girls who are failing in school may well be bringing up two babies at home. The tasks are endless and most of them are back-breaking. Bringing up bewildering numbers of children, farming, grating cassava for farine (the local staple, rather like a hard and pungent couscous), hauling water, heaving great buckets of clothes to the creek to wash and then bringing them back a hundred times heavier wet. Building a fire in this equatorial heat for cooking. Walking to the sewing centre to make clothes. These are the tasks most of the women do before they start thinking about earning a little money. “I know I should have got up at 1a.m. to start making pepperpot”, a lady said to me yesterday, “But my back and feet were so painful from farming the day before that I lay in till 4a.m!” She laughed self-deprecatingly. Sluggardly.

We had decided for International Women’s Day that we would all come out to practice for the five evenings before it. Wednesday there were four of us. Thursday only the two foreigners turned up. Friday Kristin was tearing her hair out trying to teach her wonderful and carefully choreographed African dance to absent participants. At this point we dropped half the programme. Saturday was better, with about seven people out. Sunday I went around bullying personal friends into joining in. There was no risk of us suffering from over-rehearsal. Monday afternoon when people were still having their first go at a programme item, I realised it was going to be an utter flop. Monday evening, when we were due to start, the speakers weren’t working, the amp had a problem, and there was no audience.

I was absolutely wrong to despair. The technical hitches were a fortuitous time-warp allowing an audience to gather. An hour after we were due to start, new speakers appeared in the back of a pick-up. Witch-doctor techies did their divinations. And off we went. Maya Angelou poems declaimed by our feistiest feminist, Nurse Bertha. Dances, songs, a reading about domestic violence which was patently close to the bone. Our wonderful “Aishalton Women” song captured something very interesting about the spirit in which the women here accomplish the heroism of daily survival. Suddenly I recognised my presumptuous stupidity in complaining about people not coming out to practices. Where would they possibly find the time? International Women’s Day is a moment to recognise the invisible women. Not our mothers, not our divas, not our success story women, but the women who quite literally bring to birth the whole world.

As we finished with “I Will Survive” as Gloria Gaynor certainly never pictured it, under the equatorial stars with Amerindian backing dancers, we were serenading all those women who are not the protagonists, not the Iceni, and certainly not the glamorous bare-breasted Amazonian giants of childhood fables. In Communist China, women’s sudden gender jump was sloganised as “Women hold up half the sky”. Here, many women also hold up more than half the roof with their earnings. They accept the loss of their migrating children as matter-of-factly as they welcome their sixth pregnancy. They just get on with it- an expression that somehow masks the shocking volume of the ‘it’, but also under-rates their equanimity, their stamina, their wondrous capacity for mirth.

The Interior is a Foreign Country: They Do Things Differently There

2010-02-28T10:48:00.001-04:00

Not long out of Georgetown, we are stopped by an Afro-Guyanese policeman whose Creole leads to instant misunderstandings with Amar’s heavily accented Indian English. But the eye-opener is with Percy, our Amerindian driver, who is viewed with great suspicion. “You Guyanese?” he snaps, checking his I.D. card again disbelievingly. Percy does not respond in kind, despite his superlative claim to that identity, at least if centuries count for anything.

Guyana’s indigenous Amerindian population is only 7% of the total, but they occupy 95% of its land, and have done, archaeologists reckon, for approximately 11,000 years. 90% of the population lives in the remaining 5%, the coastal strip. For many of them, that 95% is one place, ‘the interior’. Ten years ago, a Guyanese could not travel freely in their own country. They needed a separate pass for each place in the interior to be visited. And it’s prohibitively expensive. And it is neither comfortable nor convenient to get ‘there’, or to move around once you have. Amerindians, except some groups nearby, face equivalent barriers to visiting the coast. The physical gap compounds the information gap which compounds an imagination gap that keeps the two worlds apart.

On our return to Guyana, we had been catapulted straight into the Jesuit Regional Meeting. It’s a delicate privilege to sit in on parts of an insiders’ meeting when you are an outsider yourself. But over the two days we are there, the generalizations being made stand less and less up to scrutiny, because in so many senses we are discussing two different countries. The key child protection issues are completely different between coast and interior. Demographics- different. Work roles- unrecognizably different. Constraints, problems, rewards, relationships- all different.

I have misquoted L. P. Hartley’s opening sentence in "The Go-Between" because there is a time-gap between the coast and the interior as surely as there is a cultural gap. We in the interior live in a deluvian world, drenched with nature red in tooth, claw and my blood (in the case of the mosquitoes). We live in constant awareness of food, water shortage, death, birth, jaguar attacks, huge dinosaur-like birds, cow slaughtering- what Garrison Keillor calls “living between the ground and God”. On the coast most people live a life more akin to the one I was born to: cars and phones and running water and street violence and sassy children and fashion and abysmal radio adverts for small businesses and junk food and jobs. We inhabit different centuries of social interaction, of opportunities and of possessions- different belongings and different belonging.

Aishalton is a self-absorbed world by necessity, since we have no commonly available media at all. No news. No transport. Most difficult of all, no communication. I remember chuckling at an attendance list being passed by a visiting NGO round one of our village meetings with “Name” and “Telephone” as the two columns, in a place with no landlines and not even a mobile signal. Villagers may understand all the words in a Georgetown newspaper but unless they’ve worked there, been educated there or lived there they cannot visualize any of it. I recall my student last term: “Miss Sarah, what’s a pavement?” Clearly, the Georgetown people running the meeting suffered the same imagination gap- “How can there be no telephones?” I’m told that in the 1960’s, students used to do exchange visits to the interior. Maybe it’s time to relaunch this. Because with voting increasingly following racial lines, and with the steady increase in the rich-poor gap between coast and interior, an alienation slowly breeding from all those gaps could rip holes in Guyana’s skin through which its unity bleeds away.

Journeying Mercies

2010-02-11T19:06:00.000-04:00

As a child, knee-socked in a sombre Baptist prayer meeting, the oft-repeated weighty phrases bedded in my head. ‘Journeying mercies’ was one of my favourites. The ‘our-er’ assonance gives it a reassuring rightness; of course there should be mercies. What did those sober Ulstermen mean? Usually, I reckon they meant ‘arriving mercies’- the danger was the journey itself, the mercy the safe arrival. But I like the idea of the journey as the bearer of mercies; the travel of consolation.

I’ve never done the journey the whole way from Georgetown on the Caribbean to Aishalton near the Equator in daylight before. The rainforest begins after about two hours and stretches and stretches and stretches beyond the imagination. Hours pass, rutted red road, spattered dull green roadside trees. A kind of mental lumbering results from all that lumber- synapses slow down, minutes last for hours and hours for minutes. The rear oscillates similarly, between numbness and agony. It is not a journey where you can forget your own existence: the aches of holding one unnatural position prevent unselfconsciousness. The footwell is full, as always here. I am acquiring the necessary fatalism about that. For one person in the back to move their foot is everyone’s business.

My favourite rainforest tree on this journey I decide to name the Teenage Boy tree. It is very tall, painfully thin, in drainpipe trouser bark, with that mop floppy haircut that always seems to come back into fashion with some minimally tweaked detail. And to complete the resemblance, it never stands up straight.

We reach the Kurupukari crossing of the upper Essequibo at 1pm. I had not realised that you have to pay in Georgetown, eight hours away: if you reach this point without your docket, you have to go back and fetch it. Can you IMAGINE the uproar if we tried that in Europe?! Eight hours driving could take you across two small countries.

I see evidence of the creatures of the rainforest adapting almost magically to their changing environment (can’t you hear the reverentially hushed Attenboraic tones?). Stopping outside Iwokrama Rainforest office to show our papers, I see a sand lizard darting into the pile of cement powder it has made its home, by a heap of rusting iron. The only creature not hoping for rain.
When we reach the Rupununi, the crossing is almost completely dry. We encounter Mary from Dadanawa Ranch, trotting across the sharp stones in bare feet to greet us, in Wapishana of course. Her warishi is full of wet washing, strap across the forehead supporting the basket on her back. She swings it off her head and I reach to lift it into the jeep. With both hands, I can barely raise it. She is four foot six. Her friend follows on a bicycle, baby held on the crossbar, bucket hanging from the handlebars with three puppies inside.

And there are yet more mercies. I find myself coming home. Like Moley in the Wind in the Willows, the scents and ordinary sights arouse a sense of belonging, of symbiosis. The first crested caracara, the call of the southern lapwing, our trees- my first Wapishana word was ‘iminaru’, the sandpaper tree. The assumption that you wave at everyone, demonstrating that we’ve left Lethem and its delusions of suavity behind. This year I can see that the road is a road, not a sand track across endless savannah, and I recognise all the turnings, and know the villages at the end of them. And at the end of the journey, the soft bed, the candle in a frankfurter tin, the chilli soup and the relaxed undemanding welcome of the sisters, who have cleaned my house but also offer me the freedom of theirs.

I have lived among the Wapishana for a year now. People know at least my public face. I have been welcomed back with typical understated warmth. The journey of real mutual understanding might be on the horizon. I am sure it will be full of unique and startling mercies.

Instead of another success-stuffed Christmas Circular...

2009-12-19T11:28:00.000-04:00

... it seems fitting to celebrate the end of this blog with an enormous, intermittently attractive, unwieldy patchwork quilt of the new experiences that have made this year so-

so-

vivid. Remarkable. Four-dimensional. Engrossing. If it’s true that a change is as good as a rest, I must now be the most relaxed person ever to grace their hammock.

The year has held many haunting moments. Standing in the moonlight outside Sand Creek’s termite-infested church, being bitten by ants, while the ladies sang “Silent Night” to me in Wapishana and I sang it for them in German, our voices soft and unreverberant in all that thick air. Chewing, disbelieving, on my first redolent taunting Bacchic spice mango. Sitting on the balcony at the presbytery, holding B’s hand and watching his heart leak out his eyes on that strange, wrong, incomprehensible day in March. Panning for gold in the meandering and rubble-strewn rivers of my students’ remarkable Literature papers. Listening to little Ashley’s brother Hank performing ‘Wind beneath my Wings’ on Teacher’s Day, hearing the sparseness of his breath, wondering if he will need heart surgery next year, hoping so much that he won’t. Opening my mouth at the music school to explain the lyrics of “And Can it Be” and hearing my father speak. The different burn of each of this year’s four deaths. Realising I was wrong. Realising I was right. Realising I was scared. Realising I was enough.

On a sillier note, here is an offering for the list-fetishists! I’ve included the good, the bad and the ugly, but each is memorable (!) or important in some way.

• I pitied a lizard (poor iguana, condemned to steaks for nicking the haricot beans)
• Rode a hundred miles (on unsurfaced road, without stopping) in the flatbed of a truck
• Ate an egg still hot from a chicken’s butt (cooked, I hasten to add)
• Killed lots of scorpions (I didn’t pity them at all!)
• Bought fourteen pairs of pinking shears
• Lived under a thatch
• Slept overnight in a hammock in various bizarre mud buildings
• Awoke from a nightmare of a cockroach in my armpit biting me- to find a cockroach in my armpit, biting me
• Sang and danced in the Amazonian rain
• Baked proper cake in a pan
• Threw bricks at cows (slobbery washing-mascerating gits)
• Taught music, giant stave and all
• Developed a profound and affectionate admiration for a sixty-eight year old nun
• Shared a latrine with three bats
• Fell in love with mosquito nets
• Got pulled into a Wapishana dance in public and didn’t completely disgrace myself
• Got gum disease from poor nutrition
• Got an article published in a Swedish journal (random, I know)
• Awoke to find myself being stung by a scorpion IN MY OWN BED. I’m sure that’s against the rules.
• Finally acquired the art of reading slowly! Me!
• Smelt pungently of powdered black pepper and cassava, for weeks on end
• Hated horses (WHY must they scream all night?)
• Started learning an Amerindian language
• Valued my Chinese fan at its true worth
• Had my computer pooed on deliberately by a gecko. MANY times.
• Had to present my Yellow Fever Certificate at a border
• Facilitated a whole-village plan for the future
• Found a live bird-eating spider in my house (the Broscombe Court promptly condemned it to death, with Mr Broscombe as executioner)
• Failed utterly to get bored of water spice mangoes
• Gazed my fill at an equatorial sky-full of stars
• Kept a blog (never say never)
• Had my shower hut squatted in by a stubborn small snake and had to shower in the laundry bucket in my house with all the shutters closed for privacy for a few days
• Killed my first snake (the day we left). Right back atcha!
• Set up Aishalton’s first school choir
• Machetéd a coconut open and drank the milk straight from it
• Lived in a malarial area (AND DIDN’T GET MALARIA HALLELOOOOOOOJAH!)
• Lost my irreplaceable friend and mother-in-law Sue

What strikes me as I write that is how creature-filled the year has been. I never realised before quite how unpopulated my life has always been by anyone except people. ‘Close to nature’ (a phrase redolent with eco-tourist mystique) smells, hurts and keeps you awake.

Has it been a ‘good’ year? Depends on your gauges. Valuable, certainly: I have gained so much- stamina, patience, exactitude. It has had some treasure moments. But I have lost some things I can’t afford too, most notably health and fitness, and a person very precious to me. A year like this tends to suffer from too much measurement. Taking stock can become a bit of a jostling stock-take when too many people join in! It’s sufficient to say that I am grateful for it, amused and bemused by how much there is still to learn. Next year I will laugh more, say ‘No’ more, fear less, pay more attention to our wellbeing. Thank you so much to everyone who has stayed with this journal: your comments were the thread that stitched the patchwork together. Without them there would be no cohering. Merry Christmas!

THE END

Stitching up the Sewing Project

2009-12-15T17:00:00.009-04:00

When I last wrote about this on 12th October, the project was in its early stages. Now it is nearly complete. It's been a perfect equilibrium between intriguing, heartening, frustrating and infuriating.

All of our final visits went fairly well because I warned them in advance through handwritten notes (delivered via the usual fluidities of the Rupununi Cowboy Express) with individual’s names on them.

Some of the complications of the project were never solved. Sand Creek is still utterly innocent of any plans to build the long-awaited sewing centre. They are also the only village that complained that they did not get their fair share. ‘Fair share’, that is, of a free gift for which they had done nothing, with no strings attached. My child-id is very tempted to rush back there and rip the carefully selected supplies out of their ungrateful and petulant hands. My adult-ego recognises that it takes a lot of high-handed outside interventions, a lot of white parachutists, to create an atmosphere like that. (Still want to slap something, though!)

I have written into the final report a collaborative workshop next Spring, when two women from each village would have transport paid to come together for two days and discuss how best to run their sewing centres. I hope the funders agree to it. The village women will do a better job together than I could, going round running 'group management training'.

Village One, who passionately wanted everything, got it.

Village Two (The Privileged) got only dregs but remain positive.

Village Three got most things and will get their requested training too.

Village Four got parts to repair the existing machine instead of a new one.

Village Five got several new machines to help them create their new generation of seamstresses.

And Village Six got quite a lot and then complained.

Dependency culture is a massive curse here. In the Pakaraima mountains apparently it is even worse. Don’t get me wrong. Money is good. Donors are generous and to be applauded. But I am SO glad that I do not spend most of my time implementing funding projects! I WOULD eventually slap someone!

Invisible Privileges

2009-12-14T09:43:00.004-04:00

Margaret Thatcher believed she had pulled herself up by her own bootlaces and she owed none of her success to anyone else. Arrant nonsense. Pull hard on cheap bootlaces and they snap. It’s one of the most pernicious threads that you can find woven into the fabric of every self-justifying perspective- the idea of the meritocracy which starts at birth, and which makes all the world’s injustices fair and reasonable to some smug git somewhere. We in a Western democracy may not be born on to a level playing field, but at least we’re on the pitch at all.

Why do we tend to believe that we deserve our blessings when we have them, but never our sufferings?

I think it’s when our privileges are invisible to us that we find it so hard to be grateful. One of the invisible privileges of life in Aishalton, for example, is that I am not ‘a woman’, I’m me, Sarah the development worker. I don’t get any hassle except the occasional smiley catcall up at Burning Hills. I didn’t even notice that as a privilege until I went to Georgetown last month.

