First order of business...Pictures! I posted a few from Guyana, then broke my hard drive so I lost a few dozen that I'd taken since then (and thousands of others...sigh), and then went out and took a few more pictures and posted them, so now you can view them all on Facebook right HERE!
Also, here's the latest of what we've been working on at the Imam Bacchus Library - a video I directed with some of our library regulars, right HERE!
But don't forget to come back to read the rest of this blog when you're done. I promise, it's really interesting!
***
About a month ago, the world celebrated a holiday that I still can't believe exists, let alone is fairly widely known: International Talk Like a Pirate Day. When I first heard of ITLaPD, it was in college, and I figured it was just some silly Internet meme thing. I thought the idea was totally dumb, so in equally dumb protest, I decided that since I was a sort of pirate myself – an avid ignorer of online copyright infringement laws, who downloaded movies, music, and software faster than a clipper on the high seas – I would try to get as many of my friends as possible on board with an alternative International Talk Like Jake Day. As a result, quite a few of them spent the day saying "dude" a lot, while mumbling their speech in as deep a voice as they could muster, and some even went as far as adopting the bouncy gait that apparently everyone but me knew I had. It was, in my own humble and probably wrong opinion, the greatest celebration of Pirate culture I'd ever borne witness to.
Until now.
Enter Guyana, a nation that boasts not only friendly neighborhood piracy, but even federally-funded acts of intellectual property theft that have become one of the most controversial matters of state policy in quite some time.
In the first instance, we have a sort of Robin Hood-esque piracy, where folks steal from the rich/government, and giving to the poor, ie,, themselves. Guyana is a country that has distinct rainy and dry seasons. In the rainy season, it's a good idea to carry an umbrella around with you if you plan to be outside and there's more than one cloud in the sky – a rainstorm could come in hard and fast from off the coast in a matter of minutes, drench you through the knickers and down to the soul, and sail off before you even knew what hit you. But in the dry season, well, it's dry. The dirt cracks, the heat heats up, and the water runs out.
And when the water runs out, according to my landlord, the water company refuses to pump water out to their customers, so houses don't get any. Perhaps the locals would be more sympathetic if there were really no water and the whole system truly had to shut down; but the water company, while only sending a sub-minimal amount of water each day to houses, if they send any at all, continues to charge each house the same rate as usual. (It could also simply be a matter of too little pressure, but charging for water than nobody is getting is certainly grounds for anger.)
So what do the angry, thirsty locals do? An independent water-piracy scheme that could easily be the basis for a less-interesting, low-budget sequel to "Chinatown." Using household electrical pumps, they suck water right from the source and into their house. When he told me about this, I was both mildly outraged and pretty amused too. Where does the water company get off not sending us water? Don't they know how bad people smell if they can't get a shower in this weather? And if they really don't have water, then how are we still getting any? And what will happen to them if all the local water-piracy starts to take its toll? All I know for sure is that when I hear my landlord flip on the motor, I dash into the bathroom to fill my 30 gallon bucket and take a shower, just in case it's another 2 days before I can actually get a decent water supply.
My landlord warned me that this is illegal, and while virtually everyone here on the coast does it, I shouldn't tell anyone lest the wrong people hear. Except if the government wants to crack down on local piracy, they have to first deal with their own state-sponsored-piracy hullabaloo. In a scandal that was all over the local papers recently, the Guyanese government had been shopping around for the best deal on school textbooks. They wanted the cheapest way to get the most students the best education. After apparently very little research, half-hearted negotiation, and total disregard for federal law, Caribbean law, and the International Berne Convention, they decided that photocopied, pirated textbooks produced and sold by independant vendors around Georgetown, Guyana's capital, was the way to go.
Now, as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I'm not really supposed to publish or publicly demonstrate my opinion regarding government matters or local politics, so I can only say what I've heard from others and read in the papers. One common response seems to be, "Well there's a big !#%ing surprise!" The government here has earned itself a solid reputation for being totally untrustworthy and irreversibly corrupt, although it seems to me that shady, under-the-table negotiations and public declarations of piracy are two different things. I mean, let me be clear here, there have been recorded public statements and press conferences where state officials, like Cabinet Secretary Roger Luncheon for one, have said outright that their main priorities are giving their children a good education while saving money, international law be damned. There have been claims from government spokesmen that the photocopied textbooks cost 1/10 the price of the originals, although allegedly that figure is based on little more than what the committee responsible for this whole affair gleaned by asking a couple local shops how much they charge.
