"Vrrrrrr....umphhhhhh...."(Sound of a dying generator)
Monday, September 26, 2010. First night of no power in Gunzi. I have been in other villages on several occassions without electricity but always with another Peace Corps Volunteer. This time, I was on my own.
It all started around 6:30 pm when the generator would not start and my counterpart passed my house to inform me we would be without electricity for the night. Some people from down the river would be coming tomorrow to hopefully repair the generator. So as the dusk turned into the early evening I lit a candle and made myself a Peace Corps meal fit for a nice candlelight dinner--peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
After finishing my dinner, I decided to call someone with a lot of experience in the dark (twss), my dear friend Craig Finch who lives 2-5 hours up the river from me depending on the boatman, size of the motor and deepness of the river water. I spent about 45 minutes talking to Craig--mostly gossip and I took a few jabs at the sad state of his San Diego sports organizations. After hanging up the phone, I texted him within 10 minutes with some random thoughts to which he responded, "All you do is sit there and think bout random things when there is no faya(electricity)". So true. I spent the next 30 minutes or so conjuring up some crazy, non-sensical ideas--still, none have topped the time I went camping in States and decided to apply for Peace Corps though.
At about 8:30 pm I decided to go and hang out with my neighbor, the Captain, who was all alone because his woman was out of the village. He was slouching in a fishing chair with his feet up on a little stool that we call a bangi while listening to the radio. I hadn't had a long conversation with the Captain in a while, recently we have just been borrowing things from each other and I have been helping him with his phone--that's Peace Corps's 4th goal: local cell phone repairman. Anyways, we had a lot to discuss. We talked about how the cleaning the village went and some of the other projects and work that needed to be done in the village. We also talked about his chicken coup which is 10 feet behind my house and smells real bad but I might get some meat out of that soon. We also talked about things that had happened in his life; he told me a story about trouble he had with a woman when he was younger and how the brother-in-law burnt down the Captain's house and everything inside it--his gun and bed. Apparently, even Saramacans have troublesome in-laws.
I left the Captain's house around 9:30 pm to go walk through the village and see what everyone else was doing with their Sunday night without electricity. Not surprisingly, almost everyone was sleeping. One woman was still up about and washing. One guy and his wife were running a small generator and watching some films on his flat screen TV. Yes, flat screen TV in the jungle, you read that correctly. The rest of the village was quiet and so I went back to my house and fell asleep a little bit before 10 pm.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Monday, September 27, 2010
Limbo Konde (Cleaning the village)
"If you don't work today, you have to buy us a beer!"--Tjenge
During my trip to the city in late August/early September for my Peace Corps group's Mid-Service Conference, the 15th Peace Corps group in Suriname with whom I arrived, I received a call from one of my villagers who now resides in the city for school. He informed me the Gunzi villagers who now live in the city for work or school were going to hold a meeting about how we could improve the village. It sounded kind of important, so I decided I'd make an appearance.
For those of you not familiar with the situation, my village, Gunzi, situated south of the lake
on the Upper Suriname River has a permanent residency of about 50 people. Due to lack of opportunities in my area many people live more permanently for work or school in the city, Paramaribo, or this largely populated Saramacan trans-migration village (after the lake drowned a lot of the original villages along the river) called Brownsweg which is situated half-way along the road from the city to the interior. While in the city I met up with this fellow Tjenge, whose mother lives in Gunzi but he goes to school in the city. He has become a pretty good friend of mine; he's about my age, 27, and when he comes to Gunzi he likes to do radio work with me. So he and I meet up downtown and take a bus out to the south edge of town below the white bridge. Our bus stops infront of one of little stores which the locals call winkels, so naturally we buy a beer and catch up on all the happenings in each other's lives. I tell him about my trip back to the States and he talks about his school year and some girl from another river he's dating in the city. We're there at the winkel for about 20 minutes, waiting on his uncle to come. I had assumed his uncle was going to walk up and drink a beer with us but to my great surprise his uncle pulls up with a car that has the same paint scheme as the car in Grease. Also, his uncle looks exactly like the soccer player Thierry Henry which kind of cracks me up. So it's me, Tjenge, and Uncle Thierry Henry in the Grease Lightning rolling through the south end of town up to our destination.
