The Six Joys of Rainy Season

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.

Just another day in Paradise

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!

Water, water, everywhere

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.

Midnight in the Twiglet House

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!

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.

And the dragonflies moved upon the face of the water

Yesterday Edgar, a foursquare friend who combines Dickensian dignified portliness with a droll storytelling humour, waterproofed our roof. He climbed a ladder on to the single layer of thatch and clambered around shoving ite leaves into suspicious gaps, while I winced beneath, feeling the roof shake and shudder. It all looked even more precarious from outside, as the whole thatch twitched like a bad toupe. But last night, when the rains came a’knocking, for the first time the roof stayed shut.

Today is a proper rainy season day. I wake to pattering rather than hammering. Morning prayer at 6am up the hill is dark, sparsely attended and everyone is cold (it’s about 23 degrees). On my way back down, the rain-pace picks up, and my coat is drenched through before I head for the well. There is a tautological frustration in struggling to pull up water when it’s descending with such purposeful aplomb, but I need a shower now, not in half an hour. Nevertheless I put out all our empty buckets under the roof eaves, and by the time I leave for school we have twelve gallons of heaven’s water, unlaboured for.

I cannot consider cycling today, so I set off early in B’s coat (mine is beyond “soaking” and in to “pouring”), waterproof boots, my hurricane umbrella and a backpack in its own cute silver mackintosh. A plague of flying worms rises in wafts, drifting like ash, giving me compelling reason to keep my mouth firmly shut. When I reach the road, it is a red river with a clearly discernible current. I have to leap the torrent six or seven times on the walk. At the largest dips in the road, lakes have formed with greenish edges. Here the dragonflies hover scarlet and gold, greeting my bleary incredulity with a darting, nonchalant indifference. Contrasting children pass by; the dragonfly children in normal uniform, carrying their ‘slippers’ (flipflops) and wading, and the anxious-parented children in ankle-length non-breathable macks, creating the moisture inside to complement the outside. A tall girl in tiny shorts hurtles by, sheltered under the umbrella of her passenger balanced on the crossbar.

When I arrive at school, the children are mainly sheltering under the eaves, but nothing else is different. Life continues as normal. I remember London’s six inches of snow in January and chuckle.

And lo! The heavens opened...

Rainy season arrived yesterday. Just like that. Suddenly the sky was filled with rain, from top to bottom. It hushed and rushed and shushed, a constant static movement that is much harder to conjure up than stair-rods or cats and dogs. Today is different- it hurtled pokers, stabbing at the zinc roof of the school. No classes took place after 1:10 because even the most stentorian tones were hammered into oblivion by the vociferous voice of the rain. The school has no windows, so the sideways pokers gobbed all over my marking. Poor Polycarp is going to think I wept over his grammar. I tiptoed home through today’s deep mud (yesterday’s skidding sandpits). My expedition hurricane umbrella was great. My one smart pair of shoes is ruined. I disgracefully neglected to pack shoe polish.

When I got home, the flying ants were just beginning to swarm. Poor old Pharaoh, those Israelites with their insect plagues knew what they were about. Ant wars of attrition. I buttoned my shirt to the collar, but my eyelashes, ears, and dinner were all richer in protein than usual. I retired, sore beset, to the mosquito net. Now they’re nearly all dead and I have a memento mori gathered in the netting over my head. And no, I’m not getting out to brush them off. Would you?
Rainy season lasts from now to September. Let’s hope I develop Miss Smilla’s feeling for rain.

It's raining knives and knitting needles

A perfectly prepared Parika peddler!

Why is rain here fascinating, when in the UK it bores, annoys and frustrates me?

Well, in England the rain is cold. My clothes get soaked and can't dry. I've ALWAYS forgotten my umbrella. Enclosed spaces smell of rotting wool, open spaces smell of wet pavement and exhaust fumes (hmmmm- I've spent too long in the town, haven't I!)

Here, the first sign of rain is an abrupt and usually extremely welcome breeze. Next, if you're inside, is the noise. It's like a rushing. The noise comes from the roof or the ground, but seems disembodied- it doesn't drum. At first it bounces, but it flomps from the sky so quickly that it soon has nothing to bounce on except water. For about half an hour it stands on roads and paths, and then it begins to develop currents and rush.

Our little gutters would never cope. So buildings will have a great fat drainpipe running down the middle of some roofing and emptying in plumbing-system quantities on to whatever or whoever is beneath. Protection from sun and rain can often double up, so the same tarpaulin that provides shade suddenly becomes crammed with passers-by unwilling to have all their clothes and belongings turned to pulp.

Malcolm Rodrigues took us out the other day. Malcolm is a local, one of only three Guyanese Jesuits. He reminds me of a bird. Dark brown eyes, a kind of darting happy attentiveness. He made the garden at Brickdam, and he also looks after the dogs. He's extremely clever and has held a lot of inter-Caribbean and university posts, but all his attention is devoted to lab work with stroppy fifth-years at the moment, and to the dog's puppies. He's a real democrat. He pays himself no attention, has no perceptible ego, does not have Presence. No-one applauds, perhaps because he so clearly doesn't need it. He reminds me of de Mello's story of the diamond.

