A Small South American Country

[Arab Nights (imported)]

Blame this on moi! He is the one who encouraged me to make the occasional posts about work locations.

So I have done some work in Guyana. Guyana is the country down on the shoulder of South America just east of Venezuela. The international airport, an old US Air Force base, is about 25 miles outside the capital of Georgetown. It is a slog to get into town and the first thing you notice is that it is very hot, humid and flat. The drive really reminded me of the Carolina coastal plain with poor homes clustered along the highway. The big difference is that I saw no Whites on the drive into Georgetown. The country is basically 1/3 blacks, 1/3 native Indian and 1/3 from the Indian subcontinent. What happened is that when the country freed the Negroes, there was nobody to do the work in the rice fields, etc. Whites certainly weren’t going to do it. The plantation owners hunted around the world for people who would work and work cheaply. They found them on the Indian subcontinent. The thing is that they just imported people and they didn’t care to know anything about the culture they were bringing people from. So a part of those from the Indian subcontinent are Moslem and a part are Hindu. That accounts for the obvious mosques and the other buildings with the cobra snake figure on the roof that you see on the drive in. It also accounts for the little signs you see for cricket matches. You really have to be a non-bigoted person there because the nearest white guy can easily be a 100 kilometers away. As I was advised, it is not a really good idea to insult people and make enemies deep in the jungle.

Georgetown only has a very few decent restaurants. The best is a fancy multi- story Chinese restaurant. I was told that the original one burned down, so ‘they’ brought in a bunch of construction workers from China, built a walled off dormitory for them and the Chinese construction guys worked for two years to build the current restaurant. It really is quite nice and is the ‘go to’ place in Georgetown. Supposedly the Chinese have really extended their presence in the area for the natural resources.

If you go back to about 1820 when the United States was expanding across the Appalachians and to the west, the only transportation was on rivers down thru New Orleans. That is exactly what Guyana is like now. Rivers connect the interior with Georgetown. The town of Bartica is the equivalent of the (future – we are talking 1820) great American cities upriver from New Orleans. It is at the junction of the Essequibo, Mazaruni and Cuyuni rivers. It is really a jumping place and called Guyana’s garden with weeds for the drugs, alcohol and prostitution. Bartica is called Guyana’s garden with weeds – the garden because of all the economic activity and the reference to ‘weeds’ is to alcohol, drugs and prostitution. Just like the Midwest river cities of the 19th century. It is kind of impressive when you see what they transport over the rivers. There are really large gold dredges which were brought in big piece by big piece, assembled and now are moved around complete from place to place when the rivers are in flood. We went to one property and began the trip on a big river taxi speedboat holding may be 40 or 50 people. We got off at a dock and transferred to a largish outboard motor boat which zipped us up a side river as far as it could go. Then we transferred to a little put-put boat to continue upstream. The “river’ by that time was more of a creek and the jungle really pressed in on us. It was like a Disneyland ride in the jungle, which has its own sort of charm. At times the boatman had to jump into the water and rock the boat over submerged obstacles. We finally got to a place where you could see the jungle had been cleared away. When we got up on the bank, you saw that it had been cleared by placer mining, which has gone on for decades. The placer mining began as people digging and panning and ended up with hydraulic mining. For hydraulic mining, the guys form a group and pool their resources. They need a couple of hundred feet of big hose and two pumps. One pumps water under pressure to a big hand held nozzle which they use to wash the jungle soil to the bottom of the pit. There is a sump at the bottom with a much pump which pumps the water out of the pit and into their sluice boxes where they recover the gold. We got out to walk around for a look-see. Buildings there are a framework of trimmed tree branches covered with black plastic. The first building was actually rather largish with a pool table. That obviously was an ED (entertainment district) where ED (erectile disfunction) is not welcome. I crossed the ‘river’ we came up by walking across a fallen tree and there were two working girls bathing who were very friendly and posed for a picture which I haven’t shown my wife yet.

