The gods heard me and pissed on my city

Saying, “It rains and it stops,” three times last night must have tickled the gods and they sneezed today.

Last night the rain came down heavy and didn’t stop until 11am this morning. By the time I had to leave for school, the road outside was over my knees with water. I saw cars coming up the street and the water was running over their headlights. It looked fun so I put on my waterproofs and stepped outside. First mistake. “Yuh need fuh get sum lang boots bai.” Yes wellies would be amazing but all I had was trainers and wet socks so they would have to do. My tactic for riding was having my feet on the handlebars and over-revving my way down the river in first gear. It worked until I got to the middle of Middle Street, the engine conked out and I had to put my foot, no wait, my leg down in the water.

School was a strange place today. The minister of education announced that all public schools would be closed. By this time a few students and most of the teachers had turned up. During first lesson, school decided to cancel the day’s exams and students were allowed to go home if they wanted. I ended up teaching a half-filled AS Level class in the morning and a Form 5 chemistry revision class in the afternoon. I also demo-ed a lessons on seasons with them that I want Form 3 to do tomorrow:

The rain is such a strange thing in Guyana. I remember the rainy days in Region One; the whole village would go to sleep and everything would feel so lazy and quiet. Unbelievably this happens in the capital city. School felt like a ghost town and everyone wanted to go home and sleep.

Currently, they are pumping water out of Oasis Café downstairs. The street outside now resembles a 7m wide river that you would be more likely to see in the English countryside on a fishing trip. The scene is as eerie as it is beautiful. Christmas lights from neighbouring buildings are casting long shimmering reflections over the water whilst crappos bellow out low, rumbling croaks. The crappos must really love it like this; normally I see their charred flattened bodies pasted to the road in the middle of the day.

Eyyyyy, Redman! Kick up yuh stand!

“Ayyy, Redman, kick up yuh stand!”

This was the phrase shouted at me out of a bus today as for the millionth time I had forgotten to put up the stand on my scooter. I don’t know how I forget and every Guyanese person remembers!

It rains and it stops. It rains and it stops. It rains and it stops. I love this weather. The rain came as I was about to leave school but I had my waterproofs and within 10 minutes, it had stopped and the Sun was back to peak between the clouds. For some reason I am crooning for cold though. I saw a picture of a dog in my mum’s park and it looked so cold with the crisp autumn leaves on the floor.

School has turned into exam nation this week and will be the same next week. Every class is off timetable and has two or three exams per day then the students can go home. I don’t see the need for it but it gives a bit of respite at the end of a 15 week term with no half term break! Although I still have to teach A Levels. I think these guys are having their exam week in the last week of term.

I have been mingling with (or trying to mingle with) the government this week. I have almost set up a meeting with the minister of education, Priya Manickchand, to talk about LRTT Guyana next summer. She has been very elusive but sounds keen to meet me.

Next up is the President himself. I want to take one of my classes on a trip to State House, where the President lives or is supposed to live. I managed to get the number of the secretary to the First Lady today so I will call tomorrow and sweet talk my way into an epic school trip. It is nice to organise school trips without all the paperwork and the weeks of planning that they require in England.

Play Dough and Superbikes!

To get anything done here, you need to know someone. That’s what they say anyway and more and more I am finding this true. I would have been in that police station for hours and be a few thousand dollars out of pocket if I didn’t know certain people. Again today, but in a more welcoming establishment, I would have been there for hours if I didn’t know certain people. I have almost set up a Guyanese bank account, which I think is an incredible achievement.

I was sat planning a lesson on coastal erosion last night and pretty stumped for ideas. I trawled youtube looking for those dramatic clips of houses falling down cliffs but could not find anything awe-inspiring. Then I hit the jackpot. Someone had made a stop-motion video of a headland eroding using play-dough. At school today I went straight to the reception class and asked for their play-dough. Form 5 loved it. I loved that kids nowadays have smart phones. Their videos were hilarious. One of them featured a seagull flying in and out of the frame with added sound-effects.

