ring the bell and call or write us

i've been meaning to say:

if you've sent me a package in the mail, and i have not sent a letter of appreciation nor even acknowledged the gift in passing, it is not because i am a rude jerk. mail takes forever to get here (approximately 3 months for packages from north america). i know some of you have sent some packages, but they haven't gotten here yet. even if they do get to guyana, they don't come here - i have to pick them up in lethem, and i only go there once every few weeks. so if you've sent something, hold yer horses. a thank-you card will be making its way towards you sometime around Christmas.


during our week "off," crystal and i found ourselves incredibly bored, so i decided to take any chance i could get to ride around with ray in the bina hill truck. a few people here question the relationship: "what's that ray always doing always hanging out with young women?" arg. whatevs. i'd rather be driving around, seeing the country (for free!) than sitting around, clucking with all the old hens around here. at first i just thought of it as a nice way to waste time and stay relatively cool, but i have decided that driving around has been one of the wisest things i could do: i am seeing the country, meeting people from all over, and learning the names and locations of all the communities in our region (the north rupununi). good job, self.

*edit*: in case anyone (like my dad) is worried that i am falling in love with some strange guyanese man named ray: don't be. barf. i am super careful to always be around someone else, and not ride alone with him. plus, he's like, 45, with kids and a wife. and most importantly, i am not attracted to him at all. so chill out. my heart's still in alberta.

on the weekend, crystal and i went with the truck to pick up a boat from the crossing, about 2.5 hours northeast of here. we rode in the back of the green truck, on padded benches that have been lashed to the truck frame. crazy. by the end of the trip, we each had a caked-on layer of red dust covering our skin. at the crossing, a guy in a boat took us upriver to the iwokrama field station. it was a pretty neat place, and i think i'll take my dad there if he comes to visit me like he's promised. for us, it was a land of luxury: they have MOSQUITO SCREENS! none of this hammock-net or bed-net business. you could actually lounge around, in a chair in your room, with no mosquitos! genius!


my work partner here has a psychic back home with whom she still communicates. a lot of the amerindian people here believe in a number of evil spirits and stuff, and some things have happened around here that they've attributed to those spirits (like a sickness in one boy, which turned out to be parasites). anyways, my partner didn't want any of that evil stuff happening to her, so she asked her psychic what to do. the psychic told her to put 5 red marks around every opening in our room for 7 nights. so for the last 7 nights, she has been putting red nail polish on all the windows and doorways. maybe i'm too much of a new testament girl, but red marks on doorways seems a little, i don't know, old fashioned? craziness.

tonight we have our kick-off/halloween party for the after-school program. i am going as a punctuation princess. i will try to remember to take pictures. we are going to play "sardines" and another hide-and-seek-ish game. fun times.

lixo, lixo, lixo

it is funny what living in a foreign country can do to a girl. i am developing a celebrity crush on a keyboard-playing brazilian (i think) pop star named pepe moreno. everywhere we go, people are playing his album or watching his video. it reminds me of first year university, when my roommate jennifer had only ONE compact disc - A RICH MULLINS CHRISTMAS ALBUM!!! - that she played from september straight through to january. except that i don't mind pepe. i definitely minded hearing rich mullins every bloody day.

however, this celebrity crush may only exist because all the energy of my usual crush-whore-ness has nowhere to go. i have no crushes in sight. that's a pretty big thing for me. my life for the past, i don't know, 10 years can easily be classified and understood by the crushes (celebrity and real) who dominated each phase of my life. grant mcneill, reese roper, colin powles, rivers cuomo... where is your autumn 2006 replacement?

angry mother alert

i received the following e-mail from my sidekick, the parenthetical parent, today:

"On a different topic, as a fellow keeper of the language, I take issue with your wanton disregard for capitals. How can you be so passionate about the apostrophe, yet butcher the capital letter? Is our great country not worthy of a capital C? Are the mighty rivers and grand bodies of water not esteemed enough to be capitalized? Can you face the North Saskatchewan River after you have labelled it the north saskatchewan? You, my child, are Caylie Dawn, as I so proudly decared on the registry of your birth. Please stop decapitating capitals!

