First Time I Ever…
Going into the second half of the project (!!!), I thought I’d highlight the things I’ve done for the first time ever:
- Wield a cutlass
- Picked my own coconut
- Teach a classroom
- Live with other people not family
- Volunteer overseas
- Camp next to a river
- Sleep in a hammock
- Do laundry on top of a septic tank
- Sleep on a bunk bed with a mosquito net
- Clap roti
- Watch the delivery of donations from an NGO
- Speak with a drunk guy at 2 in the afternoon
- Live with giant spiders
- Ate off a fish head
- Dry off wet baby chicks
- Walk in the rain while in a rainforest
- Swim in a ditch
- Use a pipe as a waterslide
- Watch the death of a chicken
- Play with children
- Deal with chiggers
- Walk in puddles while barefoot
- Attend a wake and a funeral
- Taste bush alcohol (cassava wine)
- Shampoo and bathe in a black water creek
- Fetch water to flush toilet
- See fireflies
- Watch goats fight right outside my window
- See a horse on a beach
- See dead dogs on a beach
- Clean a high school
- Have a firecracker go off nearly in my ear
- Integrate into a foreign community
- Take malaria pills
- Sleep outside during a rainstorm
- Attempt to teach someone to read
- Deliberately avoid cops
- Judge a high school class decorating contest
- Took photo of something dead
- Attend a church service to bless a school to remove demonic influences
- Have men try to talk to me while I bathe
- Have my hand shook for Valentine’s Day
- Speak loudly for so many days in a row
- Speeched off two people in as many weeks
- Wade in a river and almost lose a slipper
- Live life with no electricity except for 4-5 hours a night (sometimes none, though)
Not too shabby a list, eh. Now, here’s hoping the second half of this project will bring the same amount of new experieces!
This is where we have a bath once a week (in addition to bucket showers)
Proof I’m Alive
Officially half way through the project!
Eat, Drink, and be Gravol’d
Just joking. I don’t think any of us have gotten sick from any food as of yet. Not from our lack of eating, though. I, personally, do not eat a whole lot when hot, but I still manage to try all sorts of things. Due to my Trini heritage, many of the foods here are familiar – but most are slightly different enough to be a bit new. So, here, for your culinary pleasure, is a summary of what I’ve been eating the past 5 weeks.
- Eggball – it is a hardboiled egg in the middle of either a fried ball of potato or cassava. It is usually eaten with a spicy mango sauce called sour. It’s pretty good! And easy to make too, so I just might do my own version at home!
- Chicken foot – enough said.
- Chow Mein – if I never have this stuff again, it would be too soon. We were sent to SCM with a giant pile of food and amongst this bounty was a ton of dried chow mein. We eat a lot of it either mixed up with veggies and chicken Vienna sausages (whoo) or like spaghetti with corned beef.
- Fried Rice – a second Chinese Guyanese staple. Fried rice is always good – i eat it with chicken but you can get it with other meats as well.
- Cook-up – for you Trinis, cook-up is like pelau – a rice dish with coconut milk and meat. Methinks that every culture out there has a version of a rice dish with meat…
- Roti – Manna from heaven. It is a bread that is kind of like a pita but definitely not like a pita. Flour based. You can eat it plain or use it to scoop up your curry whatever – potato, meats, veggies.
- Channa – another name for chick peas. You fry it up with spices. I’m used to eating it with curry and/or roti but people here eat it alone as a snack usually. You can buy little bags of it and off you go!
- Hot dog – here they are chicken, not beef or a mix up of by products. It comes with ketchup, mustard, mayo, and cheese. And it is served in a little white plastic bag. Yummy-ness!
- Cassava bread – the biggest disappointment of the trip so far. I had cassava bread in Dominica and it was pretty much the best bread ever when freshly made. Cassava bread in Guyana is totally different though – it has the look, consistency, and flavour of thin dry wall with wall paper paste mixed in. It is revolting.
- Bake and fry bake – both are breads but the former is fried (though called fry, not fried) and the latter is done in a pot. You can eat it with whatever you want – jam, meats, plain…
- Pholouri – only the best snack food ever. Pretty much just a fried dough ball (but of course, the dough has spices in it). People here eat it with the sour but to me, which is sacrilege. A good pholouri needs no sauce!
- Crackers – we got a lot of these in our food boxes so this is what I’ve had for breakfast pretty much every day. Crackers with peanut butter and guava jelly. If you’ve not had guava jelly before, do your taste buds a favour and find some!!
- Dhal – basically just split pea made into a soupy mixture. Guyanese dhal is thin, while Trini dhal tends to be thicker. Still pretty good here. Usually eaten over rice.
- Choka – this is an eggplant dish. Indo-Guyanese would eat this more as a breakfast mean along with roti. I had this the other day along with a mug of coffee. I hate coffee, but this stuff was good – tasted more like a coffee/tea mix with a lot of sugar and milk. Also had a glass of chilled coconut water. Can’t get much better than that!
- Coconut – I picked and split open my own coconut. Should have seen me wield that machete! Still don’t like coconut water (except chilled) or the jelly. But I think I am in the minority for that!
- Chicken – the main meat here which is fine by me. I’ve had it fried, curried, BBQ, and in stuff like fried rice and cook up. Also went camping with a live chicken but unfortunately for her, she was dinner.
- Plantains – like a giant banana but not really. It is delicious fried. In SCM, we’ve had it fried like French fries and as thin chips. A great snack especially when lightly salted.
