green paper packages tied up with tape

dear joel and dr. e.,

thanks for the fantastic care packages! they (finally) arrived, and it seems like such a perfect time! it's nice to have a little surprise after christmas, and also nice to have some time to enjoy the contents (i'm rationing the granola bars to one every two days). crazy that they took over 3 months to get to me.


dear everyone,

go watch my seesar emily ukrainian dance at the jube on the 20th! you've never seen such perogy-fueled fury, i swear.



we played handball and soccer with the annai secondary school kids last night. it was sweet. i miss soccer. i think i will play again next year (if i can fit it in between rowing, dance lessons, school, crafts, art/french/editing/writing classes, a part-time job...). it is nice to play barefoot. i don't like playing barefoot in canada because all i can think about is this one time we were playing at camp and joel ellard was playing barefoot and he ran through a patch of prickly weeds and a bunch of prickles all got stuck between his toes. there are no prickly weeds on our pitch here. just hard, hard dirt.

we are building a volleyball court outside here. hopefully it will be done by the end of the week. they have to dig six inches into the aforementioned hard, hard dirt using two shovels and a small rototiller. good luck, boys. it should be fun to use once it's done, though.

we helped our youth revise their "social issues" presentations. one was on nature/culture, and another was on gender. i felt really good because i was able to help out with the content on those presentations (special props to dr. long's sociology courses). i'm not so helpful with the other presentations, like "effective communication" (i'm passive and antisocial) or "trafficking in persons."

also, i've been reading alyssa's first-year anthropology textbook (so i can skip the introductory courses next year at the u of a) and i'm totally loving it. i feel like i will really love anthropology. i can't wait for school.

dear dad,

it's us!

brought to you in part by ALT-1-3-0

first things first:
rumors have been circulating that pépe moréno was stabbed and killed a few weeks ago. now, there are about a million pépe morénos (morénoes?) in south america, so no one here is really sure if it was everybody's-celebrity-crush-pépe or someone else. i hope it was not our pépe.

my sister bought me Mrs. Dalloway for christmas, and i've been reading it over the past couple of days. i've never really liked female writers, and v.w. is no exception. at least in this book. i do, however, admire her use of punctuation, especially semicolons. if the bad news about pépe is true, then virginia and her semicolons take pépe's place on my celebrity crush list.

this summer, i began to realize that my lifelong attraction to socially awkward situations is most likely due to the fact that i am mildly addicted to adrenaline, and too safe/scared to do anything physical that, for most people, would induce adrenaline rushes. being socially awkward in guyana is difficult, because everyone either things i am just being flat out rude, or that it is just a "cultural difference." maybe that's why i loved places like high school and nakamun and university: so many places and situations to be awkward.

write-offs

i am back in guyana. here's an update on my last 2 weeks in canada:

1. i had a ridiculously good time with some ridiculously good people. highlights, in no particular order, are as follows:
-painting with kelseydawn
-making a million crafts by myself
-driving to edmonton and back by myself and kickin' it, in stereo, with sufjan stevens
-making masks, going shopping, hanging out, and partying down with kaylin
-lunch with dr. e and kelseydawn
-low-key visits with courtney, jen, joel, and kev
-sleigh ride with king's/vermilion friends and family
-hanging out with joel's family even though he wasn't there
-eating blueberry crumble/anything my mom made
-hanging out with my crazy grandparents
-hanging out with our new dog
-hanging out with my family

2. i was doing really, really well until the last friday i was in alberta, when i went to see darcy for ten minutes to tell him i'm really not crazy and that he should hire me this summer because i am fairly certain i will not freak out at him or blackmail him or do anything crazy. and he basically told me he wouldn't hire me, but only because i did a shit job when i worked for him last time and not because of any "personal issues" i think there might be between us. but i don't get it, because they gave me really good references. so, awesome. so i feel like garbage about the work i'm doing in guyana, because it's pretty much exactly the same thing i did when i worked for him before. i am so, so mad.

3. after seeing darcy and consequently feeling like total garbage, i wanted to talk or hang out with ANYONE. but all my girl friends in edmonton were not picking up their phones. but there was a message on my phone from dustan, who i have refused to speak to for the last two years. and he was in edmonton and wanted to hang out. crazy. under any other circumstances, i would have ignored the message, but i felt like total crap and wanted to talk to someone, so i called him. he came over and we drove around for an hour and just talked, and it was really low-key and nice. it was just neat how one relationship that i had counted as a total write-off was rebuilt, almost exactly as another relationship became a total write-off.

our dog is so smart! one of our cats has been catching and eating the birds who come into our yard. so today, the cat and the dog were both outside near the tree where the birds feed, and the dog wouldn't let the cat sneak up to the tree! he kept walking in front of the cat and sitting down, blocking the cat in a really non-agressive way. it was funny and cute, because the cat kept trying to slink down and be really flat against the sidewalk, but the dog wasn't having any of that. so smart.

i's a damn shopper!

i drove home from edmonton with emiline on friday. we shamelessly indulged in listening to hanson for the last 15 minutes of our trip, and let me say, it was awesome. it instantly took me back to grade 8 - back to the first summer i played soccer; back to the last year i was in catholic school; back to a time in my pre-kelsey history, when i was still afraid of her (she was, and is, unassailably cool. how can you contend with a girl who is dating a boy with a green mohawk? you can't.).

since i've been home, i've been spending most of my time crafting and sewing. i usually wake up around 5 or 6 (which is when i've been getting up in guyana), and get so excited about my craft projects that i can't fall back asleep. so far i've made a corduroy messenger bag with a bear appliqué on it, and reconstructed an old t-shirt. more recons and appliqués are on the way. i will post pictures soon.

in love with the place, in my mind

yesterday was a really cute day. i just love being in edmonton.

