Immaculata

Immaculata is 15 years old, middle daughter in a family of five children. You’ll have guessed from the name that the family is Catholic. She does not speak. This is not the result of any throat injury or vocal disability- she laughs when she is happy and giggles when she is unsure. I think it is her choice never to make loud noises, only soft ones. The restraints seem to be mental rather than physical, but no-one knows the cause.

This is a warm and close-knit family. They have developed a rudimentary sign language, but it is a blunt instrument. No-one communicates with her in any detail. This means that whilst she can read and write, it is impossible to tell how well. Whilst she understands some Wapishana, of course she does not speak it. (I asked the thoughtless question “Can you speak Wapishana?” and suddenly realised it should have been rather “Do you understand Wapishana?”, or “If you spoke, would you speak it?”). In the time that I have known her she has never volunteered communication to anyone, although she seems willingly responsive, either by signs or occasionally by writing. Does communication really exist if one never frames the question, never chooses the topic? Which leads me to wonder whether Immaculata is unreachable by choice, and if so, why.

Throughout primary school, her mother tells me, the other children were not gentle. So she decided to take her out of schooling at 12. Since then, she has lived at home and helped with the housework and the tending of children. The CRS course is her first engagement with a world wider than family and church since finishing primary school. My sister is a teaching assistant in the UK, and expectations are heavy upon them to observe and understand each child’s learning style and find ways to support them. Here there are no learning disability specialists, so no-one has ever looked into Immaculata’s situation. I do not even know if it is a “condition”. She is clearly intelligent; she keeps up easily with her fellow trainees, all of whom are secondary graduates. Her attention span is very good. She seems happy and quite untroubled. If it is a refusal to speak, refusal itself seems out of character. She has a subtle but distinct aura of openness, interest, of something like hope.

At first she is very wary of me. This manifests itself both audibly (her giggles increase and rise in pitch) and physically (if I come closer she moves behind someone). Before entering the training course she has never touched a computer. She learns at a similar pace to everyone else, faster than some because her concentration is better. Her weaving and shooting also improve more quickly than average. I think as a teacher I have an intuition for whether a person is extending themselves: I get the impression that she is not. By the end she is much more comfortable in the group environment, giggles rarely, and is completely relaxed around me.

I hope that her parents are very proud to see her running a powerpoint presentation at the closing ceremony, and to see her receive her completion certificate. She takes it very much in her stride. I wonder if another person will ever really know her. I wonder whether that is an impoverishment, or whether her solitude is a gift from herself to herself. Her whole being is a smiling secret.

Eustace

Eustace is not a noticeable man. That is the first impression. I must have seen him around before last July, but the first time I really noticed him was when he slaughtered James in a bike race. It was the heats for the Deep South Games 2009. James is six foot two, was riding a titanium mountain bike, and had done the extraordinary Raid Pyrenean (a time-limited monster ride that overlaps with the Tour de France route over 21 mountain passes, not least the two most famous killers, Tourmalet and Aubisque) the previous summer. Eustace is five foot one and was riding a heavy Brazilian road bike in welly boots. He rode quietly across the finish line without a glimmer of triumph, leaving the competition considerably in his wake and whomphing like manatees.

If Leonie’s most striking feature is that smile that wells out of the centre of herself, Eustace’s most striking attribute is his spectroscopic capability. The kind of skills testosterone-ridden young men gain on expensive SAS-run survival courses are the quotidian ground of his life. At Deep South Games time we can all marvel at how fast he climbs the bare trunk of an ité tree, how quickly he lights fire from cotton, how beautifully he weaves a basket at speed, how perfectly forms an arrow from discarded scraps. For the rest of the year these are his daily occupations, not competition skills. The long bike rides in the breathless furnace of a savannah dry season afternoon, shooting fish with an arrow made on the creek bank, finding unexpected pawpaws and quickly weaving a basket to carry them home in, shinning up a coconut palm using a ripped palm leave twisted into a figure of eight round his feet, with a sharpened machete shoved in the back of his trousers. Confident that he will not fall.