Again for those of you not familiar with the situation, one of my counterparts in Gunzi was recently elected to Parliament in Suriname and I had not seen him in months. So this would be the first time I had seen him since May and the first time I would visit his house so I was pretty excited to see his crib in the city. Upon arrival, I realized this wasn't just one house for my counterpart, the place where we pulled up to was more of a compound, a whole lot of houses, about five houses, where about two boat loads or roughly 40 residents of Gunzi were living in the city. When I entered the compound it was like a time trip. I ran into a young Gunzi woman who I had not seen in months since she moved to the city and gave birth to her child, I ran into a few of the kids who recently graduated from the middle school and moved to the city, I saw my counterpart and his family, and I ran into a host of other characters who I had seen off and on again in Gunzi. This was there place in the city--not too shabby. The houses had electricity and I sat around with the kids and young men and watched Real Madrid on the TV. When the meeting finally started my counterpart in Parliament and the Gunzi Captain who was on a trip to the city began talking about fixing some of the broken structures in the village and about a big trip where twenty or more people would take a bus to the river and find boats to Gunzi to "clean up" the village. Gunzi is a pretty clean village because they organize their trash so I had no idea what they were talking about...
On the afternoon of September 10, about 25 people from city, Brownsweg and some other villages came to Gunzi and filled up the usually empty houses that haunt this village. The next day we held a ceremony for a woman named Maria who had died a few years back. We made a big hand-made mixture of food--rice, fish, cooking oil and soy sauce and one of the villagers passed out it. He put two big handfuls in my handfuls and I attacked the meal without fork or spoon like a little kid. I was pretty messy afterwards. Following this ceremony the village held a meeting about how we were going to go about cleaning up the village. I was instructed to come back to the meeting point shortly with a machette and a rake. When I arrived back with an unsharpened machette and a rake in hand, I set out with the twenty Saramacan men and adolescent boys who wielded machettes, rakes and chainsaws to go cut and clean a path that runs from the river to the worshipping houses in the village.
A few of the young guys took the chainsaws and cut down a few of the trees at the front of the path. Myself, the kids and some of the older gentlemen cut weeds with a machette and raked and threw away leaves into the jungle--note to parents in the USA: if you want your kids to do yard work buy them a machette because I will still refuse to mow the lawn when I come back to America. So after a few hours of cutting, raking, throwing away and then burning piles of trash and leaves we all met back at the meeting point, a big open structure with a top that is the village community center. The most important part of the day had commenced: lunch! Rice, split peas and chicken! Delicious! All for a half days' work, a pretty sweet deal. After the meal, we took a quick hour break and then went out and finished the work--raking and spraying the area with weed killer.
Over the course of the week, the men and I worked every morning and occassionally in the late afternoons, if we had the desire, cutting down different areas of the village and spraying them. And the men who didn't work had to buy beers for us. The hardest day was definitely when we cut down an area that was filled with trees and thick brush and was the size of at least 3 football fields. All of this work was done with machettes in hand. There were lots of blistered hands, cuts from plants with thorns and 1 cut on a leg after someone over swung his machette--do I really need to tell you this person was me. After the week of work, I could see 200 yards behind my house. Before the work, I could see 10 yards behind my house where the huge weeds and sunflowers grew. This apparently is just the beginning of the work though. Next we are talking about re-building a big worshipping structure that has been deteriorating due to termite infestation. And there is also hope to finally rebuild the village lampeesi. A lampeesi is a staircase where boats pull up and let people walk up to the village and women also bring their clothes and dishes for washing here. The best part about all of this is that people are working together and doing all this on their own. I just show up with a machette and get a lunch out of it!
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Mi bi feni Gwamba(I found meat)!
"I found gwamba(meat)!"--Me
"No, I found gwamba."--Saramacan Caselli
"No, you killed it, I found it."--Me
"Oooooo, true."--Saramacan Caselli
Just a few days ago I was tending to my garden which is slowly but surely drying up and falling victim to the dry season which has recently begun here in September, which the Saramacans call wajamaka liba(iguana month). While at my garden, I learned why the month of September is named for the iguana. Walking around and aatering some of my plants, I noticed several foreign holes which were being burrowed into my ground by some kind of creature. While I was tending to a local vegetable called kosbanti, a Surinamese string bean, I noticed there was something long and green sticking out of one of the holes. Upon further inspection, I realized it was the tail of a pretty sizable iguana!