i woke up at 4 a.m. and couldn't fall back asleep, because i get so excited about all the crafts that i want to make and all the things i want to see/do while i'm here. at 8:30, i went to MEC to pick up a backpack for a girl in guyana, and then i went to kaylin's. i love hanging out with kaylin. we went to safeway to pick up some food, and then we drove around downtown looking for richard seine. we both miss him like mad. unfortunately, we couldn't find him. we talked about working in the inner city and how much we loved the people and hated the organizations that employed us. i'm so glad we're both out of there now. those jobs were seriously so destructive for us. then we went to second cup and had a really good conversation. my favorite conversations lately have been with my post-christian female friends. it's comforting to know there are other people out there who are dealing with the same issues as me: guilt, loss of identity, believing that "satan has a hold on [me]." yikes. then we went to the legislature and talked about missing colin powles and how we've both always believed that the other was too cool to be friends with us. ah, insecure middle-class christian white girls. so predictable. i still feel that way about her though, as i do with a lot of my friends. i was so confident in high school! i guess junior high is catching up with me now. anyway, kaylin and i had a super cute time at the leg. we walked around the pedway and talked about loons going extinct and about how we are all doomed because the earth's magnetic field is shrinking. then i wanted to show her the "magic spot" at the leg. because she had never seen it. so this cute lady named maggie took us on a tour of the legislature. she was so excited! she couldn't stop talking and smiling! i want to see if i can volunteer to do tours there next year. the whole leg. was so interesting. i forgot all the neat stories about it, which i must have learned in elementary school when we visited the place on field trips. we especially liked the mace. alberta's first mace used in parliament was made out of garbage like those floaty toilet-tank balls and plastic pipe and broken teacup handles, and spraypainted gold! and they used it for FIFTY years! our province is so cute and neat. i am in love. we also really liked the magic spot (the "acoustic anomaly" where you can hear the fountain). i always like hanging out outside the leg., but i think i am going to start spending more time INSIDE. we also found out that on canada day, they bring out the red carpet and all visitors are allowed to walk up it and then into that room where all the government business is done (sorry, i forget the name. i was always TERRIBLE at remembering political science stuff) (and this is the ONLY time of year visitors are allowed in the room, and the ONLY parliament building in canada that EVER allows visitors in) and then out the back. so kaylin and i are planning to go next canada day. the day made us even more excited about our province than we already are, so we decided that sometime in the next couple of years we are going to go on a vacation to small towns and notable cute places in canada. exciting.

after hanging out with k-lin i hung out with kev. i haven't really talked to him much since the summer because i knew i would be tempted to ask him questions about darcy that i don't want to know the answers to. but hanging out with him was so fun! i really missed all his constant, lame jokes. i like that he doesn't mind going shopping with me (we went to whyte ave and i bought a sufjan album and some american apparel clothes. so predictable.). he is fun, and i am glad that he will be in edmonton next year.

finally, i hung out with joel kelly. i feel like joel must spend all his free time reading books entitled "how to be a great friend." he is just always the right amount of fun, and supportiveness, and concern, and silliness, and intelligence, and conversation. and he is my most reliable source for new music! we just went for supper, but it was really nice. i am excited that joel will be going to school in edmonton next year too. so many fun friends in such close proximity! life doesn't get much better!

new dog

with kelseydawn having relocated herself to the depths of the 403, i've had to find myself a new (if only temporary) bf. done and done.



"stets," honorably monikered after the neighbour who found him abandoned in a ditch last summer, has apparently adopted himself into my family and my parents' home. i am in love! stets is so friendly and cute, and he loves to go for walks. he likes tummy rubs and eating snow. he wags his tail furiously, and has a bad (but cute) habit of getting so excited that he will jump up all over us and try to lick our faces. having been mothered by an animal rights passivist (and by this i mean "peacefully resistant in response to injustice," and not merely "inactive toward injustice"), and then having taken that to an extreme, i have a solid conviction that animals shouldn't be taken as pets for humans unless the animals themselves choose us. and that's what stets did. i guess after wayne stetson found the dog, he tied the dog up in his yard. but whenever the dog was unleashed, he came over to our house. it was perfect timing, too, because my parents needed some company and youthful energy around the house now that all of us girls have moved out.

i am considering trying to find a job in vermilion for the summer just so i can hang out with stets. i like being with him, because i feel safe going for walks with him, but there is no need for verbal conversation when we are together.

somehow i'll find my way home; celebrity crush list

a briefing on my trip from annai to edmonton:

i flew out of annai village (5 miles from bina hill) last friday, heading to georgetown, the capital of guyana. we stopped over in lethem to pick up some people, and a soldier at the airstrip kept trying to flirt with me. he kept asking if he could come visit me at bina hill. i am always too timid to say what i really mean. and what i really mean is this: i have taken dr. long's "marriage and the family" sociology course, and have learned that despite the fact that this may sound "bad," things like social class and geographic location and race/culture really DO play a big role in relationships. and so i just want to shout at guyanese boys, "quit flirting with me! it would never work! not in a million years! don't take it personally. but get out of my face, please." but instead of just saying what i want to say, i usually drift away from the conversation (physically). but i have to admit, having boys flirt with me is definitely a confidence-booster, because it certainly doesn't happen much in canada. anyway... it was neat to be able to see guyana from the air. i liked to see the dirt paths made by people and animals in the rural areas, and contrast them to the straight streets in georgetown. it was neat to be able to see which areas are travelled most, and think about why that is. in the rural areas, people dictate the paths and where they lead; in the city, the roads dictate the people.
it was also nice to see all the rainforest. thousands of acres of unspoiled green. neat-o.

i arrived in georgetown in the mid-afternoon on friday. i took a taxi to my hotel and basically just hid there for the next three days. i am pretty terrified of georgetown, because it's a pretty violent place. they say that the violence isn't directed at foreigners, but i'd rather not take my chances. i had pizza hut pizza delivered to my room, and i basically just watched movies on t.v. and swam in the pool all weekend. two trinidadian men invited me to have drinks with them (which i very politely declined) and a creepy man from alaska told me his life story while i was trying to do sudoku at the pool. aside from those minor interruptions, i enjoyed a nice vacation by myself. i've always known it, but i am realizing now more than ever how much i like being by myself. apparently the new trend in travelling is women vacationing/travelling solo. i can see why.

