Travel Diary - Day Nine

Day Nine – Class Time

What can I say? Today we spent several hours talking, well, listening to other people talking mostly. There was a Bible study that was supposed to last for 40 minutes that went for 90, personal introductions supposed to go for 90 that went for 120 and basic expectations and planning that went for 60 instead of the planned 30. One of the tasks was to tell us where we were going to be on placement and with whom. That was all a bit of a waste of time as none of us have any idea where any of these places are and mostly only a vague idea of who the people are.

It turns out we will each get an urban placement of two weeks and a rural placement of two weeks. The last week is spent writing a report about our experience. The disappointing thing is that with one exception we are all going to be within shouting range of Georgetown and none of us will get anywhere near the hinterland. I have begun to develop a very strong impression that the church group we are with is more interested in its own survival than it is in mission to the indigenous people. Never mind, we survived the morning amid muttered grumblings and after lunch we went visiting.

The first visit was to a drug rehabilitation centre run by the Salvation Army. The Captain in charge was a formidable woman from Haiti who spoke extremely well, but she was scary. I sure wouldn’t want to get her upset! There were about 30 men at the centre and quite a number of them told us their stories and answered our questions. They ranged from poor and uneducated to highly educated and every one of their stories spoke of things lost – families, friends, hopes and dreams. It costs $US250 to put a man through a programme lasting 6 months and the centre can deal with 300 in a year. They have a 70% success rate after 3 years out of the programme – I’m no expert but that sounds pretty good! The men have to have a sponsor to come on the programme but there is nothing keeping them there but their own desire to get clean. There is no front gate, and no locks on the doors. Quite a number of the workers there are former clients. I was really impressed with what I saw there. One of the successful clients writes poetry and has some of his work on YouTube. Well worth a look - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WhFGGjVHzY

From the rehab centre we went on to see the tallest wooden building in the world – St George’s Cathedral. It is beautifully kept and it was a most pleasant interlude. Having wandered around there and taken a few photos we then took a speedboat ride across the Demerara River. The ferry ride – that’s what it really is – takes about 10 minutes. There are seats for 30 people and the ferry doesn’t leave until it’s full. Everyone gets a life jacket and you have to put it on and buckle it – they check, and yell at people who don’t comply. The river is a dirty brown – very tidal and it empties directly into the Atlantic Ocean. If you look at a map we were maybe 1-2km from the mouth of the river. I think the thing that stuck me most was how run down everything looked. The best word for it is ‘tired.’ I’ll post the photos tomorrow. We wandered around on the other side of the river, called the West Bank, for a little while before catching the ferry back and heading back to the hotel.

We had discovered a small pool at the hotel and although it’s not big enough to swim lengths it is certainly suitable for cooling off a little. A couple of us did just that before dinner and it made an amazing difference to how I felt physically. Well worth it.

The evening was our own but everyone was so tired that we rapidly dispersed to our rooms to sleep.

Travel Diary - Day Ten

Day Ten – Still Yawning

I have to confess, I thought I was over the worst of my weariness. Turns out I was wrong. We had more class time today. The Bible study didn’t go on as long thankfully, and wasn’t as laboured either, but then we had an intro to the history of the church in Guyana that I thought would never end. The lecturer gave us a wad of notes and proceeded to read them to us. The notes were quite interesting but he was impossible to listen to for more the five minutes without falling asleep. We had been given a magazine about Guyana the day before and once I had finished reading the notes I managed to read through several articles before he had finished about an hour after he was supposed to.

After morning tea – it was closer to lunchtime by now we had a lecture on comparative religion. The speaker was much more interesting, having become a Christian from a Hindu background. Unfortunately he also liked the sound of his own voice and went for well over an hour longer than he was supposed to. By now I was pretty upset with the whole thing and immediately following lunch went to my room to calm down. I got to the next lecture a little late. It was on HIV/AIDS and the speaker spoke to us like we were 12 year olds. I managed 45 minutes before I left, came up to my room and lay down, promptly falling asleep and not waking until nearly dinner time. Turns out I am not the only one feeling annoyed about what is going on, but so far I am the only one who has voted with their feet. Apparently the communications guy has rearranged the next couple of days so we are not so heavy on the talk. Phew!!! It wouldn’t be so bad if we were treated as colleagues, but there seems to be an unspoken assumption that we’re stupid or something. If this is the way they speak to their church members it is no wonder the young people are leaving in droves to go to the Pentecostal churches.

After dinner I spent a bit of time talking with the minister from Tuvalu about the trials and tribulations of getting to Guyana – he went further than me – Sydney, Singapore, London, New York, Georgetown – and missed a flight in New York! Then I went for another swim and commiserated with Helen, a minister from the United Reformed Church in London, about the lectures and lecturers.

