Balwant Singh Hospital

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.

Georgetown Newsflashes

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.

Social gyaffs and social gaffes

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

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.

The Cleaner Vacuum

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.

Perpetuity

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?

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

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!

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

"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

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!

Hanging out with Harold

Harold is 78 years old. He is a Chinese-Guyanese Jesuit in Georgetown. For about the last twelve years, he has been slowly dying of what looks like septicaemia. His feet are disintegrating in an uncanny echo of the bound feet of his female ancestors in China many years ago. Since I first met him in November 2008, he has shrunk.

Harold is Georgetown's greatest critic. The energy he spends on choler is not remarkable, until you stop to think of his life. He is living every moment with the kind of pain, accumulation of discomforts, malodour and indignity that would drive me to whining wretchedness in minutes. The tedium of lying alone in a wooden, cluttered room, all day, for years. The scaling of stairs that are equivalent to a severe rock-climb to most of us sluggards. The three weekly visits to a 1950's time-warp of a hospital. The lying on the margins of presbytery life, listening to your own world continue without you. I have NEVER heard Harold complain about any of that. Instead, he argues fiercely with the Bishop's policy. He critiques his colleagues' use of their leisure time. He gives pithy short shrift to Guyanese politics, and bemoans the degradation of Georgetown's formerly beautiful canals and historic buildings.

Harold says Mass with vigour and verve. He is a curmudgeon where most of us would be a cripple. He invests himself more in his socio-political surroundings than I have ever done. He does not have a simpery-'saintly' bone in his body. I do not think he could say himself how much his anger springs from illness, and how much it is his bastion, his armour, his protection against desolation.

Deja Vu and Starting Again

Sitting on the flight to Guyana, I looked in my handbag for a pen, and noticed that its contents are a microcosm of our life just now:

· Wallet containing credit card, debit card, US & Barbados & Guyanese dollars, Brazilian reals, sterling and my engagement ring (I’d be likely to get mugged for it in Georgetown)
· 10 safety pins
· E-tickets, passports, boarding passes and receipts for the excess baggage slapped on B’s bike without warning
· 20 undone crosswords, ripped out of a book to save space
· Wetwipes husbanded from the Virgin flight to Barbados, and tissues
· B’s cardboard Guyanese driving licence (handwritten, with a big staple through his forehead)
· Guyanese phone top-up card and a UK SIM card
· Headtorch
· Stick of mosiguard
· B’s contact lens pot in a clear plastic bag, and his glasses (in case our luggage goes missing)

We landed and took a taxi to Brickdam, passing my favourite roadsign, from the traffic police-

“STOP THE CARNAGE- ARRIVE ALIVE”

On the way I tried to text Father Anil to say we were on the way, but I’d forgotten his service provider, GT&T, is huffing with mine, Digicel, so you can’t send texts.

Being back in Georgetown feels like putting on old smelly boots- familiar, sweaty, with a pungency you can ignore but not without effort. Somehow they do feel like my boots, though. Some things have changed. The rastaman I told you about in February has gone, murdered in another part of the city; the Jesuit regional superior announced this to all in the region, because he mattered to us. Last week the whole northern part of the city was under knee-deep water because the rain was held in by all the rubbish choking the drainage canals. Streets were awash with festering garbage, apparently. Even at the best of times, much of Georgetown’s beauty is unrealised- floods are not the best of times.

We are not going straight to Aishalton, because our house is not ready. Sound familiar?! Last night, we spent a couple of hours helping Amar, Edwin and Britto to load up the Aishalton pickup truck for its return south- without us, but with most of our luggage. 10 crates of bibles, 2 industrial sized clamps, B’s bike, donated second-hand board games, a 35-cell battery for Aishalton primary school, emergency pickup-mending toolkit, a new solar panel for our house, and various unsalubrious squishy boxes and bags to be handed out to the designated owner at villages Amar passes through on the journey. It would be difficult to enumerate the public services a soft-hearted South Rupununi jeep owner performs in the course of a year.

The déjà vu isn’t just the unspecified wait in Georgetown. It’s the discombobulatingly complete unacclimatisation from the heat, stickiness and insects, which makes it feel like starting again. (I won’t say ‘afresh’ and nor would you if you smelt the armpits of my shirt!). It’s the loss that underwrites days and soaks a little sadness into waking up, as the brain registers who it is that’s missing. But perhaps we’re the lucky ones, who have the culture shock and the melodramatic absurdity of changing places and paces and faces to accompany the slow realignments in the heart’s geography.