on monday morning i flew from georgetown to trinidad. i almost missed my plane because i was talking with a girl from toronto and her mom, who were supposedly on the same flight as me, but as it turned out, they were on flight "B" and i was on flight "A." one of the security guards had to shout my name into the crowd to remind me to get on the plane. i was impressed because i think he is the first person in history to pronounce BOTH my first and last names correctly on the first try. amazing. anyways, this girl and her mom were really neat: the mom was born in guyana, but now lives in toronto, and is teaching at york university and also finishing her ph.d. there. she is writing about the effect of emigration on guyana. i got their e-mails, and am excited to talk to her about that a little more, because it is definitely a concern with the program i am working with. as soon as north rupununi youth are qualified in the least, they move to the coast or to brazil or canada or somewhere else. no good. i understand why they do it, but it is hard for me to understand that not everyone is as attached to their home countries/regions/towns as i am to mine.

okay. flew trinidad to toronto, sitting next to the woman i mentioned in the above paragraph (we had been on different planes, but then in trinidad we all got on the same plane). waited around in toronto for 5 hours, bought a sudoku book, flirted with a boy flying to edmonton (and i think i was flirted WITH by same boy), flew to edmonton, feigned interest in the conversation the man sitting next to me tried to pursue with me (while feeling grumpy and exhausted and sudoku-obsessed), arrived in edgemonton at 1 in the morning, drove back to vermilion with my dad and arrived at 4 a.m. to surprise my mom. also, my dad brought some of the things i had ordered over the internet and had shipped to my sisters' while i was in guyana, including the sufjan stevens christmas box set! hip, hip, hooray! and he brought my ipod too! so good to hear my own music again. joel added all of his (ie. joel's) music to my ipod while i was gone, which included the "50 states" song, and i have decided that sufjan and i are kindred spirits. in that there is no one who loves our respective countries more than us. i need to contact him and arrange an exchange visit or something.

room to make her big mistakes

i hitched an unexpected ride to lethem and back yesterday with some of the red cross staff who were in annai, putting on a camp that my program was helping out with. one of my favorite things ever is going for long drives, because it gives me time to think. and thanks to this trip, i think i've discovered why i am so drawn to prairies and savannahs and wide open spaces.
1. i grew up on the prairies, and so did my dad and his dad, etc.
2. my own body shape is like the prairies: flat
3. 13 years of ukrainian dancing taught me to use all the space available on stage
4. in the same vein as #3, years of playing soccer (especially with claire paterson) taught me to identify and then move into space
5. thanks to yearbook camp in high school (yes, i did go to yearbook camp, and it was sweet, even though the organizers hated everything kelseydawn and i did) and years of editing yearbooks, creative arts publications, and various newsletters, i have been conditioned to find and fill "white space."
6. i am a girl. "blank page" and all that. wanna know more? take dr. hales' "women's writing" course.

i can't help it. it's like a killer instinct. except no killing. my soul finds space, and goes there.





also... i am developing a profound appreciation for enrique iglacias' music. well, maybe not so much a "profound appreciation" as an "irrational addiction." don't tell anyone.

three cheers and a non-alcoholic toast to g-hugh

gareth, famed oxford/cambridge ph.d. candidate and stellar dominoes player, walked out of my and crystal's lives forever on sunday night when he boarded the bus to georgetown to return to the u.k. this post is a tribute to him.

thanks, gareth, for:
-heightening my perceived level of security when walking after dark by accompanying me and crystal on:
-late-night and early-morning walks in the rupununi savannahs while the moon is shining
-being easygoing enough to endure our teasing
-being a fountain of silly entertainment, despite your incredible credentials on paper (describing a flying arrow moving "literally, as straight as an arrow!"; being able to catch only vegetation on our fishing trip...)
-renewing my faith in the male gender by being sensitive and strong and not making me believe i was crazy because of the things i thought or felt
-giving life to my passive-agressive revenge on an unnamed person by making crystal and me your preferred companions for the duration of your stay
-sharing your computer... against norma's wishes!!!

thanks, friend. be well.

dasher, dancer, prancer, vixen

last night, bina hill institute had its christmas party. there were about 100 people, and we had delicious food: baked chicken, cook-up rice, curried beef, mashed potatoes, beans, cucumbers, cake.... afterwards, we had a dance party. i haven't danced for a long time, probably not since lane's wedding in the summer. it was tons of fun. i seriously love dancing so much. i have blisters on both my feet now. the normal thing was that i spent much of the evening rocking out by myself (it was more like fo-ho-ing (i don't know how to spell it. faux-hoe?), with a little bit of shakira-ing and sean paul-ing). the anomalous thing was that i actually danced with some people. i think boys/men see that, to some extent, i have rhythm, and think i would be good to dance with. what a mistake. i get really awkward and stiff and i trip over my feet and their feet and it is all just a disaster. i tell myself this happens for two reasons:
1. i am a prairie girl. i need my space. i like being by myself, and i like dancing by myself.
2. when i used to go to church, i would hardly ever sing. i am not a singer. but i would dance. and i still like to dance as worship/a celebration of all that is good/an expression of myself/because it feels good to move every part of me. and therefore it is somewhat spiritual for me. and i don't like having testosterone and toes and hips standing (or dancing) in between me and my commune with everything i am excited about/in love with.

i need to start clubbin' or something.

"mango season will save your life"

mangoes are in season in guyana, and just in time to battle impending scurvy. thousands of mangoes just fall to the ground and rot because there are so many. i had only ever had ONE mango before i came to guyana, and i didn't really like it. when i lived with lee this summer, she came into my room the first week i was there, holding a mango, and said, "i was saving this. i wanted to share it with you." cutest thing ever! so she cut it up and put it on a plate, and i really wanted to like it because the whole situation was so adorable, but i thought it was kind of yucky. but now that they are one of my only options for fruit here (guyana's interior has a terrible distribution system), i find them delicious.

on an unrelated topic...
last night i was lying in my bed, and i felt a bug crawling on my leg. i went to brush it off, but when i touched it, it was bigger than i expected it to be (sometimes ants and spiders get into my bed). i shined my headlamp onto it, and i saw that it was a baby centipede! yuck!!! they are so, so gross. and apparently they bite, but thankfully, this one did not bite me. i coaxed it onto a piece of paper and then threw the paper outside (it wouldn't get off on its own).