Here are a few of the privileges that I have understood retrospectively about being a Westerner.
In Britain, I never had to perform tasks I was bad at. I missed out on the humility (humiliation?!) of playing the guitar in concerts (playing?!- imagine a cockroach running up and down a badminton racquet. 'Scritch sss- scritch sss- scritch scritch'). Of running training in fields about which I know little.

Throughout our time here, we know that we can always leave. I remember a British politician living on the minimum wage for the seven weeks of Lent, and proudly discovering that, whilst it was not easy, he could manage fine. I wonder if he kept accounts in the weeks before and after? I wonder did he buy any clothes, any furniture, any trips to the dentist? I wonder about his social calendar before and after too. I would bet that he went to at least one big public entertainment (play, opera or football match depending on proclivity) within a week of finishing that. He seemed blind to the stamina that comes with temporariness. Poverty is not primarily about limited money- it’s about insecurity and fragility, the tedium, powerlessness, debt, and most of all, a sense that it will never ever get better. I am anxious when the well runs dry, but not despairing anxious. It’s novelty anxiety.

Cheap groceries. It’s such a shock to live in a country of low salaries, in a village where hardly anyone has any formal employment, and pay AT LEAST double for every single item. 'Tesco value'-quality pop for £1.50. Rubbish shampoo that makes your hair squeak for £3. A can of tomatoes for over £1. In a way I knew this, but it’s so blatant. We watch the film “Amazing Grace” with pride, thrilled at the abolition of slavery, as though we don’t have slaves, because all of the people who make our lives cheap and simple are invisible to us.

Perhaps the greatest invisible privilege of all is that we don’t accept other peoples’ prejudices about us. Paolo Freire says that oppression survives because the oppressed collude. So did Robert Tressell in ‘The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist’. If I ever doubted it, I would no longer. Coastal Guyanese believe Amerindians to be passive, lazy, over-indulged, dependent, unmotivated and bad at everything. ‘Backward’. Many Amerindians return from Georgetown with a disdain for their culture from which they will never recover. The rest don’t return at all. But the sight of Wapishana young adults aping black DJs and tarty Brazilian dancers makes me cringe with a deeply embarrassed pity. People despise you because of your race. So you accept their superiority and copy them. So now they despise you even more. But it’s a rare person who starts down that road and ever turns back.

What do we do with this knowledge? Because it is not our fault, and we cannot fix it.

For me, the provisional answer is this. I suspect that most people are a seagull perched on the iceberg of their own lives, observing its exterior and drawing conclusions with great confidence but a minimum of information. Only the wise can be a diving penguin, seeing the iceberg’s looming hidden bulk, knowing the seen and the unseen intimately, and predicting their impact on each other. And the rarest, rarest ARE the iceberg, feeling its mutability from far inside. And maybe that’s why we in the West are not happy despite all our privilege. We even boast about being miserable. In a highly developed society, one of the great lost gifts of being human is the sheer, simple, wordless joy of not being uncomfortable, or in any pain, or there being any big thing wrong; the state of being that equates ‘nothing is wrong’ exactly with ‘everything is right’. Finding ways to be penguins or icebergs, to remind ourselves of our privileges, to learn contentment, is an obligation. You cannot have this, you cannot feel it, in a state of permanent ease. Maybe that’s why an easy life is not easy to live well.

The well has run dry

2009-12-03T11:16:00.002-04:00

- an expression I have always used metaphorically, up to now. Our well has no water, and the rains continue to tease and flutter in the edges of our vision. But they do not come.

Today I collected shower water from the largely disused public well. It smells and tastes rusty but flows clear. My skin itches, but maybe that’s psychological. The taste remains with me, sour iron- I can smell it on my skin. It reminds me of when I was on blood thinners and had a perpetual slight scent and taste of blood from the frequent nose bleeds.

And so today I find myself preoccupied with water. Will I come out in a rash? What will I cook with, wash up with? There is no real cause for worry: I will collect drinking water from the Sisters. If necessary, I will ask the Jesuits for a daily shower at Fortress Jesuiticus up the hill. But it’s the awareness that is striking me. How many more things do I take for granted, as I have always taken water for granted? Because they aren’t really visible until I don’t have them. Is it into the thousands?

I think, properly for once, of what it is like to live without water security. Because the rusty well water I am trying to avoid is the upper aspiration for many millions of people (but how real can that be to us? Just as mortgage anxiety isn’t really imaginable to them). How will it feel to me when the ‘inferior’ well dries up? Will I be better equipped to imagine watching my children drinking filthy water, scooping out dollops of excrement before washing, swimming in a sewer? And then to imagine them feverish and ill, and knowing it’s the water that is causing it, and having NOWHERE to go to wash them clean, to rinse out their insides? It reminds me once again that Aishalton is not really poor. The other users of my well are going to collect from relatives: it’s a slightly longer walk, but they are not worried for the short term. (Water conservation for the long term is becoming a pressing issue for the South Rupununi now, though). But for those people in hundreds of places suffering from chronic water shortage, what GRACE they have, not to hate us all for our mindless privilege. How understandable when they do.

If you can have a glass of tap water that isn’t disgusting- not chilled, not filtered, not cordialled- right now, please drink one and give thanks for it.

Learning Wapishana

2009-11-25T12:27:00.000-04:00

In my life I have learnt one language (Mandarin Chinese), made an effort with three more (French, Spanish and Tibetan) and had a lovely time dilettanting about with another four (Italian, Welsh, Latin and Modern Greek). Learning a new language gets steadily more fascinating as I get older. It’s so intriguing to discover what people have no need to say, how they clump some sounds, split fine hairs of distinction with others and sift out fundamentals I can’t do without. My ears need to readjust, but so do my assumptions. A language embeds its culture, and perhaps none more so than a culture that is dying.

Eleven of us are coming to the thatched community centre for five hours a week to learn Wapishana. Two are native speakers and are coming to improve their reading and writing. The rest are beginners. The teacher is a fluent native speaker, but (like many TEFL teachers of my acquaintance) knows very little about his own grammar. The primer is written for native speakers working on literacy, so it doesn’t help him at all. I am rapidly turning into the next door neighbour’s five-year-old that you always wanted to slap, with my relentless “But why...?”s.

He tries to teach us the dead ‘u’ and ‘au’ sounds that remind me of North Wales ‘y’s. But he does not mention the tiny glottal stop before every consonant which gives the language its lovely heavy-on-the-clutch-bus-driver rhythm. He teaches us a bewilderingly random vocabulary. We know the noun ‘fork-tailed flycatcher’ long before we have learnt any nouns for household objects. The verb ‘to collect poisoned fish’ comes three lessons before ‘to hear’, and we still haven’t reached ‘to do’. When I asked for the verb ‘smells bad’ to complement our newly acquired ‘my armpit’, the teacher whooped with hilarity as if I was immensely witty. In fact I was trying to make use of ‘armpit’ in any context at all, and this was all I could think of. Do I REALLY need to word for armpit so early in my language development? We also do a fair bit of learning a noun for “a small brownish bird” or two different verb forms distinguished by “well, they’re more or less the same, but you can’t use them the same, but they’re the same really”. “Is this present or past tense?” (Pause). “Both”. (Pause). “Oh”.

My favourite thing so far is numbers. Wapishana only counts up to 400, because it counts by the body. In English we tend to talk about ‘... on the fingers of one hand’, but take away shoes, and it’s logical to use twenty rather than ten as your base unit. So twenty whole persons makes 400. Over that, you just say “enough/ plenty/ many”.

One is ‘its seed’. Two is ‘with a companion’. Three, possibly my favourite, is ‘according to the number of stones under a pot’. Four is ‘each with his companion’. Five is ‘one hand’, ten ‘both our hands’, eleven ‘one toe to our foot’. By the time you reach fifty and ‘two people’s bodies and both hands more’, the words are becoming seriously unpronounceable- “Dya’utam-pi’(d)yan-nannaa-baokooka’u-powa’a”. I have never spent a day trying to learn the numbers 1-5 in a language- and failing. I love the length of time it would take you to count anything. Imagine Wapishana accountancy classes. Or mental arithmetic- that’s not mental gymnastics, that’s contortionism!

So together we struggle onwards amidst a great deal of hilarity. It’s quite likely that we will come out at the end of the course only able to tell almost any person or combination of people that they have seen a deer. We are learning from the inside in a way that isn’t at all coherent or comprehensive. But as a result we’re gaining a few precious insights into this understated culture that has welcomed us. And we foreigners hope that our enjoyment of the language, and fascination with its particularities, might give some of the disenchanted young adults pause before they finish dumping the last vestiges of their ancestral culture into a nice shiny modern trashcan.

When the Bough Breaks

2009-11-23T12:20:00.004-04:00

Amerindian communities are often said to have alcohol problems. Before we came, I imagined that this meant some hardcore drunkards. It’s a lot more disturbing than that. I have to rack my brains to think of men in our community (over six hundred adults) whom I have not seen paralytically drunk on numerous occasions. I don’t mean giggling. I mean staggering around bloodshot with vomit down their fronts, looking like a small weary moose that’s been back-ended by a pickup truck. I can think of men that I have not seen in this state. About eight, offhand.

Locals react to extreme intoxication with tolerant amusement. There is no shame in losing control of your bladder in public occasionally. No shame in being so drunk you cannot stand up by eleven a.m. on a market day morning. No shame in giving your wife another black eye because she nagged you when you were tanked up on sweet potato hooch.

I hate to state the obvious, but opium is the opium of the people. I often think of Homer’s lotos eaters here, lulled into oblivion by a consumption that ends up consuming them. Gentle, friendly personality absorbers that disguise their winding path to damage and eventually death.

Our friendly pesky drunk is Silvio. Silvio is early forties, and lives very close to us in the valley bottom. He warmed to me the very first time he met me. Of course, Silvio would have warmed to a lamp-post in his bemused and glowing state, as long as it stood still and listened. He is always friendly and almost always beyond coherence. He is also one of the main drivers of the village tractor. The village tractor does not go very fast. This is probably for the best. Silvio took B round to photograph his wife and children, who gave him short shrift and looked absolutely murderous. I only found out why yesterday- he has no wife. He manufactured a life, perhaps to impress his new foreign friends.

Silvio died last week in a mining accident. They sluice channels through forested areas and pan gold from the sluiced mud. The sluicing undermined some tree roots, and the tree fell and killed Silvio, and a young father of two infants from Karaudarnau, and maimed several others who are still undergoing medical treatment across the Brazilian border. I thought Silvio’s liver would carry him off in another ten years or so. The last time I saw him, about three weeks ago, he was carrying a bucket of plantain wine which he vainly tried to share with me. He lurched close in, talking softly on zephyrs of fermented plantain fume. I realised he was going in for a big lippysuction just in time, so averted my face and got a wet spongy smacker on the neck instead. I just smiled and said goodbye. I’m glad I didn’t shout at him now. As if it makes any difference. I think he was a pleasant man, but already it was hard to tell who was left in there.

How Bollywood Helped Me Buy an Amerindian Boy's School Shoes

2009-11-13T15:08:00.005-04:00

"I'm looking for a boy's black lace-up boot that fits this DVD box". Not an auspicious start. The sales assistant responds to this quixotic opener with that special Georgetown bored quizzic. I explain the situation. Raul, the gorgeous Ashley's older brother, needs a pair of black lace-up shoes or boots for school. My sizing guideline and style remit is as follows:

That's all I have. And that is how I find myself swizzling school shoes repetitively over the face of Bollywood's smiling Top 50 Golden Melodies. We decide that Raul must be a size 2 (perhaps 3 in a narrow fitting). He tells me I only have seven days to bring the shoes back if they don't fit. (The journey to check size would take 6 days and cost approximately 17.7 times the price of the shoes). We break a broom straw to length to aid us in our deliberations. We poke the various shoe and boot options. Of course he doesn't have the one I want. I end up with what I hope is a happy compromise.

The shoes are plastic and not cheap: they cost two days of Alison's wages. Weep, all ye who purchase leather shoes cheaper than this at TK Maxx on a whim. Mourn, thou who who throwest away perfectly good footwear for no better reason than that thou art sick of it. I squirm uncomfortably as I think how I would feel if I had to give my hard-earned to a foreigner who knows nothing about children's feet so that she can bring back something that might be completely wrong, just because I have not the power to do my own shopping. Isn't it ironic that the same people who have all the money, and all the choices, also get everything cheaper than the poorest? Oh, yes, I remember, that's what made America and Britain great in the first place. But slavery is in the past. Colonialism is in the past.

Yeah, right.

Trepidation, contemplation, acculturation

2009-11-12T15:47:00.009-04:00

A year ago today, I landed in Guyana, alone and bursting with trepidation. Would this be our next home? Did I have the right balance of work skills and gumption to be useful here?

Now I sit, once more alone, in a cafe fifty yards from St George's Cathedral, the tallest wooden building in the world (allegedly). I am in Georgetown getting my head cleared out with nose drops, antibiotics and dental implements. (My sinuses and gums seem to be attempting a mail merge without the approved software). B is back in Aishalton, being cooked for, cooking and as usual being cooked. I am here allowing my head to clear in several senses, unremarkably and without haste.

It is a rare treat in any life, and perhaps more than average in the Guyanese interior, where even a "day off" unavoidably includes the usual roadie-cum-domestic servant duties, to hit 'pause' and rest. The painkillers are working, kind Claire does my laundry, and this time round I am not bursting with anything.

Georgetown looks different now. The market is a beautiful scruffy cornucopia, spilling over with juicy largesse. Catcalls and being called "baby" seem dreamily absurd, like shouting out "hummingbird!" to a rhino, or calling a spade a flibbertigibert. I wander around too smelly and clearly spaced out to be worthy of a choke and rob. The shops are funny- half of the produce looks desirable, the other half comic. Designer handbag for a year's meat and rice price? Why?!?! Next year it will be shamefully out of date, and frankly a lot of them look like a skinned camel's arse with bicycle ballbearing races stitched into them anyway.

I like Guyana's eclectic exigencies of place. Set three of us down in the supermarket, with a trolley each, one shopping for the Pakaraima mountains, one for the Deep South savannahs and one for Georgetown, and you would not believe the three trolleyloads had come from the same shop (or possibly the same planet). I come away bemused by the shop's demand that I make choices, with two cans of fish spray (death to scorpions ha HAAAA!), biscuits containing roughage for B, packet soups that I would not consider stomaching in England but which I now fall upon with a beagling Aunt Dahlia whoop, the same soy sauce I buy in Leeds at three times the price, a bashed Betty Crocker box cake for a fifth of the Aishalton price, mosquito coils and powdered orange juice. Such extravagance. Of course, I only buy non-perishables: I can't buy anything that melts (soap, sweet biscuits, fruit...) or crushes (noodles, crisps, breakfast cereal) as the bus journey back is bumpy, dusty and hot beyond imagination.

Last year I was in portentous mode. Big decisions, marvelling at the exoticism of it all. This year I am mundane in my thrills. Aishalton is home, normality, and Georgetown in contrast feels so developed that I keep forgetting I'm not in England. Buying some bad novels is the limit of my ambitions. I wonder what the relationship is between mundanity and peace? Whatever it is, I like it. I need less. I desire less. I am content with less. Or perhaps it's the painkillers talking!

"Miss, what's a pavement?"

2009-10-25T18:05:00.005-04:00

We sit in the lab twice a week, sharing our weighty borrowed purple ‘Elements of Literature: Introduction’ tomes. Every third lesson I write up or dictate one of the syllabus’s set poems from our sole copy of the anthology, and they use half our available time writing it into their exercise books.

There are seven of us, including me. I haven’t taught this form before. One boy I recognise from frequent detentions. One girl is one of our sporting stars. One has a heart defect introduced to me theologically by her mother. One came to me over the summer for a private tutorial because she was upset by her summer English exam mark. The remaining two are our scholarship students, though neither is outstanding: all six are similarly bright.

I count myself because we are an experiment (hence the lab, perhaps?). Not only has Aishalton Secondary School never had literature on the syllabus before: they’ve never had any arts options for CXC (the end-of-school public exams, which are Caribbean-wide). Students sit whatever subjects the staff are qualified to offer them. Since most are Aishaltoners who studied in this same region, the scientific bent self-perpetuates.

