South American Adventure, Day 1:

Tim waves goodbye to Guyana at the Cheddi Jagan airport

Maracas Beach for a few hours during our layover. Best layover ever!

It’s been a whirl-wind day. We left our friend’s G/T house at 4am and arrived at the Cheddi Jagan airport with plenty of time for our 6:20 departure with no real drama. We met the other Peace Corps girls there who we are traveling with at first and said some good-bye’s for now to other volunteers who were flying directly home to the U.S. today. To make matters even more perfect, the plane was already being boarded as we walked through security, so we walked straight on to the flight and into the air.

We flew to Trinidad and, since we had an 8 hour lay-over, were blessed with the opportunity to “take a walk” around the island. We decided that instead of waiting in the boring airport, we should explore Trinidad so we hired a car to give us a tour. We went through Port of Spain, and got out of the taxi to walk around the capital city. We saw some old colonial churches and neat architecture and ate some really good local street food called “doubles”. A double is similar to fried roti, but this isn’t your auntie’s plain old roti! We watched the vendors lather on pepper sauce and two other sauces that looked a lot like salsa, but tasted like cilantro and chutney and the final touch is a heap of boiled chickpeas (anyone who reads our food blog knows how much Tim loves chickpeas!). We were stoked to try this tasty local treat. Then our driver took us to the best beach in Trinidad, according to him, called Maracas. It was a truly beautiful beach, tucked deep into a cove, surrounded by lush, jungle covered mountains. The water was chilly but the air was warm and we enjoyed a few luxurious moments drinking in the last of the Caribbean heat and a final Stag beer on the beach.

The flight to Panama passed in fits of wakefulness, but we didn’t have much time to dwell on our own exhaustion because we boarded to Peru within thirty minutes of touching down. The flight to Lima was good, there was tons of space to spread out so Chels and I decided to claim a row for ourselves and catch a bit of shuteye. We found our hostel and had the whole dorm to ourselves too so we didn’t have to worry about waking anyone when we came in. The beds are clean and warm and the room is mosquito and mosquito net free. We are happy RPCVs! And now its sleep time.

T & C (0230 local time)

p.s. I am posting this on Thursday morning, since we were too tired to finish the blog last night. Happy Thursday! We are off to explore Lima!

View from a vista point in Trinidad. I'm pretty sure we saw a pirate ship here.

Eating doubles on the streets in Port of Spain. Best fifty cents spent on lunch ever!

Found a labyrinth in Trinidad at a cool old church.

The sock monkeys had a blast on the layover too!

Rememberables.....

I am writing this the night before we depart Guyana for good (for now at least). By the time this posts we’ll be away from GT and in Trinidad. But I wanted a smooth transition from it being a Peace Corps Blog to something else. But worry not we will keep writing. We find it highly therapeutic and simply put: pretty awesome. But before we move from this chapter of our lives, I think it prudent to reflect back upon some of the more rememberable (yeah I think I just made that word up) moments and life lessons we’ve picked up in our PC lives.  

• The 15 hour bus ride to Lethem. And after the agony of the unpaved road, I was blown away as the savannah unrolled before us. My fellow trainees and I just stared at the spectacle with our jaws dropped.  It was such an amazing experience.
• Another HVV memory: Horseback riding from the plains to the mountains and hills until we approached Skull Mountain, an ancient Amerindian burial site. Bleached bones stared at us from old, cracked clay jars.
• Mobilizing my office to clean out two classrooms full of books. And then ship off those books to schools that desperately need them, especially in the interior.
• Facilitating a workshop with 100+ secondary students about to take their Caribbean exams. This proved how capable I was, and how much I enjoy teaching. 
• Practicing what I preach. I wrote a manuscript after scrupulously studying education texts, and then attempted to lead my own sessions by example. It was a good feeling modeling what I expected from my participants. 
•  We will remember so many morning exercises, breakfasts, cups of coffee and gaffs with my loving wife. We really took time for ourselves when we needed to and grew closer to one another.
•   We will remember so many nights cooking fresh food, with fresh ingredients. We felt healthier than we have in many years. We knew where I food came from and loved it!
• Self-confidence. I’ve learned not to doubt myself. And I should just embrace that I am an expert in my chosen field.
• You reap what you sow. The amount of effort you choose to input into a project will directly affect the outcome.
• Being able to give ourselves freedom when we need it. Know when we need a break and then take one. We can be our own boss, we can be self-disciplined or not, it’s really up to us.

There are so many more memories I want to talk about: scaling the aluminum factory, the author’s fairs, traveling to Shell Beach, Linden Town Week. The different people who have affected our lives, who we’ve met and they’ve made such lasting impressions on us.   It was a good two years. I am excited to see what the next chapter reads.

Off the Grid

Today we are wrapping up our Peace Corps paperwork, spending time Skyping with friends and gaffin’ with fellow PCVs in the Peace Corps Office. Tomorrow we will no longer be PCVs! We will officially be RPCVs (Return Peace Corps Volunteers)! It is crazy!