I wish I could feel so happy about the A-Levels though. I have 17 students in my class but haven’t had a full class since September. They just don’t seem to turn up. Last month there were no students at all and the excuse was that they were revising for exam-retakes. This week, the same thing is happening again- more exams. Two students showed up today and we had a chat about attendance. They were getting annoyed but not as much as me. They seem to have accepted it as the culture. It happens in all of their subjects too. This made me feel more relieved but it still didn’t solve the problem. I went to speak to the head of sixth form who said I needed to talk to them... It’s a school-wide issue though and I just don’t know what to say to persuade them.

Another attendance problem hit the school this week. This weekend is an international car and superbike championship and as I teach well-off kids, a few of them are involved. This means that they practice late into the night and have early morning weight-training sessions to get them in shape and make them late for school (and tired). I pulled out my trump card this afternoon and made phone calls home to their parents. They said in unison, “It will be sorted next week; it is just that there is a big race-meet coming up.” I sat there a bit baffled.

It is a new dilemma for me. In London, I knew that education, school and me as a teacher could be a social changer for the kids due their socio-economic backgrounds. But here I don’t feel the same pressure. These kids will do well in their exams. Their parents mostly know the importance of education and how to work the system. They will get personal tutors if they start failing. When they graduate their families will have contacts to get them into great jobs.

I don’t feel disheartened because I love teaching at this school. I just feel odd. There are so many loose ends that need tying up.

Power-cuts and bribery in the city of sin

I am sat here typing in the dark. Power cuts are pretty frequent in Georgetown. There is one ever few weeks at home and probably more frequently if you looked at the city as a whole. Most nights I will hear a huge explosion like a gunshot. It took me a few weeks to realise that there weren’t that many guns going off. Just power-surges that blow the electricity pylons and drown whole blocks in tropical blackness.

I had a wonderfully cultured weekend as I was lucky enough to go to a play that a couple of friends were in on Saturday. The play was in the National Culture Centre and the main character was Cuffy. Cuffy was the leader of the Berbice uprising at the time when all the African slaves in Guyana took hold of plantations and the Europeans mainly moved out. The set was great and it was nice to see something like a play after seeing the raw, brashness of Georgetown’s streets. At the end however, everything got a bit awkward. For some reason, an acting judge came to the microphone and harshly critiqued what they must have put a whole lot of effort into! I just sat there and cringed!

Sometimes I forget how beautiful Guyana is. That didn’t happen on Sunday. I rode out to the Essequibo with my friend in the afternoon. It only took an hour of long winding tarmac roads with crazy undulations and random cows roaming onto the street. We reached Parika and my fingers were tingling through the vibrations but my ears were tingling as well with the instant re-population of the town of Parika compared to the empty road all the way down the highway. My ears were tingling because anywhere there’s people in Guyana, there’s a huge set of speakers blaring dancehall.

On the ride back to the city, the Sun started setting and for an hour everything was beautiful. The sky was torn across the horizon with a deep orange that slowly faded into pink then black as we rode on.

Everyone knows that Guyana is a place full of contradictions and my day was nothing different. Following a beautiful afternoon, as we were riding back through the city I turned a corner and found a police bike, lights flashing, asking me to pull over. Officer Johnson was incredibly efficient at belittling my friend then stating that my Guyanese driving licence was my dad’s! His confusion continued to the reason why he arrested me in the first place. Was I arrested?! Who knows? He then escorted us to the station where I was asked to give 10,000GYD (£33). I flatly refused, sat there for 30 minutes until they gave up and let me go, no details taken.

It was a strange experience but it didn’t ruin the day and it was only a matter of time until something like that happened.

The water is coming!!!

My goodness! I have just had a break-through! Today is the first day since I started the job in September that I have planned all of my lessons for the next day before the end of the day. It is 2.30pm and I can happily say that I have planned all of tomorrow.

