Spring Break in Guyana, South America
Rustin has been in Guyana for nearly two years now in the Peace Corps. I decided it was high time I went to visit him since I've gone and visited him every other place he's ever lived (Los Angeles, England, Virginia). So now I can add Guyana to that list. I didn't really know what to expect. Out of all the travel I've done I can honestly say I did the least preparation for this one. I just let Rustin plan everything.
The trip started with a ride on the Chinatown bus to New York. Spent the night there at Greg and Melissa's place in Harlem, woke up at 4am and took the subway to the airport. I flew North American Airlines which is a tiny little airline that flies from New York nonstop to Guyana, Ghana, and Nigeria. The airplane was mostly filled with non-resident Guyanese (Guyanese who live in New York). There are more Guyanese living in New York than in Guyana! Guyana has a very small population - only 750,000. I think there was one other white person on the plane besides me. Needless to say, Guyana is not high on most tourists' lists.
We flew over some Caribbean islands. The aquamarine blue of the Caribbean gave way to the muddy brown shores of Guyana, and sediment-filled waters float up the coast from the Amazon. Flew over the Guyanese coast for awhile then circled down around the rainforest before landing at the airport. There was some confusion at the airport because the baggage claim machines were under renovation. A lot of Georgetown, in fact, is under renovation. It's because of the cricket World Cup, which was starting a week after I left. They were working right up to the last minute.
Rustin and Karla met me at the airport and then we took a taxi one hour to Karla's village, Meten Meer Zorg, which is on the coast and on the west side of the Demerara River from Georgetown (the capital and largest city). The geography of settlement in Guyana is pretty simple. Most people live along a narrow strip of settlement that runs along the coast. Immediately inland from that is agricultural land - mostly rice and sugar cane. Beyond that, in the interior, is the rainforest. A lot of the interior is inaccessible by road and accessible only by boat.
At Karla's that first night we had tacos, thanks to the tortillas I had smuggled in from the US. Justin, another Peace Corps volunteer in Karla's village, came over along with his girlfriend, who is Guyanese but looks and sounds just like an American (whatever that means). Had a long conversation out on the porch in the hammocks with Rustin. It was nice to catch up in person after a long time of not seeing him.
Sunday we went to a fruit farm on Canal No. 1 where Nancy (another Peace Corps Volunteer, hereafter referred to as "PCVs" lives. We picked lots of different tropical fruits, some of which I'd never seen before. They had jackfruit, breadfruit, sapodillas, pineapples (called "pines"), coconuts, oranges (they are green, not orange, in Guyana), mandarins, bananas, papaws (papayas), guavas, cocoa, coffee, wax apples, and star fruit. Margaret and Lauren, two more PCVs, came out. We all went for a tractor ride through the sugar cane plantations and stopped and cut some sugar cane ourselves with a cutlass (machete). For lunch we had a delicious stew of rice, chicken, and coconut milk. We drank several coconuts. Young coconuts are full of a delicious juice. When they get a little riper they develop a filmy tender gelatinous flesh. Only when they dry out do they develop the hard coconut meat that most Americans are familiar with.
Back at Karla's we had sausage and rice for dinner. Karla lives next door to a "rum bar" that blasts loud music until all hours of the night. She also lives right on the main road so you hear lots of traffic going by. In the morning you are awakened by roosters and by chanting from the Hindu Mandir next door.
On Monday Rustin and I departed Karla's village to go into town, which is where Rustin lives and works during the week. We rode minibuses to the river, where we waited in a big old pier structure for a speedboat to take us across the river. We were caught by a big rainstorm and waited for it to pass. This is the dry season in Guyana, but even during the dry season you never know when it's going to rain or not. The nice thing is that the rain never lasts that long. It can be pouring rain one minute, and clear and sunny the next. Across the river it we were suddenly in the midst of a big bustling city. Actually, Georgetown is not that big. It's only about 250,000 people, certainly modest by most country's standards, but still it was a lot busier than Karla's village.
