What it really looks like in Guyana: the long-awaited pictures

David's host niece, Makayla

David's host sister, Michelle

Picking okra with David's host mom, Verna

David's living room 

David's Kitchen

Cutting down a banana tree

Most of David's the classes David teaches are held in a large room with 5 different classes of students separated only by chalkboards.  David often takes the kids out to the bleachers to teach his class, as it is far more conducive to learning than in the cramped room.  

Collecting eggs in the backyard

Wakes in Guyana typically consist of dominoes playing, card games, and alcohol.

Spending time with Peace Corps volunteers on the Guyana coast 

The newborn baby nephew at David's original host family's house in Timehri.

A gift from David's Timehri family: Authentic Amerindian Jewelry!

The savannah near Kwakwani

Old Year’s Night in Suriname

We ventured out of Kwakwani to celebrate New Year’s Eve (called Old Year’s Night here) in the neighboring country of Suriname.  On December 31^st, after over 13 hours of travel on several different busses, we met up with a group of about 12 other Peace Corps volunteers near the country border and took a 25-minute ferry to Suriname.  After my experience on Christmas, I decided to go into this trip with absolutely no expectations- which definitely proved to be the right move, because the night was nothing like any New Year’s Eve I had ever before experienced.

The group had been told that tons of people would be celebrating Old Year’s all over on the streets of downtown Paramaribo (The capital of Suriname).  Much to our surprise, by the time we made it to Paramaribo around 8:30 p.m., it seemed as though the festivities had already ended.  All of the shops were closed and the only people on the streets were the people cleaning up the evidence (tons of beer bottles and confetti) of a huge party that had occurred on the streets before our arrival.

We later found out that the way Old Year’s actually works in Suriname is that people celebrate all day, go home around 8pm to get ready to go to Church at midnight, and then go out again to celebrate around 1 a.m.  We kept ourselves entertained at the hotel for a few hours and ended up hanging out at the roof top swimming pool just before midnight.  Unlike in the states, there are no laws in Suriname regulating fireworks, so it was pretty cool watching the fireworks being set off all over the city.  In fact, we got to watch the coolest fireworks show I have ever seen from the roof of the hotel.  This particular firework show lasted probably 20 minutes and the fireworks were being launched in the parking lot immediately next to the hotel, so we were literally eye-level with the colorful bursts.  I don’t know how safe it was for us to be so close to fireworks, but it was an absolutely incredible experience! 

We spent New Year’s Day in Suriname as well, though the only place open was a McDonalds across the street from the hotel. Going into this restaurant with a group of Peace Corps volunteers who haven’t eaten American fast food since beginning their service in Guyana was hilarious.  I’ve never seen anyone get so excited about the prospect of eating a Big Mac and French fries.   Other than McDonalds, we walked around the downtown area and tried to see what we could of the city.  While we really didn’t get to do much exploring because the city was shut down, it was fun to spend time with the other volunteers.  Overall, I really enjoyed the trip to Suriname because it gave me an opportunity to get to know the people with whom David is spending two years in Guyana.

On the ferry to Suriname

Christmas in Guyana

Christmas is a BIG deal here.  From what I understand, the Christmas festivities started about couple of weeks before I arrived. It began with something similar to similar to our idea of “spring cleaning” in which David’s family did a thorough scrubbing of their entire house.  When I arrived, all of the furniture was stacked in a corner of the main room and covered with sheets. 

A few days before Christmas, the neighborhood community put on a Christmas show complete with a nativity skit, tree lighting, singing, dancing, and Santa Claus giving out gifts to all of the children in the village.  David played Joseph in the nativity skit, and he of course did a great job.  In fact, he was the only person in the entire skit to remember his lines! 

The day before Christmas was spent putting the house back together, putting down new floors (the floors here are kind of like wallpaper- big sheets of decorative plastic that they tape to the ground), hanging new drapes, and cooking. 

There are two special dishes made for Christmas—Pepper Pot and Black Cake.  David describes Pepper Pot as the Guyanese version of tsimmus.  It is essentially a huge pot of meat stew that is cooked for an extended period of time until the meat is tender and juicy. I unfortunately had a hard time consuming this dish, as I went to the butcher to pick up the meat with David’s host sister, and was fairly overwhelmed by the lack of sanitation of it all.  (I’m sure it was just fine to eat, but I am squeamish about eating meat that has been sitting out 90-degree temperatures for extended periods of time).  Unsurprisingly, this didn’t stop David from consuming hoards of the dish for days.  Black cake is the second special food cooked for Christmas, and is essentially a dark fruitcake made with candied fruits, cherries, 5 finger, other rum-soaked fruits, more rum, burnt sugar and malt drink.  As with all of the food here, there is LOTS of sugar in all of it.