Lovingly yours,
Mom (with a capital M)"

yikes! as i explained to her, i avoid capitals primarily for aesthetic reasons. i think they are ugly. but it makes me proud to know that my mother is as much a grammar nazi as the esteemed drs. zinck and everest. quite the contrast from my dad, who writes me letters saying, "hello they're, pip! how,s it going? its been snowing lately, and getting to cold here. hope your doing well. love me"

i love my dad, but am thankful his spelling and grammar skills (or lack thereof) did not rub off on me.

arg! why do i talk so much about punctuation!? i am in south america! it is still hot. it is sunny. i think i scorched my retinas last week when we went boating. i ordered some adidas shoes online today. not much else to report.

take the rope to my heart and fall

i just started reading a short story by tomson highway called "hearts and flowers." all i have read so far is the "contributor's note" and the first few paragraphs, and i have already developed an awe for the man and his comma lust. for example: "The first is that we, the group of writers whose work you see in these pages, were asked to write a story or an essay for this project based on, or woven around, an important, that is to say, a pivotal, event in the history of Canada's Native people." six in one sentence! i thought that kind of comma use died out after, i don't know, the 17th or 18th century. good on ya, tomson! it's inspiring, really. not as inspiring as the sentences i encountered in 17th century lit, some of which stretched on for 18 (!) lines through the artful use of commas, but impressive nevertheless.

on a similar note: in one of dr. hales' courses, she made some statement about us ("us" referring to myself and my classmates/english lit lovers everywhere/grammar geeks) being "guardians of the language." it seemed romantic (small 'r') and tolkien-esque to me. not that i've ever actually read tolkien, but it seemed to be right up his alley, what with all his "lord of the rings" and "cellar door" musings. anyway, i thought the position of "guardian of the language" a little too ambitious for myself; i don't really care for vocabulary, and i can't tell an adjective from an adverb. but i think i could safely assume the role of "guardian of the apostrophe." this is an important position, especially in light of dr. e's prediction that the apostrophe will "die out" within the next 50 years. i could arm myself with some black paint, and maybe an apostrophe on a long stick, a la lynn truss. i think it's an important and irreplaceable little squiggle, and i'm committed to doing my part to make sure it sticks around.



today two of the puppies that live around here, brothers who are a few months old, were laying around, looking as bored as we felt. a rope was sitting on the table, and i asked ray if he could lasso with it. he said of course he could, so he whistled for the brown puppy to come over, and he put the rope around his head. ray tugged on the rope a bit, but the puppy whimpered, so he let it go. the brown puppy went and laid down on the road, and then his brother, the black puppy, came over and started chewing on the other end of the rope. we laughed, and then we thought it would be funny to tie that end to the black puppy. we did, and then ray pretended to have some meat in a bowl, and the black puppy got up but the brown puppy didn't, and it was cute/funny to watch them be so confused. we laughed a lot, but all the girls here think we're cruel animal haters because of it. whatever. it's not like we tied them together and then forgot about them. i untied them after a few minutes. i think it's way less humane for people to "own" animals and keep them inside as pets and walk them around on ropes and create such a reliance on humans so that the animals can't live on their own. whatever, girls. sigh. and so goes my life in the rupununi.

goldenrod and the 4-h stone

i had a meeting with the headmistress at annai secondary, and she was very supportive of my after-school program. great! a major setback for the students and even the adults here is their shyness. amerindian people are very, very shy, and do not tend to speak up or express their feelings well. that's one of the reasons YLP was started - to enable youth to find their voice, so they could speak their mind about the things that are going on around them: things like the road being built, businesses and buildings coming up, oil companies drilling.... apparently, the students at the school very rarely speak in class or answer questions. i think that our program will help to deal with that. i hope so. i never thought i'd say it, but 4-H sure has proven itself to be beneficial for me! 8 years of project days and public speaking presentations seem a little less painful now that i see how they've improved my ability to lead.