live a normal life with me

when gesa interviewed me for this position in late july, she asked me to describe what i thought living/working here might be like. i had only learned that guyana is a country the day before, so i didn't have much to go on, except for the word "wild." and when you're sitting in the middle of alberta, the whole prospect of this place and my position here does seem a little wild. i mean, a 12-hour bus ride through the rainforest, just to get to the interior where i'm living now? my work involving fishing trips, where we see monkeys and caimen up close? but to be honest, since i've been here, i haven't been struck by how "wild" everything seems, as much as i've been struck by how normal everything feels. i mean, having high-speed internet certainly taints that, but even when we do community visits to remote villages, it still all seems normal. crystal and i still have a hard time believing we're in south america, probably because nothing seems very strange.

omnivore

so... after a morning of movie-watching, i am confronted with these images just outside our "office." apparently, a cow had died, so some of the youth (not from my program, although they live here) were cutting it up and preparing it and selling it. i guess the cow had died from drinking cassava water. cassava is one of the main foods of the amerindians here: they eat farine and cassava bread, and they also have a drink (i forget what it's called), all made from cassava. it kind of creeps me out a bit that they are going to eat some cow that they just found dead, but i guess it's not like the cow drank mercury or anything. i don't know. i just like to think of my meat as happy and healthy before it's slaughtered.

on the table in the bottom picture is a watermelon, picked freshly from the garden, like one i enjoyed for breakfast this morning!

on the table in one of the other pictures is the cow's head. sick. for a girl who grew up in rural alberta, it seems a little strange that i haven't been confronted with this sight more often (as in, ever). i like this picture, though, because gilbert's facial expression is so classically kelseydawn.

no plans

most staff from bina hill are in lethem at the rupununi expo. i didn't have the cash to go (money is SO difficult to get around here), and i've been feeling sick anyway, so i stuck around here for the weekend. yesterday i holed myself up in the office and watched three movies by myself: the notebook, reality bites, and amelie. surprisingly, it's the first i've seen any of them. anyway, strangely, TWO of the movies (the notebook and amelie) featured the following:
1. one half of of a blossoming relationship uses arrows on the ground to create a trail for the other half to follow and find a surprise (sometimes i wish i had a few more arrows-then-surprises in my life, instead of just surprises or chaos-then-surprises).
2. a thick stack of still-in-the-envelope mail. in amelie, the envelopes had been opened and the letters read (but still saved); in the notebook, none had been opened (i am hopelessly in love with the idea of a stack of unopened, posted mail. so much so that i am tempted to save all the future packages i may receive while i am in guyana and not open them until 10 years from now. i hope, somewhere, there's a boy with an attic full of letters he's intended to send me but hasn't had the courage (wait, do i want an uncourageous boy? hmm...) to do yet. or maybe he just knows it's not the right time. yeah, that's better than being "uncourageous." and one day i'll find them, wrapped in a piece of brown twine, and i'll sit on my bed and read and re-read them. sigh. a more realistic version of that story will be that the most romantic piece of literature i will ever receive will be a post-it, stuck on a fridge, saying, "went to buy bread. love you, _______." i will still sit on my bed and read and re-read it. but it might feel a little bit different.).

--

when we were younger, my mom had this awesome countdown-to-christmas kind of thing for us girls. we each had this cardboard chimney, which had a santa on top and was filled with 24 numbered boxes, which my mom would fill with treats and little presents for every day of december before christmas. sweet. so i don't have that right now, but i AM counting down my days to edmonton by eating one package of cookies a day. i bought 2 12-packs (each pack has 6 cookies) a week ago, and i am using them to keep track of how much time i have left here. only 17 more sleeps!

fury and love

it's my week off (we work 3 weeks on, one week off), and i've been kinda sick lately, so i've been spending a lot of time reading in my room. today while reading in my room, i heard a group of teachers, who are doing a week of training here, singing christmas carols as a choir. it's always so strange for me to combine tropical climates and christmas together. i've spent 2 christmases in tropical countries, and i am spending this advent in a tropical country, and it just feels... wrong. to echo bri's sentiments, i miss all familiarities of a north american christmas. to be perfectly honest, i really LIKE a lot of the things that most people hate about north american christmases: i LIKE going to the malls and seeing them all decorated, blasting Christmas carols (in small-town malls) and christmas songs (in big-city malls where mentioning the name of Christ is apparently offensive); i like bundling up in all my winter clothing and taking edmonton transit through the dark, snowy winter to said malls; i like receiving presents just as much as i like giving them; i LOVE wrapping presents (so much so that i try to convince anyone less keen on wrapping to let me do theirs for them); i like the lethargy of post-christmas dinner. i like watching movies with kelseydawn and knowing that she will inevitably fall asleep before the movie is half over. there are really only two things about christmas that i DON'T like:
1. real Christmas trees. some people would call a Christmas without a freshly-cut tree blasphemous. they say Christmas just isn't Christmas without the smell of a freshly-cut spruce (or is it pine? i don't even know). hmm. to this i say: save the tree, go buy an artificial one that'll last you 20+ years (like ours has), and just go outside and smell a still-living one. or just decorate one that lives outside, instead of cutting one down and bringing it inside. hmm?
2. i feel like i have to say this quietly: i don't know a whole lot about Jesus, but what i think i DO know about Him tells me that i don't know if He'd be down with all this obsession with Him and His birth. i know a lot of people think He'd be disgusted with all the materialism and stuff. but i think it goes further than that. i just feel like He'd feel a little, i don't know, embarrassed? who knows. maybe i've just been reading too much david james duncan.

numb and number

a little-known fact about me is that i am really good at remembering numbers. well, reasonably good. better at remembering numbers than facts or dates. a lot of people hate the idea of being assigned a number, at, like, university or for a social insurance number or something. they think it contributes to making the whole system impersonal. not me. i like my numbers. i like going through them in my head. my social insurance number, my driver's licence number, my passport number, my old king's university student number, my new u of a number, my debit cards' numbers... i like them all. i have old phone numbers of former friends kicking around in my head, and i like to pull them out and roll them around for a bit. i have our old innisfree phone number still milling around up there. i even have numbers that i can't remember what they refer to (to what they refer?).

once, a few summers ago, i lost my debit card, and i was really upset because it meant i had to be assigned (and therefore learn) a new number. i don't think people understood how losing a number could bother someone like it did me.

i think i can remember numbers because it is easy to assign your own rhythm to them. like, i can remember poetry (because of its rhythm), but am terrible at remembering speech quotes or prose lines.

perhaps surprisingly, i've never taken up trying to learn the digits of pi. maybe i should look into that....

be still my heart, or, where's an interrobang when i need one?!

i've just been informed that there is a FREE pepe moreno concert tonight in boa vista, brazil (just two hours west of lethem). why am i not there!?! oh, because i don't have my brazilian visa yet. the brazilian government is paying for pepe to give this free concert. does that seem crazy/wonderful to anyone else!?!