Tomorrow morning, early, we are flying out of Guyana, through Trinidad and Panama to Peru! We have so many exciting adventures planned and we will be essentially off the grid until May 20^th. We are backpacking through Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina so I have no idea how often will have access to the internet. We have promised our families that we will be in touch at least once a week and if we can, we will try to blog a bit about what we are up to. We will do our best to keep in touch but don’t be concerned if we aren’t the most consistent bloggers for a while. I promise updates when we are settled back in America.

Until then, we hope you all stay well. We will continue to ride the wave of emotional turmoil that is the adjustment cycle of a Peace Corps Volunteer and process our adventures, both during and after our service, as we travel. We will be watching each other’s backs and taking good care of ourselves and employing all the best practices that we know to use when traveling abroad. Sending you lots of love and hugs from Guyana, one last time!

-Tim and Chelsea

Please Bring Strange Things…

Speaking of "strange things" it was both strange, wonderful, touching, awkward and moving, to join our friends Gasper and Tanzia at church last Sunday and be prayed over by the pastor and whole congregations.

Initiation Song from the Finders Lodge

Many of you may remember one of our favorite poems, we used it on our wedding program, by Ursula K. LeGuin:

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

For us, this poem is often in our hearts and minds when we embark on a new journey or phase in life. As we prepare to leave Guyana and walk carefully, mindfully and fearlessly into our next adventure we decided to make a list of the “strange” things we believe are important to carry with us from our experience in Guyana and perpetuate in the rest of our lives. Here is our list:

Strange things/idea/practices etc. to bring back from Guyana:

· Exercising daily

· Eating a healthy breakfast every morning

· Making a weekly menu and meal plan

· Guyanese sayings: ‘just now’, ‘shucks’, ‘walk with’, ‘theif/theifed’, ‘real ting’

· Guyanese card games: Rap, Jackass

· Guyanese food: cookup, curry, chickpeas in any forms

· Eating fresh, local foods

· Farmer’s markets

· Making our own iced tea and coffee (not buying it always from Wasteofmoneybucks)

· Making our own fresh juice instead of buying concentrate w/added sugar

· Guyanese/Caribbean music

· Continuing to experiment with making fruit wine

· Exercising with a plan/work out DVD like Insanity

· Hammock time, find a place to hang a hammock inside in our future home

· Continue blogging regularly

· Saying “Good Morning” “Good Day” “Good Afternoon” and “Good Night” every time you pass a familiar face…or even a stranger

· Being more community oriented

Surprises and Farewells

Yesterday evening Tim and I had the pleasure of being the guests of honor of the best surprise party ever! We were invited to For Children’s Sake, an NGO and youth club I worked with often during the last two years, to what we thought was a recording of an educational skit. We were instructed to bring our camera and asked to take pictures of the recording for their social next weekend. Silly me, I thought we were actually going to be working all evening and I was not looking forward to it, to be honest. However, I was SO thrilled and surprised to find what the youth and mentors at FCS had put together for us.

The club was decorated with streamers, fairy lights, handmade posters and decorations, and signs all over the walls with adjectives describing me and Tim (kind, caring, dedicated, inspirational, even sexy!). We were treated like royalty; given drinks, delicious food, cake, snacks and sweets, and honored and entertained by the talented members of the club. The program was thoughtful and rehearsed and it was obvious that the kids put a lot of time and effort into practicing their songs, poems, dances and skits that they performed for us. We loved the original work, along with favorites like a poem by Maya Angelou and Bill Withers’ Lean on Me, we were even treated to some traditional Guyanese folk songs. It was so much fun! I have never had anyone do anything like this for me before and I was so incredibly touched and honored.

I was overwhelmed with gratitude and love for my energetic young friends’. I kept bursting into tears all night. What a goober. Even now words cannot describe how touched I am. Tim said it best when he told the club that all the qualities they said they admire about us, are reflected right back in all of them. They are so talented and dedicated to volunteering as Peer Educators in the community. These youth have so much to offer the world and I have no doubt that they will continue to do amazing things for Linden, Guyana and themselves. I was so glad to have had the opportunity to get to know these amazing young people, work with them, play with them, laugh and cry with them. During my two years in Linden, These folks became my dearest friends and I will miss them so much, just as I know I will be missed by them. Their touching display of gratitude with the super-fun surprise party is something I will never forget. In fact, I know that I will look back on yesterday evening anytime I am feeling down to remember the boundless joy, diversity, talent, energy, potential and love that exists in Guyana, this beautiful country I call my home (for another 10 days that is)……

What a send off! THANK YOU members of For Children’s Sake! You seriously ROCK!

Here are some of my favorite pics from the evening:

Ahhh! So surprised!!!

Then we had a dance party! It was quite hilarious to watch the white gyal awkwardly try to "bruk it duhn"...

Fun was had by youth of all ages! What a blast!