i am liking this job more and more, and realizing more and more that i want to go back to AFL next summer. i'm not sure how realistic that is. a sage piece of advice i could have benefitted from a year and a half ago: if you have a kick-ass job, don't date your boss. it's bad news. but i'm really excited for all the things i'm learning and ideas i'm having, and the whole point of this internship is for canadian youth to gain overseas experience, and then take that knowledge back to their home community/province/country. so come on, AFL. hire me back.

i had some really nice msn chats last night with some really good friends. i am excited to come home for christmas. i am excited to talk about post-christianity and richard seine and rowing and snowboarding and to have sleepover parties with friends who have already married or had kids. too bad BWIA is the worst airline ever, and i'll be lucky if i can even get on the plane out of guyana.

science fiction double feature

a lot has happened! sorry for the artlessness of this blog, but i am going for quantity, not quality...

last week, circa wednesday, i drove off the edge of my "frustration" phase, and am now coasting contently down the path of "acceptance." after a few f-bombs and freak-outs, i talked with some staff here and then sat down with my youth, and we discussed things we are all frustrated with and want to change. out of that, i've come up with two personal projects that i am going to undertake while i'm here:
1. i will be responsible for YLP's mondays and tuesdays schedule. those days, every week, will be spent at bina hill. we will do gardening in the morning, then typing/I.T., then lunch, then a meeting, and then...
2. i will be developing and implementing an after-school program for the kids at annai secondary school, right next door to us. my YLPers will help me staff it. i think it will be neat. it will be an hour and a half, every monday and tuesday, and will focus on leadership as well as ghost river's mandate of "empowering people of all ages and cultures to discover the natural world, the worlds between cultures and the worlds within themselves." i think i will do some games and stuff that i learned while i worked at the native cultural arts museum this summer.
3. i will be developing a much-needed curriculum for the Youth Leadership Programme, based on a 2-year cycle. this program has been going on for a few years, but there is a frustrating lack of consistency, coupled with redundant lessons (on public speaking, HIV/AIDS workshops, etc.)

so... i am excited about those things. it is nice to have some direction. then i can kind of take it easy on wednesdays-sundays, when we will be doing our community visits. of course, i will help out, but not have to be ultimately responsible for them.

anyway...

on friday, i made another day trip to lethem. i really like those trips. i think because i like riding ETS so much, and i miss it. the first thing i did was go to the bank. i always dread going to the bank, because one of the tellers there has a crush on me, and he instantly bounds over to the cashier's desk every time i come in. i purposely avoid eye contact with him, but he notices me immediately anyway. he was the teller i had to open my account with, and so he took down all my information and then asked me if he could e-mail me. what could i say? it was right in front of him? thankfully, he hasn't e-mailed me yet, but every time i go in, he apologizes for not doing so. the craziest thing is that i was super grouchy when i opened my account, because it was impossible for me to transfer funds from my canadian bank accounts to here. that didn't stop him. so now i just take out huge sums of money to minimize the amount of times i have to go into the bank.

in lethem, i picked up chocolate bars, fruit, whole wheat flour, and drank about 3 cans of cold orange juice. all of this added considerably to my "acceptance" stage.

on saturday, crystal and i rode with sydney, the founder of bina hill institute, to surama village. surama is about an hour away, through some forest and down a terrible road. when we got there, sydney took us around to the eco-lodge and then to the animal sanctuary. i think the "sanctuary" is so named to appease the eco-tourists who take issue with the word "zoo." nevertheless, i saw some really neat animals! i will post pictures on my flickr site next month (i've run out of uploading space). i saw some spikey turtles and a puma and a tapir and some sloths and an anaconda and a boa constrictor and some giant rodents called "labba." we got to go in the cages that all the animals were in! i didn't want to touch the snakes, but maybe next time i will. the neatest, part, though, was this:

we got to play with three capuchin monkeys! they climbed all over us and we fed them peanuts. they were so funny and such good jumpers! the girl monkey was afraid of us, but one cuddled up with crystal for most of the time.

