Travel Diary - Day Thirty Five

Day Thirty Five – Heading up the line
Saturday 03 Oct 09

Up bright and early. Head for the bathroom for my bucket bath – there’s not enough water pressure for a proper shower and a bath uses too much water, so bucket bath it is. That’s OK, once you’re used to it it’s not a bad thing – saves on water too. Maybe our nanny government back home should make bucket baths compulsory instead of their dumb shower head scheme 

Had breakfast – a tomato and meatloaf sandwich. Patsy couldn’t believe I was having tomato with bread. I just wanted something quick and easy that wasn’t going to put her out and that’s what was readily available. Then it was off to meet Dwayne at the buspark for 7am. Now there’s the rub. He said the Plaisance buspark and assumed I knew he meant Georgetown. I heard Plaisance buspark, thought it strange that he would do a backtrack to meet me and thought nothing more, mostly because people are often going out of their way to help here. Anyway, about 7:15 he calls me to ask where I am. We quickly work out that he is in one place and I am in another and my next task is to catch the first bus I can find to Georgetown. No problem, but what a waste of time – I will be making the habit of asking for more detail in future!!

Eventually we met at the market and given the option of water taxi or bus I went for water taxi first. We jumped aboard and found our way across the Demarara River before getting another bus to take us to Parika, about 30km along the coast. This will be the furthest I have travelled from Georgetown since I got here! It is also right on the Essequibo river, an enormous river that has islands in the middle able to sustain villages of several thousand people. It is huge. And muddy. It’s that brown, brown water again. Actually clear blue or green water is one of the things I really miss here – kind of strange really.

The first thing we did on arriving in Parika was visit Dwayne’s mother and his sister. That was a ten minute walk from the centre of town. We went in and were promptly given a plate of Roti with peas and curried chicken. That was quite nice (although it went through me pretty quick). Dwayne had a nice time visiting and I got to watch the first few overs of the NZ/Pakistan game on TV. That was good. It was made better by the fact that while we were travelling, David Watson, one of the other participants and a cricket fan who wasn’t doing anything else, was sending me regular updates by text. It’s not perfect, but hey, it kept me in the loop . From Dwayne’s mum’s house we caught a taxi and headed off to our first meeting. As per most meetings here this began late and finished far later than it should have.

The meeting was supposed to be an opportunity for the Youth Advisor to find out how the youth groups in the area were getting on and what could be done to encourage and help them. A little background here won’t go amiss. The GCYPU – Guyana Congregational Young Persons Union – is the organisation set up by the church to oversee the running of youth stuff in the country. It has a president, Dwayne, and various other secretaries, treasurers, assistants and so on. As oversight the church has appointed an ‘adult’ to keep an eye on things. Keep in mind that Dwayne is a 28 year old assistant lecturer at the University of Guyana and the other role holders are all adults of similar age and broad work experience. The advisor decided, without any consultation of Dwayne and the rest of the GCYPU, that he would conduct a series of meetings to investigate the, ‘problems that groups were facing.’ These guys are fixated on problems! They seem to have no idea how to change the language and the corresponding actions into something approaching opportunities and solutions.

I was reasonably hopeful as the meeting began because the Advisor said all the right stuff, that he wanted to listen to what was going on and get a feel for how things were going. Unfortunately it deteriorated from there with every comment from the young people seeming to require a lecture from the Advisor, and if a comment made him uncomfortable or challenged the leadership in any way we had to endure a round of justifications and accusations about how it wasn’t just about the leadership. I was sitting there getting hotter and hotter under the collar about the whole thing. Then the Advisor was dumb enough to ask me if I had anything to say. I began by telling the young people that I thought they were doing a great job and that should be encouraged by what is doing among them. I then turned to the Advisor and suggested that where youth groups were struggling the first point to deal with was the church, not the young people. I didn’t pull many punches and was rather surprised when, after Dwayne suggested a strategic planning meeting, he agreed to spend some time looking at what needed to happen nationally later in the week.

We left that meeting and went back to Parika township to have lunch and a look at the river and wharf. From there we caught a bus back to the West Bank of the Demerara and a taxi to get us to the next church. We got there a little early and spent the next half hour just chilling out. That was good. Finally one young lady from the church we were at turned up. We talked with her for quite a while before the Advisor turned up, at which point we told him we had had the meeting and needed to reconsider the process he was following. That conversation took a while and led to the planning meeting to take place on Wednesday. Finally we needed to leave to get back to Plaisance for youth group at 5pm. Just as we were getting ready to leave a handful of representatives turned up from other churches and we left them to John. I’m still wondering if that was particularly fair on them.

We caught a bus that took us all the way back to Georgetown and from there caught another bus to Plaisance and got to the church about 5 past 5, not bad at all. As we were coming into Plaisance Dwayne turned to me and didn’t quite tell me that I was running youth group this time around. Fortunately I had assumed as much and had done a little prep, but as with so much around here any warning at all is good warning!

We didn’t have a lot of kids to begin with but once we got underway we had lots of fun. I taught them the peg game first (everybody gets some pegs, puts them on their clothes and then run around trying to protect their pegs and steal others). Then we did, ‘one good, one bad,’ followed by praying for each other. They were all most surprised when I told them they had to pray out loud – but they did good . Then we read the Bible story – the parable of the Sower and I broke them into groups to do a short drama of one of the verses. I don’t think they do much of this kind of thing and they clearly enjoyed themselves. Then I did a brief summary of what the parable might be about. Pastor Bourne turned up just as we were getting to that bit of the session. It seemed to me that everyone enjoyed themselves, but who is to know.

I got back home and had dinner before absolutely crashing – what a long day! But lots of fun and very interesting.