Treasures of film

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

The South Rupununi Sewing Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask anxiously for whom the bell tolls

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

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

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

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

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

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

To boldly go where John Steinbeck has gone before

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

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

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

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

Rupununi Couriers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter waiting to be dragged away

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

Peter reconciled, looking most fetching in my hat

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

The Deep South Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virtually attending a Wedding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cockroach in the mug is worth two in the mind

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

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

An interview with Paul and Taise

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

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

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

Paul and Taise with the church bell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul tells the world to stop fighting and stop drinking.

Taise says stop playing jumbie.

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

The road goes ever on and on

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

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

On the way to the Deep South Games

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

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

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

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

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