Then it was up to my room, catch up on the diary, and to sleep – the more I can get the better I’ll cope with the other stuff. As an aside, the food has been excellent so far – the only thing I haven’t enjoyed has been the salted fish – it was not good. Plenty of rice and similar flavours to India but not as spicy. Going through gallons of liquid, both water and passionfruit juice. The juice is a bit sweet, but mixed with a bit of extra water it is superb. The most surprising thing has been the lack of fresh fruit – especially given the abundance of fruit at the market.

Travel Diary - Day Twelve

Day Twelve – The Last of the Lectures

The Bible Study – Aaarrgghh! This time we were given some questions that, quite apart from the fact that one of the questions given our group made neither grammatical, nor actual sense, were simply silly questions. In fact our response to our first question was that it was spurious and didn’t rate being given a serious answer. The second question we just made something up because we couldn’t work out what it meant. There would have been so much more value in simply allowing us as ministers to engage with a text and enjoy what we discovered as a group. What the process has taught us is that there is very little understanding here in Guyana of how adults can be engaged in the learning process. It might be something we can try and pass on in some small way while we are here.

The first lecture was on the life of the clergy in Guyana. The minister who shared told some amazing stories about God’s faithfulness during his ministry and at the same time highlighted some glaring deficiencies in care of ministers at every level. NZ most definitely has it all over Guyana in this regard, and as we discussed things further, over every church represented by our group – Scotland, England, Zambia, Botswana, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Jamaica. I should note here that I am the only Presbyterian in the group. All the others are Congregational of one shape or variety.

The second, and last lecture on this leg of the journey, was on the economy and its effects on the church. This was less interesting than I had hoped but still gave some useful insights into how the church here views itself and orders its affairs. One thing that it highlighted, something that had been growing out of the other lectures as well but became clear here, is that the Guyana Congregational Union is, to all intents and purposes, almost totally disengaged from the community of which it is a part. There are few if any connections that deliberately build relationship with the broader community and it seems to be a significant blind spot.

This blind spot was highlighted in the first of our afternoon visits, to Red Thread, a secular women’s organisation. As the women talked about their work in building community networks, working with abused women and children, running literacy programmes, and after-school care programmes, working with government and police on domestic violence issues and legislation it became clear that the church has almost nothing to do with any of this work in the community. In fact we were stunned to be told that the churches were planning to protest a clause in the new domestic violence legislation that outlawed rape in marriage. It was also interesting to hear how the women were struggling with the racial barriers I mentioned yesterday. They do seem to have developed some very hopeful possibilities for the way forward. As with so many organisations of this kind funding is an ongoing issue and one need highlighted was funding to have an administrator for the organisation – they could run a full time admin person for just $NZ8400 annually. Amazing eh!

We then visited a home for children that caters for unwanted children, children who have been victims of abuse and others for various reasons. It is a government funded institution that appears to be doing an excellent job.

From there we went and spent some time in one of two botanic gardens in Georgetown. But don’t get your hopes up, it was small, thinly planted and in need of a lot of work. We came back to the hotel and hung around for a little while before going out to what was ostensibly a live jazz club for dinner and to enjoy the music. The dinner menu came out and we were told there was no beef and no pork. I asked what the soup of the day was to be told there was none and when I chose another soup and asked for chicken wontons as well was told there were no wontons either. And we were early!! Ah well. The conversation was good, and the musicians finally began playing about 20min before we left – we hadn’t missed much!

And now I am back in my room, with matchsticks keeping my eyes open finishing off my missive for today. There is every chance that after tomorrow my emails will become much more spread out because I am unlikely to have such easy access to the internet. We’ll see how we go.

Travel Diary - Day Eleven

Day Eleven – Tetchy

It’s funny how easily it’s possible to lose people’s attention when you don’t attend to their felt needs. The lectures keep on keeping on, and we still feel as though we have very little idea of what is actually happening in Guyana, or in the church in Guyana.

First up we had the Bible study. The leader of the study seems to think that every comment we make must either be refuted or given a long-winded explanation. We were working with the story of Moses being put in the basket and I finally got fed up and put some context into the discussion because it was rambling through ideas that couldn’t be justified by the text. There were grins all around the room and it slowed our leader a little, but soon enough she was off on her own tangent again – ah well, you just can’t help some people. At least it only lasted the given hour rather than the 90 minutes of the first day.

