The New Pirates of the Caribbean...and Pictures!

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!

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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.

The Best of Chef Ablaye's Makeshift Fusion Cuisine

I think they say that necessity is the mother of invention.  I tend to misquote things like that pretty often, so I could be wrong, but since you're reading my blog, I assume that you're more interested in what I say than what they say.  In any case, necessity has always proven to be a powerful force in my creative process, and nowhere is this more evident than my cooking.  I began my education on the subject in college, using the best in canned and defrost-able goods to give myself cheap and tasty sustenance, but my true prowess over makeshift-cooking was forged in the Peace Corps, where limited ingredients and lack of certain nutrients forced me to stretch the limits of my palate's comfort zone to provide myself with a diet that wouldn't leave me bored, gagging, or malnourished.  I'm sure that my opinion of many of my "successes" have been tainted by limited variety and lowered standards, but I think that there are a few gems among my repertoire which some of you folks might appreciate too.  These recipes have simple ingredients, are pretty easy to make, and were mostly all made up as I was going along (so don't expect any kind of exact measurements, short of what I was able to eyeball at the time of cooking).  So for the first time in print, and just in time for the Jewish holiday season, I bring you "The Best of Chef Ablaye's Makeshift Fusion Cuisine."

PanJakes

The idea of an alternative pancake named after myself came about one day while I was in my village in Mali.  I wanted pancakes, but I didn't have any milk or sugar, and the clouds were gushing water like God's bidet, so going shopping wasn't an enticing prospect.  I could either make the blandest pancakes ever with flour, water, oil, and the one egg I had left, or I could break out my Mad Scientist Chef's Cap and improvise.  I took a look in my dry goods chest, and sitting right on top was one of the most versatile ingredients in the improv-chef's collection: dry-packaged vegetable soup mix, courtesy of Mom and her care packages.  Now, I am not a fan of brothy soups – I like to feel like I'm eating food, not drinking it.  These little 10 gram packets of soup powder with tiny nibs of dried carrot, green bean, tomato, and corn did not a meal make.

But lo and behold, I was able to find a few good uses for the stock after all.  One of them is to toss it into a pot with rice and water and make some vegetable soup-flavored rice, which is quite good.  Even more surprisingly tasty was my idea on that soggy and hungry day: make it into a PanJake!  I won't bother with the specifics of the recipe here, because if you don't know how to make a pancake, there are half a million folks on Google who will gladly explain it, and my recipe, at least the first time I made it, is precisely the same as any of them, only instead of sugar and milk, you toss in the soup mix and water.  No other spices or salt are needed, since the mix takes care of that.  If your soup mix doesn't come with tiny dried chunks of veggie, you should dice up some yourself to add flavor, and a few nutrients.

I will add that the second time I made my veggie-soup PanJakes, I tried something a bit different.  I used the same recipe, only with more flour, less water, more baking powder, and less heat under the frying pan.  This allowed me to make a thicker, fluffier PanJake, which could be cut in half and used as a flavorful sandwich bun - it goes great with tuna or cold cuts.  I've also since expanded on the idea of the PanJake to make it not just different sizes and consistencies, but different flavors too, based on whatever soup mix or other ingredients I have available: Cream of Mushroom PanJakes, Fried Tortilla-Style Curry PanJakes, Squash and Beef PanJakes (make sure to grate the squash very fine and either grind and cook or slow/pressure-cook the beef first so you can mince really tiny bits), and the other possibilities are only limited to your ingredients and daring.

Pumpkin Latkes

Well, these are basically the same as any other kind of latke, or potato pancake to you non Yiddish/German speakers.  What you're going to need first is a pumpkin.  I used a 1kg slice of pumpkin – about 1/6 of a whole large one – and that was plenty for a big lunch for me.  So if you want it to be a main course for the family, get one that's about 3-4 kg, or 6-8 lbs.  For the 1kg recipe, you also want a medium onion, some flour – I really couldn't tell you how much, but it might be around 1 cup  –  2 eggs, some oil, some garlic if you want (I didn't use any when I made this, but that's only because I didn't have any), salt, and of course, some sweet-yet-savory pumpkin-friendly spices, such as nutmeg, turmeric, coriander, peppercorn, and basil.

Grate the pumpkins, dice the onions, crack the eggs, drop in a few tablespoons of oil, toss in the spices, and mix the whole thing together.  Then, add flour until you get a consistency that's thin enough to glop into a pan, but thick enough that the liquid won't run around after you drop it in and turn into a PanJake.  There are two ways you can cook them now.  You can either do what I did and add oil to the mix and fry it on a dry teflon/non-stick pan, or you can keep the oil out of the mix and heat it up in the pan to fry the latkes in.  The problem with the latter method is that while it tastes a bit better, pumpkins seem to soak up oil more than other vegetables, so you're going to go through a lot of it, and my love-handles are showing a little too much love for that.  Either way, get the pan medium-high so that they have time to cook before they burn up, drop in blobs of the mix and flatten them out with a spoon or they will be much softer on the inside than the crust.  Fry 'er at will!

