Not over the hill yet

We are in danger of finishing a meeting on time.  It’s the end of a long day of note taking, roleplay activities, group discussions, and more note taking for the region’s Head Teachers.  The Regional Education Officer winds up her speech and I get ready to stand for the last verse of the national anthem, the usual finish to any meeting.  But no – there’s something else that wasn’t on the agenda.  I had been wondering why I had seen one of the recently retired head teachers lurking at the back.  Surely head teacher meetings are not so much fun you would want to keep coming after retirement?

It turns out that a group of the head teachers have put together a special programme to honour two of their recently retired colleagues.  The retirement age here is 55, but from their appearance and energy levels you would put both ladies in their early forties.  They are dazzling in coordinated red and black attire.  The programme includes heartfelt and tear-stained speeches, poems, songs, an acrostic – ‘R is for robust, rambunctious, resplendent Rosie’ – and a dramatic skit.  The love and respect felt for the retirees is palpable.

Finally comes the giving of gifts.  Two male head teachers have the task of presenting the tokens of appreciation – a set of jewelled gold earrings each.  Rose, known for bringing laughter, warmth and a wonderful line in topical poems to liven up every meeting, is up first. She removes her earrings and tilts her head to let her presenter carefully begin putting the new pair in.  The room collectively holds its breath as the heavily emotional proceedings of the afternoon come to a head.

Rose, always blessed with perfect timing, chips in:

“Now we see if he knows fi find de hole.”

The resulting shrieks of laughter must have been audible in England.

"They all look the same."

White people all look the same.
Cows all look the same.
Chinese food all tastes the same.
Reality TV shows are all the same.
Football matches are always the same.
All X looks/tastes/sounds/smells the same

It is interesting being on the receiving end of this for a change.  Despite living in a town with a total of probably less than five white men at any given time, I am nonetheless often mistaken for somebody else.  This is a common experience for lots of the volunteers here.  Due to the complicated history of Guyana since independence, outside of the capital and a few tourist hot spots, white bais and gyals are a rare sight here.  So to many Guyanese, we all look the same.

If you hear this kind of statement from an English person talking about their two Indian colleagues you would (and probably quite rightly) think 'racist'. But nonetheless, they are telling the truth. People of a race that you are not used to seeing often do, literally, all look the same. To you. Just like to the elderly classical music fan, punk rock all sounds the same, to the beer connoisseur all red wine tastes the same, and to the city dweller all cows look the same. But to the punk, the sommelier and the farmer there is a world of difference between bands, wines or cows.

A nice aspect of travel is that you get to experience your perception of the world around you change as your mind creates new categories and relationships to make sense of your new surroundings.  I recently re-listened to one of my first Dancehall CDs, and what sounded repetitive and impenetrable on first listen is now a connected world of vocal styles, recognisable riddims and emotional associations.  One of the hardest things when you are new in the country is that you meet many, many people who all remember you, but at that point many of them, to you, look the same.  As time goes on, the differences become clearer and the categories in your mind get more detailed and finely drawn every day. The change is too gradual to notice, but dramatic when you look back to your first impressions.

A quick google tells me this is called the 'own race bias' or 'cross race effect' (the internet really is amazing - i searched for 'they all look the same psychology' and found that out in seconds). Wikipedia tells me that this effect has been studied extensively, and studies show it may be responsible for around 30% of failed negotiations between English and Chinese businesses. I am sure that the similar 'cross music/literature/taste/species' effects are responsible for all sorts of misunderstandings, distrust and dislike between different ages, classes or social groups within countries too.

So - a late new year's resolution for everyone: take the time to investigate some food, music, people, language, sport or animal that all smells, tastes, looks, sounds or feels the same to you. You might be surprised.

PS: I managed to get cognitive science, food, music, learning, wikipedia and Guyana all into one post. Jackpot!