It is not that Eustace is unusually quiet, or bad with words. But I have rarely met someone to whom words are so dispensable. He uses them competently, like a foreigner who is pretty good with chopsticks, but the effect is of a skill learnt, not an integral part of his personality. If he thought about it, I guess he would judge words as a pretty poor medium of communication. But I don’t think he’d find that train of thought interesting. Eustace teaches weaving and archery on our young adult training course. Some of the students complain that he does not explain. I do not want to interfere with his equilibrium by articulating the scope of what he is teaching. Besides, it cannot be pinned down like that. He is bringing himself into the course; other people can bring explanations. He is also one of the community development plan team, where he listens and judges and intervenes only at need. He is on the village council, where I suspect he is equally laconic and equally valued.

There is a quietness in his face that would be easy to mistake for gentleness. I don’t think it is. I think it is peace. I think that he has chosen a life in which there are no ambitions, and few nagging worries, tugs of loyalty or twisted feelings, and is enjoying the fruit of that choice without vanity and without drama. Eustace is one of the most impressive men I have ever met, but I suspect he would be astonished and baffled to hear that, and I’m not sure it would be welcome. He neither knows nor cares whether he impresses. That is the taproot of his dignity.

Social gyaffs and social gaffes

I have had the great good fortune to make friends by accident. Two Georgetown photographers who found James’ blog tripped across mine too, and gradually through comments and chats we became friends- rather like the imaginary friends children have. Mind you, I was never 100% sure that they weren’t actually Greek girls or Canadian schoolboys or Kyrgyz herdsmen taking the piss out of me.

Strange, then, to arrange to meet up in Georgetown. I was curiously nervous, because I am very open in my blog and I had never realised until it came to the crunch how much that is a product of being so far from everyone who reads it. I suddenly observe, planning to meet these two, that I have rather laid my life out like cold cuts on a platter, and it’s very out of character for me to profligate my privacy so.

I needn’t have worried. Their balance of warmth and decorum is unimpeachable - Mr Roast Pork almost steps backwards as he shakes my hand. In Guyana, they tell me, if a married man is seen out with another woman, murmuring indubitably follows. But surely the three of us out together acts as a kind of mutual chaperone? No, it’s just as bad, because I’m out without my husband. The fact that he is 500 miles away does not excuse me. This makes me rather uncomfortable- I’m not used to being forward, rash and risqué simply by stepping out of the door with Other Men, especially not in my usual Guyana nunny bag-lady clothes. It’s funny but inhibiting. I find myself taking shallower breaths. My personality is testing the confines of a corset.

I knew already that Georgetown is a small and therefore self-absorbed (gossipy) society. But it had not crossed my mind that adults in Guyana might be less free than they are in the UK. It’s not a visible constraint- you wouldn’t know it unless someone tells you. I am fascinated and puzzled. I mean, one man, one woman, dodgy nightclub and lots of booze, yes- that might raise a few eyebrows. But three people aged 29 or over having a beer in daylight in full public view? My sister used to laugh at my gaucheness when I came to London and stiffened over kissing people on the cheek, but I feel positively touchy-feely in this context. We went out to gyaff- I spent the first half-hour fretting that I would gaffe.

I soon forgot my self-consciousness, though. I never thought when I was gradually, carefully building trust and friendships with Amerindians in the interior, that it would simultaneously deepen friendships with people reading my venting, ranting and pontificating too. Long-term friends far away email to say they feel they know me much better now. And I would never have met Mr Cult Leader and Mr Roast Pork if it weren’t for my blog: that seems very clear. Here, it isn’t really on for a husband and wife to have separate friends. Mr Cult Leader was saying that he and his wife do, but it was stated as a matter of pride, of distinctiveness, not the matter of course it would be among my UK friends. I think we would see only having the same friends as a danger for a couple, not a positive. Here it’s ever so slightly radical.