With all of the work put into decoration of the house and preparation of the food, I expected that the extended family would come together on Christmas day to celebrate.  Oddly enough, Christmas day was the most laid back and uneventful day of my entire time here.  No one came over, and the immediate family sat inside watching old Christmas movies and eating here and there (meals here are not eaten together here, everyone just makes up a plate of food when they’re hungry).  Though it was nothing like I expected, I actually really enjoyed the day relaxing and hanging out with David’s host family.

Setting up for the nativity skit

The Christmas show

Santa giving gifts to the children

Kaylie's First 2 Weeks

I have experienced so many great things during my first two weeks here in Guyana that I cannot possibly fit into a blog post, so I’ve decided to highlight some of the things that have stood out most during my first couple of weeks in Guyana.

 David’s host family: David’s host family is absolutely amazing.  David lives with a host mom (Verna), 2 host siblings (Mikey & Michelle), and a 6-year-old host niece (Michelle’s daughter, Makayla). The family is absolutely amazing—they are so welcoming and friendly, and I feel so comfortable and at home here.  I’ve spent a lot of my time here playing with Makayla and her friends/cousins who are constantly over at the house. 

 The language barrier: In theory, the language spoken here in Guyana is English.  In practice, the language actually spoken here is called Creolese—a mumbled, altered, and highly distorted version of what we consider “English.”  The weirdest part of this language barrier is that the people here can understand just about everything I say, but I understand almost nothing.  This results in many awkward interactions in which I have to ask people to repeat things over and over, and even then I don’t fully understand what is being said.  David is helping me out by explaining common phrases, ways certain pronouns are utilized (and others not at all), etc.  I’ve found that kids are the best to learn from because they’re much more willing to repeat things and speak more slowly for me, so I’m spending lots of time learning from Makayla and her friends.  Every day I understand the people here more and more, but the language barrier has been one of the most difficult parts of immersing myself into the culture and community here in Guyana.

 Guyanese Funerals: A man in David's site passed away a week ago, and I had the opportunity to experience a funeral here. David warned me ahead of time that funerals here are much different than in the states, but despite his warnings, the funeral experience was quite jarring.  While the service itself is not unlike the ones stateside (prayers, eulogies, etc.), the way that the family of the deceased acts during the service is quite different from what I’m used to.  (David has confirmed that the funeral I attended is an accurate depiction of all of the funerals he has attended throughout his 9 months here in Guyana—he’s been to dozens).  Many times throughout the service and internment, the daughters, wife, and several mistresses of the deceased broke out into hysterics—they were literally screaming and crying at the top of their lungs, thrashing around and running to the casket.  The women even went so far as to try to take the body out of the casket so it wouldn’t be buried.  In no way do I mean to discredit the family’s grief, I simply find the exaggerated display of sorry to be an interesting contrast to the funerals to which I’m accustomed.

The stars:  I never really realized how much I loved looking at stars until I came here.  The lack of light pollution here really makes for unbelievable views of the night sky.  I really wish I could take a picture of what I’m talking about to share with you all, because I cannot put into words how unbelievably gorgeous the stars are here.

A few other interesting things to note:

•  “Just now” means anytime between the recent past and some time in the near future.  The most common way it is used is to describe something that will be done soon (i.e. I’ll come home just now).
•  When I meet people and tell them I’m from the states, they often try to impress me with their knowledge of the USA by telling me that there are 52 states (and insisting that I am incorrect when I correct them and tell them that there are 50).  I have yet to come across someone who can tell me what the 51^st and 52^nd states are (I’ve even asked if they’re referring to Puerto Rico and Guam, but they say no).
• The popular music here is a mixture of reggae, soca, dance hall, chutney, gospel, and a collection of 80s and 90s music from people like Whitney Houston, Michel Bolton, Michael Jackson, etc.

Kaylie's First Guest Post!

In our three years together, David and I have travelled a good bit: We’ve taken trips to Phoenix, Chicago, Park City, the Bahamas, Mexico, and I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting.  We’ve been very lucky to have the opportunity to travel so much, and I’m so excited to add a few more countries to the list of places we’ve been together.  I plan to share my experiences of our time in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as my month-long trip to Guyana.  I hope that my blog posts will provide a distinctive but similarly entertaining perspective from David's.