LOOOOXury!

Monty Python never dies. The world 'luxury!' evokes nearly as universal a response as mention of dead parrots.

There is no doubting that the cappucino I am cradling, nicknamed "The Penultimate" (yes, I have got to the point of naming and crooning!), is a luxury. But it got me thinking about how utterly relative luxury is. The things that look like luxuries here don't at home. It all depends on where you're standing. So I thought I would take a moment to notice that a bit.

From Georgetown, these things seem like unimaginable luxury:

-A lie-in

-Hot water, to get the dishes dry or the clothes really clean

-Energy between 10a.m. and 4p.m.

-A trip to the cinema

-Dogs that ever shut up
-A state of being which doesn't involve itching

-Fresh milk
-Live music (even at Mashramani, nearly all the music was canned)

-A room of two's own

-A roast chicken dinner

But on the other hand, in Georgetown, I have these luxuries I could hardly have imagined in the previous life:

-Time; to spend, to kill, to waste and to fritter

-The magic mosquito net tent every night

-Families playing street cricket at sunset

-Great enjoyment of little things (The Penultimate's brief life is over, but I applaud it nevertheless!)

-A collection of P.G. Wodehouses that exceeds even my father's

-A husband I see every single day

-Mangoes that fell straight from heaven
-Enough sunshine to warm even my cold clammy bad moods!

-Fighting green parrots swooping round the city centre

-Tapir taxis- possibly the cutest and most impractical vehicle ever

-Waking up in the morning with NO idea what today's adventure will be

... which, of course, gets me to pondering about whether these luxuries have to be confined to different lives, or whether I'm just a twit who isn't very talented at making the most of what she's got! But then, it's a rare person who is. Lucky me; I'm married to one!

x

Granny, 72, fights off AK-47 bandits

The newspapers here make depressing reading. Every day violent burglaries, murders, muggings, perpetrators skipping bail and complex, detailed, persistent domestic violence jostle for space on the front pages of both the Stabroek and Kaiteur dailies. So this headline bellowing from the front of the Kaiteur News leapt out and grabbed us. And by 'us' I mean all of us- though with an interesting spread of reactions. Desiree, Angie and Patsy, the lovely Brickdam domestic staff, were literally shrieking with laughter. I have never heard them laugh so much. The Indian Jesuits found it absurd. I really enjoyed hearing the jokes multiply- "watch out for that Angie!" (Angie is about 80 and hale but frail) etc, but my own feelings were different. Relieved? Encouraged? This morning when we were waiting at the Guyana Revenue Authority, where the obstructive, despairing, sullen Carolita was doing her utmost to deflate, depress or otherwise derail everyone's day, a dapper, open-faced, Dumbo-eared Indo-Guyanese man stood up and prophesied: not quite doom about to rain from the sky on the GRA and all who sail in her, but something along those lines. I felt much the same about the PAYE Prophet as I do about Euline Hinds, the Hero of the Day.

Here is the article in full:

Two bandits, one armed with an AK-47 rifle, were no match for a 72-year-old re-migrant who forced them to flee empty-handed by dousing one of them with pepper spray.

The bandits had attacked the home of Euline Hinds and her husband, Desmond, at 35 Section C NonPareil, East Coast Demarara, at about 22:30 hours on Wednesday. Police believe that the bandits are the same persons who have been carrying out a series of robberies in the area.

Euline Hinds was in no mood to be relieved of what she had toiled so hard for after years in the ‘cold’.

Relating the sequence of events, Hinds said that she was in the downstairs living room watching the television programme ‘American Idol’, while her husband dosed (sic) off in a sofa next to her. The next things (sic) she knew, two bandits, one with a rifle and another with an iron bar, entered their home. The bandit with the gun pointed it to her sleeping husband’s chest, causing him to wake with a start.

According to Hinds, her husband held on to the gun and tried to wrest it from the bandit but his accomplice struck him twice in the head with the iron bar. However, the pensioner gamely held unto (sic) to the gun. Mrs Hinds then grabbed a tin of pepper spray that was nearby and sprayed it into face of the bandit who held the iron bar. “He started to shout, and stumbled out of the house. The other one with the gun managed to free himself and he too ran away. I ran behind them, but they got away”, Hinds said.