Minibuses are the most common form of transportation in Guyana. Every minibus is a business in its own right, consisting of a driver and a "conductor" who collects fares. They pack as many people as possible into minibuses. Minibuses seem to be in competition with each other to see who can play the loudest music and have the most colorful decorations. Every minibus has a name, and some of them are quite silly. Lots of cars and minibuses in Guyana have flashing colored lights. When I first saw them I thought they were emergency vehicles. They just do it for fun.
We took a minibus at to UG, the University of Guyana, where Rustin lives in a small dorm room. It's a pleasant campus with lots of grass out on the outskirts of the city. He showed me around the campus, which didn't take that long since it's not that big. I saw the Center for Biodiversity and the Englishman who runs the GIS program there. I met a woman doing her Master's in biology who helps run the museum. We then went back into town. Had lunch at a vegetarian Rasta restaurant - some delicious curries/stews. Georgetown is called the Garden City, and it does have some nice gardens, especially as they've been sprucing up everything in time for the World Cup. Rustin says that this is by far the nicest Georgetown has looked in the whole time he has been here. A number of relics from the colonial period (which lasted until 1966) remain in town, both English and Dutch. Georgetown has the world's tallest wooden building in the Anglican church. We went for a walk along the sea wall and then for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Guyana has a small Chinese population (1%) and they more or less run the Chinese restaurants, which are one of the most popular type of restaurants in the country, along with chicken.
Tuesday Rustin showed me more sights around Georgetown, including the zoo, botanical gardens, and history museum. Lunch at the Roti Hut, drinks at a terrace restaurant, and dinner at a fancy restaurant where diplomats hang out. I got a haircut - the shortest haircut I've ever gotten. I had very little hair off when he was done with that buzzer.
Wednesday we climbed a lighthouse. We went to the Peace Corps office where I met several more PCVs, including Philip who also went to Harvard and who lives out in a remote Amerindian village only reached by boat. He was in town this week picking up a solar panel to bring out to his village. Karla came into town that day to see the detinst, and the four of us went out to lunch at a Caribbean place that serves excellent stews. I had spicy minced beef over rice. That night we went to Tessa's (another PCV) for dinner. Margaret, Lauren, Tessa, Karla, Rustin, Philip, and another PCV named Laura were there. By the end of my week in Guyana I had met 13 different PCVs - 25% of the total PCVs in the country. Because Guyana is a small country, there's a lot of opportunities for social interaction between the volunteers. I got to hear about what a lot of the volunteers do, the positive and the negative. There seemed to be a general consensus that it's not the easiest life, that there are lots of hassles and problems (both from the host country, and from the peace corps administration), and that it's hard to actually make a difference.
Thursday we headed west from Karla's village. Crossed the wide Essequibo River on an hour-long speedboat ride that darts in between the many islands in the river delta. Then went further west out to a coastal community where Wes (another PCV) lives. Wes has a pretty sweet set-up, with TV and DVD and video games, and we watched several movies that night. He rents from a family who lives above him, and I got to know the daughter, who is in teacher college. Wes made pizza for dinner.
Friday we went to the end of the road, a river market town called Charity. Whereas most of Guyana so far had looked and felt more like the Caribbean or West Indies culturally and physically, here it really started to feel like South America for the first time. From Charity, we took a speedboat up the Pomeroon River to Philip's village, St. Monica's Mission.
The village was on the first hill I had seen in Guyana. There's not much to the village - the health clinic and old clapboard school where Philip works. A few houses, including his, and the pier on the river. When we arrived school was just getting out, and the pier was crowded with cute little Amerindian children. They live further up or down the river, and commute to school by rowing canoes. How cool is that!?
We went out canoeing ourselves, into a tributary to the large river. We paddled through shallow water through the rainforest. It was awesome. The quintessenal rainforest experience. Very cool. We also hiked around the area, saw some of the villgers and their small farms, saw a wooden church on top of a hill where all the villagers come because it's the only place where cell phones get reception. We went swimming in the river at dusk. We made Mac and Cheese for dinner.