- Fish – I’ve had it a couple times and fresh fish is really yummy. Camping, we had a fish called yarrow (sp?) that a fisherman gave us. It was just fried in some margarine and was absolutely delicious. I even picked meat off the head!
- Fruits and veggies – haven’t been eating a whole lot of fresh ones which is disappointing. But the ones we have had are: bora, soursop, paw paw, grapefruit, mango, orange, orawa (sp?) and pine. We have to eat fresh things quickly because they spoil within a day. It’s the lack of preservatives as well as the heat!
- Drinks – the usual suspects of coke and sprite, big red, filtered and/or boiled water, Banks, Mackerson, and powdered milk. Actually, we the milk to cook or put in tea/coffee but i think we’re expected to drink that stuff as if it were real liquid milk… not happening…
Though i have managed to try some new things, I’ve not yet tasted everything i want to taste. For example, alligator and a local bush meat called labba. Wish me luck in finding them! And apparently, we have to taste a local delicacy which is this large fat white worm…
Oh and I lied re number two. Chicken foot is not a foot and nor is it from a chicken. It is a spiced flour dough treat that is thinly cut and fried. Very crunchy and very good.
House or Home?
So, am I homesick as I pass the six week mark? Nope 
One thing that I have realized when I travel is that you need to make wherever you are “home”, especially if it is a long term travel situation. If you treat it as a ”temporary home” situation, things fall apart, get stressful, and you end up just wanting to go home.
We’ve been treating our red-roofed place as a house – no rules, no schedule, no organization. Speaking as someone who has never lived with anyone except family AND has lived alone for almost three years, it has not been fun. Not quite hell on earth but nor has it been Hakuna Matata neither. But as of this week, it will all change. I’ve taken the initiative to get the ball rolling on creating a list of house rules and a chores list. The lists are up on the wall for others to add to. By this weekend, we’ll have it all ironed out and then no more crappy kitchen! Now, hopefully, this will go a long way in changing our view point from house to home.
So, what does our place look like? Well, it has a living area, three bedrooms, a toilet room, a shower room, and a kitchen. There are no closets or shelves in this place, so that is annoying. The floors are tiles but many of them are coming off. The walls need painting. We don’t have a dining table but there is a loveseat, a couch, and two armchairs. In the kitchen, we have a sink that doesn’t have a working tap (we got the drain fixed last week). We have a stove/oven that doesn’t work and two camping-like burners, one of which doesn’t work. No fridge – so food must be eaten at each meal or else thrown out (I won’t say who but one thinks we should eat it even up to the next day but I flat out said no) – just a matter of learning the art of cooking less! Our backyard consists of a huge water tank, a septic tank, and a multi-person outhouse, probably for the use by the general public. Oh yes – there is also a cemetery behind the house… There are four shops in a five minute radius from the house. The health centre is our neighbour, as is the Anglican church and the primary school. The computer lab is a one minute walk away. Our river is ten minutes away. And my work place is 5 minutes away.
So, we have a little neighbourhood, are in the process of developing rules and dividing chores, and some good people in the house. What more would I need to have a home?
Fun Times in SCM
Last week’s post was a little bit of a downer so I thought I’d swing the pendulum in the other direction this week. Now that we’ve been in Guyana for three weeks (!!), it is safe to say we have a good idea what there is to do for fun in SCM. On the surface, the quick answer is “not much”. But all you gotta do is dig a little deeper and it is rather surprising how many different things you can do to amuse yourself.
1. Swimming in the creek is great – I’m not sure why they call it a creek since it is clearly not one. It is big enough to be called a narrow river. There is an area by the c reek called “The Landing” which is basically a grassy area by the creek. The creek itself is the Maihica River.The creekis also fu n because it apparently has a mermaid that takes one or two non-SCM residents as a sacrifice each year. I’ll let you know if I find this mermaid!!
2. Picnics! Who doesn’t love a picnic? We went on one last weekend with a local family. The seven of them and the five of us piled into their pickup 4×4 (we sat in the back! WHOO!) and off we went to a random creek in the middle of the savannah in the middle of nowhere. There, they made cook-up which is rather similar to pelau. Cooking over an open fire is always cool. We also had fun with the creek itself since there was a rubberized pipe that water was flowing through – naturally, we used it as a waterslide. We even had a competition to see who could climb UP the pipe in the “wrong direction” against the flowing water. Only one other volunteer and I were successful on our first try!
3. If the first two are too exciting, then there are other more pedestrian fun to be had. For example, the internet lab. We only get 30 minutes of computer time per day, usually 6 days a week. But we are at the mercy of the internet lady who may or may not show up to open the lab.
4. Want some physical accivity? Why not play with the billion children that are here? Anyone who tells you that running around with kids is not real exercise is a LIAR. Or you could play football (soccer) with the local boys which I have done twice, now. Even scored a goal Or you could just wander around and explore the village which is set in a savannah of a two mile radius.
5. If watching sports is more your speed, then why not catch a cricket game on Sundays?
6. Liming and gaffing are also past times. The former is hanging out and the latter is chatting. We’ve done this a number of times with three separate women of the village. We could lime at their respective shops or homes. Sometimes, they even feed us!!
7. Having fun and learning are not mutually exclusive. So far I’ve had a lesson in roti-making (need a couple more, though) and how to split open a coconut.
In the upcoming weeks, I hope that we do a lot more of the same but also climb a tree and go fishing with the local kids, most of whom I teach! And we’ve discovered that one of the shops here has movies every evening during electricity hours so we’ll go check that out at some point. Oh – and we’ve also have been having some fun getting revenge on the bug kingdom by killing little and medium sized ones