Capitals City

since my last post:

YLP travelled to Shulinab, a village of about 300 people in the South Central Rupununi district (so, about 4 hours south of here). We took the bus to Lethem, and then got a ride in the back of a pickup truck. Unfortunately, it was raining that day, so we had to tie a tarp on top of the box of the pickup. That meant that we were squished like sardines in the back: our luggage took up half the truck box, and the rest of us (ie. 7 of us) were crammed on the bench-seats. Crystal sat in the front seat, with a little girl and some eggs on her lap. Fun times. We arrived in Shulinab around 7 p.m. (after dark), slung up our hammocks, and went to bed.

The next day, Saturday, we held a "cultural camp" in which we brought together youth and elders to share games and crafts and traditional teachings. It was good fun. I made another mokro basket, but this time, I did the WHOLE THING by myself! A lot of the kids came over to watch me, which was kind of irritating, but good too, I guess. I think it gives them a sense of pride in their culture, and sparks their interest in traditional crafts, when they see a white girl take interest in those things. This basket is a lot smaller than the first one I made, and it ended up breaking a little bit because one of Rawle's kids stepped on it on Monday, but I am still proud of it.

Our camp continued into Sunday, and we held a big bonfire on Sunday night. I usually go to bed as soon as it gets dark, but I stayed up this time. It was really neat. Most of the community showed up - about 200 people! There were all kinds of neat presentations: there was a traditional Macushi band/dance group (pictured here), some Scottish/Irish teachers who taught us to dance a Ceili, lots of songs and traditional stories and even a pork roast. Ha.

Driving back to Lethem on Monday was more enjoyable than the trip into Shulinab. We took the same truck back, but it was a sunny day, so we didn't need the tarp tied over the truck box. Most of us stood up in the box of the truck all the way back to Lethem (a 2 hour drive). I was very dusty and dirty when we got into Lethem. We were supposed to catch a bus back to Bina Hill that night, but it never came, so we ended up staying the night at Rawle's wife's house. It was nice to just chill and watch movies and music videos. Strange that my current favorite artists include Shakira, Sean Paul, and The Pussycat Dolls.

I walked around Lethem barefoot on Tuesday, and I got a chance to call my parents in the morning. I haven't talked to them over the phone since September, so that was nice. I bought a ton of chocolate and some Christmas presents. We caught the bus back to Bina Hill at 10 p.m., and got back home after midnight. The bus breaks down every time it starts, and Tuesday was no exception. We would be driving down the road, and the bus would just turn itself off and we'd coast, in the dark, until the driver could get the engine to turn over again. That probably happened about 30 times in our 2-hour drive. Ugh. Also, there was some creepy kid named Terrence sitting next to me. Apparently he works at Bina Hill as a construction guy, and he knew who I was, though I had no clue who he was. Anyway, the whole way home, he kept trying to touch me. He would try to rest his head on my shoulder, and several times he brushed his lips against my upper arm, and he also put his hand on my thigh underneath my backpack! He kept it there for 20 minutes (I thought his hand was there, but I couldn't tell for sure, so I didn't do anything about it. But later I DEFINITELY felt him move it off)! Little shithead. After the thigh thing, I decided I would elbow him hard in the chest if he tried anything else, but luckily for him, he didn't.

On Wednesday, I think I rested most of the day. I did a bit of laundry. Ostrich-lady from Britain arrived that day, so YLP has been spending all our time trying to avoid her. Additionally, a package from my parents arrived! It was wonderful! Among other things, it contained soup, instant oatmeal, gatorade mix, beads, a "Vermilion" t-shirt and "Canada" hat to give as gifts, crochet hooks, hot chocolate, peppermint tea, and "the lorax." Woo! Exciting. I also found out that day that I have officially been accepted into school again! Hip, hip, hooray!

Yesterday, YLP walked to Oasis restaurant and then hiked up the mountain there. I did my hike in bare feet. It was nice. You should try hiking in bare feet, if you've not before. I rested on a big rock on the top for a bit, and then we all slung up our hammocks and just chilled. Nice.

Today we had a meeting to evaluate our program and the events we've held over the last 3 months. I think it went pretty well.

Starting on Monday, we have another week off. I don't know what I'll do with myself. Some people from here are going to Brazil, but Crystal and I can't go because Canadians need visas to visit there, and we don't have ours yet. We'll probably go sometime in the new year.

That's all for now.

writing on stone

exciting things from the last couple of days:

-oasis restaurant, just down the road, started selling cranberry-raspberry juice!
-taught the kids from annai secondary school to play kickball last night. they loved it, which makes me happy, because i think it is my all-time favorite game.
-ray found a tarantula in toka village and brought it back here in a plastic pop bottle just for me to see! then he smushed it under his foot, because apparently they are super dangerous and can kill people. i wish he hadn't killed it, but i am glad that i don't have to worry about tarantulas sneaking into my room. neil told me i didn't have to worry about it anyway because the tarantula doesn't have a key to my room. so silly. i will post pictures of it when the other computer is working, so check back soon.