The woman explained that had she managed to get the temporarily blind bandit to the ground, he would have been a dead man.

“I was not afraid. I ran behind them. I would’a leave them walking with a white stick for the rest of their lives”, the brave 72-year-old said. “I left this country long before they were born and all them snow and cold I take. I would not allow them to take it away. They did not give something to keep”, Mrs Hinds told this newspaper.

“Once you got something in your hand, you must aim to their eyes”, she advised.
She said that both bandits were wearing black clothing. Neighbours reported, later, that they saw the men enter an abandoned house lot, apparently for the injured bandit to wash his eyes. They were unaware at the time that the men had attempted a robbery nearby. The police were subsequently summoned and a massive investigation launched.

The attack occurred despite the police announcement that they had established a special unit at the Vigilance Police Station to track down the perpetrators, who they believe are responsible for several robberies.

Guyana has a massive problem with apathy. When systems don't work, public promises are reneged, security goes down the pan, the commonest response is a scowl and "this is Guyana". Too much despair leaks forward, into the future, as well as inward, into the mind and the senses. There are many ways to skin a cat (or, to coin a topical local metaphor, 'many ways to run over a dog'), but all forms of resistance surely shore up in solidarity against the despair of the majority. It's heartening to see the brave, the angry, and even Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, getting busy with the diatribe, the letter to the paper and, best of all (hee hee!), the pepper spray!

The end of Chapter 1

We left Britain exactly a month ago. I’d like to take this auspicious moment to share with you some of my great discoveries of the first month, in order of how much they astonish me. (By the end they aren’t at all astonishing, but still, Lipton’s, pull your socks up!)

1. I can still rough it. I knew B could but I wasn’t sure about my own stamina!

2. I am a talkative introvert and B is a laconic extrovert. This makes us socially rather bewildering.

3. Everyone who grew up with mangoes not only has their own way of peeling and eating them, but also rubbishes everyone else’s way.

4. Most religious people are much more tolerant of other religions than they are of different branches of their own. (This might be the same point as the one about mangoes- I’m not sure)

5. Home is in limbo- when I say ‘home’, Mirfield doesn’t present itself any more, but there is no new picture in its place.

6. I CAN get up at 6a.m. every day.

7. Familiarity breeds contempt with handwashing.

8. It is almost impossible for me to imagine respecting myself without DOING anything. I suspect one of the hardest things about the months ahead will be comprehending that my value does not lie in what I do.

9. Poverty combined with hope breeds solidarity. (Poverty without hope breeds crime I think)

10. Tetley’s tea is two whole leagues ahead of Lipton’s, which tastes of air freshener.


A month of living in separate rooms in a Jesuit presbytery has been of course highly instructive! We have been allowed to make ourselves completely at home, which I think is pretty handsome of them. And it’s always interesting to deduce what we’re getting accustomed to (as they always used to ask in China, “Are you a-customer-ed to the life here?”) from what ISN’T on the list.

To The Lighthouse

I have been burying myself in P G Wodehouse, not Virginia Woolf. So when B suggested we should go to the lighthouse, it seemed only fair to give a little homage to the good lady who made my last year at college such a headshredder.

It was about 5pm. We took a taxi up to the rough and dodgy back streets which make up the north-west end of Georgetown. The lighthouse is stranded mid-street, opposite the molasses silo, looking rather forlorn. It’s brick, hexagonal, fetchingly red and white striped, built by the English in 1869 to replace the wooden Dutch one.

It was locked. There was a large chain on the gate.

We shouted to the watchman, who ambled over incuriously. It emerged that his incuriosity stemmed in part from his being deaf and dumb. He pointed overhead, and we looked up to see an Afro-Guyanese head poking from a window. “Yawgortiz?” “Sorry?” “Y’all got tickets?” “No!” “OK”.

Not sure whether “OK” meant “sod off” or “never mind”, we lingered. Something appeared from high above. A rope, lowered inch by inch to our faces, with the key to the lighthouse on the end of it. We let ourselves in.