Next up was an hour and a half on CWM in the Caribbean. The young woman taking it was good at what she did and worked to keep us interested and involved. Unfortunately the presentation again lacked details of what is really happening in Guyana. This was followed by a lecture on the social and political situation in Guyana – at last we started getting some of the nitty-gritty details of some of what is happening on the ground. The biggest point made was one that has since been emphasised several times and that is the political and social divide along racial lines with 45% of the population being of Indian extraction, 34% African extraction and the rest Amerindian and mixed race. The government in power is determined along racial lines and most government contracts go to the race of the political party in power. It’s a fairly disastrous setup and has been a major contributor to poor economic performance of the country as a whole.

Most of my lunch hour was taken up with getting my travel receipts in order for a refund from CWM and then we were into looking at how the GCU had engaged in a strategic planning process over the past 18 months. It was pretty standard stuff but I could see that a number of the others were getting some good stuff out of it. The woman who ran this section is clearly very good at what she does and ran a reasonably interesting session.

We finished off the day with a conversation about how we were going to plan for our placements in terms of what we wanted to look at, learn about while we are out doing our thing. Each of us gets to spend two weeks in an urban placement – I’m somewhere in Georgetown – I have no idea where – and then two weeks in a rural placement – again I have no idea where.

The problem with the conversation was that the person who was leading it had not thought through the process and it made no sense to any of us. We argued the point and tried to help him to understand what the problem was, but if there is one thing we have found so far, once people have settled on a course here there is no turning back. In the end, before anyone lost the plot I came in over the conversation and said that it was alright, we would do what we were being asked to do and we would meet at the agreed time to get through it all. In actual fact we all knew that it was going to be a waste of time, but there was no point in taking the conversation further and we were all happy to just leave it until tomorrow. Infuriating!!!!!!!!!!

In the meantime we have barely seen the outside of the hotel for two days and the level of frustration is rising to dangerous levels with everyone. Add to that the fact that there has been almost no opportunity to step outside the process and reflect (although we finish at 5:30pm, by the time you have wended your way through dinner it is heading for 8:30pm – everything takes so looonnnggg – and everyone is dog-tired because of the heat) and we are all getting to the end of our tether. It will be interesting to see how the next two days go…

Anyway, I set up with Ruth to call on Skype at 9pm NZ time so I could talk to everyone at the same time. That is 5am here and I had to get going a few minutes earlier to get the computer up and running so it was hit the sack time so I didn’t run out of steam too early the next day.

Photos from my first week in Georgetown

As promised... here are some of my photos from Georgetown. Click on the little speechbubble at the bottom left to get the captions.

Travel Diary - Day Eight

Day Eight – Welcome to Guyana

Up, shaved, showered and ready for church in my Sunday best by 8:30am. I decided not to wear the tie I had bought in BA and was pleased with my choice – it was too hot and besides, only some of the people at the church were wearing them J.

The church we attended is a lovely wooden building that would seat about 250-300 depending on the temperature. It was two blocks away from where we are staying and we were picked up by taxi to get there – go figure. (we insisted on walking back) The service was a very traditional hymn sandwich with communion, with three main exceptions: the notices literally took over 30 minutes, the young people led a set of singing that included several choruses I know, arcapella and with a most unusual, but rather enjoyable rhythm, and there were something like 11 hymns sung – Good Grief! I thought a standard hymn sandwich was bad – this lasted 2½ hours in the heat and most of us were really struggling hard to stay awake.

The congregation would have been around 150 people with children and young people and after the service a good proportion of them wanted to shake our hands. The minister is a retired judge and he had a most interesting delivery. It was quite slow and rhythmic and I am quite sure contributed to our sleepiness, but at the same time it made it extraordinarily easy to listen to. After the service we were taken to the pavilion at the back of the church and given a drink – melon juice I think – a piece of pizza and a cupcake. Some of the elders came and shared the meal with us and we talked, at my table at least, about some of the history of the church in Guyana, a most interesting conversation.

Walking back to the hotel we had a small lunch (I had curried potatoes – too hot for meat dishes which were the alternative) having already had something to eat and then I headed for bed again – I slept for nearly 4 hours but when I woke up I was beginning to feel somewhat more human. In the meantime I had managed to figure out how to send international texts, I had the email working – we have wi-fi in our rooms – and life was coming right.

Dinner was a state affair with lots of church dignitaries, dressing up and interminable speeches. I sat at a table with two pastors and one of the pastor’s wives. I was quizzed within an inch of my life about what I do, what I think about the church, where I think the church in NZ is headed, etc. I’m sure you can imagine most of the rest. Along the way I learnt a fair bit about what they were doing as well. Dinner was chicken and rice followed by jelly and icecream. Quite nice icecream too. I got to meet the national youth director and he promptly booked me in to speak to a group of leaders on Friday. I’m not sure how that’s going to fit with the rest of our programme, but it would be cool if we can make it work. The rest of the dignitaries formed quite a bunch and included a former government minister of education, the retired judge who had preached in the morning and a number of other, equally formidable men and women. This might be a smallish church in a smallish country but they certainly aren’t lacking in smarts!! I would be happy to spend time learning from any of them.

