Day Thirteen – Out and About part 2
The Sugar Mill. This one is where they make the base for Demarara Sugar – we can get that in NZ. My goodness, there is a certain irony in seeing such a place plastered all over with signs saying, ‘This is a food factory, keep everything clean.’ The place was unbelievably dirty – partly just the factory environment but mostly I think because they used huge wood furnaces to provide the heat for boiling the sugar juice to concentrate it and there was a coating of ash everywhere. The person who took us around was the manager of the factory – he didn’t flick the job off to anyone else – and he clearly loved what he did. There was a real sense of pride as he took us through the process, everything from showing us the machetes and water bags provided to the harvesters, to the final sugar products ready to be shipped out.
The factory was quite compact and it produces about 35 000 tons of sugar annually, not a huge amount in the great scheme of things apparently. In fact the whole sugar industry here seems to be quite small scale and relatively inefficient, especially when compared with some of the larger sugar producers globally. I guess the most surprising thing to me about the whole process is how relaxed everyone appears to be, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. Yes, in the heat you need to move slowly and thoughtfully, but there were only a handful of people who appeared to get around with real purpose. But then, when you find out how much they all get paid I guess there is little incentive to move much faster. It was incredibly noisy in the factory itself. I found it interesting that everyone had to wear hard hats, and did, but there was no ear or eye protection visible anywhere. I don’t think it would take very long at all to lose a significant level of hearing if you worked in that environment for very long.
All in all it was a most interesting tour and we were all pleased when we got to the bus and were ready to leave.
We then visited a rice mill. It was kind of interesting, much smaller operation than the sugar factory, we couldn’t understand a word the managers were saying. For me the best thing about it was that it was a collective and was beholden to itself and its farmers, a local enterprise for a local market. That’s something that we need to rediscover in NZ – the local enterprise for the local market. There is a certain amount going on already with people in small business, Somehow we need to encourage people to become more self-reliant and less government reliant. And that has nothing to do with any concern over the national economy or anything like that and everything to do with wresting control of people’s lives away from bureaucrats and politicians and giving them real power over their own lives. Some more on that is likely to appear in my musings on the blog.
The next stop, after an amount of toing and froing, was an Amerindian exhibition. To most people’s relief it was closed – it had been a long day and most of us were pretty tired. So we went off to see the Sea Wall, a must-see attraction, haha. It is a concrete wall about 1500mm high that separates Guyana from the Atlantic Ocean. It has some small similarities to walking along Tamaki Drive, only the houses are much less swish, the people have way less money, and you are not supposed to visit after dark and certainly not on your own…you get the picture. Anyway, the sun went down while we were there, I think we walked about 2km of it on a quite pleasant evening. No big deal, but then there were 10 of us walking together.
In the meantime my offer to speak at a youth leader training event was coming back to bite me. I thought it had been forgotten since no-one had mentioned it since Sunday but it turns out it hadn’t been forgotten at all. And we were running out of time to get back, have a shower (an essential after the day we had), have dinner, and get to the training. In the end we were late but they had just rearranged some things. There were about 25 young leaders and a couple of ministers.
I started by getting them to have a go at getting a pole to the ground using just their index fingers. If you want to know more talk to anyone in the youthgroup and they will explain it in more detail. Anyway, I only gave each group one go and none of them got close. It worked out really well because I managed to get all the junior leaders in the first two groups and then got the organising committee to go last – they looked like they might make it and then it went all haywire for them as well. I talked briefly about trust off the back of that and then read the Matthew version of Jesus calling the first disciples. I zeroed in on the use of the word, ‘Immediately,’ and suggested that two of the qualities they needed to have in their lives if they were going to be able to respond to Jesus’ call, ‘Immediately,’ were humility and looking after themselves – spiritually, physically and emotionally. A bit of expansion on that, then I prayed for them and I was done. I was a bit cheeky when I told them that the self-care bit was something that their ministers were pretty bad at and it was an opportunity for them to take a leadership role in for the church. One of the ministers who was there was the Deputy Secretary of the GCU and he came to speak to me afterwards. I was half expecting a shot across the bows, but he thanked me and said that self-care was an issue that they really needed to attend to in Guyana. So that was good.
After that it was a taxi back to the hotel, write up a few things, get some packing done and then I was into bed ready to get up early to be recorded for Guyanese TV. But more on that in the next missive.
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