The last lighthouse we climbed was on honeymoon. What a difference. This one had wooden steps instead of stone, leaning drunkenly, a hexagonally corner-turning handrail. Over halfway up, we came to the key dispenser. Turns out he’s a real lighthouse keeper, manning the inland light for ships coming into the Demerara. He keeps the log, handwritten, in big school notepads with a ‘Lighthouse Logbook’ label glued on to the front.

(note death-like grip on the railing)

We carried on up, into the narrow neck, popped out the top and opened the wooden doors to the platform. When I say ‘platform’, perhaps ‘tinfoil’ would be a better description. The rail was mercifully solid, no namby fencing or other health and safety pansyhood. Broad, interesting, unbeautiful view of the docks, run-down quarters of town, building sites. Then up into the light itself, wonderful wavelets of inches-thick glass, a golden light that B guesses is gas-fuelled. Well-oiled cogs, a cared-for object. It makes me notice that I haven’t seen many such here.

Back down to solider ground, we chatted for a while with the lighthouse keeper. Gave him 500 dollars and rightly guessed that his significant “Thank you” meant “forget the change”. A bargain at the price, though.

A walk with Shivani and Camilla

I have to admit that I'm a curmudgeon of a cowardy custard. Given a choice between a new experience or hiding with a book, I turn the page with relish and carry on reading.

So when B shouted up the stairs- "em... we've got visitors!", my unalloyed delight was preceded by a smootering of reluctance. I was beautifully ensconced on the balcony of our little wooden house in Berbice. The sea breeze was blowing through the coconut palms and the solid metal security grille. The sun was just beginning to set on the ramshackle ravishing wooden baba yaga house that filled our view. I was engrossed in Gerald Durrell's "Three Singles to Adventure", telling of his animal-collecting escapades/ escapology in Guyana in the 1950s. Would I be stupid enough to trade my own 21st century adventures for a vicarious trip through someone else's, fifty years ago? Almost certainly.

With confident shouts of welcome, two girls bounced up the stairs. Shivani and Camilla are daughters of the night watchman. They are both tall and beautiful, and speak with strong Berbice accents. They had come to take us out for a walk, so out we went. No prevarications. We went first to their house. On meeting their super-friendly mother, we realised they didn't have strong accents after all. We also met the puppies, four little labradors (roughly) a few days old, eyes still shut.

Then we strolled through the back streets of town. Berbice is a backwater, with the positive connotations of that in the ascendant. A lot of locals have been here for generations and wouldn't consider leaving. Like anywhere in coastal Guyana, everyone has some relatives overseas, mostly in the US and Canada. Estimates put as many as 1.5 million Guyanese overseas, with only 780,000 in the country. In Georgetown it seems that one or two members of each family remain, with a diaspora of tens or twenties. Here people seem more rooted, more settled, contenter.

As we walked, Camilla paired up with B, Shivani with me. We two talked about family, about devils, about caimans in the ditch on the way to school, about what makes a beautiful house (Shivani= concrete and a few Disney touches, a turret perhaps; Me= wooden, on stilts, carving round doors and windows). Naturally enough, I liked old, she liked new. I liked character, she liked modernity. By the end of the walk, she was hitting me every time I liked the 'wrong' house.

She is the bigger talker, and she and Camilla agree that she's socially more comfortable, more extrovert, better at making friends. She seems oblivious to how much easier her character and looks make life for her, and to how this conversation would feel to Camilla. Camilla, on the other hand, listens with ease and interest. It is very hard to believe she is only 13. She talked about drink problems in the area, about religion, about her studies.

We got back at sunset. The frogs were beginning to sing, and Maddie the parrot went back into her cage. We had curry and roti with the Jesuits and then retreated to our shell, our little wooden haven. It's funny- people think we do these radical travels because we're intrepid. Actually, it's because we're not. We'd both be couch-potato, lazy, sociability-avoidance, channel-flicking sloths if we let ourselves! Hence the two singles to adventure.

Post me no post!

Ah. There had to be SOMETHING this unfunctioningly, obstructively, mundanely, boringly awful- every country has. If it isn't the driving licence office, and it isn't the VAT office, and it isn't the bank, it must be the Post Office.

First, you get a piece of paper delivered to your address telling you you have a parcel. You are forewarned that it will cost 500 Guyanese dollars collection fee, plus whatever they deem appropriate for duty and taxes, unspecified at this point.