PPS: This is an interesting and entertainingly named paper on the subject - apparently the cross-race effect disappears for angry faces. Maybe when first meeting people of a different race you should ask them nicely to pull an angry face? On second thoughts, perhaps not. You might get a real angry face. The disturbing implication of this is that we instinctively see people of a different race as an 'out group', and therefore potentially threatening.

Mix of 2010

This is a mix with my personal choices of the Guyana tunes of the last year.  It is mostly a pretty accurate picture of what I’ve been hearing this year, with a few personal favourites thrown in.  Some tracks are included because I love them, and some because they were inescapable.  Some are a bit of both (Rum and Redbull, please stand up). And some popular tunes have been left out - the floppy haired teenager that sounds like a girl was also inescapable, but I you’ll be pleased to know I have kept this 100% Bieber free. However, it was prepared in a factory that also handles Black Eye Peas and Shakira, so be careful.

It's mostly Soca, Dancehall and Reggae with a little hint of Chutney. I was going to write some posts about each type of music but that's what Wikipedia is for.  I'll post some more in depth mixes of each style if you all are interested.

 DOWNLOAD MIX

Tracklist:

1.      Bill Withers – Lean on Me

2.      Wayne Wonder and Frisco Kid – Dreamland (Old Dancehall)

3.      Baby Cham – The Mass (Old Dancehall)

4.      Voicemail – Laptop (Dancehall)

5.      Terror Fabulous Ft Nadine Sutherland – Action (Old Dancehall)

 This takes me back to dancing to a soundsystem on the main street last Christmas Eve. The bit where the drums drop out and the bass goes wobbly made me determined to find a copy. I love this style of older Dancehall.

6.      Buju Banton Ft Caron Gonslaves – No Second Class (Old Dancehall)

7.      Mr Vegas – Mi Believe (Dancehall)

8.      Iyaz – Replay (Dancehall Remix)

9.      Konshens – Pretty Devil (Dancehall)

Reminds me of a big crowd watching two toddlers showing off their disturbingly good wining skills at the boxing day lime in Georgetown at the end of 2009.

10.  Vybz Kartel – Virginity (Dancehall)

 I had a shock when this came on in a shared car (like a taxi that picks up passengers as it goes) with two little kids sitting next to me and nobody batted an eyelid.  But then I never understood the words to ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes To Hollywood when I was growing up, so maybe it isn’t as bad as it seems. It is amazing (and worrying, considering much of the content) seeing how many kids know every song word for word.

11.  Rhianna – Rudeboy (Dancehall Mix)

12.  Rhianna - Rudeboy (Skinnyboy Reggae Remix)

I first heard this remix on a minibus coming back from some school visits, at the magical time of day when the sun is low in the sky and golden light shimmers across the ricefields.  As a result I like it far more than I should.

13.  Beres Hammond – No Apology (Reggae)

14.  Tarrus Riley – She’s Royal (Reggae)

15.  Fantan Mojah – Most high Jah (Reggae)

I love the high synth part on this riddim.

16.  Sanchez – Feel Good All Over (Reggae)

17.  Morgan Heritage – Down by the River (Reggae)

18.  Sanchez – Pretty Girl (Reggae)

19.  Jah Cure – Call on Me (Reggae)

20.  Jah Cure Ft Alison Hinds – Call on Me (Soca Version)

21.  Peter Ram – Real Tight Ft Che’Nelle (Soca)

22.  Lil Rick – One Juk For The Carnival (Soca)

23.  Rupee – What happens in de party (Soca)

What happens in de party stays in de party. My lips are sealed.

24.  Soca Elvis – Rum Don’t Bother Me (Chutney)

There is currently an epidemic of Chutney (Indian Calypso/Soca) records about drinking rum. Another great title is ‘You Always Knew I Was A Drinker’. In general, Chutney songs are either about drinking, wining or cheating;  Reggae songs are about making love, losing love, Jah, or smoking weed; Soca songs are about partying and wining; and Dancehall songs are about clothes, money, drinking, cheating, daggering (more on this later) or fucking.