Despite loving reading, these students have read very little because there are so few books in the village. Most of them are regular church-goers in conservative traditions. Perhaps that is why they have such a strong instinct to view all texts as infallible. They approach each item with deference, seeking only to understand its top layer. They struggle to understand that stories and poems are authored. They want to stop once ‘what’s it about?’ is answered. And the story has absolute authority: if the moral is that it’s bad to be lazy, then it’s bad to be lazy. ‘Why?’ does not arise. And ‘how?’ is the hardest of all. The text’s plucking of your heartstrings or tickling of your funnybone is accepted, not examined. And like most students, they want to get it right. ‘Do you like this poem?’ has always been a hard question.

They also struggle with form. Take rhyme, for example. I remember realising that I’d always taken English rhyme for granted as an aural absolute, until my Chinese students couldn’t grasp it. With good reason: no syllables in Mandarin end with a consonant, so they couldn’t exactly hear the consonants as rhymes. You can’t call words with different tones rhyming, so if you said “sea” falling and “he” rising, they don't rhyme in Chinese. It wasn’t at all that they couldn’t hear enough- they could hear too much going on. How could they say whether those final consonants rhymed or not? It was bewildering. Like my friend Katy, who is so musical that she used to do really badly at exam aural tests, because when they played two notes for her to sing, she could hear all the harmonics clashing and vibrating in her head. She heard sixteen notes, not two.

I’ll give you one further shard from the tip of the cultural iceberg. We read a pleasingly understated poem called ‘Richard Cory’. I’m using deduction to help them engage with the poem, so I write it up leaving out the shock denouement. I try to explain the concept of living on the street- there is no homelessness here, and in a place that never gets cold, where people spend much time outside their house, roof it with ite palm leaves, and live on local fruit and wild meat, it wouldn’t be a very meaningful hardship anyway. I finish my explanation, feeling pleased with the general understanding, and a hand goes up. “Miss, what’s a pavement?”. No wonder I’m so keen on teaching them to read for gist... They guess with success the denouement, despite not recognising the pavement.

Despite the yawning gaps, they progress by leaps and bounds. Golda’s test poem ("rhyme 1&3, 2&4") about the Inter-House sports jumps off the page at me:

On the track I ran the three thousand metre race,
With my hands moving to and fro for speed.
The sun was very hot as it reached my face,
Falcons shouted for first place- their only need.

She’s clearly feeling for a regular metre, as well as choosing perfect rhymes. I think, all things considered, that’s extremely impressive.

Detention boy turns out to be sparky and full of imaginative flair. Sporty girl is perceptive, and intriguing when she tries. Scholarship girl is a budding actress, reading her drama parts with verve. Scholarship boy is lazy or tentative and it’s hard to deduce which. The girl with the heart defect is full of heart. Worried Summer Tutorial girl is zooming through with a great combination of originality and pleasing turns of phrase. I have no idea whether they will ever do well, but I have every confidence that they deserve to. I wonder is there room in the system to value excellence from scratch?

Expatriology

2009-10-23T12:43:00.001-04:00

‘Expat’ is a heavy word. For most of us, the baggage it hefts is negative. Volunteers generally despise expats. I think insulation is the main reason. Expats to them are people drive from air-conditioned house to air-conditioned office in an air-conditioned jeep. They bring home with them, thus neatly preventing ‘abroad’ from having any chance of becoming their home. Their privilege maintains an imbalance (of goods and power) that makes it very hard to form real friendships. So they become ghettoised. I guess they find their unfreedom to walk unmolested through the streets a preferable state to living like the locals. And their ghetto is usually companionable and comfortable, and not packed with searching questions or eyes.

But do I stop being a foreigner myself, just because I despise the expat lifestyle? Just because ‘all my friends are local people’ does not mean that they view me as one of them exactly.

There are two kinds of books that fill me to overflowing with rage. One type I mentioned previously: “Grapes of Wrath” or “Cry Freedom” paint injustices that act on me like caffeine. My pulse quickens, my throat tightens, I leap and dash. The Chinese have a fantastic word for stimulant- ‘ciji’ –which combines the word for thorn with the idea of energy. That’s it exactly.

But the other kind is a book so vacuous, so glib that I’m filled with disgust, and a burning desire to slap someone. I have just finished reading an American publication called, simply, “Expat”. If you are unpleasantly racist about Americans and seeking evidence to support your bias, buy it immediately. Such a collection of solipsistic, arrogant, smug, incapable, narcissistic, racist, self-satisfied, neo-colonialist, unresourceful, judgmental, pitiable fools has not been seen together in public since the British Raj tea-parties in the late thirties.

The majority of the women speaking through this volume moved abroad to write. Perhaps they hoped that being somewhere more interesting would make them more interesting. They move to exotic foreign locations such as Belfast and Liverpool, as well as Bangladesh, Mexico and China. Most are pre-Copernican in their belief that the central drama in the lives of the foreigners they encounter is their arrival. There are four main kinds of story: comedy (‘Aren’t they absurd?!’), pathos (‘It’s really really difficult being abroad’), righteous anger (‘They should be like us!’), and the most honest: autobiography (‘Look at me! Look at me! Look at MEEEE!’). The majority seem to gain no self-knowledge from their experience.

Take one instance. A young woman spends a year in China, and writes a story about trying to cook a chicken. The obvious thing to do is to make it funny. Nope. One might suspect that the hapless foreigner unable to do basic tasks would be the butt of the story. Nope. She begins by being disgusted by the market, is then disgusted with her oven, and finally gives up and THROWS AWAY A WHOLE CHICKEN. This should be a parable about spoilt brat waste, not a biographical account of a life abroad. The terrifying thing is that I think she hopes we will empathise with her. It does not occur to her to boil the chicken. Or make stock with the chicken. I am particularly struck that in walking down twelve flights of stairs, presumably past 24 flats or so, it does not occur to her to GIVE THE CHICKEN AWAY! She throws it on the rubbish for the rats. Or “perhaps the wispy-haired homeless woman who searched the trash pile daily would make her a meal”. Fortunately, she had the foresight to wrap the rubbery carcasse in a copy of the Washington Post, so if the homeless woman was disorganised enough to have no cooking appliances handy, she could read some good quality American journalism instead.

Did she never once look inside herself and wonder whether Qingdao’s refusal to adjust to her bore any relation to her refusal to adjust to Qingdao? Did she ever wonder if the disappointed expectations extended further than the market and the oven manufacturer’s? I wonder if the homeless woman despaired of (or indeed noticed) her?

I suppose everyone who writes does so in the hope that people will feel. But these women all seem to write in order to encourage the reader to clone THEIR reactions. Most remind me of the tidy blonde girl in the primary playground, mocking in a piping voice those who can’t do the newest skipping game, arbitrating primly on acceptable shoe style, and squealing to teacher if you step out of orthodoxy in any way. The best stories are the anxious ones. Four out of twenty-two recognise that it might not be reasonable to expect the country to adjust to them, rather than them to it. Most striking of all is the narcissism. They are greedy. I am flicking through again, desperately trying to find one who isn’t unquestioningly hoovering up all the benefits to themselves. Yes, there is one- the one who goes mad and goes home.

I am checking in the honestest bit of my head. Yes, embarrassed though I am to admit it, I can see the ‘Look at MEEEEE!’ in this blog. I can see the pathos too. But I can truly say that I write to try and bring Aishalton into your room like a vapour; sights, smells, occasions, particularities. I think I am more interested in you imagining Guyana than imagining me in it.

I am an expat here, whether I like it or not. I do not belong and never will. But that brings its benefits. We all need sympathetic outsiders sometimes. Aishalton already has plenty of bright, committed, interesting locals. They don’t need any more. They accept me for my good intentions, my hard work, for some useful skills I might bring, and BECAUSE THEY ARE KIND! To be an outsider and not resented is a lovely abnormality, not a divine right.

Planning the planning for a Community Development Plan

2009-10-21T12:30:00.005-04:00

People here don’t plan. Why?- all sorts of good reasons, most of them subconscious. For folklore, Kanaima is a kind of Amerindian demon in mufti that is to blame for pretty much everything that goes wrong. Kanaima plays havoc with cause and consequence. For farming, Wapishanas are used to a pretty abundant nature and a growing season that lasts all year, though of course best in the rainy season. For history, Amerindians are inured to making the best of arbitrary outside powers with absolute control. Theirs is a story of tenacity, avoidance, tracking runaway slaves and handing them over to the Colonists, and disappearing into the forest whenever disappearance was the best option. It’s a history of powerlessness. Someone else writes the story, and the Amerindians get to make decisions only about the fringes of their lives.

How do you plan? Not a question we even ask ourselves- we just get on with it. We make lists, think ahead, and balance our personal priorities with exigencies like work and mortgages and family. We plan in a context of choices. But what if we had never had much choice, and never really expected a future that’s any different from the present?

More interestingly, why do you plan? To take control of your life, of course. To make the most of the time and opportunities you have. Ay, there’s the rub: time here is cheap and plentiful (in the weedlike rather than the bountiful sense), and opportunities rare and intimidating. And even if you do plan, Kanaima or a new government strategy or a big NGO will come and mess it all up for you.

When I told my boss about my hope of running a Community Development Plan with Aishalton Village Council that involved every adult in the village, he sent me an extremely witty reply with the following image attached:

It made me chuckle, but I think he’s got an interesting point. Real community participation sounds like communism to British people, not democracy. Why? Because we are on some deep level actually rather smug about our bastardized, warmongering, unconsultative proto-fascist pseudodemocracy. In fact, we are way past democracy- Britain generally (judging by most of the mass media) is too interested in celebrity, acquisition and getting drunk/ fit/ fat/ slim/ rich (delete according to penchant) to have much time spare to notice how our country is being run. When we do notice, we despair or despise, as if that’s enough. I think I shall call this political system ‘slobmocracy’.

So I go to meet the village council to discuss the proposal. At first I am overwhelmed by the negativity. Gradually over the first hour it dawns on me how dominant and insulting my proposal seems to them. I come from a place where the facilitator designs the process, so I have offered them a whole framework. They come from a world where high-handed outsiders lay down the law and expect them to be grateful. They want control of the framework. Over the second hour, we had some good discussion of what the village might need, and decide to go ahead with a first ‘pre-plan stage’ with a group of key stakeholders.

I had thought I was starting at the beginning, but to people here I seemed to be diving bizarrely into the middle, right into the thick of things. I had started by thinking about what the plan should contain. But no- go back a step. What needs to be planned for the plan? Go back another- who has the right to decide what needs to be planned for the plan? Not me, as the Village Council point out! Go back a third- who needs to be consulted about how to plan for the plan? Go back a fourth step- whose permission needs to be asked to plan for a plan in the first place? And go right back to the beginning, and start properly- should we have a plan at all?

So this is where our first stage begins. We hold a three-hour discussion between 24 of us. We work out what constituencies exist in the village, coming up with 28. I particularly enjoy the questions- do people who own ten sheep prefer to be called ‘ranchers’ or ‘livestock owners’? (The latter). Are ‘traditional knowledge holders’ the same as ‘culture experts’? (No, they’re all different people). Are ‘fishermen and hunters’ a subset of ‘farmers’? (No). Why are there no elders or Wapishana-only speakers here? (Silence). And we write a focus question together with everyone contributing: “What strategy and systems do we need to implement over the next 3-5 years, to turn our vision for Aishalton’s future into a secure and vibrant reality? How can every group contribute to and benefit from Aishalton’s development?”. OK, I admit that it’s two questions. It’s not concise, and it’s not smooth. But we reach a genuine consensus, and that’s remarkable. Perhaps the most potent force in the day is the sense of taking control. This community has a good quotient of clever, distinctive, thoughtful people. They can do a great deal if they put their collective mind to it. But they are also pragmatic realists- why on earth would they if there seems to be no point?

Sitting at home alone, nervously waiting for the first meeting to begin, I suddenly remember a quote from LaoZi that I used at the World Social Forum:

Go to the people.
Live among them;
Love them;
Learn from them;
Start from where they are;
Work with them;
Build on what they have.
But of the best leaders,
When the task is accomplished,
The work completed,
The people all remark:
‘We have done it ourselves’.

I tremble at the privilege of being a part of something with such potential in this community. Facilitators so often get in the way. I am fortunate that it was pointed out sharply to me by the Village Council that I was NOT starting where they were. But now I think we are building on what they have. Amen to LaoZi. Do I have a cat’s chance of proceeding with such humility and grace? Death to slobmocracy. We might as well try.

Treasures of film

2009-10-14T15:51:00.001-04:00

Right. Not enough people are making comments. You’re all being far too sensible. I’m currently devoting all my efforts to community participation, and you are going to be the victims of my enthusiasm. So here is a proper singalonga blog entry. “Join in, everyone, Kumbayaaaaa....”

I love that each of us is a little world made cunningly. I love that I and you are unique dishes, sweet or savoury, made up of the ingredients of our past, our character, our attitudes, what we have heard and read and seen, and every huge and tiny thing that has happened to us. It isn’t just love and work and living on different continents that make me what I am- it’s Annie Dillard, and my primary school teacher Miss Moore, and chocolate buttons, and Philip Larkin’s ‘Born Yesterday’ too. And for me, my sense of humour and romance and wonder has been heavily influenced by films.

B and I were watching Amelie the other night and I thrilled again at that wonderful opening, where people are introduced not by their jobs and relationships, but by what they like and don’t like doing: that sensual hand plunging into the sack of beans, the hoover nuzzling into the handbag’s grubby corners. So much more intriguing. Such potential for delighting in people’s oddities.

Is it just me? I find myself remembering (and quoting annoyingly from) films often when an incident amuses, angers or impresses me. The funny thing is, it’s not necessarily from favourite films- it’s those genius single ideas, sometimes right in the middle of a heap of old tripe. So I am going to start with ten of my absolute favourite film moments, and then I hope you will add yours in 'comments' and make us all laugh, sigh, or discover new film treasures from each other.

Heart-stoppingly romantic
The end of “A Very Long Engagement”. The only war film I have ever loved. It holds such difficult emotions and macro/ micro views together. But that final moment: “and she looked at him, and she looked at him, and she looked at him...” – I choke up now remembering it, and I only saw it once, years ago. So many war films brutalise the viewer, because that is easier; to be true to war and yet retain a sense of hope, that’s fragile and fantastic.

Most depressing
There are whole French directors’ oeuvres vying for this crown. I am going for the final death in ‘Manon des Sources’, where I very nearly managed suicide before the numerous characters did. It’s one of those films that I know I should think is brilliant, but actually has me paging through the Radio Times looking for re-runs of ‘Allo Allo’.

Vicariously satisfying
“Groundhog Day”- the insurance salesman, Ned Ryerson, played by the incomparable Stephen Tobolowsky (best ever date scene too, in Sneakers- “breakfast- shall I phone you, or nudge you?!”). Bill Murray in his endlessly repeating day, slowly developing coping strategies for Mr Infuriating, right up to the smile, the bright “Ne-ee-ee-d Rrrrrrrryerson!” and the magic fist. Ahhhhhhhh! The day the Snappy Comeback comes true.

You’ll never see reality the same (frivolous)
The tannoys at the beginning of Airplane, where the white zones and the blue zones get into a war of supremacy. Oh, and the cult members with their flowers. Oh yes, and the drinking problem. For such utter candyfloss, it has remarkable staying power. I never have seen an airport terminal in quite the same light.

You’ll never see reality the same (serious)
The night scene in Morecambe Bay in “Ghosts” by Nick Broomfield. I guess it’s hard to ignore migrant labour here in Aishalton, with our population vacuum between 16 and 40. Chinese illegal migrant workers in the UK are the tip of the iceberg. Every time I pay £3 in Aishalton for a bottle of rubbishy bargain VO5 shampoo which is 99p in Superdrug, I become more uncomfortably aware that we in the West are ripping food out of the mouths of the poorest and their children, with our subsidised lifestyle. The sad thing is that the film has no answers, and neither do I. Blame globalisation, sure, but who IS that? The buck stops on peoples graves, not in the pockets of the rich. Maybe we can’t do much, but we have to do something for somebody, anybody, or despair will cauterise us. Yes, it’s that kind of film.