Now, this story would not be told properly without the proper background. When arriving in Saramaca and walking around the villages I noticed that everyone would greet me, ask me what I ate and inquire if I had any gwamba(meat). Gwamba is any kind of meat but generally refers to the three available meats in the interior: fish, chicken and any kind of bush meat. One woman in particular, a very traditional Saramaca woman of 90 years old whose Saramacan name means Rice, began ascending the path up the hill to my house every morning to see if I had found her any gwamba or if I had woken up with a woman. When she finds out neither has passed she then begins to tap her walking stick on the ground as if to take some kind of notes on me and then lets out a "wellllll baaaa(well brother)", and then proceeds to jokingly bust my chops for a few minutes before sauntering off on her morning loop around the village. One morning, I rose before she did and went out into the jungle with my counterpart and a tourist we were taking on a nature walk. Upon our arrival from the jungle and into the village we passed this 90 year old woman's house and she commented that she couldn't believe what the times had come to when three young people could go into the jungle with weapons and not come out with any meat. She then began to fantasize about what we actually did in the jungle and I was a little creeped out by her fantastic imagination. On one other occassion she was pretty disappointed to find out that I had a machette in hand when I came across a massive iguana at my doorstep and did not kill it. My reputation as a hunter in the village was pretty much at an all-time low, even my fish caught count over the year is -1 since I have not caught any and dropped one in the river that one of the kids had given me to hold.
But, as the Saramacans say, my foot knocked a good thing. Stumbling across this iguana, I thought I was ill-equiped since I left my machette at a neighboring tourist camp across the river. Since all I had was a half bucket of water I ran back into the village where a meeting had just ended with the village captain and some of his assistants, the basias. I told a few of the guys what I had found and then they started working towards my garden, without machettes! So three of these guys showed up, my counterpart and two guys in the village who came for the vacation: Benz and Caselli. So we approach the hole and my counterpart is instructing Caselli how to go about getting the iguana out of the hole. Caselli follows the instructions about as well as I would have, in other words he didn't follow the instructions. So Caselli grabs the thing by the tail with one hand and my counterpart yells at him to twirl it around and make a loop like a laso with the iguana's tail so it won't try to swing itself around and knock him. He does and the iguana remains still. So the guys call me over and they give me an anatomy lesson for the iguana, "squeeze the belly, that's where the eggs are". So I squeeze the belly and it's pretty squishy. Then, they took the iguana and placed him on the ground and began knocking him with a stick until it was dead... no machette, crazy guys!
So I am walking through the village with the guys and we're showing off the iguana. We pass the 90 year old woman's house, who coincidentally is not at home to see me pass by with my trophy, go figure. All the meanwhile, myself and Caselli are arguing over whose iguana it is. I say I found it, he says he found it, then I say I found it but he killed it and he laughs and then agrees. And so next morning's breakfast in the village: iguana and iguana eggs. So at last: mi bi feni gwamba fii, mujee(I found meat for you, woman)!
"No, I found gwamba."--Saramacan Caselli
"No, you killed it, I found it."--Me
"Oooooo, true."--Saramacan Caselli
Just a few days ago I was tending to my garden which is slowly but surely drying up and falling victim to the dry season which has recently begun here in September, which the Saramacans call wajamaka liba(iguana month). While at my garden, I learned why the month of September is named for the iguana. Walking around and aatering some of my plants, I noticed several foreign holes which were being burrowed into my ground by some kind of creature. While I was tending to a local vegetable called kosbanti, a Surinamese string bean, I noticed there was something long and green sticking out of one of the holes. Upon further inspection, I realized it was the tail of a pretty sizable iguana!
Now, this story would not be told properly without the proper background. When arriving in Saramaca and walking around the villages I noticed that everyone would greet me, ask me what I ate and inquire if I had any gwamba(meat). Gwamba is any kind of meat but generally refers to the three available meats in the interior: fish, chicken and any kind of bush meat. One woman in particular, a very traditional Saramaca woman of 90 years old whose Saramacan name means Rice, began ascending the path up the hill to my house every morning to see if I had found her any gwamba or if I had woken up with a woman. When she finds out neither has passed she then begins to tap her walking stick on the ground as if to take some kind of notes on me and then lets out a "wellllll baaaa(well brother)", and then proceeds to jokingly bust my chops for a few minutes before sauntering off on her morning loop around the village. One morning, I rose before she did and went out into the jungle with my counterpart and a tourist we were taking on a nature walk. Upon our arrival from the jungle and into the village we passed this 90 year old woman's house and she commented that she couldn't believe what the times had come to when three young people could go into the jungle with weapons and not come out with any meat. She then began to fantasize about what we actually did in the jungle and I was a little creeped out by her fantastic imagination. On one other occassion she was pretty disappointed to find out that I had a machette in hand when I came across a massive iguana at my doorstep and did not kill it. My reputation as a hunter in the village was pretty much at an all-time low, even my fish caught count over the year is -1 since I have not caught any and dropped one in the river that one of the kids had given me to hold.