After dinner we headed for bed. Before I shut down for the night I noticed David was on Skype and so I called him and we chatted for 20 minutes. He sagely told me the best way to deal with the heat was to turn off the airconditioning. That’s fine, but our class in the morning was in an airconditioned room – what can you do?? Ah well – I’ll turn mine off and put up with the rest.

Travel Diary - Day Seven

Day Seven – Day Off

Now that I’m here I don’t really have quite as much to say about things. Well, three days worth should fill a page or two. Apologies to those who like a daily dose – I have been slack. But you’ll get over it. I’ve divided it into three days so you can get your money’s worth…

Guyana is HOT!!! Very HOT!!! Not just hot hot, it’s humid hot. It’s easy to understand why everyone moves so slowly. I move so slowly in the heat. Not that I’m complaining mind, it’s just taking a little getting used to after the frigid climes of Dunedin, although I do notice that the temperatures aren’t so frigid in the south at the moment.

Soooo…Saturday, thinking that having had a long trip and late night I might get to sleep in a little, I was woken by a phone call from Marlon Fraser, the programme coordinator here in Guyana, at 7:45am to say that he would be there to see us in about 2½ hours. I mean, come on, what’s with that? And to top that off he didn’t actually arrive until about 2pm! Arrrggghhh! Still, live goes on and we had a reasonably relaxing morning before lunch. The lunch special was rice with peas. Didn’t sound particularly appetising but it was my first real meal in Guyana, breakfast was a funny sausage concoction with bread and best forgotten. It turned out to be quite delicious, a mixture of rice and peas with a little mince, some ham and some chicken spread through it and finished off with a delightful blend of spices. I’ll have that again any time.

Marlon eventually turned up and brought with him a cell phone for each of us to use while we are here and our CWM provided pocket-money – the princely sum of $G20 000. Which is a lot less than it sounds but is still a not bad $US100 or around $NZ150. On the back of that we went to the market. Mostly because Helen wanted a hat and I wanted some jeans and a shirt – I thought I might try and blend in with the locals (haha). So we visited the much mentioned in all the travel guides Starbroek Market. Fortunately we had a local guide so we didn’t get lost. It was an interesting experience, although if you’ve been to one market you’ve been to most, just this one was a little dirtier and smellier than most.

There are dozens of small stalls, all selling similar things – little knickknacks, unbelievable numbers of hats, belts, girls tops, jeans and, of all things, bras. Then as you move through you come to the vegetable stalls and the smell begins to assail you. Just as you are beginning to wonder if there is a public health risk being in the vicinity you come to the fish market, with all the fresh fish sitting in the sun, being pawed over by people looking to see if that is the particular fish they want to buy. Doesn’t do much for my desire to eat fish while I’m here! Anyway, Helen found her hat, but we were struggling to find my jeans. I have come down about 4 inches over the last 18 months but we still couldn’t find anything in my size. We took a taxi to Office Max – a clothes and general goods store, go figure – and found nothing there.

The taxi was a funny story all on its own. Fernanz, the GCU (Guyana Congregational Union) communications secretary has been acting as our guide. He found a taxi (minibus that seats about 14) that would take us to where we wanted to go. What the rest of us didn’t realise was that the taxi was stopped on a corner – kind of hard to tell. So everyone but Fernanz and I got on and then the taxi took off. The others were looking bewildered in the back as the taxi was followed by a policeman with his siren on. The taxi finally pulled over and everyone had to get out. Turns out it is illegal to park on a corner and if caught the driver has to drop off his passengers, drive to the local police station, sit there for 5 minutes and then carry on – kind of like a rugby style sinbin. Anyway, it made for an interesting few moments, Fernanz and I caught up with the others – they were only a 100m down the road – we caught another taxi and finally got to Office Max.

I found a shirt, but no jeans so from there we set out walking – it was very hot and humid and made for rather laboured journey, especially as we were stopping at every second clothing shop to look for jeans for me, much to the consternation of the others who were showing signs of having had enough. Actually I was nearly past it too. Anyway – at our very last option in the general area we found something! Yay! Bought two pairs for the grand sum of $4800. Phew! Expensive pants! Nah, that works out around $34.50. So I was happy enough, and we set out for base to everyone’s relief.

After unsuccessfully fiddling with my phone to make an international text I managed to figure out how to make an international call (I can be incredibly dense when I put my mind to it!) and then I spent the rest of the afternoon asleep – catching up on some of what I had missed before going down for dinner which was rice and a KFC style chicken that was WAY better than KFC (sorry AK). We hung around and talked until about 8:30pm before heading for bed.