Mash Time Again!

Mashramani, or Mash, is Guyana’s equivalent of Carnaval. In Arawak, an indigenous Guyanese language, Mashramani means “celebration after hard work”. It is a celebration of diverse Guyanese culture and pride and involves lots of costumes, dancing, winding, drinking, partying in the streets, glitter, feathers and food! It all started in our site, Linden, in 1970. Tomorrow is the official 42^nd Mash celebration in Georgetown and it will be our third and final Mash in Guyana. In 2010 we watched a small, local parade in Essequibo and laughed our faces off because poor Sara agreed to be in the parade and was miserable on a hot, LOUD float for hours and hours. In 2011, I participated in the G/T parade and Mashed with the Ministry of Health float. That was a crack up but it was HOT and exhausting, so this year Tim and I are looking forward to watching the parade from the street with a cool beer in hand.

As a warm up for the big event in G/T tomorrow, we attended the Children’s Mash in Linden today. The little kiddos are so cute!

February Life Updates, In Bullets

• On our two year anniversary of being in Guyana we had a Mexican food fiesta! Cassie made 7-layer dip and bought tortilla chips all the way from Georgetown (a real luxury that we didn’t know how much we loved until we didn’t have them). Then Tka (a volunteer from Guy23, the PCV group after ours) came by the house with a plate of nachos! What a treat! All the food was so delicious and we really felt good about making it to this exciting milestone.

• Work continues to be busy. Although you might think that things would slow down in the last two months we are still working on wrapping up a few important projects. I am facilitating the last 5 sessions in the Food for Healthy Babies infant nutrition class (making homemade baby food and getting very, very messy with all the cute babies trying to eat it). And Tim is planning for the second annual Student Author’s fair that he originated last year. Work should slow down in mid-March, giving us just enough time to pack up our things and get on our flight out of Guyana on April 4^th.

• There are so many fun things happening between now and when we leave that we are overwhelmed with activities. Here is what we are looking forward to: helping with some training sessions for the new batch of volunteers, Guy 24, celebrating Mashramani in Georgetown with some of our best PCV friends for the last time, celebrating Pagwah for the last time, orienting the new Linden PCVs to their new home in late March, concerts and sports events in Linden and Georgetown, PCV friends visiting our site for the last time, goodbye parties and dinners. Wow! I just realized that a lot of those things are going to be extra exciting/sad/poignant since they are “lasts”.

• We have a better idea of what our epic South America whirlwind trip is going to entail. Our tentative itinerary is this: Guyana to Peru, in Peru we will go from Lima to Cusco and see Macchu Pichu then to Arequipa to see the Colca Canyon and Andean condors soaring, then on to Bolivia where we will stop in Copacabana and check out lake Titicaca and the Isla del Sol and then spend some time exploring the winding streets and craft markets of La Paz. Then we will head down to Chile, stopping at the beach towns of Arica, Iquique and Valpariso. We will spend a few days in the capital of Santiago before taking a bus over to Argentina and relaxing in the heart of Argentinian wine country in Mendoza, San Juan and Cordoba. After we have taken in the sights, mountains, volcanoes, crazy rock formations and vineyards of Argentina we will head back to Santiago, Chile and fly home to dear, old Cali. The whole trip will last a little over 6 weeks. We plan on staying in hostels and with friends and PCVs in those countries. It should be a blast. If anyone has any suggestions or knowledge of these locales, please let us know.

• I have heard back from almost all the law schools I applied to (9 out of 10, one school still is making a decision). I have been accepted to 6, rejected from 2, wait-listed at one and gotten hefty merit scholarships from 4. Ahhh, decisions! So, now I waiting to hear final scholarship and financial aid offers before I make a decision. There are three schools that I have been accepted to that I am considering seriously. I don’t want to put too much out on the interweb but here are some clues. One is in a big, glamorous city that I would love to live in but am scared because it is so crazy expensive to live there. That school hasn’t offered me any financial incentives to attend (yet) but they have a killer reputation. One school is in a location that is cheaper to live, farther away from friends and family, has a good reputation locally and has offered me a very juicy financial aid package. The final school, the farthest away from my family yet closer to Tim’s, wasn’t on my list until I found out that they offered me a competitive scholarship. They also have a great reputation and national rank but I can’t imagine Tim and me settling down there permanently and it seems counterproductive to spend three years networking in a locale from which we intend to move away from. Anyway, I am having a hard time deciding and I won’t be able to finalize anything until all the offers are on the table. It is agonizing. In fact, it would be really nice if someone would just make this huge, important decision for me. Who is game?

• Although we have started to count down the weeks (7) and sometimes even days (49) that we have left in Guyana, we are happy to be where we are right now. I saw a cool quote yesterday that sums up the mindset that we are working on maintaining right now: “Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it is about learning to dance in the rain.” Not all moments in our Peace Corps service have been stormy, but some have, and these last two months are certainly tumultuous and emotional. So Tim and I will just keep dancing, enjoying every moment with each other in this beautiful country, right on until the end.

The Two Year Mark

Two years ago this morning I stepped off a Delta airplane onto the tarmac at Cheddi Jagan International Airport.

I remember feeling tired, but ecstatic; afraid, but anticipatory. I had just spent the day before with 33 strangers in a room at a fancy hotel in New York, and as we disembarked from our plane it was the collective start to all of our Peace Corps journeys.

I remember winter storms and our staging point changing from Philadelphia to New York in case we couldn’t get out of Philadelphia because of the massive 2009-2010 storms. I remember freezing in the New York cold, since I had only brought clothes for a tropical climate, and waiting to get past the gate to start my life for the next two years. I remember the red-eye flight, where I tried to sleep but I was too excited, so I watched the sun rise above the cloud cover and then watched the green trees and silver rivers unfold before the descending Boeing.  I remember all of this and much, much more from that epochal day two years ago.  

These last two years, all of “we” in Guy 22 trained, learned, and grew; some of us dropped, but many more continued. We’ve all made amazing friends, we’ve all pushed ourselves beyond our known capabilities, and we’ve all stepped out of our first-world comfort zones and into our third-world lives. Like a confused chameleon, we’ve tried to blend into our communities with our personalities and passions (for most of us will never blend in through physical appearance alone). We’ve attempted to motivate our counterparts and host country nationals, and, I guarantee, we’ve all felt both the bitter sting of failure and the ecstasy of success.  It’s been a rollercoaster, all ups and downs with nowhere in between. But I would never take it back. Two years ago this morning my life changed for the better.