25.  Patrice Roberts – Wukking Up (Soca)

26.  Machel Montano – Wining Season (Soca)

27.  Peter Ram - Pumping (Remix) (Soca)

One of my favourite Soca tunes. It baffles me that Soca has never really crossed over in the UK (with the exception of ‘Feeling Hot’).  I forsee a future England where Soca is in the ascendancy, and whining lessons are the new Salsa lessons. Every thirty-something single in the land will be there every week, with an instructor telling the class ‘for the next four beats, wiggle your arse into his crotch side by side… now up and down… and round in a circle… now put your hands on your knees and push back… now hands to the floor and right leg in the air …’

28.  Blak Ryno – Come a Mi Yard (Dancehall)

29.  Vybz Kartel – Bicycle (Dancehall)

30.  Beenie Man – Under Curfew (Dancehall)

31.  Mavado – House Top (Dancehall)

32.  Vybz Kartel – Gyal for Free (Dancehall)

33.  Demarco – Run Him Out (Dancehall)

34.  Serani Ft Ding Dong – Skip to Ma Lu (Dancehall)

35.  Voicemail – Style and Swagger (Dancehall)

36.  G Whizz – My Girl (Dancehall)

37.  Gyptian - Hold You (Dancehall)

For the first half of this year, every other car going past my house was playing this record. The plinky piano riff is burnt forever into my brain.

38.  Vybz Kartel – Straight Jeans and Fitted (Dancehall)

39.  Trevor Off Key – Fake Jeans Admit It (Dancehall)

40.  Bounty Killer and Elephant Man – This is How We Do It (Dancehall)

41.  Vybz Kartel – Clarks (Dancehall)

When I was growing up, Clarks were sensible school shoes that your slightly overprotective parents bought for you because they believed the marketing spiel that we all needed shoes exactly fitted to the width of our feet or we would grow up with crippled, twisted, pancake shaped lumps of flesh at the end of our legs.  Dancehall artists are obviously also very careful to have properly fitted shoes.

42.  Beenie Man – Nuh Stress Me Out (Dancehall)

43.  Beenie Man – I’m OK (Dancehall)

44.  Beenie Man – Rum and Red Bull (Dancehall)

This was huge for the last few months of the year. I included a Guyana style spinback for you all. Guyanese DJing is doing this five times a song, shouting over the mike every two seconds, and singing badly over the chorus. When Beenie Man’s set was cut short by a torrential downpour, he played these tunes and then quickly left the stage. By this point the audience had either left, hidden underneath the stage itself, or crammed themselves into the side of the beer tents desperately trying to escape the deluge.

45.  Richie Loops – In My Cup (Dancehall)

46.  Ricky Jai – Bar Man (Chutney)

47.  Busy Signal – Up in Her Belly (Dancehall)

48.  Machel Montano – Thiefin (Soca)

49.  Mr Dale – Soca Junky (Soca)

My other favourite Soca tune.

50.  RDX – Daggering (Soca)

Daggering is the only dance style I have ever heard of that has allegedly caused a spateof broken penises.  I have heard it will be featured on next year’s Strictly Come Dancing.

51.  Spice – Jim Screechie (Dancehall)

52.  Baby Tash – Believe Me (Dancehall)

53.  Elephant Man – One More Whine (Dancehall)

I love any dancehall tune that rips off old house records, especially Daft Punk ones, especially with a punning title. I heard this coming out of a record shop and had to go in and buy it straight away. Can’t stop the whining.

