Travel Diary - Day Forty One

Day Forty One – Up the River
Friday 09 Oct 09

An early start. We had to be at the Plaisance Bus Park in Georgetown by 7am. That meant being out the door by 6:25am. That’s not so bad, after all, I’m generally up with the sun here, along with every other man and his dog. Everything is far more driven by the rising and setting of the sun than I have experienced before and it takes a bit of getting used to. So we got going, caught a bus, eventually. Harry was quite certain that it would be no problem, that there would be plenty of people and the buses would fill quickly. I wasn’t so sure and it turned out I was right – we did have to wait quite some time for the bus to fill. Fortunately, because I had insisted on being out there earlier than Harry wanted to be it worked out that we were right on time, score one for planning ahead.

The reason for the early start was that we were travelling up the Essequibo River to Bartica, a gateway town to the hinterland. I had heard Dwayne and Kaoma talking about the trip the other day and asked if I could tag along. They were going up to assess the viability of restarting a Congregational Union church in the town.

Of course this is Guyana. Having got to the Bus Park on time we then had to wait ten minutes for Dwayne and then another 20 minutes for the pastor who was going with us. The bus then took another 10 minutes to fill up before getting underway, across the Demerara River and along the coast to Parika. At Parika we had to wait another 30 minutes for Kaoma and then another 45 minutes for sufficient people to turn up to fill a boat. Arrrgggghhhhh!!! But it wasn’t all bad. It was fascinating watching the interactions of the people. There was a stand up argument between the Monitor – the man in charge of making sure each captain took his turn in collecting passengers, and a captain who wanted to take his family up river independently of the monitor. That was interesting . A homeless man, asleep on the wharf was rudely awoken by a boat captain pointing his engine at him and running up the revs so the man was soaked. Everyone laughed at it all but I found it just a little sad. The homeless man got his own back in a way because he went up to the passengers with his hand out and after a whip round walked away with a handful of money – not a bad mornings work.

Eventually we found our way onto a boat and got going. Unfortunately the captain had been a little overenthusiastic in his estimation of how much load his boat would carry – it was too heavy to plane and so after about 10min on the water he turned around to go back to a dock and wait for another boat to come and pick up a couple of passengers. Once that was done we were under way for real and the journey was rather pleasant. The river was very choppy to begin with which made for a rather bumpy ride, but that was fun first time around. We passed several timber mills – the logs are floated down the river to the mills, dragged out of the water and milled before being loaded onto trucks to be taken into Georgetown or shipped overseas. The jungle is rather nice and while the water is very brown, once we got past the choppy stage it was beautifully smooth and a pleasure to watch glide past.

We were on the water for about 90 minutes, apparently far longer than we should have been, but I didn’t mind, it had been a good opportunity to just chill and let my mind wander (a scary thought at the best of times ). We arrived to a very hot Bartica and met an old gentleman who guided us to the church and told us in exaggerated detail just what was wrong with the place and what needed to be done. He then set off to find some congregational members (all six of them) while we went and had lunch at a local restaurant. Lunch wasn’t bad and we spent the time talking about what to do for the church. I suggested that their best possible investment would be for the congregation to offer to find a job and housing for someone who would come and be a children’s pastor for a couple of years. Looking at what Sophia Presbyterian Church has done, the children’s ministry led to adults asking for services. I have a feeling that this is likely to be a fairly typical response should there be sufficient courage to go down that path. I say sufficient courage because there is an awful lot of bending to what small groups of old parishioners seem to want and not much genuinely strategic thinking going on. Now I have experienced on multiple occasions the fact that God can build up a small congregation on the back of not very much. But we do well to think it through and plan a little better when we can.

We finished the meeting having met most of the parishioners and I suggested that if they sold the old pedal organ on e-bay they could probably finance a complete refit of the entire outfit should they so choose – it is very old and in remarkably good condition and I expect they could sell it for quite a large sum. Then it was off to the wharf to book ourselves onto a boat and then to wait until there were sufficient passengers for it to depart. The trip back had two main differences to the one up, the boat was uncovered, and we picked up and extra passenger part way along the river – he came out on a smaller boat to meet us, and then was dropped off further down the river. Otherwise it was pretty much the same in reverse.

Once we got back to Parika we went looking for a bus to get us back to Georgetown. By now Harry was beginning to fret because my farewell dinner in Plaisance was set for 6pm and it was looking increasingly like we were going to be late. To be honest that would be par for the course for anything here in Guyana, and Harry is as bad as the rest of them, but at least he was trying. We arrived in Parika at the same time as the main Essequibo ferry and we were immediately swamped by a veritable scrum of taxi drivers, bus drivers and conductors trying to get us to use their particular service. In the end we chose a bus that was nearly full because that meant it was ready to leave promptly. The ruse actually worked and we were off back to Georgetown. Once we arrived at Starbroek Market we had to find our way across several streets to get to the Plaisance (44) bus park. I had done the route a few times by now so I set of with Harry in tow – he didn’t seem entirely sure where we needed to go although I think he found his bearings quickly enough. He laughed at me and said I was just like a Guyanese the way I threaded my way through and around people and vehicles to get where I wanted to go. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that you use the same skills to work any crowd in the world. What really surprises me is how poor many Guyanese seem to be at picking the gap and chasing it.

We managed to get on a bus just as it was ready to leave and arrived back in Plaisance about 10 minutes past 6. I had a quick wipe down, cleaned my teeth, got changed and headed out the door, leaving Harry and Patsy to come a little later. I figured that it was more important for me to be there since the whole thing was about me. Turned out that between Guyanese time and the blackout that was going on I needn’t have worried. Even Pastor Bourne got there later than me.

The dinner was really a bunch of speeches while everyone had something to eat. Everyone took turns to get up and say what they thought about me, fortunately it was all pretty good – I obviously wasn’t there long enough to upset anyone . Then I got up and spoke, for ages in the end. I thanked people and told stories. I told the congregation that they had to do a better job of looking after their minister, and told the minister that she needed to do a better job of looking after herself. I thanked Dwayne for all the time he had spent with me and I thanked Harry and Patsy for their time and care and conversations. It was kind of nice that for Harry the thing that stood out most was that he felt he hadn’t laughed so much in two weeks as he had with me. I had jollied him along and given him a joshing for this that and the next thing and we had spent lots of time laughing together and I know that it had been a good thing for him. Patsy was amazing looking after me, spending hours cooking all sorts of different kinds of food, doing all my laundry, tidying my room, even if I had already done it, sitting talking about different things. They are a great couple and have a huge heart for the Lord.

The dinner finally came to an end and we were off home. I was absolutely wasted, but it had been a great day!