Cookup Rice, Jake-Style

This is my own version of a Guyanese dish which itself doesn't have any specific instructions, other than throw rice into a pot with a whole bunch of local ingredients like veggies, beans, fish, and some spices, and cook it up, all together.  It's simple even when locals make it, and mine is basically one variant based on my own years of culinary experience.  First, take rice and water and throw it in a pot, preparing to cook it the way you would always cook rice.  But before you put it on the fire, throw in small chunks of fish, curry powder (or similar spices that are used to make curry – I like coriander, turmeric, salt, plus some basil and rosemary) and coconut milk.  Coconut milk is actually one of the non-negotiable ingredients; it isn't proper Cookup without coconut milk.  If you don't have any fresh or canned, the powder works too but you have to wait until the water is hot before adding it.  If you want a bit more authenticity, soak some beans overnight and toss them in too, but I don't usually remember to do that.

While you're cooking the rice, chop up and sauté some other complimentary veggies like garlic, onions, eggplant, bell pepper, carrot, etc.  You want to cook them separately, because if there's one thing I learned while pulling kitchen-duty at Flo's house in Ireland (see my posts from May-July, 2011) it's that vegetables taste better when you roast them, grill them, sauté them, or do any damn thing at all to them besides boiling them.  You need to let them burn, just a teensy tiny bit so they can caramelize and release the sugars and richer flavors.  When the veggies are done, and just before the rice is finished, toss them into the pot so they can impart some of their flavor onto the rest of the rice, and wait for them to finish cooking.  Break out a glass of white rum and water, gather up some mosquitoes, put on the Hindi dance beats, and enjoy, Guyanese style!

Chef Ablaye's Chowder Philosophy

I said before that I don't like soup, but give me a good chowder, stew, cholent, or anything thick and murky, and I'm a happy man.  If I had to pick, I'd probably take a good cholent first to satisfy my Ashkenazic Jewish appetite, but the problem is that a proper cholent uses a lot of meat and barely, both of which can be scarce for Peace Corps Volunteers, and if you don't want to leave it cooking for the requisite 24 hours and use up all your gas, you might as well have a stew.  A stew is good too, but it strikes me as a cold weather food and I tend to do Peace Corps in very hot places.  Also, as I said, meat is rarely an option for me, and a stew without meat might as well just be soup, as far as I'm concerned.

That leaves my favorite fish and potato chowder recipe.  Chowder is perfect: quick to cook, cheap ingredients, and it uses one of my other favorite improv-cooking ingredients besides soup mix: milk powder!  That's right, milk that will never go bad, no matter how many miles there are between you and the nearest refrigerator!  (Just seal the bag or can, or the ants will have a nice picnic inside it.)  This is probably one of the easiest recipes I use: chop up the fish (remove the bones if there are any), chop up the veggies (which can be anything you want, but I like potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, maybe a tomato or two, and celery if I can find it), and put them in a pot.  Add water, but only enough to just cover the ingredients.  Add spices, like rosemary, basil, pepper, salt, and tarragon.  Boil until the potatoes are soft.  If the potatoes are done, you know the fish is done too, unless you cut giant chunks of fish and tiny bits of tater.  This is when you toss in the milk, or the milk powder, which I prefer to use since it's also a decent thickener.  You don't want to overcook the stuff in the pot or it will all fall apart and you won't know a chunk of fish from a carrot, so if everything's cooked and it's still too watery (as I said, I like it THICK), toss in some corn meal or flour and mix it really well.  And presto chango, you're a chowderhead!


Well, that's the best of what will most likely appeal to those of you who have ordinary folks who've never started a club with your PCV buddy called The Culinary Adventurers Club.  If you end up trying any of these recipes, let me know how they came out!  And if you have any good ones of your own that meet my criteria – cheap, stovetop-friendly, and yummy – send them to me as well.  Until then, as they say in Mali, na duminike!

How to Sell Education

It's September; which means it's Autumn; which means that as the season changes, the foliage transforms from verdant softness to technicolor crunch whose dry and crisp flavor matches the air, which chills the body, raising the goosebumps on flesh and the zippers on jackets.

Unless you're in Guyana, less than 500 miles from the Equator, where the only change in season is that it goes from hot to less hot (and a bit cool between 3 and 5 am), buggy to less buggy, and rainy to just humid.  But if there's one September constant between my native homeland of the U.S.A. and my current equatorial residence, it's that September is when all the little kiddies go back to school.

