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It seems like ages since I have written a blog post, and it looks like it too. I don’t consciously fall out of communication with my friends and family, it just naturally occurs once or twice a year. I guess changing hemispheres doesn’t change a person’s habits. For those of who you have written emails wondering if I am still alive, fear no more I have risen.

I have done and experienced a lot of things. Some memories have faded with only pictures left to recollect the awesomeness of my travels, but I will do my best to summarize the events that have unfolded. After my previous post, school was let out and I was left with nothing to do. The break between the terms lasted for three weeks, just enough time to go and see some of the hard to reach corners of Guyana. However, I had to decide whether I wanted to experience the culture of Guyana’s people (of which 95% live on the coast) or cast them aside for the deep unpopulated regions of forest. I decided to spend the time leading up to Christmas at my post and then take a trip to Iwokrama for the remainder of the break.

Even in recollection, I still can’t reason why Christmas here felt like I was in New York City. No snow was falling, but it seemed everywhere you went the holiday was being marketed. The battlefield raged with massive weapons of fake trees, horrible music, and everything green and red. I don’t consider myself a Christmas scrooge, but it takes an extraordinary human to hear “I am dreaming of a white Christmas,” the number of times I have. I spent Christmas morning with my fill-in mom (another teacher at school who invites me over for dinner and board games) who cooked a Guyanese feast. One thing I will dearly miss when I leave is the quality of ingredients they use here. Breakfast started off with a dish called Pepper-Pot, a slowly stew of meat with the juice of cassavas (sans cyanide), a tall glass of warm egg nog, and freshly baked bread. Soon after, everyone at the house sprawled out on whatever furniture was available before lunched was served. Lunch wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, your typical ham with all the fixings. I spent the rest of the day playing my fill-in uncle (teacher’s brother) in chess.

Then I packed my military sack with everything I would need for a week and hopped on a bus for the interior with two other volunteers. Intraserv buses, run daily from Georgetown to a border town in Brazil. These are the only buses here that I have seen that actually look like Greyhound buses. The bus leaves at 9 P.M at night from a small hole-in-the-wall karaoke bar in town. It cost $35(US) to get to a research field station in the forest and $50 to get to Brazil. I have been outside of the inhabited coast before but it is always jarring how sudden a change in scenery occurs just an hour outside of town. Of course the road doesn’t have any lights so you find yourself starring at the occasional beacon of Christmas lights on houses that seem few and far between. Once you hit a mining town called Linden, you leave paved roads and relative civilization. At one point, you are looking at huge conveyer belts that are probably used to transport dirt for processing during the day, you cross a shaky bridge (on a Greyhound bus mind you) and all of a sudden you are surrounded by dense rainforest and a wide dirt road. I was sitting at the front of the bus and the driver’s view was horrifying. In the darkness of night, surrounded by never-ending and dense formations of trees, driving on a road with its fair share of potholes, I held on for my life. The driver seemed like a seasoned veteran and drove like one. This meant that the bus was weaving side-to-side avoiding as many holes as possible going as fast as the bus will allow. This roller coaster ride lasted for 8 hours, with the occasional police check point. At these police check-points you had to walk into a jail/station (that appeared out of no where) and identify your name and your seat number. My only guess was that this provided the means to track travelers heading through Guyana but it seemed easy enough to get past.

We arrived at Iwokrama, a million-acre forest conversation project run by Guyana, at dawn. As you can see from my new flickr pictures, the Kurupukari Field Station is situated right along the Essequibo river. The sun was inching it’s way up into sky as Jack and I looked onto the scene. Like something out of Jurassic Park, I could see islands in the distance filled with towering trees as I waited for a dinosaur to appear in my field of vision. Occasionally you would see a small spot moving along the water, which would end up being either a caiman (local species of crocodile) or a small paddle boat with Amerindian fishers. Over the next couple of days, with Amerindian tour guides, we would use the river and travel to various field stations to witness wild life and foliage. The shades of colors on the birds, plants and insects were incredible. You were constantly surrounded by different bird calls, the howling of howler monkeys (especially at night) and the intricacy of insect communities. We were able to go on a series of bridges that let you view an area of forest from the canopies, mingle with the locals at Fairview Village, and catch and eat some fish from the river. I lack the ability to verbalize the transformation that occurs when a domesticated human, like myself, lives in such an undomesticated environment but it was an experience of a lifetime.