54.  Laden – Time Fi Warm Up (Dancehall)

55.  Demarco – She Can’t Wait (Dancehall)

56.  Enur – Calabria 2008 (Dancehall)

57.  Swappi – Dis Gyal (Dancehall)

The new song of the moment. Non-music-geeks should skip to the next paragraph now. Music geeks still here? Good. It’s a Dancehall tune based on an old Claude Von Stroke remix! Superb. I’m hoping for one based on a minimal house record next.  Maybe one of those vocal versions of Marc Houle ‘Bay of Figs’ that Diplo used to play will catch on.  And I should plan to come back in two years, by which time Dubstep will have crossed over the Atlantic. That will be amazing. Dubstep Dancehall. On that subject … there’s a Dubsteppy tune on the new Kanye album. It’s great. As is the whole album. I realise I’m way behind the time on this, but it really is good. Have a listen.

58.  Donae’o and Problem Child - Party Hard (Soca)

I like the percussion combination beat and bassline to this, and the way it sounds borderline depressed whilst instructing you to party hard.  This will always remind me of the long, bumpy, dusty minibus rides to and from Lethem, Mahdia and Iwokorama after hearing it on repeat for a couple of those journeys.

59.  Major Lazer – Pon de Floor (Dancehall)

This took until the middle of this year to get really popular, since then and has been the song of choice for showing off your car soundsystem.

60.  Busy Signal/Major Lazer – Busy Medley (Dancehall)

61.  Black Eyed Peas – I Got a Feeling (Pop)

62.  Shakira – Waka Waka (Pop)

In terms of frequency that I have heard it, this is by far the song of the year. I must have heard this over a thousand times this year.  One school event alone counted for about a hundred plays, as the song was played for every child who came on stage for the fashion show and dance display.  I have absolutely no idea why it is so popular.

63.  Jah Cure – Unconditional Love (Reggae)

64.  Angel Doolas – You Trickster (Reggae)

The ‘Coming in from the Cold’ riddim that this song is based on has been huge all year and this is the version that has stood the test of time the best.  It reminds me of sitting at a friends house in Lethem while the whole Riddim CD – twelve or more songs based on the same backing track - was being played by the neighbours on repeat.  Lethem is near the Brazilian border, and since a new bridge was built across the river that crosses the border a large portion of the residents in the town are now Brazilian.  This means you hear a lot of Forra (???) music, a very repetitive and chirpy local style of Brazilian dance music. Traditional Forra is made with drums and accordion, but most of the modern stuff sounds like they have just left a cheap Casio keyboard on the ‘salsa’ rhythm. For half an hour. Then they stop and put it on again, slightly faster and in a different key. Even with dancing girls in little skirts to watch it is hard work – as noise coming from next door it is maddening.  A nice reggae riddim CD on repeat was a big relief, and suited the lazy feel of the hot, dusty savannah town.

65.  Tessanee Chin - I Want to Know What Love Is (Reggae)

Dan’s first law of Reggae Versions states that Eighty percent of songs in the world can be improved when covered in a reggae style. The second law states that the cheesier the original, the more it will be improved.  As the original to this is cheesier than the lovechild of a strong stilton and a ripe camembert sitting in a sauna on a hot day, this cover is as good as music gets. The brass in the chorus is just amazing.  I even quite enjoy the Disney style chord change near the end.  This song also stands in for all the cheesy eighties ballads that are frighteningly popular here.

Guyanese Christmas

When your body clock is trained by a grey and rainy England, time seems to stand still in the tropics. There are two seasons here - sunny and rainy.  A slight difference in temperature and frequency of showers are your only cues that the year is passing, other than that it's always hot all year round, it's sweaty all year round, and the sun rises at six and sets at six all year round.  Christmas therefore comes as a shock each year, and passes without you ever really feeling like it is actually there.

Christmas in Guyana comes with it's own set of traditions.  In the run up to the big day it is all about cleaning, changing your curtains, and putting up the decorations - which include all the tinsel, santas and fake trees that we know and love back home, with the addition of plenty of big, bright fake flowers.

Next up come the office parties.  These run pretty much the same as back home; a mountain of food gets eaten, the quiet one has a few too many drinks and shows their wild side, and at some point there will be a conga line.