Saturday there was a big rainstorm as we were going back down the river to Charity. We hid under a tarp to keep from getting splattered by the painful hard-driving rain.
All the way back to Meten Meer Zorg. We went to a Jhandi, a Hindu party and religious celebration, for a woman called Grandma who had been Karla's host during training. There was music on an organ-like instrument and tablas and singing. Then there was the feast - seven curries, all served on a lily pad and eaten by hand.
Sunday morning I was off to the airport and flew back to New York. They'd had a big blizzard and my flight was delayed but I made my bus back to State College in time.
I was really glad that I went to Guyana, both because I got to spend a lot of time with Rustin, and his girlfriend Karla, and because I got a pretty good picture of a new country. Guyana is certainly an interesting place. 50% East Indian, 33% Black, 10% Mixed, 6% Amerindian, and 1% Chinese. People there by and large were very friendly. It's not the most efficient country, but it's got heart and life. The locals will tell you that they like their country because it is "free". Sometimes this means because there are no rules, or because rules aren't very well enforced (for instance, drunk driving is a big problem and rarely punished. People can play loud music and never worry about nuisance laws). This can translate into some real problems with crime. Large swaths of Georgetown are considered extremely dangerous, one of the most dangerous places in the world. There are parts of town where you simply don't enter unless you want to get mugged. Even in the "safe" part of the city, it is possible to get mugged, in broad daylight. Most of the PCVs have been mugged during their time there. Something like 40% of the PCVs drop out before their time is through. But Rustin and Karla have stuck with it. We were riding in a taxi one day with a Muslim East Indian taxi driver. One minute he was telling us how he believes in universal love and brotherhood and understanding. The next minute he was saying that all Blacks are no-good thieves and that they don't want Guyana to develop so they opposed the construction of the new cricket stadium. The Indian and Black populations are somewhat segregated, with the Blacks mostly living in the cities, and the Indians mostly in the villages (with the Amerindians in the remote interior). There is some mixing, though.
The trip started with a ride on the Chinatown bus to New York. Spent the night there at Greg and Melissa's place in Harlem, woke up at 4am and took the subway to the airport. I flew North American Airlines which is a tiny little airline that flies from New York nonstop to Guyana, Ghana, and Nigeria. The airplane was mostly filled with non-resident Guyanese (Guyanese who live in New York). There are more Guyanese living in New York than in Guyana! Guyana has a very small population - only 750,000. I think there was one other white person on the plane besides me. Needless to say, Guyana is not high on most tourists' lists.
We flew over some Caribbean islands. The aquamarine blue of the Caribbean gave way to the muddy brown shores of Guyana, and sediment-filled waters float up the coast from the Amazon. Flew over the Guyanese coast for awhile then circled down around the rainforest before landing at the airport. There was some confusion at the airport because the baggage claim machines were under renovation. A lot of Georgetown, in fact, is under renovation. It's because of the cricket World Cup, which was starting a week after I left. They were working right up to the last minute.
Rustin and Karla met me at the airport and then we took a taxi one hour to Karla's village, Meten Meer Zorg, which is on the coast and on the west side of the Demerara River from Georgetown (the capital and largest city). The geography of settlement in Guyana is pretty simple. Most people live along a narrow strip of settlement that runs along the coast. Immediately inland from that is agricultural land - mostly rice and sugar cane. Beyond that, in the interior, is the rainforest. A lot of the interior is inaccessible by road and accessible only by boat.
At Karla's that first night we had tacos, thanks to the tortillas I had smuggled in from the US. Justin, another Peace Corps volunteer in Karla's village, came over along with his girlfriend, who is Guyanese but looks and sounds just like an American (whatever that means). Had a long conversation out on the porch in the hammocks with Rustin. It was nice to catch up in person after a long time of not seeing him.
