Lorries Wedding

MASHRAMANI

Trip South!

The past week has been very busy, I have still been teaching computer lesson as well as helping Grade 9 after school with there projects in Maths, Science, Social Studies and English. We also celebrated Dr. Seuss for the week which was a lot of fun, reading his books to the children and watching them enjoy the silly rhymes and made up words he uses, they then set about trying to draw the Dr. Seuss characters and their own. I have also spent the week planning for Grade 6 revision lesson for after school at the library - 3 of us have taken two weeks each to help them prepare for their common entrance exam which is after Easter. I took the topic of social studies which has been challenging for me as I had to learn fast about many different aspects of Guyana in order to understand properly and teach it back.

On top of teaching we have also had a lot of guests, at the moment we have 40 christ crusaders camping in the village for 10 days, they have been doing a tour of different villages and each night they hold a service and spread the word of god, as well as handing out free bibles to people in the village. The children have been enjoying themselves greatly joining in with the singing and dancing.

We have also had British Diplomats come by as well as regular guests, we also celebrated the return of a lady called Alice who helped set up the Caimen House and library here. She has been away for 2 years and the village were incredibly excited to see her come back. So it has been a hype of activity here in the last week which was topped of with some friends coming through at the weekend and then taking a trip south on Sunday to a place called Shulinab. This was particularly novel for me as the furthest South I have been so far is Lethem and I have had numerous invites to go South and finally I did.

Shulinab is another little village in the South Rupununi, we went to celebrate a 60th birthday of a guy called Uncle Boogie aka Alan. We got there in time to see the last of the games being played and then everyone set off to his house where drinking and dancing commenced, followed by numerous funny speeches. It was nice to see the whole village gathered as well as several volunteers - which told me his was quite a man to receive such an audience. I especially enjoy these kind of events because it is the time when nearly everyone I have met gathers in one place and catches up on what everyone has been up to, but it was also interesting to see somewhere new and see how village differ from each other.

This week will be a bit quieter than the last as the camping group will leave on Thursday but also my room mate is away for a week in Georgetown helping with the training for new Peace Corps volunteers. School is also winding down as next week is the last week of school before Easter break where they get two weeks off. In the Easter break Rodeo takes place which is a fairly big event in Guyana for which we will travel to Lethem to celebrate it, it is run over 4 days and I am told that in the past it has been a day event but this year it is to take place at night. I have heard many stories about it and am really looking forward to seeing and experiencing it for myself!