Naturally, there was a lot of backlash when this story broke a few weeks ago. Various publishing companies threatened lawsuits and boycotts, other countries wrote harsh indictments, and newspapers wrote editorials that basically amounted to, "I can't believe we seriously have to scold you for this. What are you, Government, an idiot?" Well, they might have a point. Based on what I've read and people I've talked to, it seems that virtually the only people in support of this policy (yes, it was actually declared a "policy") are the ones behind it. Even one local man whose opinion I asked said that it wasn't so much the actual piracy he minded – education is always a priority – but that the committee behind the decision didn't really do anything to negotiate with the publishers or distributors for a cheaper wholesale or at-cost contract. They just assumed that buying pirated books for schools would be cheaper, so they went ahead with it.
One of the biggest criticisms against this policy, which to be fair has since been overturned by the Federal Court's coup decision to actually uphold the law against the politicians, is the example it sets. Do the ends justify the means? Should the government brashly declare that it will happily break the law for the good of its people? And the irony at heart of the issue: what will the children learn from this? There is already such a wide acceptance of copyright piracy in this country because of how few laws exist to prevent it, even legitimate general stores only offer bootleg CDs and DVDs. In fact, many of the stores that sold bootleg textbooks have stopped doing so at the insistence of various publishers, but happily continue to offer the latest in black-market music and movie releases.
In a recent local newspaper article about a new multiplex movie theater that will be built in Georgetown, the focus was not so much about the theater itself, but how it would affect the local black-market DVD business. Most of those interviewed were optimistic: bootlegs are cheaper, and a lot of people prefer to watch movies in the comfort of their own home, and aren't interested in braving the crowds and noise of a public theater. The very fact that this article was written the way it was, placing bootleggers as the victims the way American independent stores are seen as victims of Wal*Mart and the like, implies that the outrage over the textbook piracy issue is hypocritical. If the locals can do it and nobody hassles them, why can't the State? And yet, despite rampant corruption and unreliability in the government, the Guyanese people still seem to hold their leaders to a higher moral standard. At least they haven't given up hope.
Also, here's the latest of what we've been working on at the Imam Bacchus Library - a video I directed with some of our library regulars, right HERE!
But don't forget to come back to read the rest of this blog when you're done. I promise, it's really interesting!
***
About a month ago, the world celebrated a holiday that I still can't believe exists, let alone is fairly widely known: International Talk Like a Pirate Day. When I first heard of ITLaPD, it was in college, and I figured it was just some silly Internet meme thing. I thought the idea was totally dumb, so in equally dumb protest, I decided that since I was a sort of pirate myself – an avid ignorer of online copyright infringement laws, who downloaded movies, music, and software faster than a clipper on the high seas – I would try to get as many of my friends as possible on board with an alternative International Talk Like Jake Day. As a result, quite a few of them spent the day saying "dude" a lot, while mumbling their speech in as deep a voice as they could muster, and some even went as far as adopting the bouncy gait that apparently everyone but me knew I had. It was, in my own humble and probably wrong opinion, the greatest celebration of Pirate culture I'd ever borne witness to.
Until now.
Enter Guyana, a nation that boasts not only friendly neighborhood piracy, but even federally-funded acts of intellectual property theft that have become one of the most controversial matters of state policy in quite some time.
In the first instance, we have a sort of Robin Hood-esque piracy, where folks steal from the rich/government, and giving to the poor, ie,, themselves. Guyana is a country that has distinct rainy and dry seasons. In the rainy season, it's a good idea to carry an umbrella around with you if you plan to be outside and there's more than one cloud in the sky – a rainstorm could come in hard and fast from off the coast in a matter of minutes, drench you through the knickers and down to the soul, and sail off before you even knew what hit you. But in the dry season, well, it's dry. The dirt cracks, the heat heats up, and the water runs out.
And when the water runs out, according to my landlord, the water company refuses to pump water out to their customers, so houses don't get any. Perhaps the locals would be more sympathetic if there were really no water and the whole system truly had to shut down; but the water company, while only sending a sub-minimal amount of water each day to houses, if they send any at all, continues to charge each house the same rate as usual. (It could also simply be a matter of too little pressure, but charging for water than nobody is getting is certainly grounds for anger.)