Which gets me to wondering if this causes society to polarise- between respectable people who carry an Edith Wharton constraint with them, and lairy men who shout the most explicit ‘compliments’/ insults / suggestions at me on the street. Does the one feed the other? I asked if that means that men have mainly male friends, then, and women mainly female. On the whole that seems to be true. And there is an expectation that your parents will know your friends. It suddenly strikes me how very vulgar expats must appear here- what coarse social manners they must display, and how sleazy they must seem. But I, insanely decorous all my life, would hate to have sex restricting my choice of friends. I’m not very good at the girly girl stuff. And doing everything as a couple would be stifling. I think James and I feel enriched by our souls’ very different feeding troughs.

We talk about the brain drain, possibly the only strong kinship between Guyana and Northern Ireland where I grew up. Both men state very positively that the drivers of migration are women. Considering the discussion we had had already about Georgetown’s goldfish bowl of gossip, and noting that it is the husbands and not the wives I am meeting, I can imagine myself finding this self-absorbed society restrictive: perhaps that is a motivating factor for Guyanese women too. Well-paid jobs are not plentiful, and I don’t know what the statistics say on equity in the workplace but with Guyana’s birth rates and motherhood demographics (high expectation to start popping early, girls), it can’t be a feminist’s paradise. Roast Pork and Cult Leader say that they would not leave Guyana, although only time will tell whether their wives take the same view...

Those are the things they say. Then, of course, there are all the things they don’t say. They inhabit a complex multicultural cocktail of an atmosphere profoundly unlike the rarefied monocultural clarity of the Aishalton oxygen I am used to. There are no references to gaffes in my blog. They don’t fish for compliments on their generosity in sticking their necks out to entertain me. They don’t elucidate how extraordinarily ignorant I am of the country I’ve spent the past two years in, although they do introduce me to Dave Martins’ weekly column so that I can discover this for myself. I have since learnt that the correct expression for my cultural numptyhood is that “I don’t know all the fine fine”- I don’t understand the myriad nuances of Georgetown culture, and by extension (since this is the bulk of the population) Guyana, at all. And there is the whole different ambience in which we talk. I hear a definitiveness, a crispness, a kind of vaunting and hyperbole and fizz in their speech that is partly capital city and partly distinctively Guyanese. It’s a friendly and enjoyably baffling evening. The fact that I am tantalised rather than humiliated by my ignorance is a testament to something- Guyanese hospitality? Online friendships? Or just that they are goodhearted guys?

There’s a distancing pleasure in watching old friends gyaff. They comment crisply and with aspersion on each other’s increasingly elaborate retelling of old anecdotes. They scoff and mock and laugh like an old married couple, with some deliberate irony and some less deliberate. I think the fact that marriages are different in this culture means that the line of friendship falls differently too. There’s an almost deliberate play on yin-yang that I haven’t experienced since my early twenties. Gyaffing isn’t just a different word for chatting; it is actually a perceptibly different activity. Great fun, but like any new language, it would take time to absorb into oneself. I’ve been wondering lately what this blog is for. Maybe it’s the nearest I’ve ever got to a proper gyaff.

Climate Control

Through the bars on my window I stare for hours at a mango tree. My Aishalton eyes know this to be a mangy city tree, but it is visually pleasing notwithstanding. Its bark is brownish grey, coated with a flakey undercoat of moss the colour of a furry, diseased tongue. By craning my neck at a creaky breaky angle, I can see a fat, split knot identical to one of the gargoyles on New College’s south wall. It hefts its ugly chin at me, squab and swarthy. Its expression is part grumpy comedian, part dungeonmaster.

As counterpoint to my solid ailments I’m also getting variations on the vapours. It makes me feel rather Victorian. For example, I’m allergic to insect bites, so I over-use the air conditioning. Thus my toes are frozen, and my brain bemused by the indoor British climate, complete with gargoyles, absurdly vying with a gleaming mango tree framed against a deep tropical sky four feet away.

