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!