Speaking Guyanese

Calling Guyana an English-speaking country is a bit like calling Jean-Claude Van Damme an actor.  Sure, J.C.V.D. has had a lion's share of feature films to his name and royalty checks to back them up, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't find a number of them pretty Van Damme entertaning, but as for him being an actor...

So with that point snidely made, I will acknowledge that Guyana is officially an anglophone country, and pretty much everyone I have run into so far can understand most of what I say, and speaks…well, that's the tricky part.  It's English.  It's also Creolese.  It's also got a bit of Hindi, depending on where they live.  And no matter what language it actually is, who I'm speaking to will make all the difference as to whether I understand any of it or not.

My pre-arrival impressions of Guyanese accents were based on one person I knew, and another I'd heard of.  The former was Mali's Peace Corps Medical Officer, who has a peculiar but delightful mix of influences in her accent.  It has the bright, musical quality of a British accent, with some delicate calypso exoticism, and is as clearly-toned as a tuning fork.  The latter example, I've only heard of through a married couple of family friends from back home, who were speaking of a Guyanese housekeeper they once employed.  When the wife mentioned that she had a hard time understanding her sometimes because of her unique way with English, her husband replied with smiling skepticism, "That was English?"

So far, my experience listening to people here has run the gamut from our dear doctor's charming lilt to an impregnable warble which plays by its own rules – or the few it has.  The difference is in whether or not they are speaking Standard English, the kind which is taught in schools, used in official business, and spoken on the TV and radio.  Standard English mostly sounds like a mild-to-heavy accent on a slightly goofy version of what you're reading right now.  There are some Guyanese who have spent time in U.S. or have at least watched a lot of our TV shows, and have American English pretty much nailed down.

To flavor the language, there are those who use the words which technically exist, but have been collecting cobwebs in the dusty corners of "my" language's attic.  I've never heard the word "shucks!" used so many times in anything written after the 1950's than I have hanging out with locals here.  And the other day, I was asked by a bus passenger crammed in next to me if his bag was "humbugging" me, which is not only incorrect, but bewilderingly so.  (This is on par with a dear friend of mine who speaks English fairly well as a second language, and who recently praised me as "an exorbitant writer," which she insisted made sense as a complement when literally translated back into her native German.)

It's when I hear Creolese thrown into the English, as is often done here, that I get stuck and wish I was back in Mali, where I can at least understand Bambara and some of its dialects better than I can the children and drunken fishermen I've encountered here – though my dad reminded me that incomprehensibility is a common trait amongst drunken fishermen the world over.

The problem with Creolese is two-fold.  First is the warped pronunciation of their vowels, which actually shares some occasional traits with the Irish accent (Cork in particular, it sounds to me), plus whatever other ethnic influence is local to the area, be it Indian, Caribbean, or British.  "Dog" sounds like "daeg," "Thursday" morphs into "Taarsdey," "hat" is worn as a "hyat," and I can't even figure out how to spell the other sounds they use.  The other hinderance is the language itself, which has English rules tossed into a blender, along with some Hindi vocabulary in the areas with East Indian immigrant populations, and comes out sounding like the lost verses of "Day-O."

Unlike Haiti, which has standardized their version of Creole and made it their official language alongside French, Guyana still maintains English as it's only formal language, and unfortunately, not everyone knows the difference.  In preparation for my library and literacy outreach program I'll be working on while I'm here, I've been observing and interviewing a lot of teachers from Nursery school through high school, and one of the common themes that comes up is that not all the students learn to distinguish between the Creolese they speak and the English they're supposed to be restricted to in school.  In some cases, even the teachers blur or cross the line, in conversation and in lessons.

As a result, here is some of what I saw in middle-school age Remedial English writing exams.  From a more literate student in the class, there was, in immaculate handwriting, "I will like to inviting you to go fishing with us. My Father buy a new fishing boat we will go at the backdam to fishing.  A nice cook wite fish and went we finshend cook we will eat and rast a little and went we finshend we will go back fishing."  This actually sounds, to my untrained mind, like something I might hear a child say verbatim if they were to narrate this imaginary letter to me, so it's no surprise that this is how a student with poor understanding of the difference between proper and colloquial language would write.

I fear I'll have little opportunity to make headway into he local dialects here.  I'm only here for six months, and most of the people I hang out with actually do speak English fairly well, though there probably a good reason I don't spend much time with the folks I can't understand.  As for adopting my own language to fit theirs, well…no.  In Mali, I was more than happy to go around speaking Bambara, because I had no real choice if I wanted to communicate.  Just imagining myself trying to adapt my language to fit in here makes me giggle at the thought.  It's one thing to watch a Hasidic New Yorker doing a musical imitation of Burning Spear, but for me to incorporate that into everyday speech is just too much of an anatopism for my own dignity to handle.  Sorry folks, but I'm proud of my own Phluphia mumble, and I intend to keep it!

Introducing, Guyana!