Every half hour or so, a new creature will sample the tree’s hospitality. First, a slim green lizard slides silkily upward, pulsing. He too cranes his neck, flaunting a flexibility unavailable to the larger species. Second, a hummingbird thrills its few assessing seconds before rejecting the mango tree’s paucity and passing by. The next visitor is a gecko, darting distinctively, bulgy-eyed, ungraceful but charming. And finally a kiskadee stomps over, raucous and extrovert, chewing its beaky cud.

It feels so like an airlock that I struggle to believe in the ever-present heat awaiting me out there. I struggle to believe that I am free to leave. I feel like a junior Chinese philosopher who is in trouble with his Master for squandering this mango tree’s existential potential by wasting time casting aspersions at ugly gargoyles and whinging about his unrepentantly crumbling physiology. I wish I could draw.

Leonie

I have never seen a smile suffuse a person so radiantly as Leonie’s does.

The first time I met Leonie, I had been in Aishalton for about three weeks. We were still living in the Village Guesthouse (Mosquito Optimum Breeding Biohazard Zone of the Western Hemisphere). I was two weeks into fulltime secondary school teaching, jumping straight in with no preparation a month into term. It was hot- PLEEENTY plenty hot. I was sweaty, stressy and smelly. I had not smiled, myself, for some days.

I was invited along to observe the women’s sewing and leadership training. Twelve women were learning to use Singer 974s, Leonie among them. Back then I struggled to distinguish faces. Every woman is a similar height, all have dark brown eyes, all have long black hair, almost always worn up. Most are between 4ft 7 and 5ft, and most women over thirty are comfortably girthed with huggable rolls. Distinguishing features are subtle, compounded by the fact that everyone over sixty relinquishes their name to the ubiquitous, affectionate ‘ko’oko’- ‘Granny’.

They were learning about empowerment and the Johari window that day (that’s a self-analysis tool invented, I’m sorry to say, by two Americans called Joe and Harry who thought “Johari” sounded classier). Intending only to observe, I was startled to be called up to the blackboard and asked (told!) to “present something”. Now that I know how inured Aishaltoners are to outsiders coming in to talk, and never to listen, I can understand the reasoning behind this. At the time I was caught unprepared. So I said something about different kinds of power, gave some examples, and then set them a task to do in pairs. I can look back and freeze-frame their faces in my memory’s eye: Alison looking terrified, Gloria shellshocked, Anastasia shutter-faced. How lovely it would be to replay that scene now, friends and neighbours! How much laughter and banter there would be. I think some confidences shared, too.

Anyway, nervous and tense, I looked round and round again, seeking a chink in the armadillo armour separating me from these women. I can be an intimidating person, I know it to my cost, and worst of all when I’m nervous. I looked for a way in, for a break in the clouds, for a pair I could call upon to speak first. And I caught Leonie’s eye, and she smiled all over her round, pretty, well-used face, and her eyes gleamed like water catching sunlight. She quenched everything else in the room. I completely forgot to be nervous, she and her partner kicked us off and the rest was plain sailing.

Leonie bakes for a living. She runs a little mud booth called ‘Fingers’, where on Sundays (and Wednesdays and Fridays if you’re lucky) you can buy fresh bread, salara (kind of bread-swiss-roll stuffed with sweet dyed coconut), burgers, buns, and sometimes meat-and-farine or a portion of curry. On Fingers days she is usually up by 3am cooking in her homemade wood-fired oven. She is also a seamstress and makes uniforms and other clothes, mainly for family. She farms on her small plot, a few hour’s walk away, several days each week. Her youngest child is now 11, and I suspect she has been bringing up children for about twenty-five years.

I try to introduce a little grit to my description- I search for a moment in our eighteen-month acquaintance which shows Leonie in a less sunny light. She talks little. Fingers is not always open when she says it will be. That is all the grit I can find. Fairy godmothers are all very well: Leonie is the real thing. SHE makes the dress, then prepares the wonderful meal, creates the carriage and dazzles the handsome prince into being in the right place at the right time. She smiles like the sun coming up, and lo and behold, it does.