Of course this is not 1820 and there are now also airplanes to move people around. The thing I have noticed in the world is that now remote landing strips aren’t that welcome in this age of narcos. There are relatively few airstrips in the country and it is almost impossible to get permission to open a new one. We flew to another place where a flight saves two or three days on the river. Of course, once you land you need to jump in a boat for a two hour trip to the destination. There is an airport close to Georgetown that is used for regional flights. You drive out past a development full of the nicer homes in the capital. I asked what those did and was told they were all government functionaries who had managed somehow to gather together the funds to build nice homes. There is a bit of the usual Latin America system there. You go to one hanger to check in and get yourself and your luggage weighed (this is bush flying), then walk over to another hanger about ¼ mile away to register with the police (take your passport), then walk back in the early morning humidity to the first hanger. The guy I went with is a bit of a North American yuppie who stated before we left the office that he doesn’t go anywhere where he doesn’t know where he is going. He jumped on Google Earth, typed in the destination airport and was rewarded with a solid green screen with a white circle in the middle. He was a bit taken back, but quickly announced that he was going to change the screen to culture so we could see the highways and locate our destination. Google Earth rewarded him with a blank screen with a black circle in the middle with the airport name. In short, we were going to the middle of nowhere with nothing but jungle around us. When you go to places like that, you fly prop aircraft. Think twin Otters or Cessna Caravan. So the aircraft plods out to our destination and eventually we end up on final to a slot cut out of the jungle. Landing on that airstrip was like landing the wrong way on a plowed field. But we made it and we taxied up to the little police outpost. While we registered with the police there, our luggage was brought out to luggage claim which was the little patch of grass in front of the white police building. From there we hauled our luggage down to the river shore for a boat trip to the camp.

The camp where we stayed was a simple two bedroom cabin with a kitchen and a ‘living room,’ which is enough for five guys as long as one sleeps in a hammock in the living room. The normal day there is get up in the morning for breakfast, head out for our work, come back late in the afternoon, shower and throw the days clothes directly in the washer and then hang them up to dry, eat dinner and go to bed under the mosquito netting. That is the healthy lifestyle in the jungle. If you stay under the netting all night, you don’t get malaria and you don’t get VD. We did go one day (by boat) to the nearest town and walked around. It has perhaps a thousand people. Buildings are made of wood, not adobe. Some of the world’s best hardwoods come from the jungle there. Everyone was really friendly. “Boy’s town,” is across the river. Close enough to be convenient but not really in town. Some Nevada towns use that system where the cat house(s) is slightly out of town or behind a wooden stockade. Close but discreet. As we were leaving, a boat brought two of the ladies up to the beaching area. My first impression was of hard case Brazilian blondes. While their blonde hair attracted attention from a distance, up closer they just did not seem like pleasant people.

We finished after a couple of days and took the boat back to the airport for our return flight. After signing out with the police, the waiting room is the shade of a mango trees. We were lounging around in the shade as more and more people showed up for the flight. None were white. So there was this one lady in the group and this happy looking guy walks up smiling at everybody. He tells the woman, “Good morning, dear. It seems like forever since I have seen you.” She said, “Why, it was only the day before yesterday.” He didn’t miss a beat and shot back, “Yes but one day without seeing your face is like an eternity to me.” I couldn’t help but smile. That in a nutshell just seems pretty typical of how people there treat each other. I find that it puts me in a good mood to be around pleasant people. Arizona is a beautiful state, but I think you can hang around for a million years and not hear that type of conversation between two people. It isn’t so much that the state if full of hateful people, it is more that we lack that charm that makes people smile and feel good.

I talked with two people I know who went to Belize for vacation. Both said that at first they were a bit on the defensive because people kept coming up to them. They assumed everyone wanted to sell them something, pick their pockets, rob them, etc. But nothing bad ever happened. All the people wanted was to greet them and chat a bit. In the end, the great gift that Guyana gave me was to open my eyes to the simple pleasure of being around friendly people. When retirement time comes, I think I will look around the Caribbean. You can live very cheap, be a reasonable flight to the kids wherever they happen to be in the US and spend your days surrounded by people who are just really pleasant.

[A-1 (imported)]

Thanks for sharing. Maybe an entrepreneurial group can form a successful retirement community there. Maybe we can keep it from becoming rotten if we try...