Travel Diary - Day Forty Nine

Day Forty Nine – In Limbo
Saturday 17 Oct 09

Late night, early morning. I forgot to mention that after everyone else had gone we all gathered on the hotel veranda to chill out and talk together. Kateimoa was leaving early in the morning, Helen and others had been given a whole pile of food, and it was just a good opportunity to relax and enjoy each other’s company. In most ways we have really only been together for two weeks, but we have become old friends in that time in a way that I never really thought possible. It has been good.

This is as good a place as any to brush some quick character sketches. Kateimoa is from Kiribati (pronounced Kiribas) and is a young minister with a very small church. She is really gentle and has a ready smile. It is quite easy to string her a line and when she works out what is going on she lets out a wonderful peal of laughter. She has fitted in beautifully with everyone even though her English is a bit rough and you can hear her heart for her people, and for the people she was staying and working with while she was on placement.

Pitoi is an older minister from Tuvalu – a set of islands right next to Kiribati and originally part of the same group. He has a great sense of humour and regularly calls me Aotearoa and greets me in Maori. Fortunately I know enough to give right back . He has a quite traditional perspective on the church but he is also a thinker so things that would otherwise clash can be brought together, to some extent at least. He has been amazing with Kateimoa. His English is much better than hers and he has translated her paper for her, helped her to understand things that are going on and generally been a good shepherd. He has also been really great with Zarazaka whose English is not the greatest either, although Zara’s home language is French and Malagasy with is just a touch different to Tuvalu. A great guy!

Brendah is from Zambia. She is in a different class to most of us – her church numbers over 1000 people and she is the only minister. They do things a little differently there, but some of the organisational touches are quite interesting. She is quiet but when she speaks she has thought it through and her heart is for Jesus through and through. A very gentle lady but you can sense a certain amount of steel underneath should it become necessary. I didn’t get to know her as well as the others but she seems to be someone who would be great to have around when the going gets tough, not as a warrior but as a support and encourager. Very cool.

Dawn is from Jamaica and we call her Mum. She is a really neat lady with a huge heart. Whenever we went on placement we got a call from her early in the peace to make sure we were alright, and then later to check up on us. She and I got on really well and her wry smile whenever I cracked a joke was always a laugh. Each time I did something, with or without others in tow that had possible consequences I would get the stare and the telling off. Even when it wasn’t my fault! But that was OK. One day she made me promise to behave myself for the afternoon. I duly did so and in the end everyone was protesting that I was too quiet. But Dawn was happy . An amazing minister!

Zarazaka is from Madagascar. When he arrived we wondered how he would get on because his English was very broken but as he became more comfortable with us and with Guyana he really began to break out. He has a great sense of humour and is still sensitive to how people are feeling. It was cool to see him hanging out with and supporting the girls, especially Kateimoa and Brendah who I suspect were struggling a little with the environment. He just has a way about him with people and people lighten up when he is around. On our last day we played table tennis together and he was constantly encouraging me – we were pretty closely matched and whenever I played a good shot the immediate response was, ‘Good, very good,’ along with a big grin.

Keletso is from Botswana and has sole charge of another church of over 1000 people. To be honest I think these girls are getting ground into the dust with the workload that is expected of them. I’m amazed that they make it through a week, let alone months and years of it. She has a great sense of humour and a very clear sense of right and wrong and what she likes and doesn’t like. Which makes her really easy to wind up. She is really social so she responds well to a bit of joshing and we have had lots of fun. She also has some steel, and it’s not far beneath the surface. I wouldn’t want to meet her angry, that’s for sure, but great to have around for all that.

Helen is from England and if I can be so bold, a petite redhead. She is doing some amazing things with her church in Bromley on Bow where the population has been transformed by immigration to become almost entirely Bangladeshi. Some of her stories and experiences of how they have reinvented themselves to become relevant to the changed nature of their community are amazing and challenging. Helen is very sure of what she wants to achieve and goes all out to get there and is amazingly gracious if it doesn’t work out the way she planned it. It was her agitating that got us to Kaiteur and she was the one who made the drama happen. I think if it had been left to the rest of us it would have been a pathetic flop if anything had happened at all, but Helen took the opportunity on board and really made something memorable of it. Great.

David is from Scotland and has been my sounding board on more than one occasion. He’s a big man, much bigger than I am and struggled with the heat but he was always good natured and able to summon up a smile. He’s quite retiring in some ways but more than willing and able to stand up and be counted when he needs to. He is generous to a fault and simply moves through everything that happens, taking it on board and contributing wherever he can. His willingness to listen to my ponderings and come back for more is either a sign of madness or a tribute to his caring nature. I like to think of it as the latter.