Yesterday the school had a day off for a religious holiday. The principals are both of Baha’i faith, which is a seemingly little known religion about unity of humanity and unity of other religions. It sounds reasonable and there is little presence of it around school so I quite like it. Anyway, this holiday was much-needed. It made Monday feel like Friday again! The rain didn’t stop on Monday. A crazy Guyanese sentiment surfaced though; Guyanese like to sleep when it rains. I think it is because the sound is calming and the place is cooler. This meant that at the end of Monday, the teachers in my department were all commenting about how they are praying it is raining on the holiday so they can spend the day sleeping!

Some things are so similar to teaching in UK but some things are the complete opposite.

On the drive home, Georgetown got a bit scary. The roads were flooded and the drains running next to them were as well. With the sea level being higher than the city, just seeing this was scary enough.

The actual day of the holiday was less wet. There were intermissions between light drizzle and Sun. I spent the day working on LRTT (Limited Resource Teacher Training) stuff, which happened to include a Skype call to Andy in Uganda- I love technology. I really want to go back to Nepal next summer to make sure the project works with double the number of teachers that we took this year. Although I did say that I would run a project in Guyana, however, this is looking unlikely now as I can’t see any opportunities in the community around me. The big problem is finding a location that has 200 teachers because the countries’ population is very low.

                        

Liming near Linden

I have just finished reading the best modern account of life in Guyana, “The sly company of people who care” by Rahul Bhattacharya. This guy is an Indian who came for a year-long visit to Guyana and managed to capture Guyana in such an authentic way that it shocked me. He wrote most of the book in Creolese and the longer he wrote, the more Creole he became. He was so damning in most of the book but his descriptions were so perfect that it kept me reading. Finally he made the mistake of finding a “fat fowl” (gold digger) of a Guyanese girl who he never really liked and who ended up breaking his mind and turning his experience sour. Books get to me and after this happened, I wondered around feeling somber.

I got a lot of reading done this weekend as I went to a friend’s farm up the Linden highway (the same one I went to last month). We started the journey on Friday after school. This time we loaded the car with two key ingredients; mosquito spray and a mosquito net. Driving down the highway is a hand-sweating experience. The tarmac, single-lane road so obviously cuts through the jungle and you can see how the long-straight road stretches up and down over the valleys between small creeks. Parts of the road make it feel like an earthquake had just hit. At one of these undulations, I caught my friend sleeping and as the car rocketed up and down the dips, it must have felt like we were taking off in a plane. She shook herself awake as if the plane was crashing, but found me laughing as she realised what had just happened.

At the farm we met Dreads. He looks after the place when nobody is there and he helped us set up the generator and pump water for showers. On Saturday we woke up to find out why we bought a mosquito net. The outside of the net was covered in mosquitoes, all flicking their back legs waiting for a careless bit of flesh to be leaning on the net. Sadly this bit of flesh was the end of my second toe which swelled up and felt like the mosquito had drilled to my bone.

The area we were in was separated into lots of farms but each was done so inefficiently that the bush had reclaimed most of the farms and it looked like a cross between jungle and wild savannah. We walked through the farm to the edge and sat watching an eagle soar over a huge field in front of us. A guy came walking across the field towards us and after standing at a distance to suss us out, he introduced himself as Albert and quickly asked which part of New York I was from. Strangely he told me about his life in London over 10 years ago so I’m guessing he has a bad grasp of accents. He showed us round his farm, told us about constructing the Excel Centre in London and introduced us to his wife. We ate his cherries, laughed at his Creole chickens then made our excuses.

My friend made baiganee so we munched on these when we got home. Baiganee is boulangee (aubergine) deep fried in a coating of chick pea flour-paste. So basically pholourie with a slice of aubergine in the middle. After running out of these we jumped in the car and drove another 20 minutes down the Linden highway to Linden. Linden is the bauxite capital of Guyana and a bit of a smear on the pristine nature that surrounds it. The town itself is so spread out and when you manage to find the centre, it is such an annoying maze of one-way streets with no one-way signs that I just wanted to drive straight back out. But we were here for one thing and we couldn’t leave until we found it; a dutty chinee. When Guyanese leave Guyana, it is said that they don’t miss the jungle, the rum or the roti. They miss a big fat dutty chinee. I parked up and we got out to be welcomed by a guy who walked past us saying, “You two look wonderful.” 20 metres further and we stumbled upon a chinee. Linden is an awesome place.