on the ride home from surama, we stopped on the side of the road, where a local family sells barbecued food every saturday night. it was so good! and it is really cute - they just have this one light strung up on a tree, and a bunch of chairs, and the food in styrofoam boxes and the ever-present bob marley blasting from a small cd player. cute.

today was a neat day too. crystal and i asked ray to take us boating on the river. we were joined by mike, another bina hill staff member, who wanted to go fishing. mike actually ended up driving the boat. we went to crashwater, a village on the river, where some of the girls brought us sugar cane to chew on:
i had never had sugar cane before. then we boated upriver, and saw lots of birds (like herons and kingfishers) and a dead caimen floating near the shore. finally ray took us trekking through the forest to find some giant lily pads. we walked around a swamp, and came to these:



i had seen them before on a guyana postcard, and the postcard picture had a baby resting on top of the lily pad. i thought it was some sort of stupid anne geddes picture, and dismissed it immediately, but then i found out that they actually do have lily pads big enough to rest babies on. so maybe someone will end up with an anne geddes-esque postcard in the mail someday.

ah! my eyes are super dry and making me crazy! thankfully, i am now all up to speed on the goings-on of my week. hopefully i will update my blog more frequently this week, as we have some "time off" (as if we ever did anything).

love cdg

urgency! urgency! emergency!

yesterday i spent most of the morning shovelling cow manure by myself in the pasture. surprisingly, it was one of the most enjoyable times i've had since i got here. it was nice to be by myself. i had to get the manure for a composting presentation i was going to give later that day. i shovelled 4 wheelbarrowfulls of manure, and then our gardener didn't show up, so we didn't make the compost pile exactly as planned and therefore didn't end up using any of the manure. oh well.

crystal has taken up horseback riding lessons with "kapitash," the rancher (that's his title, not his name, apparently). i thought about it, but since i have old jesse james himself as my father, i decided to put off riding lessons until i get home.

(taken from upstairs at bina hill)
while i was shovelling manure yesterday, a savannah fire was approaching from the east. it kept getting closer and closer, but we've had some come really close before, and no one ever does anything, so i didn't panic. but then, just as i was finishing shovelling, everyone ran out of the bina hill building to come put out the fire. the wind had pushed it so that it was right by kapitash's house, and was approaching bina hill and our garden. all the boys grabbed buckets and drew water from the well, or broke green branches from the trees and beat the fire. i "helped" a bit too, but the help was reminiscent of how i used to "help" my mom do dishes when i was 5 years old. not too helpful. anyways, the point of this all is that it was really, really exciting, and i realized that i love fires. they draw people together in a neat way, in a way that nothing else can. i mean, i wouldn't like to watch someone's house burn down, but i liked the panic that occured when we thought we might lose our garden. when i was in sucker creek, some of the kids burned down the old band office, and the whole community showed up. some "helped," but most just stood around and watched. when i was in university, and those two fires happened on whyte ave (one at stolli's/the pet store, and one at hub cigar), kids drove from king's in the middle of the night to watch the fires. neat. we are awestruck, fearful, mesmerized by them. at training for this job (at ghost river's camp in the rockies), we were taught that fire is a sacred, male energy that is to be respected. i liked that. it made me more conscious of what i put in the fire as garbage, and how it is a good and powerful energy but that, like i said, it has to be respected. we were worried it might reach the school next door, because the wind was pushing it in that direction, but the rain came just then and put it out. neat-o.

this morning ray had to drive some of the kids to the river so they could take the boat home. crystal and i went for the ride, and it was super neat! i think the river was the rupununi river, and it was about 15 minutes away from here. it was beautiful! there were a few motorboats, and about a dozen hollowed-out wooden canoes lying around. ray told me to get into a small wooden canoe, and he paddled us across a little stretch of water using only his hands so that i could take a picture from the other side. it was so great! i will put pictures up on my flickr site soon. ray said he will take me and crystal up the river sometime, maybe next sunday. starting next friday, we are taking a week off (as if we actually did work otherwise), so we are going to drive around with ray and visit all the villages. free tourism! anyways... i collected a few dried fish scales, because when i worked at the museum this summer, we made fish scale art with whitefish scales. the scales i found here were 4-5 times bigger than those ones. then debbie (one of my YLP youth) found me an arapaima fish scale. it was huge! the arapaima is the largest freshwater fish in the world. the scale was about the size of my palm! sick!

i think later today crystal and i are going to go with ray to surama and fairview, two villages up north a little, near the essiquibo river, i think. he has to drop off some more kids. should be neat. i will take pictures, and hopefully pick up some oranges.