Best musical moment
In Amadeus, where the brat Mozart is sparkily describing the slow movement from the Serenade for Nine Winds to Salieri, and that clarinet is followed by the oboe soaring in as if life can never go wrong again, promising to solve and satisfy and set unchangeably in order, and Salieri understands that this man cannot be outshone- he can only be crushed.

Most cringeworthy
John Clees in almost anything, but I do have a soft spot for 'A Fish Called Wanda' ’s love scene where the flat owners arrive back with their small children to find him naked, brandishing dreadful Y-fronts, and he recognises them from high society, so they chat brightly about garden parties, gymkhanas and small worlds whilst all but the children do an emperor’s new clothes. But to be fair, it’s also hard to beat the moment in ‘Muriel’s Wedding’ when she asks the Afrikaans champion swimmer sympathetically, ‘Are you black?’.

Most brilliant gift
I don;t think there's any contest for this one. 'Stranger than Fiction'- the “I brought you flours” moment, when he makes his declaration of love to the baker.

Most intriguing film facelift
‘The Philadelphia Story’ mutating tidily into ‘High Society’. A story of a woman with a brain and tongue like caustic soda divorcing a violent alcoholic, turned into a pretty musical with a saintly pairing of Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby. Butter would definitely not melt. Sixteen years previous, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart and Cary Grant sizzle dangerously. Post-McCarthy censorship blandified zingy hot sauce into sweet ketchup.

Best biopic
‘Il Postino’- what a brilliant ellipsis to have a biopic of Pablo Neruda where he isn’t the main character. He appears and later vanishes, leaving lives altered, but not mattering absolutely. How much does poetry really matter? Is the main character right to act on it? His wife certainly doesn't think so.

So there's some from me! Your turn!
xx

The South Rupununi Sewing Project

2009-10-12T11:45:00.005-04:00

About four years ago, a Jesuit here drafted up a funding bid for sewing in the South Rupununi. He requested money to buy sewing machines for six villages, so that local women could make their children’s uniforms at cost, and also earn a little income to support their families. The Austrian Women’s Day of Prayer responded generously, and the funding arrived last summer, two years after the Jesuit who requested it had left Guyana for good. And so it sat for a year, cogitating, while the current personnel wondered what to do with it.

Sounds tidy, eh? What’s not to like? A neat little development project which will benefit local women, and we can all feel satisfied and benevolent. But people change. Circumstances change. Village governance changes, and with it the dynamics and stresses in communities. Sewing can be politicised just as any resources can. In a world with as few systems as this one, which may sound like bliss to any vaguely left-wing psychoanarchists out there, it is almost inevitable that personality clashes and power dynamics dominate every group, and get their own way more often than not. There are six small villages named in the bid, and six big complications that thicken the plot.

Having visited one last month, we spent the last two weeks travelling round the other five villages. [Complication 1: the messages radioed ahead arrived as a particularly inventive Chinese Whispers]. All but one clearly need some kind of support, but their needs are different in each place. The bid was imagining sewing machines, not nuanced discussions about pinking shears, pattern books and paltry human resources. [Complication 2: in all but one village, sewing machines have appeared from other sources, so let’s hope the donors are feeling flexible, as buying more machines wouldn’t make much sense].

Of the six centres in the bid, two already have sewing centres. [Complication 3: two of the villages claim they are about to build a sewing centre. They also said so back in 2005 when the funding was applied for. They haven’t. Will they?]. The village we visited last month was given everything they needed to build a new sewing centre, and it is already half-built; halfway through, their only chainsaw broke and they have to cross the border to Brazil to get a new part. [Complication 4: half of the money was spent on this one village before I got involved, leaving one half to go into fifths, which sounds rather like too many children and not enough cake].

I said two villages already have sewing centres. [Complication 5: one of these actually has TWO sewing centres! One is Catholic and one falls under the village council. I’m here with the Jesuits, so who gets the money? Both centres assume that they are the appropriate recipient].

This leaves three. I take along my little form, and talk through my little chart, but people are bewildered by choices. I ask about their priorities in several different ways. “What do you find yourself needing here? What is frustrating about sewing in your village? What supplies are hard to get?”. No reply. “If I dropped you in Georgetown with $100,000 for your sewing centre, what would you buy?”. Confused silence. “If we were only able to get you one thing, what would be most useful?”. Blank stare. This applies even when the marvellous Ivy translates into Wapishana for me. In one village, I finish my meeting, leave the women to chat and then come back half an hour later and ask if they want to add anything. They blurt out that what they really need is training on how to run a centre- how to manage their money, how to keep tally of supplies, what to lend and what to give away and what to charge and how to form a committee. This does not come within the project in question. I might be able to help later, off my own bat, but will I have the time, opportunity or permission? I still don’t know.

And two of the villages prove disheartening company. [Complication 6: a bright and dynamic young member of our own village council said to me today “It’s a problem we Amerindians have. We wait. We lie back in our hammocks and wait for someone to come and fix things for us. We don’t want to work for ourselves. Some of our people are like that.” Apathy lurks at the bottom of every bottle of parakari, rises off the Department of Education paper with your CXC fails listed on it, sneaks in the door that closes behind the next white person who had parachuted in with the answers to all your problems].

To summarise. Village One wants everything (that’s the easy one). Village Two has everything and wants more (token gestures will have to do). Village three needs everything but actually wants training. Village Four wants a new machine instead of repairing the existing one. Village Five wants to create a new generation of seamstresses. And Village Six is torn between wanting supplies and having no-one who cares enough to use them.

I look back over the visits and see all their faces once again. Brenda beaming, showing off the little skirts and trousers they have made for their sewing centre fundraising event. Vivintia tight-lipped and solemn trying to choose priorities in the face of all that need. Edwina doughily determined not to understand a word I say. Toshao Arnold talking enthusiastically about converting a half-finished mud and thatch building outside his office into their new sewing centre. Saydan bright with excitement about the sewing training she has just been booked to deliver in WaiWai territory. Ann biting down frustration about yet another woman dropping out of the free training she was due to begin the following week.

How to be fair? How to split the money? Will it really make a difference to anyone? It’s like living in the textbooks I studied for my Development masters. Will the sewing projects be sustainable? To be honest, I do get rather sick of donors banging on about sustainability- why on earth should it always be possible for villages to sustain projects when the donor pulls out? Do you think they were just being LAZY, not finding the resources themselves in the first place? In which Deus’ Machina is the money going to float down when a community has so little they are thankful to feed themselves?

If I thought that donating money was the best way to help, I would be a management consultant with a lot of standing orders. But certainly the money is needed. I just feel even more strongly now that the money needs to be in hands that live close to local people, that lived there before the money arrived and stay after it is spent. Among all the challenges of working for the Catholic Church here, the biggest plus is their commitment. The Jesuits have been here for a hundred years- they are not going to pull out when the money is spent, or huff and leave when it doesn’t change people’s lives to their exhaustively researched satisfaction. The developing world is not a problem to be solved. We are all ball-bearings in a Newton’s Cradle- sometimes a harmony, sometimes mesmerising beauty and sometimes a battle. The sewing centres will follow their path and I will follow mine. The Austrian women have taken action to make someone’s life better, and so have I, and now I will try to support them in making use of it rather than bossing them into a pseudo-perfection which our own efforts did not attain.

Ask anxiously for whom the bell tolls

2009-10-09T10:16:00.000-04:00

It is 6:45a.m. and I am up to my elbows in soapsuds when I hear the tolling begin. The church bell (acetylene tank) is struck briskly for meetings, slowly for deaths, one strike for each year of the life ended.

One. Two. Three. A long pause. Four. Five. Each time it pauses out of sequence I draw a sigh of relief that it's primary school age. Not one of my students, please God, not another one from the secondary school.

Thirteen. Long pause. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Long pause, dragging and dragging, until I accept that it's not going to be struck again. I drop everything and trot out of the house, up the hill to the sisters, heart in my mouth. Let it not be a student, please, let it not be. The sisters will know, they always know every bit of news.

And of course they do know- they found him. Little old Bernard, alone in his house, dying of fever and old age and his hourglass simply running out. Sister Goretti saw him the night before, and when two of them drop in in the morning to see how he is doing, they find him cold. No-one knows his exact age, so they strike just long enough to announce an adult death.

Mainly I feel relief. How good that he had company on his last evening. What a blessing that he was found quickly, early the next morning, before the predators could take over. How GLAD I am that it was no sixteen year old. But I also feel stretched, tugged somehow. The deaths I have encountered over the last two years- my father, Michael Hinds with his bike accident in March, B's mum Sue, and then Jude's suicide in May- have all been tragedies. Too early, too mysterious, too agonising. No-one is traumatised by Bernard's death. There is no-one to mourn him. Is that a good thing? Is death's rightness imaginable? I'm so used to the raging against the dying of the light, or the indignant sanctimony over an unmourned grandparent (as if the acceptance of death is an outrage), that I do not know how to appreciate this Wapishana pragmatism.

I think none (or very few) of us comprehend that we do not really believe we are going to die until someone close to us does, or we receive news of our own potential death. Maybe the memento mori isn't morbid at all. Perhaps when we accept the rightness of death we can say "In the midst of death, we are alive".

To boldly go where John Steinbeck has gone before

2009-10-08T10:12:00.002-04:00

There is such spiced, luxuriant pleasure in realising within the first few pages that the book you have just started is a treasure chest. I’ve been sulking at John Steinbeck since “The Grapes of Wrath” put me into days of agonised rage bitterer than I had known since early childhood, when one of my sisters stole my favourite toy and convinced my mother it was hers. Injustice slit me like razor blades. I was angry, so angry I couldn’t sleep. I blamed the book. Now I look back in awe at a novelist with such moral power, but texturing so confidently and with such restraint that I never heard his voice.

Now I find that my lambent moments are perfectly described in ‘Travels with Charley’. If you haven’t read it, get to the library now.

OK, now you’re back from the library, let me tell you what intrigued me so much. Steinbeck reckons that the breathless long droplet of a lambent moment, when past and present and future collapse into one, can only happen when you’re alone. I described lambent moments as those times where you can’t tell if it’s poetry, art or life that is so beautiful. Where time abolishes sequence, and ‘no’ and ‘maybe’ are powerless and a moment holds you in thrall to ‘yes’.

I have never seen this described elsewhere, until now. I feel simultaneously gazumped and comprehended. On the whole, it’s a lovely feeling. To boldly go unawares where great feet have trod is affirming as well as deflating. A view is not necessarily spoilt by signs of habitation. I’m not sure he’s right that one has to be alone though- my lambent moments bring their bubble walls with them. I become alone even if I’m not physically. We walk the valley of the shadow of life alone, as well as the other one.

Rupununi Couriers

2009-10-04T15:36:00.006-04:00

There is a fantastic poster irony at the Aishalton Administration Building. It is an information flyer for the National Post Office. It advertises their wonderful range of services, and gives new postal rates, with a phone number below to find out more. It is carefully laminated, and displayed in the lobby of a town with no postal service and no telephones, landline or mobile. I seem to be the only one who chuckles.

When I was in primary school, I remember a short story about the Pony Express. I’d always had an instinctive pro-Indian bias in the playground games: injuns seemed to breathe a musky potential, whereas cowboys evoked gung-ho cloddishness- what B would call ‘seat-up kind of guys’. But this was different. The wild but controlled dash to get news to the farthest reaches. Sensible derring-do, that seemed laudable; American rugged individualism, the hard graft of the American Dream.

There’s an element of the Cowboy Express in the system here. Every vehicle becomes a post van, every motorbike a Rupununi Courier. We all carry what we can, and most items seem to arrive at their proper destination too. You may remember that Guyanese post is fraught with trauma; this is much simpler. Under the ‘proper’ post, friends from here cannot pick up a package for us in Lethem, the nearest post office, even if they have a letter from us authorising them, so picking up a ‘proper’ parcel would cost us ten hours in time and probably $10,000 in fuel. On the other hand, under the informal Rupununi Courier System, people trust you with fragile and terrible responsibilities, most of them not sealed. I haven’t been asked to carry a baby yet, but it’s certainly not out of the question.

Travelling round the villages in recent weeks, we have had our first proper experience of being Rupununi Couriers.

From Karaudarnau we return with a package for the District Education Officer, two important handwritten forms for the church, of which of course there are no copies, and a splitting black plastic bag of clothes (with a treat of cream crackers peeping out) for Roy’s little daughter at Aishalton Secondary.

From Dadanawa we collect a small box for a patient in Aishalton hospital, and a young Amerindian man in need of a lift.

At Achawib, the headteacher hands me a $1000 note to give to his daughter who is in my choir, with strict instructions to buy flipflops with it, NOT snacks. We also bring back one small boy for the school, and one large and quite new Brazilian bicycle which a woman had borrowed to cycle from Aishalton to Achawib with her baby on her front in a sling- a whole day’s journey.

The least straightforward errand is at Sand Creek. We have been asked to bring back a photograph of a boy who was operated on for his cleft palate in January. He was due back to the hospital for a check-up some months ago, but how can parents even consider the expense and complications of the seventeen-hour journey when it’s not an emergency? Little Peter Jacobs comes out of nursery school with his teacher, takes one look at B and bursts into the most heart-rending sobs.

Peter waiting to be dragged away

We had not stopped to think, but B looks (very, by local standards) like the R.A.M pilot who took Peter away from his Mummy those months ago. He naturally deduces we have come to take him away. I could kick myself hard for a thoughtless idiot. B had the brilliant idea of getting all his classmates out for a group photo, so he slowly recovers his composure. I suppose I now have a glimpse of what it’s like to serve a subpoena. (I speak to his mother, who says that the scar does not pain him much, but when he eats hot food it leaks through the little hole at the top of his scar, under his nose, and hurts him). We eventually leave without Peter, but with several photos and a flatbed full of coconuts.

Peter reconciled, looking most fetching in my hat

It all sounds rather charming; a kind of grapevine-cum-underground railroad-cum-giant family. And often it is. But think how much power resides with the vehicle owners, who already had the clout of money behind them. If I was a local person, I would struggle sometimes, having to place my trust and my urgent errands in someone’s hands simply because they have more power than me already. It’s a place where rights are not sufficient. What use is it to me if I have rights to freedom of information and freedom of movement, but not much possibility of either? The Rupununi Couriers carry a big responsibility, whether they are conscious of it or not.

The Deep South Games

2009-09-20T12:19:00.003-04:00

You’ll want James’ photo album up in a different window while you read this! http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/jmbroscombe/DeepSouthGames#

The only fitting equipage in which to arrive at the Olympics of the South Rupununi is in a flatbed truck. It is dark when we load up the Bandeirante, a true bandit of a vehicle. Into the flatbed go the two bench cushions, requisitioned from a minibus in days long gone by. In go the buckets of snacks and flasks. Into the spare tyre goes Sister Leonarda. The rest of us perch on the bench cushion, all lined along the right-hand side because one of the bolts is gone from the spring-leaf suspension on the left chassis. Last of all, in comes a heavy, dumpy wooden flight of stairs, for easy ingress and egress. B climbs into the driver’s seat, “Grrrrrmph” grumbles the engine, and we’re off, just before 6am. They say a prayer on leaving, with a lovely unselfconsciousness. We sing to the sunrise, voices juddering and jerking over the bumps. We stop off for a picnic after an hour and a half of rectal lobotomy, and complete the journey in good spirits, arriving at about 8:15.

The Deep South Games are in their thirteenth year. The seven communities of ‘the Deep South Crescent’ (Aishalton, Awarewaunau, Maruranau, Shea, Karaudarnau, Achawib and Parabara) participate, and the winner hosts the games the following year. So this year Maruranau was the venue. The event lasts for six days, of which five are for imported sports (volleyball, football and cricket) and one for ‘cultural activities’. As if that wasn’t unbalanced enough, they call the imported sports ‘The Games’, and the last day ‘Indigenous Day’. What could be totemic risks being tokenistic.