Dutty Chinee:

Mek sure fuh put yuh wife and yuh pickney dem

“Mek sure fuh put yuh wife and yuh pickney dem,” said the wonderful accountant at school yesterday as she handed me another form for something else I have to get. National Insurance Scheme apparently and hopefully there is a work permit on its way to me soon. I have been reassured that I am not an illegal immigrant as some paper work has been filed for me but it is crawling its way through the dusty underbelly of Georgetown’s Agency of Bureaucracy.

Talking about dusty places, my lunch box has become the target for a minute world of sugar ants. For two months now my lunchbox has sat undisturbed on my desk until lunchtime. Sadly Wednesday became the day the sugar ants discovered its home and I munched half my way into a slightly too crunchy cheese sandwich. Thursday came and I stupidly didn’t learn my lesson. The ants learnt theirs so before break time they were tucking in. Finally it is Friday and this week has taught me well. I left my lunch box in my bag and carried it around with me. I also had a back-up of a thick aluminium foil coating around the sandwiches.

Yesterday I thought back to my summer of Teach First training and planned a lesson “outside the classroom.” The troublesome year 9s were out in the tropical Sun measuring speed, distance and time of toy cars racing down ramps. I thought this was a great idea until Guyana found a practical joke; torrential rain for precisely 10 minutes whilst we were outside. Thankfully the kids were undeterred and carried on their physics just underneath tiny bits of shelter dotted around the back yard.

Last night I was absolutely shattered. I went for a nap as soon as I got home. Waking up an hour later, I realised I still had to plan all of the next day’s lessons and make three 100 mark end-of-term tests by the next day. I prioritised and forgot the last two lessons, smashed out the tests and was done by 8pm. Just in time for the expat arrival- a few Canadian/English friends came round to do some rum sampling.

A Caribbean Diwali- Flashlights, Explosions!

Today was a whirlwind of emotions! Somehow four of my classes’ tests coincided with each other. Form 4 did a fantastic job, six A*s and 100% A-C. I made some calls home to parents to congratulate their kids; one in particular got a D in the last unit and has been working his socks off to pull his grade for this unit up to an A*! The two A Level classes probably fared slightly less well. I’ll have to wait until they get marked to see. One of the classes opted for me to mark them (that’s my evening gone!) whilst the other class wanted to peer mark them. Finally form 3 was more of a mission. Last lesson of the day and 3 walked in late; immediate detentions. The rest did the test, some lost marks for talking, some for cheating.

Back to Friday and the best moment of the day was hearing a fellow colleague singing ‘Single for ever:’

“I don’t have to stay at home, I don’t have to answer me phone, I could have any gyal in me car.”

Friday afternoon was market day, a great idea to get the students thinking about businesses. They had to run their own business and sell their product to the other students. It was nice to get the afternoon off teaching and be able to plan for the week ahead but bittersweet in that I would have had 4S and 5S who are a delight to teach.

Finally the bell went for the end of the day and the start of the three-day Diwali weekend. The Diwali pageant itself was on Saturday. It was just like Titchfield Carnival that I remember from my childhood. Lots of trucks decorated with lights and costumed people parading down the sea wall road. Being Guyana, there was added lime, more sticky-hot heat, hand-held explosives (instead of sparklers) and a Hindu twist for Diwali.

As the trucks went past our section, people started to leave for home but we had some friends further down the procession so we jumped on the back of my bike and road right through all the lit up trucks, got a police escort for part of the journey then continued through thousands of people all shooting fireworks over our heads as we road by. We reached our friends before the carnival so got the pleasure of watching all the floats again!

Sunday was a bit more relaxed. The floats moved on to Berbice. There were still hundreds of people blowing things up on the sea wall though. One of my friends/ Guyanese cousin made us Seven Curry. Apparently this dish is exclusively Guyanese and a big mash-up of seven different Guyanese curries. It was really tasty and we stuffed our faces.

Guyanese family :)