And then Christmas Eve. You might expect this to be a quiet time for family, church and contemplation.  It isn't.  Chrismas Eve is one of the biggest and messiest nights out of the year.  Early in the evening it is all about shopping, liming, and getting your photo taken with Santa and Elmo in front of a Hannah Montana backdrop. As the evening progresses, the street gets busier, the soundsystems get louder and louder and everybody gets drunker.  There is a seamless transition from shopping with the family to wining, drinking and discharging your home-made aerosol flamethrowers. We wind up watching a spontaneous breakdance competition on the street, backed by a soundsystem made up of a car with a laptop sat on the bonnet and a pile of speakers on the roof, and accompanied by the sounds of bottles exploding under car wheels as they unwisely try to reverse out of their spots.

By Christmas morning my house is still shaking to the bass from the bar over the road, and Main Street is a wasteland of broken bottles. Christmas day traditions are food based - Pepperpot, Black Cake, Ginger Beer, Garlic Pork, apples, grapes and walnuts. Black cake is a heavy dark fruitcake and Pepperpot is a delicious Amerindian beef stew, made from casreep, which is similar to molasses but is one of the amazing variety of foods that can be created from Cassava, a starchy root vegetable that is the staple diet for Amerindians living in the interior (explaining life in Guyana sometimes leads to a neverending chain of smaller explanations; the role of Cassava is a long post in itself).

Boxing day in Georgetown is another big party day, with the Big Main Lime bringing people and sound systems from all across Guyana.  In Berbice it is a choice between sleeping off your christmas indulgences and going to the races.  I'll follow up with a bit more on the races in a future post...

Happy new year everyone!

Pointless Guyana related lists

Clearing up half-written blog posts from a while back - here's some pointless Guyana related lists.

Noteworthy facts I was told about Berbice (my region of Guyana) before coming here:

1. There's lots of farming
2. It's the hippy region of Guyana
3. There's a relatively nice beach

Noteworthy facts I wasn't told about Berbice (my region of Guyana) before coming here:

1. It has the biggest number of mosquitos
2. It has the most vicious mosquitos
3. It gets the most blackouts

Most impressive types of roadkill

1. Caiman (alligator)
2. Plagues of frogs that have apparently fallen from the sky carpeting the road for miles
3. Cows 

Things ants love to eat

1. Honey
2. Jam
3. Flour
4. Biscuits
5. Bread
6. Sink Plugs
7. etc

Things ants won't go eat even if you leave them open on the worktop all day with a sign saying 'free and food, come and get it' and hot lady ants employed to entice passers by

1. Marmite

Good old days

On a roll today, one proper post, one 'this thought popped in to my head' one.  The thought?

You know when people look back to 'the good old days' - where there was no health and safety, no speed traps, you could give a child a clip around the ear, when men were men and women were women?

I live there. (Disclaimer: This is an exaggeration. Many attitudes are changing rapidly in Guyana. I would love to give VSO and similar organizations some credit for this, but probably pirated TV showing Oprah every day is what we should thank. But in essence, this is the situation.)

There is definitely another side to the rose-tinted silver-lined sepia-tinged memory.

• No health and safety - Lots of people die and get horrifically injured at work. Lots of them. Frequently. Really badly.
• No speed traps/traffic calming/speed bumps - Seriously, I will never complain about this again. Traffic here is deadly.  For a tiny country, the number of people being killed in road accidents is terrifying.
• You can give a child a clip round the ear - I'll be (a little too) honest here. Corporal punishment works. Kids here are better behaved and more polite than you could hope to find in England. But, and this is a big but, they grow up learning that strength gives you the right to beat someone who doesn't agree with you. So men beat their wives, wives beat their men, parents beat their kids and sometimes their parents, and nothing gets discussed.
• And men are men and women are women - so women are expected to cook, clean, take care of the babies, do everything to care for and treat their men, and men are expected to drink rum and come home late.  Gender equality has allowed many women to go to work now, but they still have to do all the housework, put up with infidelity and raise the children at the same time.