-an unlikely set of friends: a cranky canadian girl of irish/ukrainian heritage (me), a 30-year-old cree/soto girl from saskatchewan (crystal), and a startlingly unpretentious 25-year-old oxford/cambridge ph.d. candidate from wales (gareth, who is here for 6 weeks and then goes back to the u.k. to finish his ph.d.). we went for a REALLY nice walk last night to oasis restaurant just after the sun set. the walk was about 2 kilometres each way, and although we used our headlamps when we walked through the savannah, we agreed to all walk in darkness along the road. it was lovely! there were millions of stars, and fireflies, and only one vehicle passed us in each direction! the weather was comfortably warm, not stiflingly hot like it usually is here nor bitterly cold like it is at home. when we got to oasis we drank our cranberry-raspberry fruta (gareth had beer), and we played dominos and made fun of gareth's mosquito-repelling armbands and legbands. he is a fount (font?) of entertainment, i tell you. it is nice to have friends here. too bad he is leaving in december (he comes back to guyana after april, when we leave).

i always get really jaded about my work here, believing that it is not as important or valuable as the work that some of my peers (ie. king's graduates, AFL alumni, etc.) are doing at home or overseas. i am not feeding hungry people or saving aids-stricken africa, nor am i equipping ghanian women to set up sustainable small businesses for themselves (arg - that's a whole other story). i am playing kickball with secondary students and going on fishing trips. at times, i recognize the value of this program: youth in ylp are very obviously being equipped with communication and leadership skills, which are vital in a time when their country is being invaded by companies looking to exploit their traditional lands for natural resources. and we are building relationships and community, which are undoubtably important. but sometimes it is really hard for me to see those things.

god is going to make a change. mmm?

yikes. for some reason, blogger has opened my account on this computer in spanish (or portuguese?). at least i know the buttons on here well enough to manoevre around and post.

easily, the most exciting news to come to me lately has been this:
http://www.asthmatickitty.com/music.php?releaseID=63
i just found out about it minutes ago. my heart is racing. whew. anyways.

ylp went on a community visit to the village of massara this weekend. it is a really pretty community with about 400 residents. i was sick with a bad cold the entire time, and my eyes were burning again for some reason, which made the whole trip considerably uncomfortable, but it was still pretty neat. on saturday afternoon, the toshau (chief) of massara took us upriver in a motorboat. after about half an hour, we landed on a big sandy bank. toshau and the boys went into the forest to cut some trees and collect some bark to construct and tie up a shelter. it was so neat! they found about 8 logs, about 10 cm in diameter, each splitting into a Y on top. they dug holes in the sand and put the logs in there, and then laid two long logs parallel to each other across the Ys. they secured it with stripped bark, and then tied a tarp on top. we slung up our hammocks, and then went fishing. it was my first fishing trip ever! i didn't actually fish, but everyone else did. they just used line and hooks and bait - no rod. they would spin the bait/hooks around above their heads and then throw them out and reel them in. cute. everyone caught at least one fish - most caught piranahs, which were bright orange on some parts so it looked like they had been spray painted. while we were fishing, we saw about 8 or ten monkeys in a tree along the riverbank! they were so close! i think those are the first wild monkeys i have ever seen. we went back to our camp, and everyone ate fish while i ate bananas and peanuts. i was still feeling pretty sick, so i went to bed early. but not before i saw a caimen (crocodile) swimming in the river, about 30 feet away from us! exciting! the caimen come out at night, and apparently they are just like bears - they don't bother humans as long as we don't surprise them. it was right at dusk, so it was a little hard to see, but i definitely saw the caimen's head and back. crazy. i slept in my hammock and had a miserable sleep because of my cold, but was thankful for my midnight pee break because it gave me the opportunity to wander around alone on the sand under the stars and the moon. amazing. i hope we get to do that kind of trip again sometime when i am not so sick.

when i woke up that morning, i felt even sicker than before. we packed up all our things by 6 a.m., and were back in massara around 7 a.m. i stayed in my hammock most of the day, while the rest of ylp went to church and then played volleyball with the villagers. massara has lots of fruit trees, so we enjoyed a lot of oranges and lemons and marvelled at how beautiful the mango trees are. mangoes aren't in season quite yet, but they are just coming out, so there are a lot of little green unripe mangoes everywhere. apparently during mango season, thousands of mangoes just go to waste because there is such an abundance of them. anyways. pretty trees. in the afternoon, i was able to venture out of my hammock, even though the sun continued to scorch my retinas. i watched volleyball for a bit, and then walked to the river with crystal and garreth (a welsh boy who is here to do natural resource management). a side note relating to this walk: a few weeks ago, i succumbed to the allure of flip-flops. i bought a pair of brown havaianas, and have stayed in them since. but on friday, i decided that since my feet were getting dirty anyway, i'd rather go barefoot than flip-flopped. so i have been shoeless for the last couple of days (including aforementioned walk to the river), and it has been wonderful. i read in my "rediscovery" book a little while ago that an elder said if she could do anything over again, she would "go barefoot earlier in the spring and later in the fall." done and done.

in the evening on sunday, ylp had to go to church again in massara to thank the people for having us. i was distracted because i was really sick and really hot, and we didn't even end up doing the presentation we were supposed to. but i'm glad i went, because the pastor was wicked awesome. at the end of EVERY sentence, he would end with "hmm?" he probably said, "god is going to make a change. hmm?" about 15 times during his sermon. my brain registered that that would be something i would normally laugh at, but i was too uncomfortable to actually laugh. i wasn't sure anyone else was amused by it, but when we got out of church, all my ylp youth were making jokes about it on the walk back to our "house." neil especially was super funny. my youth rule.

today? uneventful. sore eyes. oh! i got my first care package! i received a package sent by emilonely on september 18. yikes. thanks, em! i JUST ran out of chocolate today, so the vanilla bean hot chocolate and pirates of the caribbean m&ms are definitely appreciated.

my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied

gesa left yesterday. it was really nice to have her visit. before she left, all of us in YLP went to the hospital because crystal, gesa and i all have bitrouge (a tiny red bug that makes you itch a lot) and needed cream. rawle decided we should all get deworming pills too. everyone here deworms every 3-6 months. i'm glad he made that decision - i'd rather not know if i have worms or not and just be on the safe side, than find out that i have them and freak out and be disgusted. so... deworming party! sick. thankfully, the process isn't too x-rated - just 2 pills a day for 3 days.

our after school program is going remarkably well. the students love us, and our youth feel really empowered by the work they are doing. it is neat. i posted some new pictures on my flickr site today, so be sure to check them out.

i want to have a logo for our after school program, and in my usual un-artistic fashion, i've decided to have a contest for the schoolkids to design the logo. the prize will be supper at oasis restaurant for the winner, one friend, and two YLP youth of their choice. should be neat. the headmistress of the school fully endorsed the project and prize, saying the kids will "surely be motivated" to submit artwork because of the prize. cute. i think it will be great.