Sunday we went to a fruit farm on Canal No. 1 where Nancy (another Peace Corps Volunteer, hereafter referred to as "PCVs" lives. We picked lots of different tropical fruits, some of which I'd never seen before. They had jackfruit, breadfruit, sapodillas, pineapples (called "pines"), coconuts, oranges (they are green, not orange, in Guyana), mandarins, bananas, papaws (papayas), guavas, cocoa, coffee, wax apples, and star fruit. Margaret and Lauren, two more PCVs, came out. We all went for a tractor ride through the sugar cane plantations and stopped and cut some sugar cane ourselves with a cutlass (machete). For lunch we had a delicious stew of rice, chicken, and coconut milk. We drank several coconuts. Young coconuts are full of a delicious juice. When they get a little riper they develop a filmy tender gelatinous flesh. Only when they dry out do they develop the hard coconut meat that most Americans are familiar with.
Back at Karla's we had sausage and rice for dinner. Karla lives next door to a "rum bar" that blasts loud music until all hours of the night. She also lives right on the main road so you hear lots of traffic going by. In the morning you are awakened by roosters and by chanting from the Hindu Mandir next door.
On Monday Rustin and I departed Karla's village to go into town, which is where Rustin lives and works during the week. We rode minibuses to the river, where we waited in a big old pier structure for a speedboat to take us across the river. We were caught by a big rainstorm and waited for it to pass. This is the dry season in Guyana, but even during the dry season you never know when it's going to rain or not. The nice thing is that the rain never lasts that long. It can be pouring rain one minute, and clear and sunny the next. Across the river it we were suddenly in the midst of a big bustling city. Actually, Georgetown is not that big. It's only about 250,000 people, certainly modest by most country's standards, but still it was a lot busier than Karla's village.
Minibuses are the most common form of transportation in Guyana. Every minibus is a business in its own right, consisting of a driver and a "conductor" who collects fares. They pack as many people as possible into minibuses. Minibuses seem to be in competition with each other to see who can play the loudest music and have the most colorful decorations. Every minibus has a name, and some of them are quite silly. Lots of cars and minibuses in Guyana have flashing colored lights. When I first saw them I thought they were emergency vehicles. They just do it for fun.
We took a minibus at to UG, the University of Guyana, where Rustin lives in a small dorm room. It's a pleasant campus with lots of grass out on the outskirts of the city. He showed me around the campus, which didn't take that long since it's not that big. I saw the Center for Biodiversity and the Englishman who runs the GIS program there. I met a woman doing her Master's in biology who helps run the museum. We then went back into town. Had lunch at a vegetarian Rasta restaurant - some delicious curries/stews. Georgetown is called the Garden City, and it does have some nice gardens, especially as they've been sprucing up everything in time for the World Cup. Rustin says that this is by far the nicest Georgetown has looked in the whole time he has been here. A number of relics from the colonial period (which lasted until 1966) remain in town, both English and Dutch. Georgetown has the world's tallest wooden building in the Anglican church. We went for a walk along the sea wall and then for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Guyana has a small Chinese population (1%) and they more or less run the Chinese restaurants, which are one of the most popular type of restaurants in the country, along with chicken.
Tuesday Rustin showed me more sights around Georgetown, including the zoo, botanical gardens, and history museum. Lunch at the Roti Hut, drinks at a terrace restaurant, and dinner at a fancy restaurant where diplomats hang out. I got a haircut - the shortest haircut I've ever gotten. I had very little hair off when he was done with that buzzer.