After a week, we hopped on a bus going back to Georgetown. I had a couple of days to settle back in before another term started. A new program from the Ministry of Education took my old students away from me and put them in a new slower-paced program. They basically have one teacher now , sitting with them all day teaching each subject. Maybe in an attempt to give them a chance to catch up with the kids who were able to learn in Primary School, they are recreating Primary School for these children until they grasp those concepts. I don’t have a background on educational psychology, and so I can’t really comment on what is going to happen to the kids in these classes. Anyway, I have moved on to teaching grade 8 mathematics (Form 3) and teaching information technology to all of the upper-level classes. Teaching mathematics to form 3 is pretty simple, in fact still mind-numbingly simple, and still gives me some frustrations. No matter how good a child’s math teacher is there will always been some cracks in their mathematical foundation. These kids seemed to have pretty shaky basics in math, but because they are at least in form 3, it looks like they have the motivation necessary to take my class.

The Canadian organization Global Partnership for Literacy donated all of the computers that have been sitting in the computer lab. At the end of last term, they actually paid a visit and was appalled by the obvious lack of utilization. I did my best to explain to them the systemic problems that I am encountering and my suggestions to get the lab up and running. In an oddly refreshing manner, they took my suggestions to heart and invited me to a meeting they were having with some donors. It seemed like I was finally talking to the people I needed to. I am finally allowed to give free classes to the teachers on the basics of computers which I wasn’t allowed to before. I am getting a projector and a screen this week from GPL. They are also removing the useless blackboard, putting curtains to block the sun (and provide better viewing for the projector) and finally getting the internet hooked up. All this work however is useless without a qualified teacher. I am working with both GPL and the ministry to train the teachers at the school, and maybe even bring one up to speed to take my place as the IT lab administrator when I leave.

Before I talk about leaving, I actually took another trip this past Saturday. I went to the mining town Bartica where another volunteer is working. To get to Bartica, I needed to take a mini-bus for an hour to the Parika Port. There I got on a speed boat that traveled on the Essequibo for an hour to Bartica. I am used to seeing mainly people from East Indian and African origins where I live, but in Bartica it is all Brazilians. The gold business has been booming lately (it is at an all time high right now) and people are finding tons of it in the forests near Bartica. You have a town in transition, with BMWs driving along one of the five only paved roads and huge houses appearing next to small shacks. People are bilingual there in both English and Portuguese and it really feels like I crossed the border into Brazil. Port-Knockers (the local term for the miners) seemed to be everywhere looking to spend their recently acquired cash they got on hookers and alcohol. The modern version of an old western hub or a South American version of the diamond fields in Africa. I took a small hike to a local monastery about three miles outside of town and then went back to soaking in the party back in town.

Leaving is a very awkward subject. People have begun to ask me if I am leaving and why I am leaving and they do it everyday. I don’t know how to respond to them, because I haven’t really made up my mind about leaving. I can’t say that I want to stay here, but I can’t really say where I want to go. It is amazing how your mind changes in a day, let alone a year, but I feel even more lost in my sense of direction. My life in America is beginning to seem like a dream. Conveniences like a washing machine are actually mind-boggling. Honestly, I can’t imagine what it will be like to gain the precious hours I spend washing my clothes back. I can’t imagine what it will be like to finally be able to use the internet and challenge my brain whenever I choose. Maybe it is something more fundamental than keeping my mind occupied. In America, you have limitless choice and convenience. Here in Guyana, things just aren’t that developed. My body and mind have adjusted to this limited life style, and it seems horrifying going back to the dilemma of choice. In the impoverished world, you go through such a wide range of emotions, the delta between happiness and sadness seem so much larger. This emotional wave is dampened in America, relating to the consistency and safety I used to cherish back home. My trajectory of life has been forever changed, and the only choice I have is to spend the next couple of months figuring out where I might land next.

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