It is Leonie’s birthday next week. I know this because, last year, we arrived at the shop unbeknownst and were given a free meal because it was her birthday. I expostulated ineffectually with my mouth full- and later asked did she ALWAYS make her own birthday cake? She smiled her amazing smile and said yes, of course, as if the question was a joke. I asked further, has she NEVER been given a birthday cake? No. One of my saddest specific regrets about leaving early was being foiled in my plan of arriving at Leonie’s on 18th September with a home-baked cake and a balloon. But the cake, of course, would be very temporary. The smile is perennial.

Amerindian Heritage Month

How can you generalise about humans? I am often staggered by how unfeasibly different even family members can be. Generalisations about races went out with the Ark (as did all races- except the Chosen People, and a few lucky bestial couples, along with of course a lot of very smug fish who have harked back to it ever since as the Great Piscine Renaissance).

Nevertheless, there are some things I’ve noticed about ‘Amerindians’ as a group which fascinate me. To celebrate Amerindian Heritage Month, which starts today, I should like to start by mentioning some of those observations. Then each Monday I will attempt a ‘portrait’ of one of the Wapishana people I have got to know in Aishalton.

When I arrived in Guyana, I was told that Amerindians are shy. I believe this impression comes from two things: in my experience, Amerindians talk less than Guyana’s other populations, and I have found them to be reticent with strangers. The first Amerindian I met completed most of a seven-hour jeep journey without speaking to me, and would not make eye contact, let alone return my smiles. I thought I must have either gaffed horribly, or repulsed her with some malodorous foulness or other. The following day she came up beaming and threw her arms round me. I don’t believe it’s shyness so much as an instinctive, uncalculated caution. The vast majority of the Amerindians I have met have been both very friendly and very private. It’s a warm yet respectful combination.

Sorry, I know it’s a cliché, but they are happier. This might be due to the fact (from my experience, I believe it to be fact) that people in developing countries, especially in rural areas (I suspect it isn’t true in the capitals), are brilliant at getting enjoyment out of a life whenever nothing is going actively wrong, where many of us developed country people seem to be expecting something to be going actively right in order to be happy. Maybe that is part of the reason why they are also widely perceived as passive: maybe their passivity is connected to their skill at contentment, and to sacrifice the one is to threaten the other.

We are formed by our language: of course the Wapishana language has shaped the consciousness of people in Aishalton. My teacher told me that the word “wapichan” means “slow and methodical” and the word “macushi” means quick, so a Wapishana will do a slow, laborious, thorough job where a Macushi will finish faster but less finely. All those gorgeous details, such as the word for face meaning literally ‘the savannah of the eyes’ and solar eclipse being rendered as ‘sun death’, create a mind-map uniquely contoured to suit life here. Having a small vocabulary also affects the way you view the world: grouping things differently, relying on words less. It makes it difficult to teach here, and to write up group documents with any kind of consensus.

Wapishanas have an immediacy of the mind which is lost to those of us who have learned detachment. They are either out or in. When they read a novel or a poem, the writer IS the protagonist. My trainees could not detach themselves to do a task purely as an example: at the Training Centre we did an exercise to teach spreadsheets, where the trainees called out scores for themselves in various personality traits. The spreadsheet training was swept away as people got thoroughly enthralled by the content. I’ve seen it in all sorts of fields, that incapacity to think in the abstract. In a way, I think it’s really good that we Westerners are able to look at ourselves as consumers, as audience, as targets for an advertising campaign- can see how the writer is trying to manipulate us at the same time as we read his message. But it sucks away our spontaneity. Our capacity for enthralment is stunted.

How much of this is cultural and how much socialisation cannot be disentangled. These are my impressions; I wouldn’t claim them to be diagnoses.

Amerindians are one of the great romanticised ethnic groups in the modern world, along with Tibetans and a few others. In a way, they are blessed by their isolation, and the fact that an outsider cannot “become” an Amerindian. The Dalai Lama does not encourage converts to Tibetan Buddhism. He points out that we are born into a culture and religion or world view and it’s probably as well to stay there. But he gets stuck with a lot of post-modernist Tibetan Buddhists (memorably termed “dharma bunnies” by a rather scurrilous friend of mine in Xining) who shop for the peace and harmony and try to ignore the sky burial, the occasional fat-cat Rimpoches and the status quo feudalism that come with it.