But, as the Saramacans say, my foot knocked a good thing. Stumbling across this iguana, I thought I was ill-equiped since I left my machette at a neighboring tourist camp across the river. Since all I had was a half bucket of water I ran back into the village where a meeting had just ended with the village captain and some of his assistants, the basias. I told a few of the guys what I had found and then they started working towards my garden, without machettes! So three of these guys showed up, my counterpart and two guys in the village who came for the vacation: Benz and Caselli. So we approach the hole and my counterpart is instructing Caselli how to go about getting the iguana out of the hole. Caselli follows the instructions about as well as I would have, in other words he didn't follow the instructions. So Caselli grabs the thing by the tail with one hand and my counterpart yells at him to twirl it around and make a loop like a laso with the iguana's tail so it won't try to swing itself around and knock him. He does and the iguana remains still. So the guys call me over and they give me an anatomy lesson for the iguana, "squeeze the belly, that's where the eggs are". So I squeeze the belly and it's pretty squishy. Then, they took the iguana and placed him on the ground and began knocking him with a stick until it was dead... no machette, crazy guys!
So I am walking through the village with the guys and we're showing off the iguana. We pass the 90 year old woman's house, who coincidentally is not at home to see me pass by with my trophy, go figure. All the meanwhile, myself and Caselli are arguing over whose iguana it is. I say I found it, he says he found it, then I say I found it but he killed it and he laughs and then agrees. And so next morning's breakfast in the village: iguana and iguana eggs. So at last: mi bi feni gwamba fii, mujee(I found meat for you, woman)!
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Year 2 begins...
"Keep me in your heart for a while" --Warren Zevon
Well, I have not really felt like keeping up the blog recently but I would like to change that. Good things are happening in Peace Corps Suriname, now I have consistent internet access in my village and hopefully I will be able to inform people about my work and life at least once a week as opposed to once a month or once every two months which I found to be rather bothersome and unenjoyable because so much of the day to day nuances were lost to the stories of big adventures or summaries of the month that had passed. Please continue to comment if you are reading the blog that will give me some much needed encouragement to maintain the blog.
Since I have not blogged in a while, I will bring the uninformed up to speed on what has transpired in my life over the past couple of months. In May, Suriname had its elections and one of my counterparts was elected to parliament. It was an exciting time to be on the river and see the boats loaded with drummers and politicians pass the village. Also in May, the new Peace Corps Suriname group arrived which was exciting, 24 new volunteers. Unfortunately, that meant that the Peace Corps Suriname 14 group, the group which arrived before my group, would be departing in July. I miss those guys more than they probably know.
In June, I went back to the grand ole' United States of America
. Back home. Day 4 in America, I was at the ballyard in San Francisco and John got in a fight with the Giants' mascot, Lou Seal. John, you're an idiot but an inspiration to every bleacher bum opposed to a sports organization mascot... I also had my money on the seal, sorry dude. I took a few trips while in the States, I went to Lake Tahoe for the 4th of July weekend and also made a day trip to Sonoma. And of course, I took what was supposed to originally be an over-night trip to Chico and turned it into a 4 day extravaganza. All the while I was filming these trips with a video camera so I could bring the finished product back to the village.
Once I got back to Suriname, I made it back for the World Cup Final, Spain Vs. Holland--me, Chris Rodriguez vs. those strange Dutch tourists, errrrrr, I mean our friendly paying clientele at the tourist camp. Myself and two Peace Corps friends of mine watched the game at a public gathering where we were 3 of 10 people rooting for Spain at a place that held at least 400 people.
Arriving back in the interior, I went to a going away party for one of the volunteers who lived in a neighboring village. Finally making it back to my village, Gunzi, I delivered post cards and a letter to children who had written my family in America. My village also congregated at night and watched the video I made of America.
They were blown away when I walked through the Chico State library and showed them how many books were in a library. They were also amazed at the skyscrapers in San Francisco. And finally, I may have finally found a woman for my dear friend Jimmy Hok who appeared in my video; the woman in the village is like 60, only has one kid and runs her own business. She also cooks a mean rice, fish and okra dinner. I'd say a solid find for Jimmy.
