Eddie Doyle, 6 Apr 2010 15:44 hours
Lethem, Guyana Lethem at last After almost a month in Georgetown, it was lovely to get an invitation to celebrate Phagwa (The festival of colours, is a Hindu Spring festival) in one of the (East)Indian communities just outside GT. Ester, who invited us used to work as a community worker (still teaches children in her own time every Sat) in the area. We spent most of the day, first being plastered by hoards of children with colour pellets, and then getting slowly plastered as the adults threw up bottles of rum in front of us, when we visited Ester’s old workmates. Needless to say it was a loud and colourful bunch who headed back to GT as the sun was setting…….4 days later the colour was still under my nails!!
If you drive south out of Georgetown for 2 hours you come to Linden (a bauxite mining town). It is also here that the tarmac gives way to dust roads, and does not start again until 10 hours later when you enter the Lethem roundabout with turnoffs in to town or over the bridge to Brazil. If you start this journey late at night as most mini-buses/cars do, it means at least 6 hours tearing through the jungle in pitch black on slightly larger than single lane dirt roads…….add to that, tropical rain downpours. Timothy our program manager was the unlucky one this time driving us to our new home and work places in Lethem.
A stop is made in the darkness to allow yours truly to empty my bladder of Banks beer from the night before but instead I nearly empty something else and s**t myself when I hear the eerie screaming sound of howling monkeys from the jungle. As the dawn breaks the first ferry crosses the Esiquibo river at Kurupukari but there is enough time to see blue and yellow Mccaw parrots and Toucans with the long yellow beaks before we board. A 10 minute journey across on a ferry that should have been scrapped 40 years ago……is the only means across this beautiful river…..a fact the ferry workers used to get better wages not so long ago. Another hour in the jungle before the Rupununi appears and we (myself and Behi) get the first view of the landscape we will live with and stop along the way to meet people we shall work with in the coming 2 years. Finally after 16 hours (4hours of stops) and an amazing trip we enter into our new house in Lethem
The old saying is ”The Luck of the Irish” although I prefer “ Fall into a bucket of s**t and come out smelling Chanel 5”. Either of the above describes my being asked to lead a community based eco-tourism tour for 8 days around Guyana, four weeks after arriving in the country and only 6 days after arriving in Lethem. Together with 14 representatives from 5 AmerIndian communities within 2 hours drive of Lethem , We travelled to 6 of the major Guyanese tourist attractions to see what was on offer and to give the participants some ideas how to further develop their tourism projects in and around their home communities. For me it also meant meeting and developing friendships with people from some of the communities I will be working in. It turned out to be quite a success, although we were all pretty shattered after all the mini-bus travel. I hope I will be included in the follow up project (if and when there is one) to go to the communities and see how far things have progressed and what the further needs are from VSO.
I should have got this page off before Easter but we still have no Internet at home so the only access is at the Conservation International Offices where Behi has her office and I have been given a desk even though I am actually (or will actually be) employed by VSO. (I will include more about the Easter celebrations in my next blog as it will take up some place). I have a meeting tomorrow (Wednesday) with the Catholic Church priest Fr. Joachim to try to decide how we will plan the vocational training at the church’s workshops, so I’m looking forward to that. PS I just got word that my placement is now clear. Magic.. Until next month
Take care. Some photos this time!!
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