Andrew is from New Zealand and throws himself into everything with joyous abandon, often to the amazement and concern of his hosts. Whatever the opportunity he grabs it with both hands, even when he isn’t sure where it is going to take him. He’s not afraid to voice an opinion and when he gets the chance he will make sure that a little bit of teaching or amiable direction or misdirection gets thrown into every conversation. He has a wacky sense of humour and has lots of fun winding up the more staid of the party, mostly knowing when to bring everything back down to normality. He is not alone among our group in finding it very hard to leave Guyana.

So that’s us in a nutshell. Which is kind of appropriate in some ways . After all, where else would you expect to find a bunch of nuts? But I was going to talk about the last day. First up we walked into town so some people could collect a last few items of shopping. Not really the best time to do it as it is a national holiday – Divali, a Hindu festival and none of the East Indian shops are open. A problem when you consider that the vast majority of shops are East Indian owned and run. Most of the stalls are run by Africans. Anyway, we waited around for our escort into town and eventually Helen and I had had enough and decided to make our own way into town. She had some things she wanted to get, I was just on the prowl to fill in time. As we walked we talked and that was good. The streets were near on deserted compared with what they normally are and it was a kind of eerie feeling because I haven’t seen it so quiet since I have been here.

We had made our way into the centre of town and Helen was looking to buy more sandals (I’m sure she is taking about 20 pairs home with her) by the time the others caught up with us and after a little conversation Kaoma and I left them looking at sandals and trinkets while we went to look for a shop that Brendah could buy a computer from. You guessed it – none open. Disappointment for Brendah but Helen may be able to help her find something during her stopover in London on the way home. We wandered around for a little longer before heading back to the hotel. We dragged our baggage downstairs and piled it in the lobby while we checked out. Then it was into two buses to head for Splashmins, a holiday resort where we would spend our last day.

By the time we got there we were hot and tired and the day was only half done. We were given rooms and settled in briefly before heading off for lunch. I had cookup and fried fish – the cookup is a mixture of rice and peas with various spices added in. It’s mostly really good. The only problem is that the pile they put on your place is enough to feed two people! Ah well, I’ve gotten used to leaving food on my plate so it was just the same thing again. Right after lunch we took a boat ride – a whole 5 minutes worth to go to the other side of the resort and supposedly look at fauna and flora. What they didn’t tell us was that there were a small handful of birds penned up at the end of the property and the rest of the place was the remnants of an orchard, hardly what it was cracked up to be. But for all that I wandered off and had a pleasant time walking through the orchard. I think the others thought I was lost because they were inordinately pleased to see me when I turned up back at the collection point. Then we were back on the boat and back to the other side.

From there Zarazaka and I went and hired some table tennis gear and played tt until the djs setting up for the festival finally got in our way once too often. As it was Zara had wacked one of them on the head as he was chasing a ball. We had a heap of fun but by the time we were finished I was absolutely soaked. So then it was time to go back to our rooms, get changed and go for a swim. That was a let down if ever I had one. We got to the swimming area to find that it was so shallow you couldn’t even swim a decent freestyle stroke. So in the end we just paddled around in the deepest bit we could find making the most of the opportunity to cool down. I should explain that the resort is built next to what is really a large pond. An area is roped off for swimming and there are kayaks and paddleboats that people can use. There are two powered boats with lifeguards who charge around creating a wave pool effect every so often to the joy of the children and spend the rest of their time yelling at anyone who wants to have a decent swim. Killjoys! We got yelled at, but too bad.

Having cooled down we headed back to our rooms to have a rest. Rev. Hannibal came out to see us in the course of the afternoon, but everyone of us was asleep so she went home without seeing us. A pity, but there we are. We all came to around dinner time and then traipsed off for dinner. This time it was chicken and noodles, same quantities and I ate even less – I wasn’t feeling much like eating and my stomach was beginning to protest – warning signals, but I didn’t get that until later. Zara and I found a basketball and played around on the bball court for a while before Dawn called us all together for our final farewell speeches. It was nice to hear everyone say their little bit and brought a bit of closure that would have been missing otherwise. We sat around and chatted for a while and prayed for Kaoma as well. I had a little prophetic word for him which brought great humour because we had been making all sorts of fun of the school of prophets that Kelly had attended during her second placement. But it was a good time.

We headed off to our rooms without much more ado. Dawn and I were being picked up by taxi a little after 3am to head out for the airport so we were all pretty keen on getting at least a little shut-eye. I fiddled around sending some texts for a while – I had to give my phone back before I left – and then dropped off to sleep.