Travel Diary - Day Thirty Four

Day Thirty Four – Escape
Friday 02 Oct 09

I have lovely hosts, but I am beginning to feel as if I am imprisoned, with no opportunity to go off and do my own thing. The problem is that the hosts were all strictly instructed that it wasn’t safe to leave us alone and so we are chaperoned everywhere. It is beginning to get to me!!!!! Soooo…this morning Harry took me down to the local medical centre to have a look at what they are doing there – it was pretty much as I expected – a local medical centre, and as you would expect, they were busy and weren’t particularly interested in having visitors getting in the way of what they were doing. Works for me!! So Harry set off to run some errands, I waited for him to go out of sight and then headed off in the other direction. Unfortunately, about 100m down the road he caught up with me. Darn it!

It ended up not quite so bad as he had to go and get a tank of water organised, asked where I was headed and said that he would catch up with me later. I told him that I was going into hiding and that he wouldn’t be able to find me. As it turned out that was a truer word than I had expected. I had told him that I was heading to the sea wall to sit and watch the ocean for a little while. Not exactly an activity that needs a chaperone, especially when it is conducted in broad daylight! The road that I took to get to the seawall ran past Magic’s house – we had visited Magic on Monday. His daughter came out to ask me if I could organise a time for her to speak to the church folk about her business – stuff about Aloe Vera. I think she thought I was the minister for the church. Whatever, I told her that I couldn’t really do much but that I would suggest it as a possibility to Pastor Bourne. She took me back to the house to collect some information for me to take with me.

Since I was there I asked if I could have a look at some of the jewellery designs that Magic worked on and spent the next 30 minutes looking at designs before the man himself made an entry and proceeded to entertain me for the next 40 minutes with his views on everything Guyana. It was actually really interesting and gave me some insights into the mining industry, the foreign exchange situation, business, and a whole lot of other things as well. I finally made my escape and headed off the sea wall.

I had just about settled into a bit of chilling out when my phone rang. It was Dwayne calling to ask if I wanted to go for a swim – I had talked about enjoying swimming at a youth thing the other day and he had gone and done some research. As best I can tell there are only a couple of pools open to the public in the whole of Georgetown – people just don’t seem to swim much. There is great glee about an Olympic sized pool opening sometime in 2010 – it will be the only one in Guyana! Well I just said yes, I’ll be there as soon as possible. I raced, as much as anyone goes at speed in this heat, back to the house, collected my togs and a towel, told Patsy where I was going, and headed off to catch a bus. Managed to get one quite quickly and caught up with Dwayne about 45min after he called me. Not bad going around here I have to say! From there we caught a taxi to the pool. It was so good to get in a few laps – it is just too hot to do any real exercise here and swimming is just the ticket. Unfortunately the pool is outside – not something I had even considered and I hadn’t thought to take any suntan lotion with me. Duh! I only did 500m and then hopped out, hoping that I hadn’t been in the sun too long. Boy was I wrong! There was definitely a bit of a sizzle going on by the time evening rolled on. Interestingly it actually made the evening heat easier to bear and so it wasn’t all bad. Pity though – won’t do anything for my pasty Dunedin skin 

After my swim I went in search of some blank CDs – it took a while, some things that we take for granted in NZ just seem to be incredibly hard to come by here, and other things are no problem at all. In the end I found what I wanted. I also discovered a whole lot of Christian CDs – that’s cool – until you realise that every last one of them is copied. You can buy them for between $G100 and $G200 each depending on where you go. Quick translation - $NZ0.70c to $NZ1.40c. It’s that whole copyright enforcement issue again – interesting.

I headed back home and burnt my wedding march onto CD for Sunday – hmmm, another copyright issue perhaps. Did a bit of other work and then we headed off back to the church for choir practice. Oh, my, goodness! You have no idea!! In fact I’m not even sure how to describe it in words. Try this…imagine a simple chorus, simple tune, no fancy rhythm, say, ‘This is the day.’ Now start slightly flat, add in someone else a little flatter, add in a monotone with volume, add another tuneless voice in a different key to everyone else, give it a soprano that is almost on key and finally add someone who has no idea at all. Mix it in with an enthusiastic tambourine. You’re close to this experience. I will give them this – that when I sang with a bit of volume they mostly followed my lead. Kind of problematic when this is the only time I will be there. I took it for as long as I could before I turned to Harry and said to him straight up that this lot were terrible. He called over the main girl and they asked me to try to help.

That’s a bit of a call – I like singing, but I have never been much of one for choirs and I have never had any singing lessons so aside from the fact that I am a musician I felt rather out of my depth. I have no idea what the right exercises would be – after all, my second name is not Whoopi!! Well I took them through some exercises that I thought might help them to listen to each other and to what they were singing. To my surprise it actually began to make a difference. They were still fairly awful, but there was a little method to the awfulness. Most of them appear to have the right stuff to be singers but no-one has ever given them any help to get it right. It actually epitomises all the singing I have experienced here – Guyanans seem to love to sing, at least in the churches, but very few of them can hold a tune and for the most part they don’t have any instruments to help them along. Don’t know what you do about that, or even if anything should be done. They’re clearly happy making a joyful noise to the Lord, maybe that’s all that’s necessary. I just need to leave my musician ears on the shelf at home!

After the choir practice I headed home and straight to bed because I had talked my way into a big day going up the west coast with Dwayne tomorrow.