TIREDDDDDD!

Friday was World Teachers Day. Thankfully Guyana takes international celebrations to heart and pulls out all the stops. We had an assembly in the morning where the students said little tributes to their form teachers, which was a bit strange considering I have only been at the school for a month. I worked my ass off for 2 years to get those London kids to like me! School put on a lovely lunch for us; chicken kievs, green rice and chocolate-coated strawberries were on the menu. After school, 2 students from my form class came to give me gifts (this is ridiculous). They gave me a wallet (turns out I didn’t need the one I stole from Debenhams, long story), a personalised mug with a blackboard-style outside and (worryingly) a 33% extra bottle of shower gel. I had quite a tiring and busy week last week so I spent a lot of it looking forward to the weekend but by 3pm on Friday, I didn’t want to leave school. It baffles me to read that sentence back.

 

So before Friday, I was looking forward to the weekend because Javan and I had been invited to go to a farm up the Linden highway. To Georgetown-folk, a farm is like a little retreat. People tend to have a few workers who stay on the farm to keep the place nice and look after their property. They also have a house so it is pretty similar to the idea of a holiday home. Our friend’s farm was just that. The house was really big, surrounded by 500 acres of land and their own creek full of the inky-black/ tango-orange/ tannin-tea water that I seem to crave at the weekends. About 8 of us went from Georgetown so we had a really good party on the Friday night, fueled by a lovely dahl puri and Guyanese curry.

 

On the drive down we ended up getting lost (missed the sand track turn off in the dark) and finding ourselves all the way in Linden. On Saturday, with our new-found sense of direction, we drove back to Linden to a Peace Corps party. Linden was a strange place- it is a small town (2^nd largest in Guyana) mainly based on mining bauxite and sat on the edge of the Demerara river, which eventually winds its way back to the coast at Georgetown. We made a really poor attempt at forming a quiz team and taking part in the Peace Corps’ quiz.

After a while, we headed back to the farm, this time with a few more people; one of whom was carrying a gun in a holster around his leg. Of course, when you get to a farm with a gun, that means target practice. Holding that 9mm glock in my hands was incredibly scary. I was shaking the whole time! After a few miserable shots into the dark, I handed it over to Javan to try his luck. Eventually the shotgun was pulled out and at this point I chickened off!

We awoke the next morning to hundreds of mosquito bites (no net and I forgot repellent!) but we ran down the creek to cool off. That afternoon the group started the drive back to Georgetown. The Linden highway is a straight road that runs right through the middle of Guyana. If you keep going past Linden (for about 20 hours) you get through to beef-country and Brazil. Scattered along the highway are small resorts where you park your car next to a creek, turn the volume up stupidly high and swim, dance and play games. We stopped at one of these creeks and did a bit of all of that for a couple of hours. It always makes me laugh at how beautiful places like this in Guyana are and how unbeautiful Guyanese people can make them. It is taking me a long time to get accustomed to this but I’m slowly appreciating it more.

Javan up a tree

In Georgetown there has been a big event called Guyexpo for the past week. I had the impression that it was a huge range of businesses and entrepreneurs all sharing their ideas and presenting their work at little stands. There was a bit of this but, just like the creek resorts, it was mainly drinking, dancing and partying! I popped over with a friend on Sunday evening to witness the carnage. Both of us were incredibly tired from the weekend so we wandered round the stands until we got annoyed by the crowds and the music. I drove their and back; my first experience of driving in Georgetown. Apart from my inability to drive an automatic, no road markings to show where to stop/go, no signs to show one-way streets and windows so tinted that you had to wind them down to look in the wing mirrors, the drive was fine. I actually really enjoyed it and felt like a G with the tinted windows; really sad, I know.