Travel Diary - Day Thirty

Day Thirty – Walking the Village
Monday 28 Sep 09

I’m not sure if this was an intro to Plaisance Village or pastoral visiting. We set out to have a look around part of the village. It’s not particularly difficult to find your way around. I would say at a guess that there are probably around 3-4000 people living here. The streets are all straight lines and between a couple of cellphone towers and a water tower it’s pretty easy to get your bearings. The land for the village was bought by a group of 63 freed slaves and it is amazing how close that still is for most of the people who live here, nearly 200 years later. More on that later.

We set off down the road. Most of the roads are unpaved and very dusty. I don’t imagine they are very pleasant in the wet season. Every road has a trench running alongside it. Basically a trench is a large drain. The interesting thing here is that people have done something with their trenches. They have water lilies growing in them and for the most part are well cared for. There is a multitude of small fish in the water, and apparently quite a few larger fish. I’m kind of surprised that I haven’t seen anyone fishing in the trenches yet – they seem to fish most other places.

There is always a lot of foot traffic on the roads and that is enlivened by the various vendors both parked on the side of the road selling this that and the next thing, and those wandering down the road with buckets or bags of fish or bread or newspapers. As they go they call out what they’re selling and people appear from their houses and purchase what they want. Bicycles are a common way of getting around and it is amazing what is carried on a bicycle. I have seen 3 people on a bike and it is normal for there to be two to a bike. And then you see sacks of flour, bags of cement, large propane gas bottles, one guy even had four packs of coke and sprite – sounds fine until you realise that each pack had 12 one litre bottles in it – you could hardly see bike and rider and how he remained upright is beyond me.

Anyway, we wandered our way down the road, Harry pointing out various things of interest and me asking questions as we went. Just along from the church we stopped outside a house where Harry called out – the way to introduce yourself is to call out, ‘Upstairs,’ or, ‘Inside.’ If people are there they will come out to their verandas and you go from there. Keep in mind that the houses are all on stilts. Often the downstairs area is built in but in general people live on the second story – a practical response to the common flooding in the area. So Harry called out and no-one answered. But instead of continuing on down the road we went around the back of the house, up the stairs and inside where Harry found the person he was looking for fast asleep on his bed. He woke him up and brought him out to say hello. Mr Adams is 89 years old, a pillar of the church, and deaf as a post. So we got his potted history along with something of the history of the church, well his early experiences, at a full blown shout. A lovely old guy, but my goodness it was good to move on…

From there we visited a jeweller by the name of Magic. Fantastic sense of humour, as far as I could tell anyway, I could only make out one word in 4 or 5. And from there we headed up to the sea wall. The sea wall stretches for miles and miles – it is quite an amazing setup and the thing that amazes me is that although it was easily 2-2.5m above the water apparently it is common for the water to lap at the top. Not a lot of use in a storm I wouldn’t have thought. It does highlight how much of the coastal area is actually below sea level. There are pumps distributed along the coast designed for pumping water back over the sea wall when things flood. Actually, the most impressive thing, if you could call it that was that the Atlantic Ocean was brown. It is an effect of the massive river systems that lace the country and apparently you have to go out up to 12km to find blue water.

We wandered along the sea wall for a while before coming down and going along another road and stopping off at the house of a former assistant police commissioner. A very intelligent man but the house was enclosed and it was like sitting in a sauna. I confess my attention soon wandered.

Once we left there we walked up to the Post Office where I was introduced to the Post Master, a young man who proudly told me that he liked to take the best of all the religions without commitment to any one in particular. He spoke well and with assurance about what he believed. Interesting.

Our last visit was to a metal working business. The owner of the business was articulate and had a banner to fly. There’s no short way of telling the story, but I think it is worth repeating. Not long after Plaisance was settled the people realised that they needed somewhere to set up a cemetery. The church, Zoar Congregational Church, negotiated with the sugar estate for a piece of land that would be used as a cemetery. This has been used for a long time as the village burial plot but recently the church decided that it was beginning to fill up. As a result the decision was made that it would no longer be a free-for-all for the burial plots and that only members of the church could be buried there. Now given that there is a huge government-run cemetery not all that far away you wouldn’t think that would really be a major problem. But of course it is. Not least of all because the church is no longer representative of the members of the village. Back at the beginning the 63 slaves who had settled Plaisance belonged to and were active members of the church. Of course, as per any group of people, not all their descendants followed in their footsteps and now many of the descendants of the original founders have nothing to do with the church. They are asking, quite reasonably in my view, why they can’t be buried in plots that their forebears acquired.

I got the whole story in far more detail than I have given you and at volume as the engineer and the church elder argued over whether it was a fair decision to close the ground to non-members . As I pointed out the Bible doesn’t use the word fair. I found myself coming down on the side of the non-members to be honest. It was incredible to hear the deep, deep feelings that go back to the slaves. I find myself asking the question again, ‘How can thinking people treat other people other than as themselves?’ These people are free, but their lives remain dictated by how their great great great great grandparents were treated. I’m not sure how that is healed, or even if it can be. You see various preachers on TV here taking a variety of approaches to it, but they clearly aren’t reaching these people. And from what I’ve seen their ‘answers’ are either bound up in prosperity theology or dubious ideas based in unsound reading of Scripture. Not healthy.

Anyway, the problem wasn’t solved there, and it probably won’t be, but I did make a suggestion that Harry seemed to think was worth exploring. I told him about the memorial wall that I saw at the Crystal Cathedral. About 2m high and really as long as they want to make it, there are small cubicles built all the way along so people’s ashes can be placed there. I suggested there would be plenty of room to build a similar wall that could accommodate several thousand sets of remains without even trying. It wouldn’t help the people who really wanted a burial plot, but it would at least show that the church was coming part way to the party. And it could be a fundraiser by selling each cubicle for a small profit. Ah well, their problem, not mine.

Finally we headed back home. It was only a morning trip, but I was had it by the time we got back. The heat is amazingly draining, especially when you walk any distance in it.

Later in the afternoon I told Harry I wanted to go out and connect to the Internet. He told me to hang on and called one of his sons in town. We were invited to visit the son’s business where I could use his internet connection. So off we went into Georgetown. After a rather long walk we found the business and I was set up with a connection. Got all my stuff done and we were getting ready to leave when Aubrey, the son, offered us a ride home. A Toyota with leather seats and airconditioning. A button on the key started the car before we got into it and it was nice and cool before we ever got to it. NICE! We went to Aubrey’s house and sat and talked together about a few things. He is good value and I could enjoy getting to know him better. His wife and children live in the US and he spends about 8 months of the year working his business in Guyana and 4 months in the US with his family. Tough call!! But as he said, it would be very hard to start again in the States and he is clearly doing very well in Guyana. Has a nice, very nice house. Problem is that his family don’t want to come back to Guyana. A definite dilemma!

He came around to Harry and Patsy’s place for dinner and we had a great conversation before he headed off home and we headed for bed. A long day but a good one!