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.