The Games themselves are enjoyable of course. The opening ceremony is set for 9am, and by a feat of unparalleled organisation, it actually is. Maruranau’s Toshao, Mr Patrick Gomes, is head of the District Toshao’s Council and a man of great presence. (He’s also generous: he lent us his outhouse to sleep in, and later put up the Peace Corps volunteers too with no prior warning). Grass skirt for culture and microphone for modernity. Alcohol for sale all day to keep the visitors happy and boomed commands to pick up rubbish all day to keep the locals happy. The opening ceremony proceeds with the obligatory local dance, done with great dignity by older women brandishing excellent home-made maracas. A skinny giant white person lopes through it all, oozing around as unobtrusively as he can.

The teams then parade out. Our banner-carriers get dressed up in traditional Wapishana costume, just for the march. No-one ever wears this now except for cultural shows. Our sulky sultry young man is told sharply to remove his gangsta-style heavy chain and put on a traditional necklace instead. He wears his traditional dress hipster-height to show off his CK boxers. The feather headdress suits his smooth young face. All in all, it’s a profoundly telling outfit. The girl wears lycra shorts below the skirt for modesty; traditional dress doesn’t cover much.

We (Aishalton) have been preparing quite seriously for these Games. The footballers have been out training at 5:30am each morning for weeks, the volleyballers at 4:30pm for a couple of months now. The 8th August heats for the cultural events were hard-fought too, and for the most part impressive. We’re determined to do well.

We are ready. Our elegant young Aishalton ladies troop out to their cricket match looking the part, trim and fit. The barren and dusty crease is ready, after half an hour of brushing with a pointer broom. Here come Maruranau. They stomp out to the wicket heavily, barefoot and dressed in matronly skirts. But as it turns out, Maruranau is peopled by Valkyries. These valiant stout ladies should be running the world. If the gap at Thermopylae had been filled by those bosoms, the outcome would have been altogether happier for Leonidas. Those breastplates shining in the sun, those smiles, would have had the Persians fleeing for their lives. They excel in the element of surprise- no-one could ever be ready. And then BAM! – they smack that ball like a child’s worst nightmare clobber round the back of the head and they’re OFF. On the wings of song (perhaps Flanders and Swann). Fleet of foot, doughty and dainty and so, so fast. I hear the hoods in the back of the stands laughing in disrespect, but I’m laughing in delight. They acquire 97 runs in 20 overs without extending themselves at all.

With the Games complete, Indigenous Day takes its turn. I can make it sound dreamlike. I can zoom in close and show Eustace Martin’s face, patient and timeless, blowing smoke and then fire from tinder. I can charm you with Valerie’s speedy spindle, and fill your eyes with the rich gorgeous colour and flicker as the speed weavers race their ite leaves crossways and crossways into baskets. Or I can step back and show the emptiness at the edges of the wide angle. Fatima running in bare feet from the Awarewaunau boundary to win the long distance race against no-one. Rosana cycling alone to ‘win’ the bike race. Every single female archer failing to hit the target with all three arrows, and having to move them closer to winnow out a winner. Only three out of seven villages entering the arrow-fletching contest; two in the young people’s spinning race. And over it all, pounding Brazilian music. At the edges of every prospect, men stupefied with alcohol; staggering, dancing or down and out. Or I can speak with pride; of Aishalton’s many victories, and of their presence in every event. I can describe their triumphal return to Aishalton on the tractor, blowing horns and banging things, waving their trophies, brown-skinned and beaming and beautiful in the sunlight.

Overall we won. So next year, the Games are in Aishalton. And for the first time, there will be a planning committee with representatives from each village, so participation should be up. Maybe some trends are reversible, and the Games will be able to nurture a new generation of Wapishanas proud of their culture, and increasingly expert in its ingenuities. Maybe next year we’ll end the Deep South Games with an Indigenous Day that is not its colourful fringes but its crowning glory.

Virtually attending a Wedding

2009-09-12T00:49:00.002-04:00

“It is only the beginning of a journey”, I tell myself with a sniffle. “One cannot always be there to see people off”.

Stephen and Sarah’s wedding day, four thousand eight hundred and twelve miles away. How can I mark the day auspiciously? Should I dress up? Should I go and stand outside Aishalton’s empty church at the appointed hour? Or find a white butterfly to throw confetti at? My stiff upper lip is at a loose end.

The wedding is almost ready to begin. You stand front right, waiting, nerves stretched tight as a harp. Stephen. I remember the undersized purple shrimp pocketed in a frail elbow. Two days old and still losing weight, four pounds twelve I think you were, and a peeled grape of tiny squeals. For some reason I remember vividly the bad eighties haircuts round the bed. Helen’s mullet, Philip’s loose perm and tight jeans. Esther’s exhausted face and dark (scared?) eyes. That was the last time I remember you looking helpless. You were an adored little thing, the beadiest most heart-rich smile 309 Whitewell Road ever saw.

I have a wonderful recording of you as an eleven-year-old, accent thick and chewy as liquorice, saying “So, am I going solo on this tape or what?” and a dry-as-dry-ice adult voice in the background drawling “Just carry on, Stephen”, as you entertained me strangely (far away in the Chinese desert) with jokes about corks up doggie’s bums. I never saw a child so suited to the epithet “irrepressible”.

As the readings sound out, I remember you reading at my wedding, almost two years ago. 1 Corinthians 13, the naming of love’s parts. Your strong accent somehow turned those adjectives into commands. I see my father’s face, heart-shaped and pointed with illness, the black eyes clinging on to you, averted for just a moment from the shadow of death. Seeing himself in you, hearing himself in the certainty and clarity of your voice. Profoundly and unshakeably proud of you. I exhort you with those words now. Love IS patient, it IS kind. It is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. Never forget, both of you, that love does not just aspire to these things. It IS these things.

The ceremony finishes. “Splendid!” booms the organ. I am in the back row, standing by the aisle as you leave the church. As they throng you outside, I take you in my arms, and tell you everything I wish for you. My heart for your happiness, my smiles for your joys, my teeth gritted in sympathy with the difficulties, my stomach clenched with the pains, my hugs for the coldness and my tickles and Monty Python for the dullness. I share a warm and excited hug with your bride. And as you leave the reception, amidst a big goodbye, for the first time on your wedding day I am akin with all the others. We all say farewell and continue on our diverging paths.

True, it is only the beginning of a journey. Not all is lost- I have not ‘missed it’. I am seeing your wedding through a glass darkly. And you both know that in a sense I was right there with all the others, seeing you off in style.

A cockroach in the mug is worth two in the mind

2009-09-11T10:52:00.001-04:00

Today's 6am shock. Need I say more?

("The cockroach says "We are such stuff as nightmares are made on, and our little life is rounded with hatred and insect repellent".)

An interview with Paul and Taise

2009-09-09T15:06:00.009-04:00

I met Taise first, back in March, huge baby Pius slung on her slim hip. But since then I see them often, working in the Sisters’ garden in return for food or some money. Paul attended a summer education programme and is now avidly interested in computers. Both of them come and look over my shoulder as I send emails in the chicken shed.

[Did I ever describe our internet access? It's redolent with Bond-esque subterfuge. Enter a grubby old shed, press one button and a huge bank of high-tech gadgetry rises from the floor, all dials and levers and gleaming chrome, as behind you a lake drains away to reveal a giant satellite dish. Actually that's not true- enter a grubby old shed, bring your own laptop, plug in a blue network cable and hey presto, satellite internet as long as it’s not too cloudy or stormy or otherwise inclement. Our shed is peopled with modem, wheelbarrow, chicken feed which is subject to ongoing chicken raids, leftover cardboard boxes, handwoven reed bags, fuel in huge drums, broken equipment, wistful hungry dog, dead car batteries, fish drying, laundry buckets, a vast collection of pointer brooms and two worn truck tyres.]

I am not sure how clearly Paul and Taise understand the reach of the internet, but their short online chat with my sister Naomi about a month ago made a big impression on them. They asked me to put them ‘on the internet’ so you can all read about them. When it came to the crunch, however, they were tongue-tied.

Paul and Taise with the church bell

There are eight children in the family. Paul is the fifth and Taise the sixth. (See http://jmbroscombe.blogspot.com/2009/08/day-one-hundred-and-seventy-two-last.html for some of the others).

Paul says "my favourite things are fishing and reading. I love reading storybooks bad". Taise loves playing with the Sisters’ table football. When I asked what they think is the best thing about Aishalton, Taise said that Aishalton has jumbies- she couldn't think of a compliment. Paul said Aishalton would be best by keeping our village and environment clean. He thinks the best things are going to school and coming to church, but Taise interjected indignantly he doesn't come to church as much as she does.

Both of them like school. Paul's favourite subject is mathematics, but he likes all the work. When I asked about dislikes they weren't so sure, but Paul doesn’t like the floor when the dust is blowing in his eyes (the concrete was recently re-laid but it's powdering up to oblivion). Taise says "I like reading and drawing. I like the hot meal. But I don't like when people fighting me. Paul does fight me sometimes".

The difficulties in Paul's life are the exams at school, and the cows that come into the compound: "and I have to chase, and it be hard, and my hand is blister", he said, showing me his small brown callused mitt. Taise's hardest memory is when she went to Kayu’s birthday and got left alone in the dark. Neither of them mention the gardening, or hunger, or looking after younger siblings. These are the fabric of life, not the negotiables.

When I asked "If you could change one thing in your life to make it better, what would that one thing be?", Taise immediately answered "A dolly". Paul said "By not fighting when they calling me by names at school (like jumbies they calling me)". Oh, and a toy gun.

The last question is a hoary old chestnut: 'What would you like to do in the future?' Paul says he'll train to be a police and stop people fighting. Taise wants to train to be a nurse.

So what is their message to the world, via the mysteries of the internet?

Paul tells the world to stop fighting and stop drinking.

Taise says stop playing jumbie.

Both Paul and Taise are intrigued by the idea of the world outside Aishalton. But from a life of knocks, they are canny and cautious. They aren't taking too much as read in the fact/fiction department. If you have any reply to them, please leave a comment below this blog, and I will pass it on.

The road goes ever on and on

2009-09-02T10:16:00.006-04:00

Thick dust boils up behind us in a dry foam, barrelling inward in grey-white plaits, like the swirls the beater leaves in half-whipped eggwhite. We are in the plank flatbed of the mini-truck on our way to Lethem. Minutes pass like hours, hours like dreams. We reach red rubbly trail, hard-crimped into vertebrae by work machines. I can feel the road’s spine in my own: mine compresses in sympathy, one vertebra shorter at the end of the six-hour journey than it was at the beginning. I remember on a previous juddery journey, trying to explain to a local lady about Slendertone. She wasn’t even amused: paying for excess vibration is the last word in absurd.

A family hitch a ride with us. (I think Percy only picks up people he knows, but he knows everyone in the Deep South so that doesn’t cut it down much). The three of them sit in the spare tyre: father heavy and pugnacious, mother slim and pert in her ‘No more autographs, I’m far too busy’ t-shirt, daughter ravishing with her perfect skin and first lost tooth gap, hat carefully aligned. I warm to the dad when he places his fat leg carefully along the tyre’s rim to hold his lovely ladies comfortably in place as we crash and bump along. The last time I rode in this flatbed was on the way to the August Games, with all four sisters. They truly ride in style: a double thickness bench cushion, a huge picnic and a set of wooden steps for climbing in and out, which would be a bit of an Everest for their short legs.

On the way to the Deep South Games

Pure white shocks the eye in two places. Great egrets perch ridiculously in the tiny sandpaper trees, dwarfing them, like an eagle roosting in your tomato plants. A massive, perfectly white cumulus cloud bulges over half the sky. This cloud was certainly not washed in a Guyanese machine. The grubby scuds in the foreground look more in place; the shoddy and mungo of the cloud world. Shortly after this I relish my glimpse of a peccary in a puddle, a hairy-hog waller.

Ironic that you’re all driving around good roads with your fantastic lumbar support, and here, where it would be most useful, we don’t even get a seat, and crash around in the back of an open flatbed, if we’re lucky enough to get a ride at all. The nearest thing I have to a cushion is my ipod, my tiny time machine that rescues me from too much reality and fills the engine roar with stories of other journeys, other cowboys and horses, other lives being lived differently.

He couldn't photograph the butterflies so took a cheeky zoom of me watching them!

Beauty assaults us twice more. At each creek is a swarm of small yellow butterflies, plain and blunt like cabbage whites. They flutter up in shoals as we drive through. And once, near the end of the journey, a raucous stag party of macaws rises up to flaunt and roister at the top of the tallest ite tree. B is tortured by the juxtaposing of suspense and a complete lack of suspension. The camera cannot cope with the truck’s tremolando. Photos blur, the view blurs, the hours blur until all that is left is the road’s spine and mine, and the miles still to go.

The disastrous macaw picture- there's a limit to what even Nikon's vibration reduction can do!

Fruit Anxiety

2009-08-26T12:37:00.001-04:00

This is my name for a psychological condition I and several others suffer from in Aishalton. It applies equally to vegetables, but I think ‘Fruit Anxiety’ has a better ring.

The anxiety begins the moment you arrive home from the market with fruit or veg. Shall I put them in a plastic box? The cockroaches won’t get them, and there won’t be a haze of tiny flies infesting my kitchen. But soon the box begins to sweat. Condensation forms and begins to flow. The fruit begins to rot, and then collect moulds of every colour except the expected one. Marrow?- red, with a damp grey and white beard. Bananas?- hoarfrost with green edging. Onions?- a treacle-like substance with red tidemarks. Potatoes?- blisters, oozing, with a foul smell. Papaya?- boils (you don’t want to know). Tomatoes?- grey and exploding. Pumpkin?- blue, fading to white and bushy. Mangoes?- first speckled like a leopard, then oozing, then white. All of these occur at an improbable time-lapse speed.

Hmmm. Maybe not the plastic box. Cardboard?- can’t get cardboard here. Out on the table in a bowl? Covered in cockroach bites in the morning. Hanging in bag from the kitchen shelf? A haze of tiny flies grows and grows until you dread entering the kitchen. So I go back to the plastic box, drying it out twice a day (sometimes washing and drying the fruit and veg as well). This means that I become a rot, mould and pest policeman. And if I let my attention slip for half a day, it’s too late. Either the fruit or the kitchen is festering. It is hard to find time to work amongst my foodstuff-policing responsibilities.

The anxiety level is roughly double if the fruit or veg in question is a gift. Fruit Anxiety means that the gift is greeted with a mixture of joy and dread. Added to the frustration of waste is the guilt of scorning generosity: literally throwing juicy pearls before swine, gifts gone to the dogs. I do get some tiny satisfaction from seeing the Infuriating Sleep-Destroying Cows munching vile slimy marrow beard, and a kinder consolation from feeding chickens lovely fruit that is too over-ripe for me but ambrosia to them.

Thus fruit and vegetables become our masters. Their presence demands activity and military planning. Fruit Anxiety is clearly a disorder of many facets: obsessive-compulsiveness, single-issue fixation, ingratitude, and a disordered attention to food.

There are two ways to protect yourself from Fruit Anxiety. The first is to have trees or vegetables in your yard, and only pick things minutes before eating. The second is far more popular among Amerindians- live on meat and farine. It may not be a balanced diet, but at least you retain some mental equilibrium!

Lambent moments

2009-08-24T10:01:00.000-04:00

There’s a wonderful scene at the beginning of the film “Before Sunset”. The hero is sitting in a bookshop in Paris, the final stop on his book tour, deflecting critics intent on plundering his secrets. “What really happened?” they ask. He tells them instead of his next book, a book enclosed within the infinitely expandable bubble of one single moment. The moment is something like this: a man watches his young daughter dancing on top of a table, torn between loving admiration and protectiveness- wanting to tell her to take care, to get down. Simultaneously he relives a moment in his past with his first love: she is on top of a car, dancing, and the air is heavy with possibility. We, the knowing audience, see the moment he is embroidering, or even remember it from “Before Sunrise”- there is no car; she is dancing in the street in the dawn half-light to the music of a basement harpsichord. It’s hard to tell who the fiction is for- himself, the critics, or the love of his life hovering unbeknownst outside the window, waiting to be rediscovered. What ‘really’ happens?

