Friday, December 29, 2017

Tragedy at Bina Hill

On December 11th, sometime around 7 AM, Leticia Pablo died.
She was a very dear student, and was one of the first that I got to know when I moved to Bina Hill. She was bright, warm, talented, and gracious, and will be sorely missed.


The Halfway Point

Ahhh Midservice: That point about a year in where they haul in what's left of your cohort and examine the shattered remnants of what used to be Peace Corps Volunteers.

We're the first environmental group in Guyana, and in some of the most remote locations. None of us have regular email access, and about half of us don't even have cell service at our sites. My site, which is one of the easiest to travel from, still takes an inordinate amount of prep and about two days to get from site to Georgetown.
With this in mind, Peace Corps emailed us our travel arrangements.
No calls were made until the day before some volunteers needed to actually find a ride for the first part of the trip out.
It's a good thing we're pros now. Just a few rolled eyes and some good-natured grumbling (from my fellows, who have better temperaments than I do), and everyone made it out on time.

I, on the other hand, almost didn't make it. After a distressing morning of no-transportation-available which left me barely making it to the airport only 15 minutes before the flight left, I was in one of those moods that leaves small children fleeing in terror, and causes wise adults to clear a very large path around me. Then we had our medical exams. Oh goody.

The good news is I'm probably not dying. At least not from TB (which was a legitimate concern. It's not rare around me at all). The bad news is staff stomping into the exam room with paperwork while you're half-naked on the table is also not rare. This did not improve my mood.

Luckily the Guy 29 group is well used to my gremlin-mode, and never fails to cajole me out of it. Plus there was a pool. That always helps.

I know Peace Corps is hoping I'll go into detail about all the training sessions they had, and all of the other technical stuff at the Midservice "trainings" but that's probably more boring to read about than it would be to write about, so I'm going to do us both a favor and instead post silly pictures.

Lance telling some crazy story
The boys enjoying the pool

Jon. I'm pretty sure this is just his normal look.

Our very own "Creation of Adam"
I won't tell you how long we spent trying to get that shot perfect. I'm perfectly happy letting you assume we nailed it perfectly on the first try.

Dylan sporting his glorious mutton chops. Despite our many entreaties, he shaved them off after this picture.

After our IST several months before, the boys decided not to shave again until Midservice. Since Kirsten didn't want to get left out of the fun, I styled her hair into the manliest beard ever.



The Beard-y Pic. Also, the cover of my next album. Also, I need to start a band...
Dylan, Thomas and I made a quick daytrip out to visit our first host families, from back before we moved to our sites.

Jennie and one of her grandbabies

New-mom Orlenna napping with her baby
Of course I dragged Daniel to the creek again.

He started it. I just finished it.


Thomas was with us, and at one point I became slightly concerned, because the creek is fairly isolated, and I looked up to see this:

Yep. This is definitely a murderer.

Luckily most of the time he looks more like this:

This guy probably wouldn't murder anyone.
(You can read his version of events at tomstravellog.wordpress.com . If he did murder someone, you'd find it there.)
So there you have it. Six of us have survived a whole year, and they're keeping me in high spirits with their shenanigans. The best part about Midservice was having all of us in one place to hang out for awhile.






Wednesday, December 6, 2017

What they learn

Bina Hill Institute is a strange place. It's a weird sort of tertiary school, but instead of higher education, it's meant to be a second chance for hinterland Amerindian kids who either failed out of, didn't finish, or maybe just never got to go to Secondary School. It's supposed to teach them both traditional Amerindian skills, and prepare them for jobs in the environmental sector in things like forestry, agriculture or tourism. It's set up like if someone was trying to copy an American tech school, but had never actually seen a tech school.

Basically, it's a great idea, but very poorly executed. Don't get me wrong, I love the concept, I love my job, I love the location, I love the students, but what Bina Hill was set up to do, it isn't actually doing. Classes are often interrupted or don't run at all, and due to a number of factors (lack of resources being a big one) most of the learning they do is in a classroom, staring at a chalkboard.

I started with the negative, but there are still some things the students ARE getting. In their second year, they do internships at tourist resorts in the region, which gives them practical experience, something to put on their resume, and great connections with possible employers. They also are doing really well with their work in the agriculture class, now that they finally have a new teacher (the previous one left partway through the prior year, so there was no agriculture teacher at the agricultural institute for the better part of a year). While they prepare the vegetable beds and plant the fruit trees, they learn about composting and soil maintenance. While they raise chickens, they learn about livestock maintenance and cost-of-production calculations. When they go out into the forest to cut sticks for the climbing plants, they learn about local trees and best practice clearing.

There is a learning curve though:

Ana is not quite sure how she feels about these chickens

Conway is stoked to try though

Gaibert, our most efficient chicken-killer

While some students did the slaughtering, others plucked and washed

What food looks like when it doesn't come in supermarket packaging

Shena and Mervin preparing to go into the forest

Grayson carrying out freshly cut poles for the climbing plants

Bora plants (which look similar to string beans) and student-made trellis

The agriculture teacher giving instructions to Shena and Fenella

It's not all hard work though. Since part of the idea is to preserve culture, the students learn traditional dancing and crafts that are dying out.






The end of the Cockroach Dance which always ends in giggles

A student starting either a basket or a farine sifter

One of our more advanced weaving students added a beautiful color pattern to his
They also do wood carvings, but those pictures will come later.

One of the most recent additions to the curriculum is a Home Economics class, which focuses a bit on the usual things like nutrition and cooking, but focuses more on the hospitality side of tourism with table settings, serving, and menu planning.

Every once in a while though, the Home Ec class makes delicious desserts, which they sometimes share

These kids work really hard, and I'm very proud of them.

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

The Demons of Bina Hill

Photo and captioning by Jon

Since I can't post pictures or videos of the "demonic fits" the students of Bina Hill were having, here's a photo of Thomas looking the part (actually, he was just innocently sleeping on a plane, but he admitted it looked rather funny and told me I could use the picture here).

Apparently every year in October, demons possess the students, starting with the girls. They start having "strange seizure-like fits, super-human strength, are insensible and don't feel any pain, scream about hallucinations, run out of doors into nowhere, and coordinate actions with others afflicted."

Now I can't speak to past cases, nor to ones I didn't see, but none of that was true of the ones I did witness. What was it really like? If you've ever seen a six-year-old throw a tantrum for attention, well, you've seen demon possession.

In any case, a pastor was called in and performed exorcisms on all the girls. When that didn't work, several were sent home to "recover." Here's hoping it worked, because it interrupted classes for far too long two years in a row now.