Travel Diary - Day Eleven

Day Eleven – Tetchy

It’s funny how easily it’s possible to lose people’s attention when you don’t attend to their felt needs. The lectures keep on keeping on, and we still feel as though we have very little idea of what is actually happening in Guyana, or in the church in Guyana.

First up we had the Bible study. The leader of the study seems to think that every comment we make must either be refuted or given a long-winded explanation. We were working with the story of Moses being put in the basket and I finally got fed up and put some context into the discussion because it was rambling through ideas that couldn’t be justified by the text. There were grins all around the room and it slowed our leader a little, but soon enough she was off on her own tangent again – ah well, you just can’t help some people. At least it only lasted the given hour rather than the 90 minutes of the first day.

Next up was an hour and a half on CWM in the Caribbean. The young woman taking it was good at what she did and worked to keep us interested and involved. Unfortunately the presentation again lacked details of what is really happening in Guyana. This was followed by a lecture on the social and political situation in Guyana – at last we started getting some of the nitty-gritty details of some of what is happening on the ground. The biggest point made was one that has since been emphasised several times and that is the political and social divide along racial lines with 45% of the population being of Indian extraction, 34% African extraction and the rest Amerindian and mixed race. The government in power is determined along racial lines and most government contracts go to the race of the political party in power. It’s a fairly disastrous setup and has been a major contributor to poor economic performance of the country as a whole.

Most of my lunch hour was taken up with getting my travel receipts in order for a refund from CWM and then we were into looking at how the GCU had engaged in a strategic planning process over the past 18 months. It was pretty standard stuff but I could see that a number of the others were getting some good stuff out of it. The woman who ran this section is clearly very good at what she does and ran a reasonably interesting session.

We finished off the day with a conversation about how we were going to plan for our placements in terms of what we wanted to look at, learn about while we are out doing our thing. Each of us gets to spend two weeks in an urban placement – I’m somewhere in Georgetown – I have no idea where – and then two weeks in a rural placement – again I have no idea where.

The problem with the conversation was that the person who was leading it had not thought through the process and it made no sense to any of us. We argued the point and tried to help him to understand what the problem was, but if there is one thing we have found so far, once people have settled on a course here there is no turning back. In the end, before anyone lost the plot I came in over the conversation and said that it was alright, we would do what we were being asked to do and we would meet at the agreed time to get through it all. In actual fact we all knew that it was going to be a waste of time, but there was no point in taking the conversation further and we were all happy to just leave it until tomorrow. Infuriating!!!!!!!!!!

In the meantime we have barely seen the outside of the hotel for two days and the level of frustration is rising to dangerous levels with everyone. Add to that the fact that there has been almost no opportunity to step outside the process and reflect (although we finish at 5:30pm, by the time you have wended your way through dinner it is heading for 8:30pm – everything takes so looonnnggg – and everyone is dog-tired because of the heat) and we are all getting to the end of our tether. It will be interesting to see how the next two days go…

Anyway, I set up with Ruth to call on Skype at 9pm NZ time so I could talk to everyone at the same time. That is 5am here and I had to get going a few minutes earlier to get the computer up and running so it was hit the sack time so I didn’t run out of steam too early the next day.