Perhaps because outsiders cannot buy in, perhaps simply from isolation, most Amerindians (unless they have lived on the coast) are unused to presenting themselves; either to impress, or to be understood. Ask a villager “what do you do?” and you will probably get a blank stare in return. The 1001 questions that determine job, status, abilities, social level and background are utterly meaningless here. I and most of my British friends probably don’t consider ourselves vain, but we have been packaging ourselves in increasingly sophisticated wrappings since our eleven plus or first SATs, or whenever the world first held up its yardstick and raised a sardonic eyebrow. Amerindians in the interior don’t do this. The outcome is that the careless or biassed bystander will confirm their prejudice that Amerindians are unimpressive, and will entirely misunderstand them. And I’m not entirely sure that anyone cares. I sincerely hope that they continue not to give a tinker’s cuss. What happens when Amerindians move to the coast, though?- that’s when the misunderstandings become dangerous.

The Cleaner Vacuum

Half-woken in the small hours by torrential rain, I fumble with the mosquito net to get up and cover the laptop with waterproofing. Entangled moth-like and feebly struggling, it comes to me that I am in Georgetown, not Aishalton, and I fall back exhausted. I’m insulated now, and have no need of Ortleib bags. Cause for thankfulness, a sensible person would think.

It’s strange, shifting environments so utterly, so suddenly. I was told by a proper hippy when I left China that the soul travels at walking pace. I think it might be true. I’m just about reaching Lethem tonight. My id should reach Georgetown around 19th September at 1pm. I’ll let you know her impressions of the journey when she catches up with me.

Here I am, cleaner but in a vacuum. Here, I am cleaner but in a vacuum. Similar statements, telling different truths. I read Annie Dillard and I am not sure she helps. Illuminates, maybe. “All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind- the culture- has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel.” Words seem too blunt; words seem to blunt the raw gusting force of abandoning a home without ceremony. The richness of Aishalton laps at the edge of my mind in multifarious motley. It claims me in my dreams, and wakes me up bereft. Don’t get me wrong. I stank. I was shattered. I cursed the blaring Brazilian music pounding deep like mining drills at 2am. I worried constantly, especially since the scorpion in the bed, the snake in the shower, the monkey spider sent from heaven above plummeting towards the bedroom, and the man who got the back of his skull ripped off by a jaguar.

And yet. It is so REAL. So vibrant in its stinks. So viciously close to the unpeopled world. I want to say it is real like a child’s drawing is real, which is the nearest I can get to its strange dimensionality with my sand bucket and shovel.

Words fail me. I fail them. What remains is the attempt to finish the sandcastle I’ve been building, knowing it’s a feeble likeness, and knowing it will wash away, but rushing nevertheless to give you a representation of Aishalton’s fascinating, isolated, unique immediacy before the tide comes in.

'The Contest', by Thomas Williams

Thomas is Aishalton's best carpenter, and a multi-talented man.

At dusk he came,
Young, shiny black and fleshy strong.
He lingered awhile,
Staring arrogantly,
Balefully eyeing the old front gate, there.
But an oath
With a stone
Trailed him down the rocky rutted way.

A monstrous shadow blocked the gateway;
Flashing beams pinpointed him,
And raining missiles did not miss him.
Then the challenging bellow
And weighty footfalls
Like the slowly receding tide
Gradually faded down the misty roadway.

At grey dawn,
Ah, my dears!
The slip bars no guard now,
But forlornly laid, like slain soldiers
In the gateway.
Surely, in the most sleepy hours
The stubborn young bull had returned.
Wreaked havoc with the gate,
Cropped the lusty grass,
Seasoned with thyme.
Then before first light
Made his getaway.

Thereafter, in an afternoon
Or many afternoons,
Leisurely, he idled past.
Maliciously, in long sideways glances,
Looked at the hated reinforced front gate,
Biding his time,
Calculating his next move,
For sure, that’s for sure.

