One Week in Laluni!

We got to spend a week in our sites to meet our supervisors, counterparts, new host families and schools! My site is called Laluni, it is an Amerindian community in Region 4 about two hours from Georgetown. It is an agricultural community where most families are farmers, with about 300 people. It's very rural and very simple.

Here is my new school, Laluni Primary School! They have a nursery school attached and grades 1-3 downstairs and grades 4-6 upstairs. There is a teacher for a every grade, which is surprising and less than 70 students in the whole school! Very small.

 There are two kids in first grade! This teacher is getting her degree from UG in Georgetown so she is only in class one day a week right now...

 There was a volunteer in this community for two years who left in July, Evan, who started a library project. They have built the library and have some books but now I will be organizing all the books according to level, finishing off the library, teaching about the library, being the librarian and then training a new librarian for when I leave!

1. This is my new house! We have no electricity, no running water and my new bffs are some bats that have moved in. I will be living with an elderly woman named Marcie, who hosted the last volunteer.  We do have a solar panel but the battery is currently broken...thankfully the school has a working solar panel that works so I have been charging my electronics off that. We were literally making dinner by oil lamp and taking it into the wash area to have some light to bucket bathe with...it's definitely going to be an adjustment but I'm excited for the challenge.

 I went on a run one morning and this was the road through the village, very beautiful and quiet.

 I also got to celebrate Phagwah, Holi, with my school while I was there. It is a celebration of good over evil and was pretty fun to throw colors on each other!

The whole school! 

"Let go of expectations so they don't negatively impact your reality," -Peace Corps

Guyana!

Hello from the land of many waters and little to no wifi! I am going to try to keep a blog but i’m not too sure how well that’s going to work, so we’ll see! 

Let me try to catch you up on stuff that’s happened over the last month!

-Yesterday was our one month-aversay in Guyana, crazy how time is flying yet dragging. We are half way through our Pre-Service Training and just learned our 2 year sites last Friday! This week we are in Georgetown for training with our counterparts and then will go visit our site for a week starting on Saturday with them! 

-I am living on an Amerindian reservation called Mainstay with my mom, Sunita, sister, Lorianne, brother’s girlfriend, Nicole, and their month old baby, Luther! Most of the men in the community work in the interior mining for gold, so my host dad, Jr., and brother, Lorenzo, came for a week to meet the baby and then headed straight back out to keep mining! I also have another sister, Tiffany, who lives and works in Georgetown.

Four other volunteers and I are living with the Pearson family, one of the founding families of Mainstay. We all live really close together and are constantly in and out of each other’s houses, it’s very communal and fun! Just last night as our last night in Mainstay for 2 weeks, my mom had everyone over for duck curry and roti! I made the plantain chips ;-) 

-During the week we head into town to Bacchus Library to train on various things and hang out with each other, there are 38 of us all together, 21 Health and 17 Education Volunteers. 

-Our family has a ton of animals around our property! My family has a warthog (type spiky pig….unclear) that they found as a baby and my sister raised. His name is Austin, of course. My Granny Rita has a toucan named touckie, and two dogs named Flassie and Slow. My Auntie Minerva has two pigs that just had 8 piglets and are not as cute and cuddly as I would like them to be...

-From our homes on the Essequibo Coast to Georgetown we need to take a speedboat or a ferry to cross the Essequibo River. When we went to the Ministry of Education a couple weeks ago we were taking a speed boat back when one of our engines broke and we were only on one, crawlin along. At one point the ferry, which takes twice as long, passed us. Then our other engine died and we were just sitting in the middle of this river. Someone in the back mentioned they were ankle deep in water…this is when we realized we might be in trouble! They got one of the engines going but we were still taking on a lot of water, good thing we were all wearing our Peace Corps issued life jackets! Finally another boat came and we piled onto that one, women and children first, leaving the other one, sinking in the river. Whoops! 

The overwhelming question I keep getting from friends and family back home is, are you glad you joined the Peace Corps. I can definitely say I’m glad I went through that whole stressful process and left for Guyana. It’s already different than I thought it would be and being in the Peace Corps is so much more involved and time consuming that I expected. But I can see how influential they are here and how much work they have already done. I am excited to begin my two year service, integrate into my community, and get to work on helping with whatever is needed! 

Guy 30!

Hiking from Mainstay to neighboring village, Capoey

Mainstay gals, me, Rachael and Sam enjoying a coconut

"Most of us will plant trees, whose shade we won't be able to enjoy" - Ben Franklin (Peace Corps Guyana Motto)