August was a pretty wild month. Things were going fabulous--I stopped doing the dreaded English lessons and began giving computer lessons to the kids which are much more productive. My friend in the village, Stefano, graduated from school at the top of his class. People were enthusiastic that I had returned from America and were more receptive to working with me. And us Peace Corps Volunteers have even begun to receive funding to do bigger, more high impact projects! And best of all, two women in the village had begun feeding me every night. Everything seemed to be going right, then BAM!
Got a call out of the blue from home and was informed my grandmother had died. The news really broke my heart and has had me in a funk the past few weeks. This news was really hard to swallow alone, again. My grandfather also passed away about a year ago while I was in Peace Corps. But I feel fortunate because the last time I saw my grandparents they were together and I had some interesting discussions with them about their younger years that I otherwise may have put off having if I had not been leaving the States to join the Peace Corps.
So, although it was a tough loss I am going to hang in there and stay tough like they learned how to do.
Well, I have not really felt like keeping up the blog recently but I would like to change that. Good things are happening in Peace Corps Suriname, now I have consistent internet access in my village and hopefully I will be able to inform people about my work and life at least once a week as opposed to once a month or once every two months which I found to be rather bothersome and unenjoyable because so much of the day to day nuances were lost to the stories of big adventures or summaries of the month that had passed. Please continue to comment if you are reading the blog that will give me some much needed encouragement to maintain the blog.
Since I have not blogged in a while, I will bring the uninformed up to speed on what has transpired in my life over the past couple of months. In May, Suriname had its elections and one of my counterparts was elected to parliament. It was an exciting time to be on the river and see the boats loaded with drummers and politicians pass the village. Also in May, the new Peace Corps Suriname group arrived which was exciting, 24 new volunteers. Unfortunately, that meant that the Peace Corps Suriname 14 group, the group which arrived before my group, would be departing in July. I miss those guys more than they probably know.
In June, I went back to the grand ole' United States of America
. Back home. Day 4 in America, I was at the ballyard in San Francisco and John got in a fight with the Giants' mascot, Lou Seal. John, you're an idiot but an inspiration to every bleacher bum opposed to a sports organization mascot... I also had my money on the seal, sorry dude. I took a few trips while in the States, I went to Lake Tahoe for the 4th of July weekend and also made a day trip to Sonoma. And of course, I took what was supposed to originally be an over-night trip to Chico and turned it into a 4 day extravaganza. All the while I was filming these trips with a video camera so I could bring the finished product back to the village.
Once I got back to Suriname, I made it back for the World Cup Final, Spain Vs. Holland--me, Chris Rodriguez vs. those strange Dutch tourists, errrrrr, I mean our friendly paying clientele at the tourist camp. Myself and two Peace Corps friends of mine watched the game at a public gathering where we were 3 of 10 people rooting for Spain at a place that held at least 400 people.
Arriving back in the interior, I went to a going away party for one of the volunteers who lived in a neighboring village. Finally making it back to my village, Gunzi, I delivered post cards and a letter to children who had written my family in America. My village also congregated at night and watched the video I made of America.
They were blown away when I walked through the Chico State library and showed them how many books were in a library. They were also amazed at the skyscrapers in San Francisco. And finally, I may have finally found a woman for my dear friend Jimmy Hok who appeared in my video; the woman in the village is like 60, only has one kid and runs her own business. She also cooks a mean rice, fish and okra dinner. I'd say a solid find for Jimmy.
August was a pretty wild month. Things were going fabulous--I stopped doing the dreaded English lessons and began giving computer lessons to the kids which are much more productive. My friend in the village, Stefano, graduated from school at the top of his class. People were enthusiastic that I had returned from America and were more receptive to working with me. And us Peace Corps Volunteers have even begun to receive funding to do bigger, more high impact projects! And best of all, two women in the village had begun feeding me every night. Everything seemed to be going right, then BAM!
Got a call out of the blue from home and was informed my grandmother had died. The news really broke my heart and has had me in a funk the past few weeks. This news was really hard to swallow alone, again. My grandfather also passed away about a year ago while I was in Peace Corps. But I feel fortunate because the last time I saw my grandparents they were together and I had some interesting discussions with them about their younger years that I otherwise may have put off having if I had not been leaving the States to join the Peace Corps.
So, although it was a tough loss I am going to hang in there and stay tough like they learned how to do.
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