With school back in session, it's time to kick my work here at the Imam Bacchus Library into overdrive, and start doing some heavy-duty outreach work, convince students that reading will make you cool, and parents that reading will keep your kids smart and out of trouble.  Since my last posting here, I've begun the arduous task of learning how to become a movie director, and then teaching the head librarian here everything I've learned in the last month.  Taking a page from PBS's classic show "Reading Rainbow," we're basically recording our weekly Story Hour, where the library's director, Imam, picks a theme for the week, and then reads a few books, tells a few stories, and organizes some fun artistic activity for the Nursery-Primary School-age children who come in.  Meanwhile, the librarian and I film the stories, make cute little music videos out of the activities, and then try to wrangle the bucking bronco of video editing software, Adobe Premiere Pro, to make a short movie out of it.

Premiere Pro is a dense, hard to wield, and unfriendly program, and figuring out how to use it is the PC equivalent to navigating the great Labyrinth and battling the Minotaur, armed with nothing but some dental floss and a q-tip.  But once we've managed to wrestle some good production value out of it, the two-phase plan is to a) upload the videos to Youtube for the world to see what amazing stuff we're doing, and b) to start broadcasting them on the local television station, to help advertise the library, while sending out our message of the value of literacy.

Now that school is back in session, the summer regulars no longer have time to show up to the library anymore, so we're also going to start bringing the library to them.  On Monday and Tuesday, for example, we'll pack a truck full of books, head out to the primary school down the road a couple miles, and set up a sort of display fair, where we can show students firsthand what we have to offer, when many of them might not have come out on their own.  We have a whole list of other projects which we will try to begin to implement over the next few months before my contract here expires, but I'll save talking about those until we've started getting to work on them.

In the meantime, I'm going to take some time now to tell you about some interesting things going on in one of my other homes-away-from-home, Mali.  The news there is remaining steadily ominous.  We've got a fog ('cause it's the rainy season there now, get it?) of political uncertainty in the south involving interim governments and conditionally-rejected offers of international military support, profoundly disturbing reports of Islamist extremists sending the northern part of the country on a fast-track to becoming "the next Afghanistan," as the media is often fond of putting it, and no end in sight to a long-standing drought and regional food crisis.  While I've been reading the headlines often enough, and I'm probably equally informed about current events in Mali as I am about those in American, which is actually saying fairly little, I've definitely lost my inside grasp on what's been going on there since the Coup.

So I'm not interested now in rehashing what a 5-minute Google News search could tell you.  No, I'd rather let you know about some of the positive influences that are continuing over in Mali, despite these times of uncertainty which try even the noblest hearts.  There are dozens of great organizations, and I'm sure most of them deserve at least your awareness, if not your support, but today, I'm picking just one particularly cool project for this post because, well I have friends who work there.

The organization is called myAgro, and while it's only just a baby, at 8 months old, they've been making some really great headway, and influencing a lot of small-scale Malian farmers.  They do this through giving loans and establishing savings programs with local farmer who sign up for the program.  According to one of their recent performance reports, they have already signed up hundreds of farmers for their program, earned thousands of dollars in savings for farmers in their program (in a country where, for millions of people, earning just one dollar in a day can make the difference between eating today or not), and continue to run a weekly program to publicize the programs and educate and interview farmers and program members around the country.  As those of you who know me might imagine, this some-time farmer, radio DJ, and cheapskate finds a lot to like about myAgro!  And of course, the founder, Anushka Ratnayake, is an awesome person who I met a few times during my last stint in Mali.  And to quote my good friend and fellow Mali RPCV, Audra, who currently volunteers for myAgro while living in Chicago, "What is really interesting with myAgro is that in the midst of all of the Malian politically instability, their programs are offering solutions for farmers to create sustainable food security for themselves."  See, we're not talking about a charity here, we're talking about a capacity-building venture, a program that doesn't give away fish, but creates fishermen.

If you want to learn more about myAgro, peruse their website at www.myagro.org, or alternatively, you could just take my word for it and head straight to their Donate Now page.  Trust me, a few bucks on your end can go a long way towards some relief in a country that needs it, and setting good examples for sustainable agricultural methods which, if spread widely enough, will encourage positive and lasting change where it's needed.  That's right, for the price of one trenta-sized double-macchiato triple-mochaccino latte caffeine jug, you could help improve farming capabilities in the most fantastic country most of you have never been to!

Well, that's it for now, folks, but keep your eyes on the blog for the continuing adventures of Lower Merion, PA's favorite globetrotting blogger...

Just Take a Look, It's in a Book...