Lambent moments. Where you can’t tell if it’s poetry, art or life that is so beautiful. Where time abolishes sequence in favour of serendipity. Where ‘no’ and ‘maybe’ are powerless and a moment holds you in thrall to ‘yes’.

Preparing to start teaching a literature course at Aishalton Secondary, I read poems all afternoon. It has been a long time since I did this. The poems have a strong Caribbean bias. Some are good, many not. At 5pm, sated with issues clumsily disguised as art, I transgress and traverse off-route to Derek Walcott. It’s a poem about his father’s death and the power of words. Beginning slowly, his pellucid perfections seep into my mind, follow the heart’s arteries to the brain. I can hardly bear to continue reading, because if I do, it must end. As I finish I stumble out into the evening sun, stunned with perfection. All is quiet. A cow rips grass, an old friend of mine, sunlight gilding its ear hair. It provided the iconic image in November that I sent to all my friends announcing our move here. Curled horns, white hide, huge almond eyes. Even now, when Aishalton is unremarkable ordinary home, this beautiful cow is exotic. Everything coexists for a long breath- the hopes I had then, Derek Walcott, my father’s vividity, the beauty of equatorial evening light, the cow’s breathing, the purpose of our presence here, poetry and love, stupefaction- and then I exhale. Return to the house, dazzled, needing to cook dinner before the light fails.

Lambent moments. I guess we all have them. I guess they expire if we are too busy to notice. They might be treasure. We might be paupers without them.

"If she was just mad, I would keep her"

2009-08-20T17:54:00.003-04:00

We visit Shea briefly. It is about three hours from Aishalton, the end of the north-east ‘road’. We have left behind the relative prosperity of Maruranau here. The walls of the houses are cracked. Gaps between mudbricks ventilate friably. The tracks are overgrown. Rubbish scars the grass, turning wildflowers into weeds. Nevertheless it is beautiful. Shea rock broods, shadowed by the slanting evening sun. Its gigantic black mass is articulated against the distant mountains. Unexpected friendly faces pop up everywhere- “Miss Sarah” recognised from school, Father Amar known and loved by local Catholics.

Headteacher Pernambuco’s house is one of the smartest. We park the jeep and pick our way through cow bones and long weeds to the front door. The house is concrete, painted green, hemmed in by thick clusters of banana palm and cassava. We sit outside, in the shadow of the house. The chairs are all full; I choose to sit on the gas bottle. The headmaster is an imposing man. He looks massive (my eyes judge height in context now, so I see a 5ft 6” man as tall). I’d guess he’s 5ft 7”. Confident, unsmiling, with the hook nose and lidded eyes of the smaller falcons. He tells us a bit about the school, which teaches years one to nine (5 to 15 years old). Many parents do not want to send their children all the way to Aishalton for secondary. Children are important for farming and housework, but perhaps most of all for childcare of the younger offspring. Parents will walk three hours to their farm and stay for a week, leaving the babies with a ten or eleven year old. A nine-year old boy who cannot cook at least something is the butt of jokes. A nine-year old girl who cannot look after a baby independently is unimaginable.

We hear a sudden animal whine. Headteacher Pernambuco looks uncomfortable. “My father had a child outside” he says. “She’s disabled. I didn’t know her till he died. Now she lives with us”. I wonder at the maths- his father still sowing wild, damaged oats in his fifties. We comment that it is good of him to look after her. I ask if she is physically disabled or learning-disabled. “No, she’s mental, you would say, mental illness, I mean she’s mad. I’m trying to send her to Georgetown. I can’t take care of her here. If she was just mad, I would keep her. But she’s awful violent. You can’t leave the little ones with her. It’s not safe.” I ask what age she is, expecting an epileptic child. “23 or so. No-one knows. And she messes all over. If she could use the toilet...”. Round the corner she comes, pushing through the crowding banana palms. Skinny, short hair, nimble. Her eyes dart. She sees us and begins to approach. He rises and tells her to go back. She is chewing something. She puts a hand over her mouth, extends the other boldly, like a forceful panhandler. Her skin is pale brown and perfectly smooth. Short curly hair, no expression at all, except perhaps a trace of wariness. He moves towards her, implacable and large. She backs away, then turns and darts off. Somehow she gives the impression of controlling the situation. He returns to his chair. “She eats the banana leaves just so. The plants, she rips them out. And she’s very violent.” I find the dark allotment oppressive, the air somehow depleted. I want to leave. We talk for a while about places that she could be sent- Guyana is not rich in institutions for people who are in good physical health but tear at children, defecate everywhere and eat gardens. Father Amar promises to contact the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa’s sisters, who may be able to look after her.

Shortly after this we take our leave. They press on us vegetables from the garden, a huge pumpkin and a long marrow. They are generous people, heavy laden, matter of fact about their one burden too many. As we drive away, we do not talk. I cannot get them out of my mind- the big family, already weighted with responsibilities in a poor village, bequeathed a violent and mysterious young stranger. Someone is securely locked in that slim curly head, fighting, no-one knows whether to get out or from some implacable malcontent of another kind. Who is to care about her when they cannot know who she is?

A second bite at the luxury cherry

2009-08-19T12:49:00.005-04:00

I remember in Georgetown considering what ‘luxury’ meant, and how relative a concept it is.

But now I’m wondering why I need to tally so slavishly. Is recollection of the luxuries that I cannot currently enjoy enhancing or impoverishing my life? Someone regaled me with a lovely detail about Paul Martin (the rugged teddy bear of Belem in January) the other day. In his normal life in Karasabai, Paul lives in conditions rather like ours, except for the hundreds of miles from village to village that he walks every year. When Paul is in Georgetown, apparently he really enjoys ice cream. He accepts it with alacrity and eats it with quiet relish. I can just see it- the springing up from the table, the healthy dollop, the happy grin and the attentive chomp. But the rest of the time, Paul does not consider ice cream. It does not enter his mind. He does not remark on its absence, or greet it with “Wow! I haven’t had ice cream for...”. You can hear the rue in my voice, can’t you?! I’m a shocking recaller, myself.

And there’s another confession to make. Reading this blog, it is painfully clear that I boast of my deprivations as a consolation for enduring them! As if this were not the life I have chosen. As if life were one of those muscular competitive board games that leave entire families flushed and swearing under their breath at Christmas. I compare too much. Today is what it is. My problem is that I want to have my cake, eat it, have some left over, share it with friends, bake another one, eat the lot and then move on to doughnuts. I’m allergic to being envied, so I paint with the true but unflattering brushes of one of those lumpy Flemish realists.

Do you think that taking things for granted is a blessing or a waste? I have realised that the concept of luxury has a symbiotic relationship with taking things for granted. But I suspect it’s over-simplistic to say that once you take something for granted it’s no longer a luxury. I luxuriate in taking for granted my husband’s love for me, whereas, years ago, I worried about not being able to assume it. Now I value it more, not less. But for me, I think luxury should only exist in the positive- the “isn’t it wonderful?” without the “if only”. Maybe taking things for granted is security, and luxury is joy, and you need both in balance.

So in the spirit of Paul Martin, instead of wallowing in luxuries past, I am going to tell you about the luxuries of life here, now, and unbalance the books.

The smell of a lime straight off the tree. It fades after about 20 seconds, making its peppery green cedarwoodiness all the more precious.
The quality of evening light here, and the happy laziness it has the power to bestow on almost everyone (except footballers and chickens).
Watching the audience’s faces at the village community centre as they whoop and guffaw at unintelligible Wapishana skits or songs.
The taste of a cup of Lavazza when you know it’s non-renewable; my personal fossil fuel.
Waking up to my husband’s face every morning, and falling asleep to it every night- it makes me very aware that I have travelled far too much over the last seven years. (It’s ironic that people think we’re ‘travelling’ here, when the truth is that I haven’t been this static since my schooldays).
Free fruit, especially mangoes, starfruit, bananas, five-fingers, papaya, sour oranges and limes. I’ve discovered an eighth type of mango here- the turpentine. The distinct odour of turps is slightly off-putting, but it tastes quite like the water spice. A bit fibrous but juicy, peachy-sweet and delicious.
Ingenuity leading to deliciousness in a kitchen against comically long odds.
The magic mosquito net. Kristen the Peace Corps volunteer said to me the other day that she can’t imagine coping without it. I think we are both slightly embarrassed by our love affair with our nets. The cloudy white Aladdin tent- I feel safe in there, and it’s more than the barrier against biting insects. It’s the bubble, the submarine, the child’s proprietorial claim-staking in the wendy house.
5:45am. It’s a fantastic time of day. We’ve never really met before, and I guess I’ve always assumed we wouldn’t be friends if we did.
Time – to gaze out at the mango trees, to notice every small wildflower growing by the track, to try to describe a person adequately in all their vivid eclectic uniqueness, and to see my own foibles through the unique concatenation of mirrors life has granted me.

Aishalton Music Course 2009

2009-08-15T12:46:00.007-04:00

Adorable Agnes is 9, sloe-eyed and sweet. Loving Leonarda is 62, valiant in her disclaimers. The rest of our band of twenty-five participants is fairly evenly spread across the intervening ages: Cute Coleen in her teens preening in between the scenes, Beautiful Benita bonny in her twenties, Keen Kateri concentrating through to the end of her thirties, Rosey Rona singing through the narrowest possible lip-gap so as not to let her forties slip through, and Anxious Anthony modestly failing to notice how well he’s doing in his fifties.

It’s an impossible task, running a music course here. Almost no-one has studied any music before, and musical notation isn’t present in any form in people’s daily lives (school music classes, sheet music kicking around in public places, internet, songbooks available at churches or clubs...). One of our group plays the guitar, and two have ever had a go on the descant recorder, which they call a flute and blow without ambition or technique. We have one very bad blackboard, chalk, a large empty hall with a thatch that drops even more than the twiglet house, some benches, two guitars and a recorder.

Bevis drawing the award-winning perfect treble clef

The first attempt at music dictation- more than half the class were note-perfect

So, freed from the constraints of resources and facilities, under no pressure to achieve anything of note, we’re having a ball instead!

Two broom handles and some string made Steve the Giant Stave. We learnt the names of the notes on it, sung ourselves on it, raced on to the correct notes in ‘spaces’ and ‘lines’ teams, and leapt from note to note like goats. The benches that are missing a leg are flipped on to their sides to make seats, so the good benches become the right height for tables. People rule up their own staves in cheap notebooks- particularly eclectic when they give staves 4 or 6 lines. Our pub quiz (no, no beer, but teams, proper question rounds, swapping papers to mark, and PRIZES! – a packet of biscuits for the winners, lollies for the runners-up) question sheets took me a full morning to write up in hexiplicate, but were worth every minute, as they gave the quiz the proper gravitas.

Winning team in the 'time signatures on the floor with chalk' speed contest

Pencils are perfect for conducting, and my laptop is just about loud enough to play extracts for them to find the downbeat, work out the time signature and then conduct along. We make treble clefs with string, tell stories with giant cardboard semibreves and crotchets as clues, and do as many entertaining breathing and whooping exercises as people can manage. We also dance three-step and four-step with breathless hilarity.

Working on rhythm by singing with actions

Retention has been good, and the quality of attention astounding.

Agnes and Joan taking down the notation for today's new song

Sister Lucy and Clara, our dancing stars!

Adults are giving up time on their farms to be here, children stacking up home responsibilities for the weekends. I’m trying to imagine some of my sister’s London pupils coming early to music class to sweep the dead cockroaches, storm dust and general detritus out of a large hall, without being asked. Failing. We have learnt all the basics of musical notation and are now starting to apply some of it. We’re grappling with the idea that there are choices to be made in singing- even dynamics have come as a shock, so phrasing is positively Copernican.

The most intriguing thing to me has been trying to imagine a world where songs are organic mysteries. Why should you expect a song to be fathomable, and to sound the same every time, if you’re thinking of it as a tree or a small fruit bat? I am trying to appreciate “To God be the Glory” with anything from 4 to 9 beats in the bar, but it definitely feels unsatisfactory; refractory, like a bad-tempered camel. Because people on the course have expressed some frustration with the rhythmic incontinence of Aishalton’s musical style, I am trying to teach them about songs as buildings: deliberately constructed, balanced and often even symmetrical constructs, containing rooms with different functions. I hope I haven’t killed anything in the process. Of course, some songs can carry off a certain time-signature fluidity- and others can’t get any worse. We have some amazing Caribbean choruses that certainly make it easier to imagine WHY people think of songs as trees or small fruit bats.

Closing celebration (Father Britt centre)- clapping 5 concurrent rhythmic patterns

We finished the course today with a concert party for friends and family. Everything was home-made: the programme, giant notes frieze, music education posters, doughnuts and cake and cool-down (Rupununi name for flavoured drinks). The participants conducted, danced, clapped, sang, acted and laughed their hearts out. The audience, of an even wider age range than the participants (5-90, to be precise), joined in with the clapping and dancing. It was a wonderful afternoon. I can’t tell you how proud I am of them. They are clearly proud of themselves and each other too. I don’t know whether anything will come of the course, or whether participants will consolidate what they have learnt. But ‘development work’ could get terribly humourless and ethicatious if I’m not careful. Sometimes we all need a bit of extravagance, a bit of beauty and a bit of nonsense. Music is a great place for the childish and the childlike to meet, and replace inhibitions with exhibitionists. It’s a friendship centrifuge.

Simplifying

2009-08-07T18:27:00.006-04:00

After some recent rather self-indulgent obfuscatory philological excesses, I have decided to tone down my language and indulge less pathologically in orthological extravagances. So today’s entry will be uncluttered and factual. A personal campaign for plain English.

the shadow says it all...

A motorbike drones overhead, aiming for the tamarind tree. The locals call them black bees. This one is so large that I can see it reaching the mango grove eighty yards away. There’s a kiskadee in the shower and a rooster in the wheelbarrow. A dog crept into the kitchen and ran away with our whole bag of eggs. The brazil nuts are so fresh they evoke juicy coconut. There are seven kinds of mangoes here: the buxom (some disagreement over whether it’s really ‘Buxton’), water spice, grafted, table, long, Julie, and sour. My favourite at the moment is the water spice, which tastes of lavender.

A diet of flour and rice is transformed by onions. I just bought the last two pounds in town. The barbecue grill is the only safe place to grow basil. Elsewhere sheep, lizards, cows or hens eat it. The netting on the bedroom ceiling is drooping with poo, ite leaf fragments knocked down by rain, and cockroach carcasses. The kitchen isn’t exempt either: I heard myself saying calmly the other day, “Don’t leave the chopping board there to dry honey, the bat shits there every night”. I no longer notice noises I’m not worried about. B tells me the shower door creaks very loudly. I don’t hear that. I do hear the horses shrieking in the middle of the night, the knocks that turn out to be cowhorns on my shutters, and the anonymous rustles above my head in the dark. I killed a medium-sized scorpion at 5:45am today with three hard blows of the hammer. It’s splattered all over the kitchen. I shook for an hour. I won, though. Really it should have been shaking.

How did it go? It didn’t really work, did it? You don’t tone down Aishalton. Words aren’t even the half of it. It’s not an obvious place- facts are rare, rumours rife and mobile, knowledge scanty and people friendly-reticent. Perhaps I need the elaborations to bolster an illusion of volition. B conjures up the beautiful in images. These words are my attempt to wave a wand over the ugly, the scary, the infuriating and the dull, so I can live in it better. I’m aiming for more grace and more aplomb. That would be my dream combination.

Time travel

2009-08-04T16:01:00.004-04:00

“The past inserts a finger into a slit in the skin of the present, and pulls”. Annie Dillard observes this happening in ‘A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’ (incredible book). She’s so right. It pulls in unexpected ways. Thumping laundry today, my ipod on shuffle (I’m not a very authentic Wapishana washerwoman), I inadvertently enter a time machine for a tinted tour of my past. Tinted because my life slow-motions before my eyes with a personalised ‘favourites’ soundtrack.