Trinidad & Tobago

Disclaimer: We took pictures on David’s camera and forgot to transfer them to my computer before parting, so I don’t have pictures yet to go along with this post, I will make sure to post lots of pictures from both trips when I get back in January.

For those of you who don’t know, Trinidad & Tobago is one country with two islands—Trinidad is the more industrial island, and is the Caribbean hub for business.  Tobago, on the other hand, is for tourists and is the island on which we spent most of our time. 

David and I met up at the airport in Trinidad and proceeded to take a quick 20-minute flight to Tobago.  They run these flights many times per day, as a lot of people commute between Islands for work.  We stayed at a place called the “Hummingbird Tobago Hotel,” which was more of a hostel than a hotel, but had an air conditioning unit and hot water, so it was all we really needed.  It was also a 15-minute walk from the Buccoo Bay (a main tourist area), so it was really nice being so close to everything. 

Unlike most other trips we’ve taken, we had absolutely nothing planned ahead of time beyond flights and hotel accommodations for our vacation in Trinidad & Tobago.  We spent most of our first day walking around town and along the beach.  In the beginning, we were in the super touristy area, and we really couldn’t walk more than 20 feet without someone stopping us to ask if we wanted to go snorkeling or on rum punch tour on a glass bottom boat.  But once we got far enough away, we were able to take are shoes off and just walk along beautiful beach without any disturbances.

On day two went to check out Fort King George in Scarborough.  The fort was on the very top of a huge hill that overlooked the entire island—the views were absolutely breathtaking.  This area also included an old penitentiary, hospital, and graveyard.  Most of the buildings date back to the British occupation in the 1800s.  Pretty cool. 

Our third day was by far my favorite.  We decided to rent a car and drive around the island (the island is small enough that we were easily able to drive around the perimeter in a half-day.)  The people in Tobago drive on the left side of the road and the driver’s seat is on the right side of the car—this took a bit of getting used to, bit it was kind of fun.  We only had a couple of instances where I had to nicely (but quickly) remind David which lane in which he should be driving in order to avoid oncoming traffic.  Driving around the island was great—most of the trip we had the jungle directly to our left and the ocean directly to our right, so either way we looked, it was absolutely stunning. 

We didn’t stop too many times, but our main destination was the Argyle waterfall.   The area is not set up very well for tourists, and all visitors are required to have a guide to take them up so they don’t get lost.  Brian, our tour guide, took us on a hike that was awesome, but was much more intense than either of us had expected.  It was definitely not tourist-friendly; as we were using our hands to rock climb up the side of the waterfall a good bit of the time.  It is activities like this that make me grateful that I have the opportunity to travel while I’m still young enough to boulder up the side of a mountain.  After the waterfalls, we stopped by “Sunday School” which is basically a street fair with tents of people selling Caribbean BBQ, lots of music, and dancing.

All in all, our alternative Thanksgiving/Birthday/Hanukkah vacation was a great introduction to the Caribbean.  Now I’m hungry for more time there—fortunately, just two short weeks later, I’m on my way to Guyana (well, I will be after my 10 hour layover at JFK) J

I look forward to updating you all on our coming adventures in Guyana over the next month!

Festival of Lights

I’m sure many of you reading the title of this post, in conjunction of its timing are assuming that it’s about Channukah and how I'm going to celebrate here in Guyana. Well no. Despite Channukah starting this week, this post is actually about the other “festival of lights.”

On the weekend of November 3^rd I went back to my first host family that I spent training with, since they're Hindu, to celebrate Diwali with them. Diwali (also spelled Deepavali) is a Hindu holiday, similar in a sense to other “winter time” holidays (i.e. Channukah and Christmas). In fact when a neighbor walked by as we were cooking outside my host dad told his neighbor that “… today [Diwali] is my Christmas.” To me it seemed like a fusion of Channukah and Thanksgiving. The entire day we spent at home cooking and hanging out which really reminded me of Thanksgiving; spending all day long cooking a big dinner and spending time together waiting for the big meal. All the food was prepared inside in the kitchen and cooked outside on the fireside. One major difference between Diwali and Thanksgiving is that everything we cooked for dinner we weren’t allowed to even taste. Everything had to be prepared using only sight and smell to determine if it was seasoned correctly. Which was pretty darn impressive since we were making A LOT of food and using A LOT of seasoning in all of the dishes (imagine doing that for Thanksgiving?!). I'm still not exactly sure why this was; I was told it has something to do with the religious aspect of the holiday, something about not being allowed to be the first to eat as the first piece of all the different foods had to be sacrificed to the specific deity that the holiday focused around. We also weren’t allowed to eat until after 6pm.

