Where does your rice come from?

Thursday was the big day for a bunch of the A Level chemistry students. They were retaking their practical exam from last year and I had to invigilate. The technicians had done a brilliant job in setting the practical up; each student had hundreds of pieces of equipment and tiny beakers of multi-coloured chemicals. I had to carry out the practical myself to check the chemicals were working so as soon as the exam started, I set to work following the exam paper like a recipe. I felt like Harry Potter sat in Snape’s classroom as I mixed together all the unknown solutions. From what I saw, the students did really well. There was an issue with one of them swallowing the dark purple solution as she tried to use her mouth as a pipette instead of using a pipette.

I headed to the University of Guyana after school to have a tour around. One of my friends is due to start working there soon so she showed me around the place. The campus is a good 20 minute drive from the city centre so there is a lot of open space. The buildings are no more than 3 stories and each one is spread out with neatly trimmed lawns between them. The buildings, as anywhere in Guyana, are battling living in the tropics and they look in need of some new paint. I walked past one classroom full of student nurses in their matching uniforms. The class was packed with people and they had no fans or air conditioning.

At 5am on Friday, I was up and ready to hit the road. I had been asked to accompany a school trip to the Essequibo. The Essequibo is Guyana’s longest river and the banks of the river by the mouth are full of industry, mainly rice mills and some sugar plantations. The plan was to visit some of these industries as part of a humanities trip. After being asked to meet at school at 6am, I reached school bang on 6am. The next person to arrive came at 6.30 and by 7.30, we left school in the bus. One day I will know how to deal with Guyanese time.

We drove to the Demerara river and crossed the bridge in the bus. As we drove down the West coast, we picked up a few students who lived along the route. At 9am, we made it to Charity; the launch point for boats heading into the Essequibo and further. Our boat took us out into the middle of the river. At its mouth, the Essequibo is over 20km wide so it really is more like being at sea than in a river. The water was murky-brown from all the silt being washed through the country and apparently it was salty but I didn’t taste it. On the other side, we landed in Supernaam and continued the journey by road to a big rice mill.

 

The Bacchus rice mill supplies most of Georgetown and certainly every Chinese restaurant in Georgetown with rice. I had never really imagined what a small countries’ daily supply of rice looked like but I got to see it on Friday. The rice mill was filled with rice. Every space without rice either had sacks for putting rice in or old Chinese machinery for dehusking/sorting rice. Just as I started to think of it, one of the boys got a handful of Class-C rice and shoved it down another kids back. Great work.

One of the owners gave us a tour of each mill then we had a tour of their poultry farm (I can still smell it) before heading to their community projects. This was my favourite part and I found a new hero in this country. Using capital from the rice mill, one of the sons had started doing community work in their local area. He had built a lovely school, library and park just opposite their business so I spent a long time picking his brains on this. The library was very impressive. It had so many books and looked so clean, ordered and tidy. They even had an Xbox Kinect and computer area that were free to use. His aim was to fund it through the school which was fee-paying.

 

I’m just off to do my first Guyanese 10k now!