Life in our new home

We’re in it now. We’ve been in our village for almost two months. We have spent a lot of time getting our house in order. It hadn’t been lived in by anything but jungle critters for about 3 years so we had to do some major scrubbing down of the walls, existing furnishings and the floor to remove the bat odor, etc. David has been doing some creative carpentry to create screens for all our windows so we can leave them open without being chewed up by mosquitoes. They are working really well and have made the evenings and nights pleasant. David is now working on getting rid of the bat colony living in our rafters. They are quite attached to our home and have been reluctant to leave despite the addition of daylight and some insecticide. David is now installing a heavy duty screen over the openings into the space between the ceiling and the roof. We just have to figure out how to get them to leave before closing up the space completely. We don’t want to create a bat crypt.

Christine spends much of her time fighting to keep our spot in the jungle. The jungle is constantly trying to take the space back. It’s a process of cleaning to keep the multitude of visiting insects and small creatures from setting up camp and staying permanently. Every day requires sweeping the home and washing every dirtied dish in the river. The river is ¼ mile from the house. It’s a lovely walk in the early mornings, unless you’re carrying a full load of dishes and laundry to be washed.

Christine is also reluctantly learning to cook. It just has to be done. The women do the cooking and they talk about it a lot. She is always being asked what she cooked today – then they want details. Damn! To distract them from real food, she has started making cookies and cake and sharing liberally. Now she is more often asked if she is cooking anything sweet today. She has had several women over for cooking lessons to prepare these delights, the most popular being “No bake chocolate cookies”. Good thing, too. Baking here is a late night only activity due to the heat and most households don’t have ovens.

As for life away from the house, we spend our time visiting, working and making a map of the village. The people here are mostly subsistence farmers and it is basic slash and burn agriculture. It’s really hard work – cut the jungle, burn it, muck out the stumps and plant crops. Then, 9-10 months later, harvest and haul to town to sell (weeding in-between). David has helped with this several times and has started our own small “grounds” close to the house - see new pics. Our grounds will be some leafy greens, cucumber, a long string bean called kosubanti and a really tasty squash called pompun (pumpkin). Villagers here grow mostly root vegetables, bananas (several varieties), blisteringly hot peppers, ginger and some greens. The staple is definitely the root vegetables however, cassava being the primary one. Bread, dumplings and a dried cereal much like grape nuts (kwaka) are the main consumables made from cassava. Christine has learned how to cook the bread – see new pics (making the “dough” is actually quite involved). The cassava bread and kwaka have an amazingly long shelf life considering the environment. The cooking process essentially drives all the water out of the cassava and it can last for several months in this condition. They grow another root vegetable called pom taya. This is the main cash crop this time of year. A dish called pom (not surprisingly) is made from this and apparently it is very popular in here and in Holland.

We haven’t started any specific project work yet. We’re still getting to know the community and the people. Peace Corps does not want volunteers to start project work until they have been at site for at least three months so they have a good feel for the community they are in. We think the map should help with most any kind of project work however because it provides good baseline info for a variety things and has definitely been a good conversation starter around the village. We’ve also gotten several kids to help out with the tape and compass. I’m sure our NPS, FHWA and USFS friends will not be too surprised that David brought rudimentary survey gear into the Suriname jungle – and he’s using it!

Finally, children continue to play a huge role in our integration. We spend a lot of time with children of all ages, both one on one and in large groups…sometimes too large. Unfortunately, even the children suffer from our linguistic shortcomings. David recently refused to return one boy’s headphones, mistakenly thinking he wanted our ipod that went along with them. So the poor lad is music deprived for a couple of days while we’re in the city.