Lethem eat cake!

last friday and saturday our Youth Leadership Programme hosted a youth-elder conference at the benab (big tipi-like, thatched roof gathering place) in annai. at first i thought it was lame, but then it got really neat! i learned how to spin cotton from some of the female elders, and then on saturday i learned how to weave my own basket out of mokro bark! i will put up some pictures sometime soon.

i had a really bad sleep on friday - we've been sleeping in our hammocks, which is difficult for a girl who only sleeps on her stomach. so on friday, i woke up 8 or 10 times that night (too hot/had to go to the bathroom/uncomfortable/baby next door was crying) and was so exhausted the next day that rawle organized for me to use one of the extra bedframes and mattresses. so now i have a bed! it is sooo nice. my former hammock is my current bedsheet. i think i might sling up my other hammock outside and put my hammock mosquito net on it, so i have somewhere to chill in the evenings. but i won't put it up yet, because there are some sketchy guys staying here for a few days...

on saturday night, some guy jumped over the wall of the room next to ours and punched our friend gilbert in the stomach, and then jumped out the window. scary!!! fortunately, because of the scare of crystal's attack earlier in september, we pushed to have our room super secure, so when that all happened, our room was safe. we have two doors, both of which have locks, and our windows all lock, and the space between our room and the next ones and the ceiling has been boarded up. so we don't feel too scared. but i feel scared for gilbert.

on sunday crystal and i just bummed around all day. went for a quick bike ride, sat around and radiated heat.

on monday i took a day trip to lethem. up until now, there has only been one bus that runs through Guyana, heading southwest on sunday, tuesday, and thursday, and heading northeast monday, wednesday and friday. but just last week, the North Rupununi District Development Board started running a bus every monday, wednesday and friday that goes to lethem (two hours southwest of here) in the morning and returns in the evening. it's great! i went to the bank and was thankfully able to withdraw some money that my mom had transferred, and then i bought some chocolate bars and fruit juice and some towels to do yoga on. then i bussed home! it was a good trip, and hopefully the bus can keep running. i really really like bus rides through the rupununi after dark. nice and cool and relaxing. oh! i forgot! rawle also took me to brazil for a few hours. lethem is right on the border with brazil, and we took a speedboat across the river to brazil, and then spent about an hour at rawle's brother's. i'll need to get a visa if i want to spend more time there, but i think i will get one, as long as rawle takes us there. i wouldn't want to travel through brazil alone. also, rawle drove me around on his motorbike/vespa! that's my first time! i am in love, and almost tempted to buy one in canada, except for the fact that it would be totally useless to me for most of the year.

yesterday was a gong show. sometimes i think this place is a nazi regime. it's basically run by that crazy british ostrich lady, mentioned earlier in my blog. she controlls everything by e-mailing her spokesperson here (the british puppy-loving girl) 20 times a day. they are just really crazy, and moniter everything we do. now crystal and i have to write down our personal internet time in a little logbook. give me a break. i'm not 12 years old. AND one of the ladies in charge told our cook that she wasn't allowed to take things out of the shop and charge it to bina hill's account, that she could only cook what was in the cupboards. so yesterday for supper we had noodles and cake. not for celebration. because there was nothing in the cupboards. no flour to make bread. what a joke. but i bought 4 packages of oats when i was in lethem, so i know i'll never starve. also, thankfully, i've discovered that orange juice and orange-carrot juice is available at the shop here! i won't get scurvy!