our garden has pleasantly surprised me with a new crop of watermelon! so exciting! i bought one a few days ago, and even though it was significantly underripe, it was delicious and a welcomed break from my daily dose of fried chicken/rice. by the way, i am putting on weight. which, as some of you may know, is good news, because i weighed 114 pounds before i came here. i'm not a fat girl yet, but i'm getting there. so expect it, and don't say rude things to me at christmas. one of the girls who was here last year started taking starch neutralizers to keep the weight off, because all we eat are carbs and fried food, but i don't know if i really want to mess with my body like that. but don't worry - i will make sure to get back to my usual twelve-year-old-boy physique within weeks of returning to canada for good in april.


in other news...

i think a lot about my breakup with darcy, and although we never actually said it (well, maybe i did), one of the reasons the breakup happened was because we both needed time and space. it is neat that i am in a place that has an abundance of both those things. i don't have a lot here, but i definitely have more time and space than i know what to do with. and i like it.

also... everyone: please make a list of good books you like and think i might like. i am running out of books and will need to buy a mountain of them at christmastime to last me the next three months. keep off the list jane austen, margaret atwood, and cookbooks. poetry books are acceptable.

an update on pepe moreno: it is getting more and more out of hand here. the only music people ever whistle is pepe moreno songs. the only music people play on guitar are pepe morenos. he is a keyboard-playing god.

too tired for titles

gesa, our "program officer" (a.k.a. the girl who hired me for this position) from calgary has been visiting us for the last couple of days. it has been really nice. nice to talk with someone without having to sift through a strange accent to decipher words, and nice just being able to talk with a white girl from alberta.

after gesa arrived on friday, we all (YLP youth, crystal, rawle, gesa and i) went to annai for sports days. i never really like sitting around, and it was very hot, so i went home after about an hour. the kids were pretty cute, though. they all had white undershirts on and colored matching shorts and hairties. each school had to draw and color their own banner, and they were all very well done. EVERYONE shows up to sports days. old ladies, horses, babies, donkeys. this was the regional meet. the craziest event was high jump, because they don't have any crash mats. kids just flew over the bar and crashed into the sand. awesome. we ate supper at oasis that night. i'm pretty sure i am averaging 10 meals of fried chicken per week. ah, well. better than eating fish.

on saturday we had meetings with gesa in the morning. then we drove to annai and aranaputa and kwatamang landing. the best part about saturday was barbecue, though. i think i've written about it before. anyways, it's this family from aranaputa who sells fried rice and barbecued chicken and cold drinks on the side of the road from 5-7 p.m. every saturday. they have a generator that powers one light, and they have benches and chairs set up. it is the cutest thing ever, and it is really amazing food. i look forward to it every week.

on sunday we stuffed 20 people into the cab and box of an extended-cab truck and drove to surama and the iwokrama canopy walkway. we visited the animal sanctuary in surama again and played with the monkeys there again. gesa and rawle held the anaconda. i saw a red-footed tortoise (like the ones we were going to get, kelsa!) there too. then we went to the benab at the top of the hill and had an AMAZING picnic of fried chicken, fries, mashed potatoes, and lime juice. our youth had prepared it all just before we left. delish. oh! and, while we were eating, we watched my celebrity crush pepe moreno on dvd. EVERYONE was mesmerized. apparently the kids just watch that dvd on repeat all day long, every day. ha. what a dreamboat, that pepe. it's so funny to me. my brain can't handle how ridiculous he is, or how incredibly in love with him everyone is. after pepe, we went to the canopy walkway. to be honest, it was kind of a letdown. we only saw a few green parakeets, and nothing else. but it was wonderful to walk through the forest. i love it. when we were walking down the mountain, i fell behind the group to take some pictures of the trees, and i was far enough behind that i couldn't see anyone ahead or behind me. it was wonderful. i love the forest. i like to walk barefoot in the boreal forest, but i was kind of afraid to here because i might have stepped on a snake or scorpion or something. the trees had neat clingy vines all over them.

oh! i forgot. driving to surama was especially nice, because there were MILLIONS of yellow butterflies fluttering around. it was like driving through a galaxy of stars. pretty.

driving back from iwokrama, i was tired and cranky and hungry and squished. gesa and crystal and i aren't allowed to sit in the box of the truck (thankfully) because of ghost river's safety policies, so the three of us were squished in the back of the cab with another girl and her baby. we stopped in surama to drop a few things off, and the girl with the baby asked me to hold the baby while she stretched or something like that. so, i am the only person on this entire trip who doesn't like babies, and who doesn't coo over them and talk in silly voices and make faces at them and want to touch them always. but i am sitting in the back of the truck with this tiny baby, the first baby i've held in years, and she pees on me. awesome.

today we practiced our activities for our after-school program during the morning, and then at 4:00 we had our first session for the program. it was great! apparently, all week the kids had been asking their teachers when we were going to come back, and were also asking if they had to dress up again like last time. the teachers explained that, no, dressing up was just a special thing for halloween. haha. so anyways, today we played a few wide games and then split up into 4 groups, and those of us in YLP led an activity either in pairs or individually. the kids each attended 2 activities today. afterwards, as the schoolchildren ran for supper, i was walking back with my youth and i asked them how it went. kevin bounded over to me, grinning wildly, and exclaimed, "perfect! awesome beyond awesome!" cute!!! it's so neat to have our kids be so excited and empowered by this project. i hope we can continue and expand it.

tonight might be our last night with gesa, so we had a special supper. rawle even had some brown bread made for us! what a treat!

he temperature here is a few degrees cooler than it had been in september/october, which is such a relief. i have even had to pull my second blanket over me for the last couple of nights! so nice!

one of the nicest things here are rupununi full moons. i usually wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, but i don't mind doing it when the moon is full. i like to stop on the way to the outhouse and just stand alone at midnight with myself and the moon and my shadow. the mountains are silhouettes. my shadow hugs my feet. everything is illuminated.


anyways, i am super tired, and i need to sleep.
love cdg

http://marriedtothesea.com/110506/blogmonks.gif

reluctant

it's pouring outside. visibility is less than 1 km. most people from bina hill are in annai at "sports days" (track and field for the school students). i came back here to avoid getting stuck in the crowds and the rain.

there's a horse tied up. i think it's a mare, maybe an appaloosa. looks like my dad's horses. anyways, she's not tied up like normal, with a bridle and maybe a long rope attaching her to a tree so she won't stray. instead, her two front legs are tied together with about a 1/2' length of rope between them. she has to draw up the entire front part of her body and kick forward with both legs to take a step.

it makes me want to cry. i want to untie her; i don't want the person who tied her up to be mad at me. i think it's cruel to tie her up like that; i am afraid someone will look down on me if i let her loose. this is reflective of how i deal with most justice issues i come across. something's gotta change.