The young one,
Hidden under the giant mango tree,
Immobile on the ancient rock,
Whispered desperately, “At the gate- the bull!”
Through the door I flew,
Hatred brimming,
“Death”, I’m thinking
Shouting crazily “Stone him, stone
The wretched bull”.
But already, shoving like the express train,
He was distant on the plain.

Then again,
In the small dark hours,
When sleep was most deep and dreams pleasant,
While roosters everywhere
Flapped and crooned wakefully,
The blunted index poked the ribs,
Then hoarsely she muttered “Cows”.
Lazy movement,
Serious munching, just outside.
Surely, most impolite.

The final assault had come.
The rogue had returned.
I looked at the barb.
I looked at the “x”.
Neither was disturbed.
Where had he made his gate?

Dreamlike,
The young ruffian
Sneaked around the wall.
Instantly spotting me, he charged.
Lightning he was,
Pushing, twisting,
Snorting angrily,
He forged through- then bolted.
And the bars?
Oh, how they cracked, ear-splitting cracked,
And loudly broke,
Real fast. In an instant/ in a flash.
All twisted in the dust
On a fresh dark moon.

The bull?
He had come and was gone.

A Diary of Departure

Like a whirlwind, it’s over. My life in Aishalton has ended. In less than a week I have travelled a road that reminds me of grief. My departure felt like a rupture. As I write I recognise wryly how melodramatic that sounds. I think illness makes all misfortune strike us disproportionately.

The short version is this: in May, I came down with a nasty infection of the back which I had once as a child. Heavy antibiotics didn’t cure it, and it flared up again, so I came to Georgetown in June for treatment. A third time it attacked, at the beginning of August, and by the time I finished yet another hefty wallop of two simultaneous antibiotics, I barely had stamina left to stagger up to the training centre. So when the fourth flare-up began, we talked it through and accepted that I am no longer strong enough to recover in Aishalton. I am so weak now that every Tom, Dick and Harry ailment is felling me. My back needs cured, but I’m also risking malaria, dengue and who knows what by trying to soldier on. Workaholic- yes: hero or masochist- no!

The longer version? Here is a little diary of my last week. I wish I could have said goodbye to Aishalton, my home, in a less peremptory fashion.

Monday
Went up to the centre at 7:30, first time since last Mon. Got through an hour, then started blacking out. Had to hang on to the blackboard. Then had to sit down, which kills my back. Bailed out at 9:30. Fever. Got home and lay down. Don’t think I can do this any more. I am going to have to bite the bitter bullet, and find a way to leave.

Wednesday
B and Father Varghese online chatting about possible charter. He is stuck in town and needs to get back- I am stuck here and need to get out. Kills lots of birds with one stone. Half of me says “Yes!” and the other half cries “No!”. How can I go, right in the middle of everything? But how can I stay, harried by pain and worry just like that bullock I can see in the mango grove, harried by dogs while it waits for the slaughter?

Thursday
Charter booked. Saturday lunchtime. Can’t get my head round it. Can’t believe I’m going just like that. Abrupt. But keep feeling flashes of relief, too. It’s out of my hands now. No more agonising. Alea Jacta Est. I’m so grateful for the flight. Jesuit generosity has never been so timely.

Friday
My last night. Videoed a stunning sunset, said goodbye to my literature students and trainees who were playing volleyball, preparing for the Deep South Games next week. Went out to the latrine late. There was just one firefly. Just one generator running. Just one ‘Moo’, and not a single star.

Saturday
Goodbyes. People brought little gifts of their belongings- a locally made woven picture that looks just like my house, two beautiful seed necklaces that must have been hard to part with. Some women had found time to make me something: Psalm 23 painted on a cotton cloth, my favourite snacks for the journey. I hadn’t expected tears from anyone except myself. There were quite a lot of tears. The only goodbye I didn’t regret was to my pit latrine. That I will not miss, never. At the airstrip some people were waiting, and there were speeches and gifts and a Wapishana song written hurriedly for me.