So what do the angry, thirsty locals do? An independent water-piracy scheme that could easily be the basis for a less-interesting, low-budget sequel to "Chinatown." Using household electrical pumps, they suck water right from the source and into their house. When he told me about this, I was both mildly outraged and pretty amused too. Where does the water company get off not sending us water? Don't they know how bad people smell if they can't get a shower in this weather? And if they really don't have water, then how are we still getting any? And what will happen to them if all the local water-piracy starts to take its toll? All I know for sure is that when I hear my landlord flip on the motor, I dash into the bathroom to fill my 30 gallon bucket and take a shower, just in case it's another 2 days before I can actually get a decent water supply.
My landlord warned me that this is illegal, and while virtually everyone here on the coast does it, I shouldn't tell anyone lest the wrong people hear. Except if the government wants to crack down on local piracy, they have to first deal with their own state-sponsored-piracy hullabaloo. In a scandal that was all over the local papers recently, the Guyanese government had been shopping around for the best deal on school textbooks. They wanted the cheapest way to get the most students the best education. After apparently very little research, half-hearted negotiation, and total disregard for federal law, Caribbean law, and the International Berne Convention, they decided that photocopied, pirated textbooks produced and sold by independant vendors around Georgetown, Guyana's capital, was the way to go.
Now, as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I'm not really supposed to publish or publicly demonstrate my opinion regarding government matters or local politics, so I can only say what I've heard from others and read in the papers. One common response seems to be, "Well there's a big !#%ing surprise!" The government here has earned itself a solid reputation for being totally untrustworthy and irreversibly corrupt, although it seems to me that shady, under-the-table negotiations and public declarations of piracy are two different things. I mean, let me be clear here, there have been recorded public statements and press conferences where state officials, like Cabinet Secretary Roger Luncheon for one, have said outright that their main priorities are giving their children a good education while saving money, international law be damned. There have been claims from government spokesmen that the photocopied textbooks cost 1/10 the price of the originals, although allegedly that figure is based on little more than what the committee responsible for this whole affair gleaned by asking a couple local shops how much they charge.
Naturally, there was a lot of backlash when this story broke a few weeks ago. Various publishing companies threatened lawsuits and boycotts, other countries wrote harsh indictments, and newspapers wrote editorials that basically amounted to, "I can't believe we seriously have to scold you for this. What are you, Government, an idiot?" Well, they might have a point. Based on what I've read and people I've talked to, it seems that virtually the only people in support of this policy (yes, it was actually declared a "policy") are the ones behind it. Even one local man whose opinion I asked said that it wasn't so much the actual piracy he minded – education is always a priority – but that the committee behind the decision didn't really do anything to negotiate with the publishers or distributors for a cheaper wholesale or at-cost contract. They just assumed that buying pirated books for schools would be cheaper, so they went ahead with it.
One of the biggest criticisms against this policy, which to be fair has since been overturned by the Federal Court's coup decision to actually uphold the law against the politicians, is the example it sets. Do the ends justify the means? Should the government brashly declare that it will happily break the law for the good of its people? And the irony at heart of the issue: what will the children learn from this? There is already such a wide acceptance of copyright piracy in this country because of how few laws exist to prevent it, even legitimate general stores only offer bootleg CDs and DVDs. In fact, many of the stores that sold bootleg textbooks have stopped doing so at the insistence of various publishers, but happily continue to offer the latest in black-market music and movie releases.
In a recent local newspaper article about a new multiplex movie theater that will be built in Georgetown, the focus was not so much about the theater itself, but how it would affect the local black-market DVD business. Most of those interviewed were optimistic: bootlegs are cheaper, and a lot of people prefer to watch movies in the comfort of their own home, and aren't interested in braving the crowds and noise of a public theater. The very fact that this article was written the way it was, placing bootleggers as the victims the way American independent stores are seen as victims of Wal*Mart and the like, implies that the outrage over the textbook piracy issue is hypocritical. If the locals can do it and nobody hassles them, why can't the State? And yet, despite rampant corruption and unreliability in the government, the Guyanese people still seem to hold their leaders to a higher moral standard. At least they haven't given up hope.
