Mash and general angst

Hitherto unyielding money issues have consistently impaired our ability to get out of Wakapoa. Most weekends we find ourselves confronted with a stark choice: stay home and sacrifice another fragment of our sanity as we wash clothes and sing the chorus of "Buffalo Soldier" on a loop (incidentally, this isn't the least agreeable way to while away the time, but one definitely feels a touch of cabin fever) or catch a boat to Charity, which is obviously preferable but does rather eat into our basically-non-existent cash supply.

Luckily, we're sometimes stripped of the element of choice; that is, when we run out of food and our need to eat dictates we leave and restock. 

This trip to Georgetown is in part due to the above, but mainly the fact that the last vestiges of whatever sanity we once possessed are now rapidly falling away like bits of wet cake (I miss Black Books).

We're blaming a combination of things: our headmaster/HM, a lack of anything to do due to our HM's stranglehold on the village, our HM, the corrupt education system, our HM, teaching being soul-crushingly frustrating, and our HM. It was only when, last week, we were forced to stab a guy in the chest and both cut about five inches off our hair in a fit of misdirected rage, that we realised we weren't coping very well, and decided to get the hell out.

The fact that our trip coincides with Mashramani - a celebration of Guyana's becoming a republic in 1970 - isn't so much a happy coincidence as a handy guise under which to travel. "Partaking in a carnival" is distinctly more agreeable than citing "killing spree imminent unless we're allowed out for a few days" on our leave applications. 

Now that I've made my time here sound sufficiently awful, I'd like to qualify that Wakapoa is an incredible place and I'm still glad I did this. It's shown me with (horrifying) clarity what I can and can't deal with, and has also afforded us the opportunity to do some pretty amazing things. Hopefully the meeting we've arranged with the Guyana rep for this evening will enable us to continue experiencing amazing things. 

And give our hair a chance to grow back.

Mashramani - an Arawak/Lokono word, literally translating to "celebration of a job well done" - commemorates British Guiana achieving independence from the UK in 1966 and becoming Guyana (and later, in 1970, the Cooperative Republic of Guyana). I taught my class the significance of this in a Social Studies lesson last week, and felt guilty and colonial as I strode around lecturing them on their own country in my gung-ho, Mary Poppins-esque manner. All that was apparently born of this lesson, though, was a string of misgivings about British people (valid), and their choices of national symbols. Several students approached me over the next few days to wonder aloud if I didn't think "Union Jack" was a bit of a stupid name for a flag.

So, aside from doing Britain a great disservice in the wider world, what else do I intend to achieve over the course of the year?

• See Kaieteur, the world's largest single-drop waterfall. And hang over the edge, obviously.
• Enter at least one event in the Lethem Rodeo at Easter, and encourage Claire to do the same.
• Improve my Spanish. My current, diminutive repertoire will make this an easy one to achieve.
• Continue to see improvement in my students' literacy. I have put a lot of work in with them both during and after school, and was ready to maul when our HM said learning to read wouldn't benefit my class, and to play more cricket with them instead. Regardless of his feelings on the matter, I am going to continue dragging my students kicking and screaming through phonics exercises, and the one book the school has ("Walk Two Moons" by Sharon Creech). We still play lots of cricket, anyway.
• Learn more Arawak than "die kan shie cabo".
• Find more books, for students and for me. There's a tiny library in the primary school with a few things donated by various agencies and missionaries, but the children aren't allowed to access it. The contents mostly wouldn't be of any use here anyway. Think the original 1984 Macintosh manual, and a Mavis Beacon touch-typing textbook (the village has limited electricity, and no computers. Though words are words, I suppose). After some digging one weekend I did find a collection of T. S. Eliot, which I've been devouring in my hammock. His asperity and attenuated sensibility (and, I like to imagine as I read, his dapper dress sense) are the perfect foil for our shaggy appearances and the vastness of the continent on which we're living. Hah, look at that. I'm waxing romantic about poetry. There's something I rarely did six months ago.
• See more of South America. We're in the process of drafting an itinerary for the month we'll get to travel between Summer Term ending and our flights back to Gatwick on the 15th August. Peru and Bolivia are on the agenda, and I'm desperate to see Chile, but monetary constraints will likely ensure that we get as far as the end of the creek.
• Learn to enjoy cricket. Learning the rules, and being able to discourse upon them at length, does not mean I've grown to like the game, which is unfortunate in this region.
• Stop powering my way through bags of sugar with a spoon, reasoning that "hey, if I'm living near the Demerara River I might as well get my fill, right?"

And that's about it. Adios x