Flying out. Big, wrenching sobs, the kind a child cries. As their faces disappeared I was almost wailing: this is not something I do. Too sudden. That’s what I keep thinking. So much of our psyche there (yes, I did type ‘here’ unconsciously and have to change it) is formed by the difficulty of travel. It’s a part of our identity, that two-stage long-haul. I feel like MacDuff, from the womb untimely ripp’d. The flight was loud but calming. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me when I saw the sun sailing strangely through the trees, passing like a silver disk below the canopy. For hundreds of miles the rainforest is flooded, and the sun was perfectly cast in the invisible water, travelling along with the plane like an impossible dazzling shadow.

So here I am, sucked out of Aishalton by some unseen hoover and deposited in Georgetown, amidst all the comforts except the home-made, and all the luxuries except the smiles of home friends. I close my eyes and I see Aishalton: some part of my mind still thinks I live there. I wonder for how many days it will remain as ‘home’ in my mind? I won’t know until suddenly it isn’t any more. ‘A few more moons...’, as Chief Seathl reminds me. Flux is the order of things.

Now it’s Sunday, and I lie on a comfortable bed in the Jesuit House in Georgetown, waiting to see a doctor tomorrow. Allowing for medical exigencies, our plan at the moment is to stay in Guyana until November. James has a list of photographs untaken that haunts his dreams and will pack out his days. I have a mountain of tasks to complete, conversations to finish by Skype, bids to see through and reports to help people draft in Amerindian cyberspace. The reflecting can come later. Before any of that, it’s rest and medication, rest and medication, the soothing hum of air-conditioning and the kindnesses of Bob and Malcolm.

Insulation

Insulation from the natural world is unnatural.

I look round my house for a wall I can’t see daylight through. Not that it matters, since a few feet higher up there is a gap the whole way round large enough for any bird, snake or modest-sized rodent to sashay through, wherever the roof meets the walls. And anything can climb in through the roof thatch too. Our friend Edgar told us a story of dashing out of a friend’s home for a leak at midnight and being bolted out of an ité-roofed house. He was dressed only in a sheet. A little the worse for liquor, he decided to climb through the ité. Halfway through the solemn drunken care of his manoeuvrings he fell abruptly and got perfectly jammed, like Pooh plugged into Rabbit’s front door. I cannot but smile at the thought of his stout dignified personage, neatly clipped moustache, smartly tucked toga, bulging from the absorbent twiglet thatch like a candle from a cake.

Artificial insulation makes sense for warmth. We love hermetic sealing, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad. But perfect insulation leaves us unable to breathe. We become like Jill Masterson in Goldfinger, one of the shortest tenures of any Bond girl. She is painted all over in gold, which suffocates her because her skin can’t breathe. Is it a coincidence that here in the land of unsealing ceilings, I’ve never seen a child with eczema?

I tape up all my food boxes to keep the cockroaches out, but that’s unnatural too. Cockroaches remind us that we are part of the food chain. Funny, how outraged people are to be eaten by lions when in the end they will be thoroughly munched by the much humbler earthworm. I guess it’s the patience of the worm that reconciles us. Tibetan sky burial is the final refusal of insulation; welcoming the humility of death by being chopped into pieces and set out for the vultures. Cremation is the other end of the spectrum, thumbing the nose at death’s ravaging worms. But perhaps insulation is one of the reasons we city-dwellers have so lost our humility in the face of nature. It has given us delusions of control.

I know when I return to Britain I will struggle with the fact that I can’t hear the weather. That when I open the shutters there is no breeze because the window frames are full of glass, not air. That I can live in t-shirts whatever the season because every building has an artificial climate. I wonder when we’ll admit that climate control in our houses and cars implicates us in climate change in our oceans and weather? Nevertheless, I still yearn for it sometimes. A solid wall with no micro-views between the bricks. Food containers that contain only dead ingredients. Insulation in all its forms to keep the encroaching predators at bay.