To create your future, or let it create you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just another day in Paradise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legacies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking the Temperature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rupununi Rodeo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Water, water, everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sewing up the Sewing Project

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

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

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

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

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

Watominap Wapichan Da'u

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dastardly and Muttley

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

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

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

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

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

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

D-Man

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.