Just about every person over the age of 30 to whom I informed of my impending trip to Guyana mentioned the one thing they knew about the country: Kool-Aid suicide cults.  Now granted, that was more than I knew about the place before I was accepted to work there in my latest Peace Corps Response gig.  In fact, like most of my other under-30 friends, I was barely familiar with what continent it was on.  The first thing I learned about Guyana, other than its location, was that it's distinguishing landmark was the inspiration for "Paradise Falls" in Disney's Up.  I love that movie, and I think the first 15 minute segment is one of the greatest love stories ever filmed, which is why it seemed rather unfair for the second thing I learned about Guyana to be the 1978 Jonestown Massacre, in which over 900 people died of suicide poisoning at the hands of Jim Jones and his People's Temple cult.

However, the first things I saw firsthand in Guyana happened as the captain woke the passengers up at 5:00am to inform the us that we were beginning our descent, and the sky above the clouds was a brilliant psychedelic rainbow horizon, unlike anything I've ever seen.  A band of ROYGBIV stretched in a thick line across the sky, darkening down into a flat plain of tarnished-silver colored clouds.  As we descended into the clouds and the sun rose higher above the horizon, we flew through an iridescent golden-gray nebula of wisps and puffs, broke through the bottom, and saw an endless deciduous-green shag carpet, like something from the Disco era.  I've never seen, at least from that height, such thick jungle, such an impenetrable canopy of treetops which were only occasionally sliced open by the dull glitter of murky rivers.  The captain announced that we were about to land, and thanked us for our patronage, and with about four seconds and 100 feet of altitude to spare, the jungle broke and the runway began not an inch too soon.

We were picked up at the airport by Flavio, the PCR supervisor, who drove us through the capital, Georgetown, to our hotel, and then to the PC Bureau.  It was my first glimpse of anything in the Western Hemisphere south of Florida, and looked as new to me as Mali did my first time there.  Most of the houses have a similar look; squat and wide, with almost flat, barely triangular roofs, and virtually no buildings exceeding five stories, except for St Georges' Anglican Cathedral, which was once the tallest wooden building in the world.  They also drive on the "wrong" side of the road (as opposed to the right side), which was a tough transition to make in terms of not completely freaking out when I would see a car barreling straight towards us on our right side.

The next few days flew by in a tizzy of orientations and introductions to just about everyone on PC Guyana staff.  Elizabeth, the other Response volunteer who arrived with me (and also happens to come from a Philadelphia suburb near mine), and I were given the skinny on the rules and administrative issues, most of which were familiar, if slightly different from our previous PC posts.  For example, the idea of having weekends off from work and not counting towards vacation days as we travel is different from Mali where we are considered to be officially always on duty, though not necessarily always working.  We also were warned of the new social protocols we would have to get used to, such as how inviting a girl into my house is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from inviting them into bed, regardless of how innocent my intentions might be (and I am nothing if not a man of innocent intentions!).

After three days of orientation, plus a "safety and security" tour of Georgetown, I was ready to be sent off to my site.  We took a taxi to the Essequibo River, which we were then obliged to cross the water by way of a half-hour speedboat ride weaving through islands and bouncing on the waves.  We landed in a town called Supenaam, which I am disappointed to admit was not actually called Superman, and then drove off to the town of Affiance.

Affiance is located right on the coast, but sadly, the beaches are mostly just grassy mud and shallow water.  However, the whole area is absolutely gorgeous, with the strip of towns along the coast, of which Affiance is one, being just a long row of houses and businesses along a single main road, and nothing beyond that road but the sea on one side and rice fields on the other.  The palm trees are plentiful, the livestock are ubiquitous, the heavy gray rainy season clouds loom dramatically, and walking down the street, I keep getting a strong but anonymous scent of something that smells just like Mali, but with a slightly curried flavor to it, which I assume is on account of the predominantly East Indian population here.

It's been less than a week but I already have a million thoughts of this new home of mine and plenty that I want to write.  In consideration to your attention span, I think I will just leave off here, and update you all next week after I've begun my work at the Imam Bacchus Library.

But before you go, I have some great news!  If you thought something like a military coup d'etat and temporary evacuation of the executive staff meant the end of Mali Health Organizing Project, think again!  The local staff are still on the ground in Sikoroni, Bamako, carrying out their normal routines and continuing to implement their programs.  They have a weekly radio program dealing with health issues that gets heard by potentially millions of listeners.  Their Community Health Workers are still diligently making weekly visits to families to check up on the health of the Action For Health program members and training them in early intervention for illness control.  And my pet project in the short time I worked for them, the Three-Legged Stool of Nutrition, was used during a recent nutrition fair which you can see at their blog.  In order for MHOP to keep maximizing their great work, they need funding, and this month, they are running a special fundraising campaign, which you can see all the details about on their newly redesigned website, malihealth.org.  I don't like to plug things needlessly on this blog, be cause let's face it, it's mostly about shameless self-promotion, but MHOP is really a great organization with some creative and capable people running it, and they're not just working to improve the health situation in one part of Bamako, but to create a template for other similar NGOs to learn from.  So donate, already!