You then plod off to the central post office. Imagine the filthy concrete corridor outside the dark grey concrete toilet block in a spectacularly run-down old concrete comprehensive school. That's the front entrance of the national Post Office. You find your window. Opposite the window is a row of chairs, identical to the ones in Lewisham hospital A&E. People have the same expression on their faces too- a kind of pained, hopeless boredom that has a spark of anger in it.

Hand over your leaflet to a girl trained in eye contact avoidance. Her whole being, it seems, is awash with despair. She walks the walk of the doomed, talks like someone who has worked in a Jobcentre for FAR too long, looks at your leaflet as one imagines Mary Queen of Scots looking at her own death warrant, minus the drama. Huge sigh. Says something that sounds like "yaweyeee".

"Sorry?"

Another long sigh, this time fetched deep from the abyss of a well-practised diaphragm. "Y'all got ID?"

Hand over passport. Writes number, very very slowly on to your slip.

Walks away. No, 'walks' is far too dynamic a verb. 'Drifts' is good except it sounds too noncholant. How about 'dearths'? Yes, she dearths off (slowly of course) to seek your parcel. About ten minutes later, just as you've fought your way into a Lewisham hospital chair, your name is called.

"Brassome?" You watch as they chop into your parcel with a huge knife and not too much care. The belongings are rooted through, to mild curiosity from fellow queue-ees. The biro is wafted along your pale trousers that escaped the knife.

Unexplained hiatus. Everyone in the queue is unconsciously assimilating the MQofS/ Post Office Sigh.

Customs officer comes out and roots through your parcel. Leaves.

Second unexplained hiatus.

Opportunity to give thanks for learning the beautiful gift of patience.

And now your slip comes back, with an utterly arbitrary figure written on it for 'duty', and another for 'VAT'. Everything in the parcel is VAT exempt, and duty exempt too as far as I can tell, but since it costs less than last time, I don't argue.

"Hurray!", you think. Done.

Ah no.

Next, the parcel is re-taped and put on another table.

Third unexplained hiatus.

Next, you get called forward, with all the verve and charm of Eeyore on a very, very bad day. You pay for your parcel. "Hurray!", you think. Really done this time.
Not so.

Now you join your final queue, with the slip received from the payment, to sign in a Large Exercise Book before receiving your parcel.

As you walk (exhaustedly or gaily, depending on your temperament and length of time in captivity) to the exit, you remember a conversation with a Jesuit yesterday about the Horrid Internet, and how it has led to the death of the Lovely Post Office, and how young people now don't engage with the present because they can remain in past lives with contact through the internet. I say, God bless the internet. And P.S.- please don't ever post me anything!

x

Journey to the East

When I was flying out to Guyana in November, the journey took 45 hours instead of 20. So I made some Guyanese friends. One told me that, if I was to have seen Guyana, I must go to Berbice. Her Georgetown childhood was peppered with trips there, and she said it was friendlier than Georgetown, better weather, better food and generally a bit of a paradise.

Can't really disagree with any of that.

We went by taxi. B fell asleep, and I fell into a musing meditation. Half an hour from Georgetown, I found the phrase 'tropical paradise' popping in to my mind, so I hit 'pause' on the muse-muscle and looked round. A nice rich blue sky, road lined by coconut palms. Blissful, blissful cool created by the speed of the car, rushing through the front windows and battering my hat into submission. Individual wooden houses, mostly on stilts to avoid floods and mosquitos. Some with gardens, some with washing, all with hammocks strung where the ground floor would be. The absence of rooms means an absence of tasks, so the hammocks are usually occupied. Every so often, wide open space of paddy fields, populated by greedy looking cows and their companionable egrets.

The traffic was about half sane, half psycho. The psycho half is minibus drivers and livestock with a death wish. All the boy racers in Guyana work as minibus drivers, eternally accelerating hard, braking hard or hitting the horn hard. Cows, donkeys and goats are plentiful road users, and generally don't at all mind the traffic. The sane half is donkey carts, cyclists, motorbikers and car drivers.

The new Berbice bridge took 21 years to build. It's a floating bridge, very basic, probably took about 2 months to construct. The rest of the 21 years was spent, one must deduce, arguing. We crossed it in ten minutes. Up until Christmas 2008, you had to take a ferry across the Berbice river. From Georgetown to Port Mourant would take about 6 hours. Now it takes 2.