But some of the 'good old days' stuff is true.  People look after each other.  There is a real sense of community.  And children respect their elders.

Or at least they pretend to, for fear of licks...

Day in the life...

OK, getting back on the blogging wagon here. I'm going to change my attitude a bit to what i do here, so future posts may be a bit rough around the edges... I have decided to go for more posts, less trying to get them exactly right.

so ...

A few people have asked what exactly my work days are like here. That's a difficult question to answer - to take this week as an example, I've had:

• a day and a half spent planning, marking and organising in the office
• an impromptu speech to open a disability advocate for kids training
• a day facilitating a couple of sessions (including a completely impromptu STI awareness bit complete with very graphic photographs) for a parent conference at a primary school
• a day visiting teachers in schools

You may notice the word impromptu comes up quite a lot.  The best thing about the impromptu STI session is that I didn't even consider that this was a funny situation at the time.  Myself and another, newer volunteer were put in the position of having to give a talk about STIs, with no warning whatsoever, to thirty shell-shocked mothers, and I only realised this was out of the ordinary once my colleague pointed it out.  Guyana has made me un-surprisable.

Anyway, my day today was visiting schools.  I am working at the moment together with a Peace Corps volunteer who is mainly based in New Amsterdam Special Needs School.  Together we are running a series of workshops for primary school teachers, one from each school, looking at strategies to make schools more inclusive.  A combination of chalk-and-talk teaching, an overambitious curriculum, too many tests at a young age, and teachers with either little training, no training, or inappropriate training leads to a majority of pupils getting left behind, and leaving school with very limited basic skills. We are aiming to train one teacher in each primary school in the region with some strategies to involve more pupils. These teachers then in theory can train the other staff in their schools.  Today was a follow up visit to see a couple of those teachers in their own classrooms.

Both schools were over an hour from where I live on a minibus 'up the Corentyne' - towards the Corentyne river on the border with Suriname.  This takes you from the more urban areas of New Amsterdam and Rose Hall Town into more rural farming areas, where the main road is both a road and an area to graze cattle, dry rice, store piles of mud, and mix cement.  None of this road furniture stops the minibuses tearing along at ridiculous speeds on the wrong side of the road with Vybz Kartel blasting out of the speakers.

Both of the schools I visited today were a real breath of fresh air.  In each, the head teachers were working incredibly hard, and incredibly effectively, to make calm, structured learning environments and to give their teachers ideas to engage more pupils.  At one school, they were working to develop a Resource Centre in a building that had clearly been put up years ago with development money, but never staffed or made use of.

The teacher I saw in the next school had worked with a previous VSO volunteer, and had a wonderful attitude towards the children.  She believed, and showed through her teaching, that engaging the children positively through activities, games, stories and songs is the best way to get them to learn and behave well.  I saw a revision session where pupils were reading and answering questions together in pairs, and a phonics session punctuated by songs and silly actions. The fourty pupils, a previously struggling group with some challenging children with very disadvantaged backgrounds, were having fun and learning without realising it. And she was even using a couple of ideas from our workshops amongst plenty of her own!

I came away from today feeling terrified that we were about to run into a bull much more positive than I have for a while about the value and impact that VSO volunteers can have here.  Sometimes the challenges and obstacles, particularly at the level of policy and beauracracy, can make you wonder how big an impact we can really make. It is really heartening to see real evidence of ideas getting passed on, filtering in to everyday teaching and making a real difference.

Song of the moment: Beenie Man - I'm OK/Rum and Redbull

Postscript - therefore, please donate to VSO!  A re-adjustment of foreign aid policy has decreased their share of the British funding pie, so they do need support.  In my experience in Guyana, VSO are certainly one of the most effective organisations for helping people to help themselves without becoming dependent on outside aid.