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