So we crossed and entered the region of Berbice. Still the lovely houses, the egrets, but now large areas of sugarcane too. We passed cattle trucks full of canecutters, 60 workers on hard wooden benches, heading home to drink away their tiny salary on expensive Demerara rum.

Musing resumed. I pottered around my memory of other rice paddies, other egrets, other palm trees. We passed the smartly repainted Vigilance Police Station, cruised through sunny, palm-covered Lancaster, and left tiny, wooden-housed Hong Kong behind. I wondered about what makes a day worthwhile, sitting there feeling so HAPPY because I was cool, nothing hurt and there was nothing worthier I should be doing.

x

Rich man Poor man Beggarman Thief

RICH MAN

He lives in an enormous house-cum-hacienda-cum-cum-loggia-cum-filmset. It's by the seawall, a couple of miles out of town. 'Seawall' conjures images of white beaches, cocktails, people relaxing, crashing blue surf. Here it's more like Belfast docks but hot- an ugly protective wall to protect the reclaimed land from the sea. Much of Georgetown lies a couple of metres below sea level. The Dutch did a good job, with dykes and cokers and a serious seawall, but even the Dutch have to admit to Canutish effectiveness when it comes to controlling the sea.

So his palace looks out on to a heavy, graffitied concrete barrier. As we walked in, a blast of Abba, followed by a visual image straight from Mamma Mia- about twenty attractive young people and children cavorting (yup, properly cavorting, bright laughter and all) in a figure-of-eight pool. Waterfall, fountains, underwater lighting, sound system blasting out "money money money"- and the choice of song is NOT poetic licence, I promise!

The couple were very hospitable, particularly the husband. He runs a large store here which is about to lead to a supermall (Guyana-scaled). He talked incisively about business, the international financial crisis, job creation, the Guyanese diaspora and alternative Caribbean models of development. His beautiful youngest daughter is a golden girl- uber-confident, courteous, attractive, happy. He is secure, slightly mercurial, expansive, an unselfconscious lord of the manor. His wife is prosperous, plump, envied, with a ready smile that I didn't see in her eyes. They were gracious to us. There was something slightly over-ripe about it all, but I might have been carrying that odour with me.

POOR MAN

There is a government-run Amerindian hostel in a run-down part of Georgetown. Unless they have family in town, Amerindians (who live throughout the 90% of Guyana that isn't the coastal strip) stay there when they come to town. They live in large dormitories with no privacy, so theft is a big problem there. It costs 500-1000 Guyanese dollars a night- I have no idea how they afford this, as very little cash exists in the interior.

We strolled around uncomfortably, saying some hellos. The priest who took us thought our discomfort unreasonable. To me it felt like a trip to the zoo- a rather voyeuristic viewing. The lady who runs the hostel warmed up when I asked her about her own home. She's from the Pomeroon river, a rainforest community. I had forgotten that smiliness is rare on first meeting- I noticed that in November when I went south. The children were finding playthings in the concrete rubble and on the filthy choked creekbanks. It was the day after Valentine's, so discarded balloons were everywhere, being bitten, kicked and popped. The adults looked listless, or worse than listless. The zoo came to mind again- that lion, turning her back, too bored even to sleep.

BEGGARMAN

A rastafari man lives on the pavement outside the presbytery. A striking man, tall, with very dark skin and a long ex-handsome face. The hair that is technically his glory is tied under a filthy old shirt, I think blue originally. He sleeps on 3 layers of cardboard. The older Jesuits usually give him dinner in a plastic tub. Sometimes he asks, sometimes he doesn't. Occasionally he has a camberwell carrot of a spliff, but most of the time, spliff or not, he is clearly in a world which is not the street outside Brickdam. He very rarely looks at passers-by as if they are separate from that world. He looked very straight and clearly at me once, but I have no idea what he saw.

THIEF

Malcolm told a story at dinner. Thieves broke into the garden of the presbytery to break in the side door. The dogs were loose, so when the larger puppy leapt out they swiped its head off with a machete.

Four seasons in one day. I'd forgotten this feeling of immediacy that seems unique to developing countries. Please forgive me, I'm about to have a Portentous Moment! I think 'civilisation' blunts life and death. Maybe that's why in the west we're so bad at death. Sometimes I think we're not that great at life either.

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