We went to see a cycle race. We crossed the Demerara floating bridge, a massive haphazard child's meccano toy with greedy-looking brown water lapping just below the road edge. It was hard to tell which way was up- water reaching up, water lavishing down, thin strip of grey-brown road, grey-brown light and muddy grey-brown cars in between.

We saw the riders sheltering together under a large tarpaulin, skinny tyres shying away from the sheet water. We guessed they would postpone the start, so we set off to see the Essequibo river.

Georgetown is on the Demerara. Parika (accented like 'paprika') is on the Essequibo. Twenty miles wide at the mouth, with islands big enough to live on. Apparently the biggest is larger than Barbados. I suspect it's a very nice town, especially if it isn't underwater when you visit. It isn't that the heavens open- it's more like experiencing life as an amphibian does. The arm that isn't under the umbrella is of one being with your sleeve within seconds. Almost everyone stops what they're doing and gets under an awning. We did.

... she didn't

A man approached me. Small, grubby, smelling distinctly of recently-consumed, not-freshly-opened beer.

"Welcome to my country! Where y'all from?"

"Y'all like cricket? Ooo we WHUPPED y'alls asses yesterday! We destTROYed ya man! Ooo! Hee hee heeeeee!" (This was proper mirth, not a laugh but gurgling mirth)

"This rain didn't suppose to be like this. This is dry season. It's climate change. What you do in your country and we're experiencing the effects. You see? Our ecosystem all messed up."

"Your Jeff Boycott, he was good though. But this lot- we WHUPPED y'alls asses! Ha ha!"

"Well, gotta go. I run this here internet cafe. Anytime you want to see Parika, you come find me here".

And he reeled gently off. Next time he reeled gently past, the beer was fresher and more confined to the breath.

My part was to nod, smile, affirm and feel guilty for climate change. He's right of course, but I was surprised. I hadn't expected the language and awareness to be so universal.

Meanwhile, it rained. Sometimes it slackened, sometimes the drains gurgled, the drainpipes opposite ejected water with force so it banged on to the street below.

In the end we gave up and drove back- to find the cycle race over. They had gone ahead in the rain and wind, and were happy enough with the times achieved. Malcolm joked over dinner that the guy doing the breast stroke won. It's seriously dangerous cycling on skinny tyres in deep and flowing road water, but I suppose they're used to it. For myself, I'll stick with yawning under the awning as the rain comes tumbling down. It's somehow restful. And we'd better get used to it!

x

Wet wet wet

At the Greenpeace ship moored in Belem for the WSF

My feet are all wrinkly, as if I've been in the bath. My shoes and rucksack and hat and socks and life generally are sodden!

Serves us right. We went to the Amazonian zoological garden today, and B forgot his umbrella. So the camera got my umbrella, and we got wet. It's a beautiful garden, but for the first while we were too waterlogged to appreciate it. After two hours of drenchment, we got a seat in the cafe. The day looked up. We ate meat in fermented cassava sauce (intriguing and mainly nice), and watched the rain bounce off the little lake, the giant leaves, the canoes and people other than ourselves. The park has more kinds of rainforest trees than I could count- beautiful. When the rain slowed to a mere downpour, we wandered round and admired the tamelife (I guess that's what you'd call ex-wildlife). The manatee looked so sad, so lonely and so resigned. The macaws pointedly ignored us, in a self-conscious, back-turned manner, whereas the scarlet ibis just got on with life, pecking hopefully at the remainders of papaya rind. The Amazonian tortoises were probably my favourite, climbing over each other and plopping down in heaps for a nap. They run over each other like caterpillar tanks.

All the paths were so deep in water you could see which way the current was running. When the rain stopped, the treetops were fugged up with mist, and invisible creatures started shrieking. It's strange listening to the rainforest and heavy traffic at the same time! We squelched home wetly, stopping to buy beer for the final evening on the way. It's peculiar, climbing off a pretty grungy bus, then trying to dash across a six-lane highway which is running 6 inches deep with water, loaded with backpacks, a 12-pack of beer, camera, walking stick and two umbrellas- "whomp squelch clunk clunk squoosh squelch clunk whomp eeeeeeeeeeeeeek"...

The World Social Forum ended today, not with a bang but a whimper as far as I could see. It's been an interesting experience but I'm not sure I'd attend another. This kind of magnitude (roughly 80,000 people) kyboshes any chance of coherence. A large quantity of events were cancelled, moved, unfindable, unwatchable or unmemorable. My own duncehood with Portuguese of course didn't help. But I think maybe the WSF is not for people like me. Others seemed to get lots from it.

We were planning a sunset trip on the Amazon to finish our stay in Brazil, but considering that a reasonable amount of river had already fallen on our heads, we decided to take it easy this evening instead. Off to Guyana early tomorrow, when a new (hot but hopefully dry!) chapter begins. Wish us luck. x