D-Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Journeying Mercies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead of another success-stuffed Christmas Circular...

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

so-

so-

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE END

Stitching up the Sewing Project

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

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

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

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

Village One, who passionately wanted everything, got it.

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

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

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

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

And Village Six got quite a lot and then complained.

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

Invisible Privileges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The well has run dry

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

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

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

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

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

Learning Wapishana

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the Bough Breaks

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

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

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

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

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