This I really didn’t question too much as I assumed (similar to Judaism) that it had to do with waiting until sunset. But I decided to ask my host sister why we wait until 6pm. Why not sunset? Why not until X amount of stars in the sky? Was 6 a symbolic number in Hinduism? She shrugged her shoulders and told me that this was a question for “the old people.” Damn. There must really be a deep mystical reason for waiting until 6pm that not even my host sister knows. So I went back outside to ask my host dad why we had to wait until 6pm to eat. And to my surprise, he shrugged his shoulders and said “tradition!” which I couldn’t help but laugh. At least I got an answer.

The biggest similarity between Diwali and Channukah is the lighting of diyas, hence why Diwali is called the “festival of lights.” They’re little clay dishes filled with ghee and a cotton wick to make a small lamp. Since I had only lit candles in my channukeahs before I never really saw how an oil lamp was made (ironic since that is the original channukeah). It’s super easy; just lay the cotton wick at the bottom of the dish and take a big spoonful of ghee (or coconut oil) and place it in on top of the wick and rub the wick sticking out with the ghee/oil and light. There’s no set number of diyas that people light (unlike Channukah). Normally families lay hundreds of diyas all around their house, yards, and balcony’s and leave them lit all night long. However my host dad’s uncle died a month or so ago and in Hinduism a sign of morning is not to light diyas or do much celebrating for one year (pretty similar to Judaism) after a death in the family. So we only lit 3; one on the gate to the house, one on the balcony outside, and one on the family’s altar alongside the sacrificial plate of sweet meats to the deities.

For Diwali we can’t eat any meat, just “sweet meats” and vegetarian foods. For dinner we cooked the famed 7 curry that we eat with our hands out of a giant leaf. Each of the 7 curries is prepared separately and spiced just a little differently. The curries are: dal (split peas), catahar/”old cloth,” balanje (eggplant) and edoe, bagee (greens like spinach), pumpkin and aloo (potato), channah (chick peas), and achar (mango relish). In the leaf goes a big mound of rice and bit of each of the 7 curries to make one big serving. I started to eat each of the curries separately to taste them all, but then I looked over and saw all my host sisters had mixed all the curries and rice together and just ate everything at once. So I followed suit. It was good, really really good. And the best part about eating with my hands is that there really is no graceful way of doing it. I thought I looked like a slob making a mess shoveling food in my mouth, but when I looked around I was pretty on par with my family so I felt a lot better about my abilities. After the 7 curry came the “sweet meats” which was just what they call different desserts: parasat (something like halvah, its roasted flour with ghee and coconut milk), vermicelli (something like kugel), coconut stuffed empanada like things, mini doughnut bites, and this type of cookie made by just mixing condensed milk with powdered milk. We made plenty of food to share out to neighbors who would come by to try the sweet meats and the “VIP neighbors” and friends would also get a leaf stuffed with 7 curry. The leaf makes it really easy to transport; a container and plate all-in-one.

Then after we ate plenty of 7 curry and a few sweet meats me and my host sisters, dressed in their sari’s, walked around the community to go look at the other houses to show me what it looks like when people lay out hundreds of diyas. It’s really a pretty sight to see all these small oil lamps laid out everywhere giving a warm glow to the entire home. Although I’m not too sure how people walk around their yards without knocking any diyas over as they're all about a foot apart from one another. Throughout the neighborhood people were playing with sparklers and lighting off fireworks and firecrackers. I’m sure there’s some religious reason as to why everyone lights off fireworks, but I didn’t ask about that; only if I could set off a big one.

It was really nice to spend time with this family again and a blast to celebrate Diwali with them. I’m really excited to do it again next year, if anything to have some more 7 curry!

And for the rest of you, enjoy your “festival of lights,” happy Channukah!

A Diya

The leaf used as a plate for 7 curry

My host sister and me in their saris

7 curry: (clockwise from "12") catahar/”old cloth,”   bagee, balanje and edoe, mango achar, pumpkin and aloo, and chana; dal is underneath everything

Eating with our hands

The "sweet meats"

All the curries

Lighting sparklers