Wednesday we climbed a lighthouse. We went to the Peace Corps office where I met several more PCVs, including Philip who also went to Harvard and who lives out in a remote Amerindian village only reached by boat. He was in town this week picking up a solar panel to bring out to his village. Karla came into town that day to see the detinst, and the four of us went out to lunch at a Caribbean place that serves excellent stews. I had spicy minced beef over rice. That night we went to Tessa's (another PCV) for dinner. Margaret, Lauren, Tessa, Karla, Rustin, Philip, and another PCV named Laura were there. By the end of my week in Guyana I had met 13 different PCVs - 25% of the total PCVs in the country. Because Guyana is a small country, there's a lot of opportunities for social interaction between the volunteers. I got to hear about what a lot of the volunteers do, the positive and the negative. There seemed to be a general consensus that it's not the easiest life, that there are lots of hassles and problems (both from the host country, and from the peace corps administration), and that it's hard to actually make a difference.
Thursday we headed west from Karla's village. Crossed the wide Essequibo River on an hour-long speedboat ride that darts in between the many islands in the river delta. Then went further west out to a coastal community where Wes (another PCV) lives. Wes has a pretty sweet set-up, with TV and DVD and video games, and we watched several movies that night. He rents from a family who lives above him, and I got to know the daughter, who is in teacher college. Wes made pizza for dinner.
Friday we went to the end of the road, a river market town called Charity. Whereas most of Guyana so far had looked and felt more like the Caribbean or West Indies culturally and physically, here it really started to feel like South America for the first time. From Charity, we took a speedboat up the Pomeroon River to Philip's village, St. Monica's Mission.
The village was on the first hill I had seen in Guyana. There's not much to the village - the health clinic and old clapboard school where Philip works. A few houses, including his, and the pier on the river. When we arrived school was just getting out, and the pier was crowded with cute little Amerindian children. They live further up or down the river, and commute to school by rowing canoes. How cool is that!?
We went out canoeing ourselves, into a tributary to the large river. We paddled through shallow water through the rainforest. It was awesome. The quintessenal rainforest experience. Very cool. We also hiked around the area, saw some of the villgers and their small farms, saw a wooden church on top of a hill where all the villagers come because it's the only place where cell phones get reception. We went swimming in the river at dusk. We made Mac and Cheese for dinner.
Saturday there was a big rainstorm as we were going back down the river to Charity. We hid under a tarp to keep from getting splattered by the painful hard-driving rain.
All the way back to Meten Meer Zorg. We went to a Jhandi, a Hindu party and religious celebration, for a woman called Grandma who had been Karla's host during training. There was music on an organ-like instrument and tablas and singing. Then there was the feast - seven curries, all served on a lily pad and eaten by hand.
Sunday morning I was off to the airport and flew back to New York. They'd had a big blizzard and my flight was delayed but I made my bus back to State College in time.
I was really glad that I went to Guyana, both because I got to spend a lot of time with Rustin, and his girlfriend Karla, and because I got a pretty good picture of a new country. Guyana is certainly an interesting place. 50% East Indian, 33% Black, 10% Mixed, 6% Amerindian, and 1% Chinese. People there by and large were very friendly. It's not the most efficient country, but it's got heart and life. The locals will tell you that they like their country because it is "free". Sometimes this means because there are no rules, or because rules aren't very well enforced (for instance, drunk driving is a big problem and rarely punished. People can play loud music and never worry about nuisance laws). This can translate into some real problems with crime. Large swaths of Georgetown are considered extremely dangerous, one of the most dangerous places in the world. There are parts of town where you simply don't enter unless you want to get mugged. Even in the "safe" part of the city, it is possible to get mugged, in broad daylight. Most of the PCVs have been mugged during their time there. Something like 40% of the PCVs drop out before their time is through. But Rustin and Karla have stuck with it. We were riding in a taxi one day with a Muslim East Indian taxi driver. One minute he was telling us how he believes in universal love and brotherhood and understanding. The next minute he was saying that all Blacks are no-good thieves and that they don't want Guyana to develop so they opposed the construction of the new cricket stadium. The Indian and Black populations are somewhat segregated, with the Blacks mostly living in the cities, and the Indians mostly in the villages (with the Amerindians in the remote interior). There is some mixing, though.
posted by Matthew Hartzell at 10:09 AM
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