Our First Week in Guyana: Reflections

As we hurtled across the Essequibo river, the widest in Guyana, on our bumpy, splashing speedboat, we wondered what our host family would be like. Guyana is such a diverse country, in terms of the types of people and geography, that your experiences can vary depending on where you are. Mainly Guyanese people are either Indian or African or native American Indian by descent. Within these racial differences, Guyanese adhere to a diverse range of religions, mostly Hindu, Christian and Muslim. Your experience of a “traditional” Guyanese family would vary depending on what their socioeconomic status was and where in the country they lived. With all these factors unknown to us, we had a lot to imagine as we whizzed by islands on our 45 minute speedboat journey to the coast.

By now of course, we have been living with our host family for four nights. They are amazing people. We live with an Indo-Guyanese family in a small village on the Essequibo coast. Our family is big, busy and welcoming. They have hosted one Peace Corps volunteer before so they have been through some of the hilarious adventures of teaching us how to live in this wild country. Our host mother has three grown sons. She and her youngest son live with us in the house. She runs a general store out of the front of the house. Our brother works at a bank as a small business loans coordinator and is a very active volunteer at the local branch of the Lions club. Our yard is connected to a back house where the middle brother lives with his wife and two young girls, ages 6 and 3. They are busy people as well. This brother has his own business selling fowl, like baby chicks and such, and birdfeed and his wife works at a large appliance store in a neighboring village. The oldest brother and his wife live a few houses down the road from us and he also owns a business in transporting and selling farming supplies. Because our family is so industrious there are always people coming into the yard to do business. It has been, and will continue to be, a great way for us to be introduced to the community.

Our Guyanese family is doing a great job of teaching us how to adapt. They answer all our questions and bring us out with them when they go out on business or leisure. So far we have met many neighbors and know our way around the coast fairly well. Our host mother is teaching us how to cook, mainly she is teaching me, Chelsea, since women do most of the cooking around here. But Tim gets his butt into the kitchen too. Our mom  makes great Indian food. So far I have learned how to make chana (spiced boiled chickpeas), chicken curry (with a whole chicken that I was shown how to prepare by chopping it up with a machete) and saada roti (a puffy bread type item). I don’t know how to spell any of these things and my success when I cook them by myself next time is doubtful. However, it is really fun to learn. We have both been shown how to do our laundry by hand. Even though we have a washing machine, it is unlikely that we will have one in our own home so we have to learn how to do it by hand for when we go out on our own. It is hard work but results in nice, clean smelling laundry when we pull it off the line.
 

In addition to the in-house learning we’ve learned many thing via the Peace Corps. We’ve done intensive cultural studies on the Guyanese including their etiquette, social norms, and gender roles. The lessons are too many to mention and we’ve only been here a little over a week, but needless to say we’ve also focused sustainable project development and integration in to the community. The Peace Corps has also provided us with texts to support their in-class learning, and I think we have more on the way. I (Tim) am super excited; I love books and I love learning new things and community development is definitely something I’ve never tried my hand at.

Last Saturday (the 13^th) our host mom took us for a walk around the community. We met so many neighbors, and everyone is so welcoming. We’d go to house after house sometimes being invited inside where they plied us with food and drink and other times we’d just sit and “gaff” (or chat) out by their main gates after we were introduced by our host mother. It is a wondrous culture and everyday we’re learning something new.

But, of course, it is not all stuffy studying (not that I’m complaining) we’ve had so many experiences and one happened “just now” on Valentine’s Sunday.

We woke early Sunday morning after a great night hanging out with our middle brother, his family, some friends, and another PC Trainee. We were laying in some hammocks, taking some breeze, with a mug of coffee in one hand and the other behind our heads, watching the eastern sky turn from orange to blue, when our middle brother came out from his house in the back. The night before he’d mentioned he might be going fishing next morning, and with nothing planned we said,  “Sure, sure.”  So he came out front and queried if we were still interested. As the Peace Corps recommends, we accepted the invitation as another chance to learn about Guyanese culture. 

After making some calls our brother organized the trip with his uncle, who is taking care of another PCT, to come down to the trenches away from the beaten path. We piled into his big yellow truck he usually uses for deliveries of his feed with Chelsea, his wife, and him in cab, while I was in the open truck bed with his two daughters and a cousin who is visiting in town from Trinidad, where he works and lives presently. We made our way down the Public Road and picked up the other Trainee and some more cousins then turned off of the road to the rice fields in what we call here the back dam.

Field after field bumped by. Some were green with vitality, while others were dead and fallow. It has been a bad year for rain, so many fields aren’t blooming as they should, but this did not subtract from the beauty of our surroundings. Coconut trees lined the border of the fields, twisting and turning on their quest to find the sun (not a hard quest here in this country). Cows pastured and long-necked, white birds perched in the verdant paddies. Dragonflies whirred in our wake sometimes coming in swarms, other times only few buzzed behind us. A pall of dust, kicked up from our truck, only enhanced the magnitude of the scene. By the time we’d finally arrived at the end of the road I was covered, head to toe, in wondrous white particles (Chelsea just said I looked filthy).

We walked to the edge of the trench, which, like the fields, was low on liquid. We picked our way through bushes and razor grass and then began to fish. Well, us white kids watched, while our host families used the nets to capture fish. They pulled up a variety of Guyanese local fish, including a pirreye, or piranha (not edible, in fact it will try to eat you), some edible fish, which will no doubt be on our plates any day now, and we even snagged a small alligator in the net but it swam away before we could get a good look at it. After some time the fishermen forgot about the net and just jumped in and began fishing with their bare hands, feeling the water for the fish, then, when they’d get one, they’d toss it to shore where one of the little ones picked it up and tossed it in the bucket. It was an experience and very impressive.

Another great experience we were lucky enough to share with our host family was a Hindu holiday at their church, or mandir, celebrating the original form in which the god Shiva appeared to mankind. We had planned ahead to join our youngest brother and host mother last Friday, the 12^th. So, when we got home from school they had laid out some appropriate Indian garb for us to wear. Both of us looked pretty dashing in our bright, colorful outfits. We spent the evening chanting and singing in Hindi and, later, enjoying a snack of fruit, puri and sweet rice with the rest of the devotees in our community. We felt really welcomed and it was a nice way to relax and spend some time in meditation and prayer. All in all it was really enjoyable, I am sure we will go again sometime in the rest of our two month stay here.

In the next few weeks I imagine we will be really busy with work but there is a national holiday coming up next Tuesday, the 23^rd called Mashramani, or Republic Day. Most PCTs plan to head out to a nearby lake for some swimming, water sports and learn how to play cricket. We are really looking forward to it. So, we will try to get an update up sometime after Mash.

We miss you all at home and hope that all is going well. Let us know how things are or just send us an email or letter, old snail mail style. We’d love to hear an update from home. Sending lots of love!!!!

C&T