*edit*: my dad sent me this e-mail:
"Caylie: Just read your blog and had to write. That horse you talked about is quite probably better off "HOBBLED" than being tie to a single tree. this allows her to have a wider range of freedom and better grass variety, than if she was tied to a tree. Tying a horse to a tree with a long rope has ruined may horses, as they get tangled up and brusie there legs etc. Hobbling may look bad but may people do it here when they are camping with no fence enclosure available. Believe me, that horse is better off being hobbled rather than tied. she doesn't mind either, just can't gallop away and risk being hit by a vehicle."

so... an interesting piece of information. however, my ignorance regarding horses does not excuse my inaction.

right here

i realize i have not really given a run-down of a typical day for me here. so here goes:

5:30-6:00 a.m. - i am waked by roosters crowing, donkeys braying, dogs barking, and a number of other barnyard/jungle animals making their presences known. beside me on my single-sized mattress, beneath my white mosquito net, i keep some books, papers, pens, contact solution, contact case, glasses with case, earplugs, my keys, and my headlamp. i sleep with my alpaca-wool blanket as my pillow, and my blue and yellow crocheted blanket (that i started making for darcy while we were dating, finished making after we'd broken up, and decided to keep for myself, at least for a while) keeps me warm. i try to lay in bed until 6:30, because one of the biggest challenges here is trying to keep oneself occupied for all the hours that make up the day.
6:30-7:30 a.m. - eat breakfast. if our youth are at bina hill, they cook breakfast for themselves, as well as for crystal and me. usually breakfast consists of bake (fried bannock), porridge, white bread/peanut butter, pancakes, or eggs. if they are gone, crystal and i make porridge for ourselves. all of this is done on a propane stove. crystal likes to drink fresh milk that the rancher brings over every morning - i wouldn't touch it with a 39-and-a-half foot pole.
7:30-8:00 a.m. - every couple of days, i do my laundry. we handwash all our laundry, using basins in the outdoor showers. i find this semi-enjoyable, even though i am terrible at rinsing the soap out.
8:00 a.m - the office opens. by now, the solar panels have collected enough power to support the computers. i check my e-mail accounts and my blog. there are never enough e-mails.
8:00-9:00 a.m. - if the youth are around, we have been trying to work in the garden for a few hours in the morning, while it is cool. lately, all we've been doing is digging trenches from the showers to the citrus trees out back so they can soak up our dirty water. mmm, manual labour and gardening! my two favorite things!
9:00 a.m.-noon - putter around bina hill. check e-mail a zillion times, have meetings with our youth to discuss for the thousandth time what we are going to do in the vague future.
noon - eat lunch that has been made by auntie margaret, the cook at bina hill. lunch is the big meal here, and so we usually have rice with chicken or beef or fish, and maybe some potatoes and greens. lunch is the only meal that we have ice for (ray picks it up from annai when he goes to pick up the meat every day), and that is more of a treat than you can imagine. sometimes we have kool-aid to drink; sometimes auntie margaret makes lime juice with limes, water, and sugar. i like that better than the kool-aid. once in a while we get guava juice or pineapple juice or something else.
noon-4 p.m. - more puttering around. checking e-mail. meetings. planning. wasting time. feeling guilty about not doing anything. sweating.
4:00-5:00 p.m. - crystal usually goes for a bike ride to oasis. this is partly for the exercise, and partly because she has a crush on a boy there. i go with her about 10% of the time. i prefer walking to biking. biking makes me so sweaty, and the road is really bumpy and it hurts. usually i sit around bina hill and read or plan or dream about university and how cute i am going to look in a u of a unisuit when i join the rowing crew.
5:00-5:30 p.m. - i eat supper. again, this has been prepared by auntie margaret. she usually makes supper at about 3 or 4 and leaves it on the table for us to eat. yay, salmonella! supper is a small meal - sometimes we have meat, but sometimes all we have is a bit of white bread and maybe some peanut butter. i am hungry a lot of the time! there aren't a lot of snack foods here, so i usually end up eating a million cookies a day. i would prefer granola bars or something remotely healthier, but nothing is available.
6:00-6:30 p.m. - the sun starts setting behind the pakoraima mountains, and the bugs start coming out. i've gotten smarter - i can usually beat a lot of them by just putting on socks and long pants. but i usually end up heading to my bed/mosquito net at this time. it's lame, but i have my reasons: 1. the mosquitos really are bad, and my legs are already really ratched up from scratching them. i'll show you when i'm home for christmas. 2. there's really not a lot to do here. we have a limited amount of electricity at the institute (and none in our room at all, i should add) because all our power comes from solar panels and a small wind turbine, and after dark, all we can afford to power is one or two lights and one or two computers. and there are 10 of us who live here, so unless we watch a movie together, it means that 8 of us are out of luck on any given day. 3. i never get any real personal space. i live in a room ("room" is a generous term. more like a "shack" or "barn") with 3 other girls, and then 4 or more boys live in the same building as ours but outside our room. when i go to bed at 6, it means i have 2 or 3 hours before anyone else comes to the "house." true, i lie alone in the dark, but it's nice to just be alone.
7:00 p.m.-5:30 a.m. - sleep! punctuated by midnight trips to the outhouse, when i am armed with my t.p. and headlamp; the sounds of bats squeaking and crashing into our metal roof (INSIDE, not outside, our room); the shuffle of my roommates coming in to our room when they are ready to sleep; and the BOOM that can be heard as they hip-check our stubborn door.


there y' are. a pretty typical day. sometimes i go along for drives, if i'm lucky.

i miss scheduled activities/classes, if only for the satisfaction gained when skipping said events.

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.