on a completely unrelated note, i think i am getting over darcy. but it might just be that i am preoccupied/excited about the possibility of going to school next year AND joining the rowing team. nevertheless, it feels good.

peanut factory

-went for a short drive and stopped at a place where a few people were drying thousands of peanuts on tarps. i never realized that peanuts HAD to be dried out. i took a few handfulls, but they weren't quite in the "ready" stage, so they were a little soft/stale tasting. neat to learn about peanuts, though.
-got an e-mail from our supervisor in canada, who told us that we will not be hosting a group of canadian interns in november/december as we had been planning. which means that crystal and i have to make up 6 weeks of new programs within the next month. yikes. it's kind of a relief, though. with the canadians, we'd have to be going out to villages quite often, and i am already dying from all the bug bites i'm getting.
-one of the mangy dogs around here had puppies a few nights ago. she had them under the step of one of the boys' outhouses. the british girl who works here keeps tending to them, and is really excited because she is going to make one her own. i cite my allergies as the reason i stay away from them, but mostly i just think they're ugly and dumb.
-i ate my first guava ever. the seeds are so hard! not something i will be doing regularly.
-i went to shower a few days ago, and as i pulled the tarp to "close" the shower, i saw a tiny frog nestled in the folds. i made it go onto my fingertip, and looked at it a bit, then put it on the ledge of the shower so i wouldn't crush it in the tarp. we watched each other during my shower, and then when i was done, i was studying it and wondering if it would still be there if i ran to get my camera. while i was staring at it, lost in thought, it JUMPED RIGHT AT MY FACE! yikes! i screamed a little and jumped back. it hit my cheek and fell all the way to the ground. my heart was racing and adrenaline was pumping.

comma chameleon

apparently, the Conservative government just went through some budget cuts, and one of the programs that lost funding is young professionals international with foreign affairs canada. which means that this is the last year that the program i am in right now will be running. sad. pretty amazing that i got into it when/how i did, though.

highlights for today included:
-continuing my love affair with apostrophes and commas by way of reading more of eats, shoots and leaves
-enjoying more than my fair share of some deliciously tender beef
-having my first "bath" here - in a white plastic barrel cut lengthwise. it was UNBELIEVABLY enjoyable, and will be done more often.

Cinderella of the English language

i finished reading "a thousand barrels a second." there's not much to do here on weekends, because most staff goes home and there is really no transportation to get us anywhere, except for our bikes that can take us to a few select nearby villages. so i slung up my second hammock on friday, and spent most of the weekend reading. it's a neat book. read it.

my new love, conveniently, is also my new book. i've been meaning to read "eats, shoots and leaves" since i heard about it a few years ago, but have never gotten around to actually doing it. i cracked it open today, and the preface was all it took for me to be spellbound. i will share some of the good bits:

-Praise for Eats, Shoots and Leaves: "At long last--a worthy tribute to punctuation's stepchildren: the neglected semicolon, the enigmatic ellipses and the mad dash. Punc-rock on!"- James Lipton. (ha. "punc-rock on"? so nerdy.)
-(from the foreword): "Once the poor stepchild of grammar..., punctuation will emerge as the Cinderella of the English language."
-the author asked "passers-by to 'pin the apostrophe on the sentence' for a harmless afternoon chat show." CUTE! best idea ever!
-"Some may say that the British are obsessed with class difference and that knowing your apostrophes is a way of belittling the uneducated." (this is how i feel, for real. yikes.)
-"For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word 'Book's' with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker." (again, how i feel.)
-"Part of one's despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. . . . We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation." (note: i am really unsure of how i should work my ellipsis in that paragraph, and genuinely fear the ridicule of my fellow grammarians. you know who you are.)

thanks to this book, i am realizing that i don't actually love grammar, as i have always assumed. i will have to relinquish the title of "grammar girl," and perhaps gracefully move on to "punctuation princess." i'm not so good with grammar as a whole, but i'm pretty punctu-riffic, i think.

i am only on page 19, and i am already dreading reaching the end of this book. it is too good.