First I’m in China, sitting in my concrete living room wrapped in a quilt looking out at the sandstorm. The sky is beige, the sun green, the overall daylight effect flat white. I am listening to a tape of James Taylor, a recent introduction by the brother of the man I am falling in love with. “Sweet Baby James” indeed. Suddenly I’m a schoolgirl, final year. The last sister has just left home, so for the first time in my life, I have a big bedroom to myself. I have a single of Marillion’s ‘Lavender’ on repeat on the record player. A long arm reaches, lifts, drops again and again. I am knitting, my fingers are cold, adult life is beginning to beckon. And then without warning I’m at Cambridge Folk Festival, seventeen years later, marvelling in awe and disbelief at the percussive violent genius of Rodrigo y Gabriela. The smells of cut grass, the Saturday Guardian and damp blanket provide an odd but pleasing counterpoint to the raw duende seducing its way off the stage. As if the ipod is concerned for my blood pressure, the next thing on the menu is the voice of Garrison Keillor. I’m in a big 4x4 on snowy freeways from Chicago to Washington DC. B is driving and we are VERY late because the hired 4x4 leviathan had been impounded when we parked it next to a fire hydrant (invisible under three feet of snow, but apparently we should have known...) and he spent the whole afternoon amongst the poor of Chicago pleading, paying fines and queueing to get it back. Keillor calms us, solves and satisfies and sets the world unchangeably in order (sorry Larkin!). We get there in the end; fifteen hours driving through seven states, arriving with fifteen minutes to spare. And then suddenly, the time machine lifts and drops me into Chopin, and now I am lost. I am six years old, sitting on the hall floor. It’s Saturday. My mother is teaching at the School of Music. My sisters are at Orchestra. There is only a reverberating radiator and a thin wall between my dad and Chopin, and me. “Aaaaaagh!” vociferates through the wall as a bum chord sounds, followed by a specially violent correct one: the pure distilled sound of frustration. Because more than anything else, my father wants to capture Chopin, to cradle the music between careful hands, like cradling a baby who can’t yet hold up her head. Ah, the responsibility! The lovely terror!

I switch off the ipod after that. The skin of the present should only have to tolerate so much tugging. I return to Aishalton slightly dazed, bulging with the riches of my past, to find the dirty linen of the present requiring my full attention.

Father Britt

2009-08-01T14:17:00.001-04:00

I defy anyone to summon Father Britt on to a page (poetry, prose or drama) or a screen (TV, computer or shadow puppet). His ninety years of life have given him a wealth that enjoys poverty, a depth that is not complex precisely, and a stature that suffers nothing from stumbles or a bow in the spine. How are such qualities to be distilled?

Father Britt smile lights up the room around him with glee and mischief. His smile creases his whole face, but I can’t look beyond his eyes. It is not so much that his eyes smile, as that they ARE smile. Every day that I go to Morning Prayer, I shake his hand and appropriate one smile entirely for myself. He has been in the church since 5a.m, sitting in the dark enjoying the peace so that when dawn arrives he will be there to greet it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the sun refused to rise the day he slept in.

Joining the hordes to eat outside during the Celebration in May

Father Britt is very deaf. Added to this, he hears women’s voices less clearly. This has two effects: first, people tend to treat him as if he is stupid, or at least a blunted intelligence. Their mistake- after shouting the same facile comment three times, he will finally hear it and counter with his distinctive understated, dry wit. Many times he has made B and me laugh out loud with the chalky, gentlemanly English ascerbity of it. Second, it makes you very aware of how much garbage we pad out conversations with- many sentences wish themselves unsaid on third holler. Now, I tend to ask a question which will allow him to conduct most of the conversation himself. He is full of fascinating memories (watching the first sea-planes being developed at Lee-on-Solent as a boy in the 1920s), opinions (he reads as many papers and magazines as he can find) and facts. Unlocking them is frustratingly difficult, especially as he is clearly sociable. Delicate questions are no longer delicate after you’ve bellowed them three times to the surrounding district. He is staggeringly open to new ideas, and to re-assessing his views in the light of new evidence. I miss the conversations I could imagine having with him.

He came to Guyana by boat in 1954, not long after his Ordination. He could thus be excused for being very conservative (he’s 90!), very colonial (Guyana was a colony for the whole of his first decade here), and rather ex-pat. But it would not occur to Father Britt to be any of these things. He is too humble, belongs too dearly, sees himself too much at the service of people. This makes him surprising. He appreciates everything, remarking every day on how good each meal is, insisting on washing up his own plate, and even handwashing his clothes. (The difference between the humble and the pigheaded; he only washes the half-dirty ones, giving the rest to Emma who will do them better). Most days he gardens, sometimes walking right out of the compound to collect manure. Getting up from planting is hard for him, but not humiliating. He glows not like a fire, or a candle, but like a lantern.

I find his company poignant because he shows me what my grandfather could have been. They have some superficial resemblances, but my grandfather’s life was twisted out of shape because he tried to have two lives, and got lost in the maze of the parallel realities he created. He was miserable, and bitter, constantly meting out the judgments of which he was so desperately afraid himself. Perhaps we become what we fear. Father Britt is a man who wills the one thing. I honestly believe he fears nothing. Jesuits talk about freedom: watching him day after day, I think I am beginning to comprehend it. It’s a kind of empty-handed abundance. And when his trumpet sounds, his life will not be lost, but completed.

Retail (aversiono)Therapy

2009-07-31T14:02:00.004-04:00

I head off sub-shopping on my bike. (Sub-shopping involves telling your conscious mind you are going out for a bike ride, and you might just stop off at a shop if you happen to pass: that way you’re not too disappointed when they have nothing at all to sell you except bad dry Brazilian biscuits and nylon undergarments). I pass the non-smelly dump (pleasing to me, disappointing to the mangy hungry dogs that slink away as I approach). The path is so narrow that the stiff grasses tickle my spokes, playing harp melodies. I splash through some mud and almost stall, heaving the pedals manically round so I won’t have to stop and put a foot down into three-inch bog. Nearly there now- not that I’m heading anywhere in particular of course... I get superstitious about setting my heart on things.

Aishalton is the shopping capital of the Deep South. We have four shops which are clearly distinguishable from homes (as long as you know where to look-and look hard!). Their stock overlaps on a very few staples: jam (always guava or pineapple), tomato paste, tinned ‘sausages’ (the EU regulations would burst into flames at the merest pong of them as you open the can) and baking powder. Otherwise they specialise: one in hardware, one in cleanliness, one in luxury goods (coke and oreos, and we even saw apples once but they’d all gone by the time it was our turn), and one in cheapness, playing cards and brightly coloured, terrifyingly shiny-fabricked brassieres.

First I find myself at Fortnum and Mason’s. First impressions are so important in attracting a certain kind of customer. Not only is the veranda floor tiled, it’s so clean you could eat your dinner off it. You enter the emporium and are immediately met by a clean glass counter with stationery, hair scrunchies and Pink Lady lip gloss. The shelves are tidy, but not exactly embarrassed with overstock at this stage of the rainy season. I come away with just two sachets of FlavorAid (violently coloured chemical drink flavouring which nevertheless masks the smoky odour of fireside-boiled drinking water).

Next stop is Morrison’s. It is neighbourly and proclaims its wares on cheery posters, but the “more reasons more reasons more reasons” leave me dissatisfied and wondering whether ever to come back in just the same way Morrison’s does: less reasons less reasons less reasons. Less food too. Still, she does stock “cook in me and I’ll feed you all week” pans, pins, pens, barbed wire, bolts and blowtorches. AND her guava jam is fractionally in the lead (I saw seeds in it once). She stocks chicken, potatoes and onions, but doesn’t have any of them this week. I nearly buy tinned mixed vegetables but I’m just not quite that desperate yet. Next!

Our third emporium has two strong Lidl resemblances: the eclectic ad-hoc stock, and the harassed and miserable looking staff. Also like Lidl, they have the best value and widest (!) range as long as you don’t insist on something in particular. It looks like an Aladdin’s cave of nylon, plastic and tins. The staff often disappear into the dark rear of the shop. Sometimes they come back. The beer is out there. There is often a crowd of drunk men by lunchtime. I buy coke (which in England I never drink but outside is a must somehow), a different brand of EU-scandalising pseudo-sausage (not a halal chicken Vienna!), some perceptibly firm potatoes, and garlic in some improbably professional-looking packaging. B and I will marvel over that for a while when I get home, speculating on its carbon footprint, which I’m sure will be nothing to almost any item we would buy at Sainsbury’s. That’s one thing about shopping here: no refrigeration means no transported perishables. We generate a standard (Lidl-size) bag of rubbish here in the time we would fill a dustbin at home.

Last stop is perhaps the most mysterious of all. Let us call it The Old Curiosity Shop. I suspect the tins of unidentifiable fish of being Dickensian anyway. In Georgetown, we realised with a profound shock that this is where China sends the stuff it doesn’t want. The unnamed tinned fish here looks familiar. Perhaps it is fried dace from China. Curiouser and curiouser, perhaps it is the very cans of fried dace we turned our noses up at in the Gobi desert. That would larn us! The red bra dangling in front of my nose gleams reproachfully. The umbrellas are fetching, and the Chery Chempagne drink positively delicious. But my enquiries for eggs, beef, chicken and onions are all met with the kind of sullen incredulity appropriate to trying to buy such items in a lingerie store. They do in fact usually sell the above, but it’s hard to believe from the flat finality with which my queries are rebuffed. Still, B got even shorter shrift last time- when he asked if there was any beef, they replied “Not in YOUR size!” I’ll leave it to you to deduce the error from context. I am an English teacher, after all...

Time to go home. After two hours of touring, we have enough for a strange, stodgy, protein-free meal. A successful shopping trip.

I spy with my little eye...

2009-07-29T09:58:00.006-04:00

.... a royal barge, children red in tooth and claw, and a giant stave.

I open the toilet door to see a carapace sailing sideways, slow, regal and splendid in its tiny glide. Only a moment later do I see its motive power: a procession of tiny black ants. Throughout my (hrrrmph) stay, the royal progress sails on, millimetre by millimetre, to its grisly end. So must Mary Queen of Scots have felt on seeing the yawning maw of the Tower of London- except that of course, she wasn't already dead. Lucky cockroach, escaping at least the mental agony. Then on the other hand, Mary Queen of Scots didn't get eaten.

The children are playing outside the back door, over in the mango grove. The happy laughter. How sweet! Oh. Those are catapults. A sudden outraged squawking and a great flock of green parrots rises. A series of dull thuds. Down they come like rotten pumpkins, some still struggling. The happy laughter. Little brutes! Off they trot, handfuls of claws, pendulent fat broken bodies, feathers akimbo. Only later do I discover that the parrots are for the pot, not for spite. There's no meat to buy; the neighbours' chickens are beginning to show slingshot wounds. 'Waro Damorid' sounds a lot more socially acceptable than 'parrot pepperpot' but they taste just the same.

I go inside to plan my two-week music course. Now then. 26 participants registered, aged 8-55. No-one has ever studied theory. All like singing, and some can too. No manuscript paper, printer, stereo, textbooks, metronome or instruments. So I start designing my giant stave. We will make it of string. We will people it with our initials and with A-G words like 'deaf' and 'face' and 'caged'. We will trample all over the theory of music with our flipflops, and stomp it into submission. And if it won't submit, pah! We don't need it anyway. We'll continue to roar and pause unfathomably over the contours of Amazing Grace and How Great thou Art. If Nature doesn't like Nurture, it can always cart it off with ant-like efficiency and eat it.

Sisters, Sisters, never were there such devoted Sisters

2009-07-24T11:55:00.004-04:00

From left: Calista, Goretti, a friend, Leonarda

One of the benisons of life here is falling within the orbit of the sisters. 4 foot 10 dynamos, from tribal India, at first they seemed to belong in a batch. They are much loved, much accepted here. They visit and sit with the old and the sick. Women come round to discuss marital problems, violence they dare not yet stand up to, children running wild. There is a steady, unobtrusive stream of grateful visitors with fish, a few fruit, a little box of buns. The sisters told me just after I arrived “we feel our home is over the next hill only”. They merge right in. They arrived in 2006, and three of them have not been back to India since.

As we settle in here, they become more distinct. I know how each prefers their tea (no mean feat, since they always say “as you like”!). I know who will get up in front at church, who will catch birds or iguanas, who prefers teaching teenagers and who is more comfortable with the little ones. I guess who is the best cook, who dreads laundry, who kills the chickens. Their community life is very private, but every Saturday now they come to our house for afternoon tea. We have a truly lovely time together. I have thought several times of attempting to word-paint them, but have only now plucked up the courage. Since they have appeared on Picture of the Day (Sister Calista holding the bluebird), it is time to usher them gently out of seclusion and on to this stage too.

Sister Calista
(see http://jmbroscombe.blogspot.com/2009/07/day-one-hundred-and-thirty-three-sister.html )

Her smile is twice the size of her voice. She is the oldest, at 68 (hard to believe), but in many ways the youngest. She has an innocence that has something to do with never studying while always learning- but always for use, never for power. She is too humble to get up and speak in front of a crowd. She would lose all her words. Her beam and call of “Ahhh!” whenever I appear rejoices my heart. You would choose her to visit your touchy relatives, for company on a journey, to sit with you when you were ill.

Sister Goretti
The first time I went to a birthday lunch with Sister Goretti, I got a shock. I had thought her the quietest of the four, but get her at a party and she whoops and rushes, initiates singing, drags people up for speeches. I have rarely seen someone do this without wanting attention for themselves. She doesn’t. She has a wonderfully dismissive nod when you thank her for her manifold and tiny acts of kindness. Her English is weak, and I think there must be a reason for it. I’m not sure she believes in words very much. You would choose her to shoo everyone into the front rows of church, break the ice at a stilted party, work wisely with a depressed person.

Sister Lucy

A sweet name and a sweet face. You could mistake Lucy for early thirties until you look closely. We know her least because she recently returned from three months in India. Last week I saw her playing Chinese whispers with a group of streetwise and relatively disaffected ‘yoof’ I know from the secondary school. They stood in a circle holding hands. They have no defence against her happy and expectant cajolery.

Sister Leonarda

‘Leon’ for ‘Lionheart’, definitely. Leonarda is a trained midwife and health worker. The first question she ever asked me was “how is your urine?” (Not without reason, I hasten to add!). She is rotund and vital, stout and doughty, an Indian Sister Cadfael. The sparkle in her eyes fits with the revving motorbike roll of her ‘r’s. She is that rare combination, a great talker and a great listener. Not a dreamer or a judge, but valiant and hopeful in the teeth of her own pragmatism. Resourceful, nobody’s fool, generous to the faults and weaknesses around her. You would choose her to run your orphanage, have a word with your flirtatious daughter, give short shrift to a slimy politician.

These four live humbly and generously amidst the physical hardships that make up normal life here. To me they represent everything that is admirable about dependency- interweaving, mutuality, the risk of loving. The fact that their graceful stamina goes unremarked makes it if anything even more remarkable.

This week, I 'ave been mostly feeling....

2009-07-21T11:03:00.006-04:00

... despairing rage!

Monday. Laundry day. Sometimes the backache outweighs the sweet buzz of moral rectitude. But usually it is weirdly satisfying. Five hours between two of us, the walks to and fro to the well, the 'final' rinse and the little heart-sink at the fizz of not-quite-soap-free cotton, one more walk and thump and then the sweet satisfaction of fragrant, sun-dry clothes. Even when it rains and the washing can't dry, still, the strife is o'er, the haulage complete, the stale sweat stink defeated. Hallelujah!

This week, it's a war. We do the laundry together (well, to be precise, I start soap-sudding stinkies at six while B still snoozes). I haul 24 buckets up the well, B more. He washes the hammock single-handed:- anyone who knows B will immediately leap, Lewis-Carroll-like, into imagining a world of arcane techniques, the ingenuities, the sheer inventive brilliance with which he approaches this task.

We get it all done in the morning. Mid-afternoon, I look up from the bid proposal I'm scanning, ear alerted by a quiet but unfamiliar noise. The line is shaking. I flop from the hammock and head for the door, to find a huge cow, working its way along the washing, masticating. It has finished with my only t-shirt and moved on to my shirt. The sleeve is shredding, and so are my nerves. Anyone who says cows are colour-blind is lying- it avoided both of B's red t-shirts between the two now-defunct tops. For one brief moment I looked in slow motion, watched it drool from the corner of its muzzle, revolting wad of half-digested mashed viscous cotton, watched my sleeve seam part, green slime oozing in. Then I roared. I ran at it. I yelled obscenities. The hoofmarks where it dug in to turn and run are deep enough to have collected water this morning. Usually I would be nervous of that bulk, those horns, but rage at the sheer injustice of it consumes me. After all that scrubbing and thumping, after all that HAULAGE!