Nothing makes me feel more like a Peace Corps Volunteer than being the lone caucasian walking through a racially disparate neighborhood with a cadre of half a dozen loud, boistrous, and totally incomprehensible dark-skinned youngsters in tow.

That's about where I was earlier today, being led by these kids from house to house along the Guyana's Essequibo Coast, visiting families to ask them about how well and how often they read.  The kids were there to show me which houses they knew were inhabited by families worth interviewing, and not just stodgy old bachelors or toothsome guard dogs.  They also gave a sense of legitimacy to my presence; a lone, out-of-place-looking stranger from a strange land asking a mother of 3 if she reads newspapers looks less peculiar when six or seven of the mother's son's friends are vouching for him.

But don't worry, there's a purpose to my intellectual lurking habits – it actually is a legitimate part of my job here.  I've been assigned the task of helping the Imam Bacchus Library, a new and growing public library in the middle of this stretch of coastline promote itself and expand its programs.  The goal is to get more people to use the library, which would in turn promote literacy throughout the community, something that seems to be lacking.  Before getting to any of that though, the last three weeks were spent observing, interviewing, and fact-finding throughout the library's greater zone of influence.  My first week here had me feeling like Billy Madison as I spent my days in nursery and primary school classrooms, enjoying story-times, reading classes, sing-alongs, art projects.  A highlight: one nursery school graduation rehearsal where the kids practiced their performance of Vitamin C's "Graduation Song," which I'm amazed actually enjoys the same role in Guyana as it does in the U.S. as the unofficial day school graduation anthem.

During this initial period, I observed what seemed to be strong foundations from the schools' end concerning reading education, but since I was only able to get a superficial glance at the end of the school year, there was no doubt that I was missing a lot.  As I began my observations of the secondary schools the next week, I began to see the outcome of the early years of education.  As one would find anywhere, there was a wide range of ability in the students, despite all coming from basically the same education background – with universal school curriculums designed by the national Ministry of Education.  There were plenty of kids who were bright, literate, and enthusiastic learners, but there were a surprising number of kids who literally could not read.  Remember my last post where I quoted that writing sample from one of the star students in the seventh grade remedial class?  That was one of the better examples from that class.  The weakest of the weak students wrote literally gibberish.  Words resembling "iggitbidf" or "luberkrad" were typical and the authors could not remember what they had actually written, and certainly couldn't read it.

My next step was to take a stab at figuring out why this could be the case, so I started asking the different constituent groups what they thought.  The results were about as uselessly varied as I'd been expecting.  Students blamed the teachers.  Teachers blamed the parents.  Parents blamed their kids.  Chickens blamed their eggs.  And I realized that this whole question probably doesn't matter all that much to me.  I'm only here for six months, I have a undergraduate degree, and I have neither the time, expertise, or interest in trying to tackle a vast issue like the illiteracy culture of this country, certainly not compared to much more qualified folks who are working on that very issue already.  Peace Corps is all about doing grassroots empowerment, not large-scale cultural overhauls.

Besides, it's not as if the system is hopeless.  As I said, there are plenty of successful students graduating schools and getting quality educations, by Guyanese standards at least, and there aren't so few of them that they would be considered outliers.  The good students share the system with the weaker ones, at least in the early years.  It's only when they enter secondary school that their grades begin to determine their placement in classes and the quality of the education they are given, since school budgets are also higher at the more selective schools.

So what am I going to do?  What I was asked to: make this library awesome!  Attacking the problem one symptom at a time seems the right way to go about my job, and since the library hired me to help encourage literacy, I'll use the library to do it.  The theory is this: Make the library more fun and give more people reasons to go there --> More people using the library most likely results in more people reading, learning, and associating positively with those things -->  More kids get into the habit of reading and self-educating, and more parents start to see this as an activity for their kids which is easy to encourage, rather than an unnecessary alternative to watching TV and playing cricket --> Attitudes towards literacy improves.

Which leads to my posse and me running around town to knock on doors and find out who does and doesn't already use the library, why they do or don't, and what we can do to change that.  My supervisor – the library's founder and head – and I have been brainstorming possible activities and allures, such as contests and "read-a-thons" like I had back in elementary school, filming the story-time hours and puppet shows we already run and have them broadcast on the public access TV station, holding literacy and computer training classes for all ages, but especially for those out of school, and creating our own homemade version of one of my favorite childhood shows, Reading Rainbow.

We'll see how far we get, but I'm hopeful that we can make the library one of the major cultural institutions of the Essequibo Coast, and transform how the people here view literacy and education.  Who knows how much potential innovation can be tapped from people who don't even know how creative they can be until they're given a chance and a reason to try?

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!