The shirt was coated in a kind of liquid green silicone. It looked like those bodies in goo in the Matrix. In fact, it's a visual effect to be found in every horror movie and most of the sci-fi films ever made. And the SMELL! Since people compliment my powers of description, I am going to do you a favour and NOT describe it. My t-shirt was similar but, as a paler colour, is suffering more long-term. Like what happens when a two-year-old finds Mummy's clothes dye supplies and has a go at tie-dyeing. I was too depressed to re-wash them, so B did them both. You can imagine the thick white foam, the scrubbage, the unprecedented thoroughness. Of course I cannot replace the clothes. But they will never feel fragrant again. I will wear them with a shudder. The eternal footman will point at my cow-stains and snicker.

Midnight in the Twiglet House

2009-07-17T15:52:00.002-04:00

First comes the pattering- the lizards arrive. They run across the mosquito netting, weight spread, twisting their heads and pooing with avidity. Second comes the quiet throbbing rip of a hungry horse heaving up grass. Then it’s the bat, the one I call Red Bull, on speed as usual, hurtling round corners like a boy racer, also excreting with enthusiasm. And now comes the thunder, first a lapping ripple, then kettle-drum rehearsal at the London Symphony Orchestra, then a threatening roar, and finally Dolby Digital earthquake sound effects. With the last comes the rain,

from rustle

to patter

to splatter

to batter.

Bits of thatch rain down gently, like ash. With the rain come the cows, sheltering under the eaves, a foot from our heads. Tonight they are restless, and knock on the shutters to be let in. Even though I know it must be cows, I still call out “Hello?”, the knock is so human. They “mmrrrrrruurr” low in their throats, upset and jostling. They knead the ground. As the rain dies down, most drift away, and I drift off, to be woken by the sound of dung hitting earth right behind my head. Even at 2am, just startled awake, I immediately think “cow not horse” from the sound of all that shit hitting, the flat splat of cowpat.

I’m tired today. I love the twiglet house. But sometimes it would be nice to spend a night in arid sterility, a clean white soundproof room, insulated from the rustle, splat, rip and growl of nature in all her glory.

Air, hair and a bit of a scare!

2009-07-15T10:24:00.000-04:00

I guessed the rain would come in many flavours here. Actually it’s the air. Today it is slightly heavy and moist, like wearing a thick damp fleece jumpsuit. Yesterday the whole atmosphere was a perfect, smooth blancmange, and walking involved pressing yourself forward step by step through a giant milk-based dessert: laboursome, with a sticky residue (so THIS is what it feels like to be a raspberry in a pannacotta!). On a cloudy morning when it’s below 25, the air waits, motionless, humming just below the level of hearing. On changeable days it is like swimming near the shoreline: you enter cool pockets with a shock, and then without warning it’s warm again. You can feel the currents following their own mysterious trails of logic. But best of all are the precious minutes before the rain. The wind jaguars come leaping, roaring, playing havoc with the shutters. You can stand in the cool blast and feel your eyelids blowing back, or use the moment to hurtle around grabbing in your laundry before the rain variously hurls down, chucks itself at you or suffocatingly embraces the world.

Short hair is definitely the ideal choice when it’s hot, AND when it’s rainy. It dries quicker in both cases (sweat or rainfall). But haircuts are gold dust. I had a thousand dollar (£3) haircut in Georgetown, but I don’t get to Georgetown much. And frankly, ‘£3’ suits it better than ‘thousand dollar’- that one certainly gained in translation! So Alison, a good friend and mother of the lovely Ashley, has agreed nervously to cut my hair. I sit on the adjustable salon chair (a bench laid on its side). We sit outside my back door, to the amusement of all the market day bystanders. My gown (binbag with hole in the top) is lowered over my head. B empties the last poisonous remnants from a spray bottle of ‘Shoo!’ insect repellent and fills it with water. Alison has brought her paper scissors. I explain the rough outlines of modern female hairdressing (an area in which I have vast expertise of course), with some demonstrative chopping gestures, and then we’re off. The ‘Shoo!’, it transpires, is still rather potent and needs another rinse. The scissors are a tad blunt. Our neighbour, whose body consists of 30% solids, 10% water and 60% parakari (the local firewater) comes over to lurch, belch and touch my white skin. My demonstration needs some clarification halfway through. But the outcome is definitely less Georgetown and more Toni and Guy. I’m VERY impressed. Alison is a woman of many talents. She is fully qualified as a cook and food handler, and is called out sometimes to local villages when they need caterers for a special event. She cuts both her boys’ hair. She recently completed the sewing training provided by the Basic Skills Trust in Aishalton, and has made some impressive-looking clothes, including Ashley’s Nursery School Graduation dress.

Ashley (in the graduation dress) and Alison

She is hoping to open her own snackette this Autumn. Having tasted her chicken and roti and her cake, we are ardent supporters of this enterprise! Motivated purely by women’s empowerment, of course, not greed.

Alison and Ashley leave after sharing some market day cake and drinks with us (‘Market Day’ is the concept- ‘Cake and Dodgy Home-brew Day’ is the reality) and trying on B's flipflops.

B is heading out the door to search diligently for the photo of the day, just as a snake is heading in. Our first large snake in Aishalton, and it is coming confidently in the back door of my house. ‘Alarming’ is rather politer than the word that popped out of my mouth (let’s just say the bats, birds and lizards do it liberally from my roof). Alison says it was a Whiptail. “You want to careful, it’ll wrap itself round your ankle, that one”. “Is it poisonous?” I ask. She looks slightly baffled. “I mean, does it bite?” Alison and Ashley smile. “A snake is a snake”. Enigmatic smiles, an open little phrase. Compact, clear and yet potent with so much interpretative, storytelling potential.

Aishalton life in numbers

2009-07-13T09:50:00.000-04:00

(to the tune of “On the first Day of Christmas”, obviously)

On the 85th day in Aishalton, my tallies said to me:

719,000 Guyana dollars won for the Nursery School (thanks GENCAPD!),
720 dollars for half a chicken,
171 days since we left Ledgard Wharf and came to Guyana,
166.38 square miles that make up Aishalton village,
134 Toshaos (Amerindian village leaders) in the whole of Guyana,
103 paces from the well to our front step,
55 paces to the toilet in daylight, 66 in the dark (with 52 cranks of the wind-up lantern),
39 children in my larger Form 1 class,
20 places on my August music course,
16 children in Natalie’s family,
14 Aishalton people who feel like real friends,
11 bites currently on my feet and ankles (mainly toes, bizarrely),
9 bucketfuls of water to wash two pairs of trousers,
8 arm-hauls per bucket up the well,
5 children from Aishalton Primary who have just won national scholarships in the exams (WOW!),
4 festering mangoes,
3 days of Nursery School staff training,
1 bat living in our house,

And an oriole in the lime tree.

A solidarity of small things

2009-07-11T11:53:00.001-04:00

Once upon a previous lifetime, i.e. in Brazil six months ago, I wrote about solidarity. I wonder what you think about when you hear the word? I used to think rallies. Lobbying MPs. Sit-ins, protests, marches. They are all images of struggle. My subconscious thesaurus had solidarity firmly in the activist category- solidarity and oppression as obverse and reverse.

Here in Aishalton, we recently attended a consultation on the Guyanese government’s low-carbon development strategy (www.lcds.gov.gy). After studying all that development theory, it was fascinating to see a ‘grassroots consultation’ from the small end of the microscope. It took place in the secondary school where I have been teaching. Two female government ministers, some environmentalists, Amerindian organisation representatives and facilitators flew in on a specially chartered plane. They proceeded to wilt and sigh their way through an exceedingly hot five hours on the town’s most comfortable chairs (carried up the hill from the Government Guesthouse on the heads of dormitory students), sipping Mount Roraima mineral water and garnering what breeze there was while the rest of us crammed into the body of the school on the children’s benches and regretted not bringing drinks. I wonder if they found themselves sympathising with the children who would sit exams here that same week in hotter weather, on harder chairs, with ‘papers’ written up on a blackboard fifty yards away. Perhaps I am being unfair to suspect they were too preoccupied with strategic thoughts or their own momentary discomfort to ponder the children’s daily reality. Our ‘consultation’ lasted five hours, of which all but twenty minutes was presentations from the front. Many of the local villagers, the bulk of whom left formal education at fourteen or younger, saw the discussion document (57 pages, including appendices, of fairly technical language) for the first time when they arrived that day. Heartfelt congratulations to those who managed to digest the gist, cogitate the debate and respond with aplomb. At four o’clock our Consultors dashed back to the airstrip in a regional government jeep, clutching smart handbags, face powder compacts, high heels and participatory legitimacy to their hot and smartly dressed bosoms. Those left behind variously smiled and chatted, talked positively about the message of the strategy and grumbled about tokenism, insufficient preparation and the authenticity of hasty and information-poor ‘informed consent’.

It’s a strange solidarity we feel here. The solidarity of wondering which battles to fight and which to concede in pragmatic powerlessness. Of walking off to the outside toilet in the rain at midnight. Of operating with a quarter of the information you need for every decision or discussion. Of smelling of pepper-sweat and mould and ripe socks. Of day after day after day of ordinary Aishalton life. Of laughing immoderately at mildly funny jokes. Of living on whatever you can find to cook, alternating between repetitive and experimentally weird. It isn’t grand or portentous. It expresses itself as much in the things you choose not to say (“In the UK a teacher would be sacked for doing that”, “Let’s get an NGO to send us lots of money!”, “how do you LIVE with all these biting insects!”, “No, I do not enjoy eating cassava every day”) as in the things you do say.

Tomorrow we have a meeting with the Toshao (village leader) to discuss the LCDS in preparation for the President’s meeting with all of Guyana’s 134 Toshaos on 20th July. Our Toshao wants to know which questions to ask. The old adage “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference” springs to my mind. The Toshaos cannot meet beforehand, to discuss and then present a unified perspective. This is their biggest and best chance to be heard, and many Amerindians in Brazil or Peru would be astounded to be accorded such a moment, but it’s a hamstrung opportunity, circumscribed by so many things. It’s an Aishalton chance.

“You SHALL go to the ball!”

2009-07-02T13:36:00.005-04:00

Graduation- the season of the year for Aishalton’s fairy godmothers to go toke with the wands.

Students here do not give a lot of input into the design of school events. Unusually, for Graduation they were offered the chance to decide on their graduation outfits. They chose deep blue, between gentian and regatta blue. I didn’t know what to expect: American gown-and-mortarboard silliness? School uniform but just in a different colour?

The fabric was ordered in May. It arrived two weeks before graduation. It’s pale lilac. So much for protagonism! The students are matter-of-fact about the lilac. The boys will have black trousers, lilac shirt and tie. The girls will have lilac dresses.

Thirteen girls and two boys are graduating. Exam results will not arrive here until early September (about two weeks after students in Georgetown get theirs). So graduation is simply a celebration of completing five years of secondary schooling. There are 75 students in my first year classes. That is quite an attrition rate.

The day arrives. The school auditorium (i.e. the wide corridor from one end of the building to the other) has been decorated with lilac and white paperchains, ruched lilac curtains tied up with string, balloons advertising Century21, Brazilian car dealers, Budget car hire, Happy Birthday and Its-a-boy! balloons, Christian proselytising balloons.... We begin with a procession of the graduating class, to the strains of the school song, played with one finger and a great deal of flourish to a disco beat on a synthesizer. Here come 13 bridesmaids- tarty bridesmaid with red bra strap, embarrassed bridesmaid whose mother had gone against trend with a short skirt, girly and womanly, stumbling on unfamiliar borrowed heels, made up like a 50-year old matron, in they all come. What dresses! Lilac satin, strappy or strapless, mostly floor length, all fitted. It bears far more resemblance to a beauty contest than a school event. One boy has not turned up (whether because he couldn’t afford the outfit or couldn’t afford the loss of street cred I couldn’t ascertain). The solitary man looks striking, responsible, stiff with borrowed enjoyable formality.

Our programme is long. It seems that all Amerindians have a very high boredom threshold, and can sit through days of thoughtlessly delivered tedium. Perhaps it is simply good manners. We have several speeches, into which any thought that has accidentally stumbled has been solely dedicated to appropriacy rather than diversion, interest or, heaven forbid, delivery style. All of us are seated on the children’s benches, pressed close together. It is as usual over thirty degrees in the school, and the zinc roof presses ever lower as the sun rises ever higher.

Finally it is time for the certificates and trophies. B bought me fifteen sheets of card in Georgetown, so we had managed to print out certificates with eagles watermarked in colour to represent the school motto, ‘Fly to the Top’. Six of the fifteen graduates have won a trophy- best academic, best sporting, most cooperative, most disciplined, most improved, best dormitory student. One of the fathers has bought his daughter a trophy from himself, just for finishing. He is invited to the podium after the six prizewinners have been called out, and he awkwardly calls his daughter forward, stiff in her dress and the embarrassment of a carefully dressed up father, and presents her with a grand trophy. He has found a way for his daughter to be queen of the occasion for one brief moment: the first member of her family to finish secondary education.

It is dignified against all odds. The ballgowns are 1980’s Disney. The auditorium is shabby, the decorations mockable, and Synthesizer Man faintly ridiculous. The speeches are dull and the students’ achievements modest. And yet. For many of those graduating today, this is the grandest recognition they will ever receive. Most will soon be parents. Few will ever have formal employment. A life free of officialdom can also be pretty sparse in affirmation. So the fairy godmothers stay up late stitching, fathers find a way to get a trophy ordered from Georgetown, and the students look solemn and walk carefully on this, a day that ends one era and catapults them into a future without structure.

"Guns don't kill people; people kill people"

2009-06-27T11:28:00.000-04:00

I think this is a slogan for the pro-gun lobby. I was extremely amused to have it quoted at me in 'persuasive writing' class, in the following memorable ditty:

"Gon don't kil people
People kil people
It just skeard people
For a time
Gon is just for style"

What a testament to testosterone! Romario got his best mark ever for this one, which flanked an excellent line drawing of a handgun.

People here are not used to advertising. This has the Janus effect: they are extremely gullible, but believe themselves immune. They are an advertiser's dream. But the best part of the class was that people here do not use blandishments. Say it how it is. "Colgate- it cleans your teeth". "Pens- useful for writing with". And this, the best of them all. "Have a gun, tell people it's not irresponsible, scare them into submission, and best of all, be REALLY, REALLY COOL". The trickle effect of peer advertising here in the 21st century Wild West.

All Covered in Cow Slabber

2009-06-22T17:00:00.002-04:00

Another normal day. I come out at 5:45, to watch the hindquarters of a large horned cow trotting away from the washing line with my bread cloth. I give chase. The cow speeds up. I shout "Give that back!" and it wags its horns at me and heads across the playing field. I shout in my teacher voice "Don't even THINK about it!" The cow turns, looks at me, flicks the cloth over its shoulder where it hits the ground with a wet gooey smack, gives me a dirty look and keeps trotting. It's so slabbery and yellow that I pick it up by the clothes-peg, but my hands still feel besmirched for the rest of the day.

I go to school for Exam Day 6, and watch 75 children wilt and lie on desks. Some are trying to write well, some to think at all and others aiming to survive the afternoon in 32 degrees at 94% humidity under a zinc roof. The two last arrivals have only a stool to use as a desk. I stand throughout.

I come home in time to mash chickpeas into peanut butter and call it hummous. I notice while I'm kneading dough for flatbread that I've slowed down. I'm kneading gently, more in the spirit of Mozart and less the frantic Led Zeppelin of last week. I sift through the rice for the three resident types of grub: the black ones, the orange straight ones disguised as rice grains, and the tiny brown worm types.

We're asleep by nine. In honour of San Juan, tomorrow night people will be getting extremely drunk (starting early afternoon) and then walking on burning coals. The party is RIGHT outside our house. We're getting the sleep stocked up in advance!