today i am ... disciplined.

it's amazing the amount of stuff i can do in a day now. stamina is improving, competency and learning curve were both on the up-and-up today, all in all, a great way to end the week. and it only took two months!! :o)

i am taking karate lessons three (now 4) times a week, and they've actually come in handy already in many ways. the most obvious one is discipline of mind and body. all the running around that i do for other people during the day gets done, i retain enough energy to go and train for an hour and a half, and i sleep better than i have since i got here.

this wonderful place my sprit is in now comes on the heels of a wonderful weekend tourist/mission trip to Sand Hill mission (not a clever name, as you see from the pictures). this excursion was with my roommate Eileen, our nurse-friend, Carolyn, a Lutheran minister, John, and brother Paul, our "organist" and his traveling keyboard. we had a blast. my first trip out of georgetown in weeks, my first ride on the demerara river, and my first taste of fresh coconut water! see for yourself:




This is the gang, L-->R Brother Paul, Eileen, Carolyn and Kate, all smiling because we survived the busride out to Timheri (it was WICKED fast).











the second pic is reverend John baptizing miss shanika lakeisha (or maybe it's the other way around??) she was AMAZING - i've never seen a baby so calm, so smiling, with so much spirit and so little crying at a baptism! maybe you can see that she's reached out and grabbed a hold of his shirt in this picture ... it's tough to distinguish, but she did. it was like they were old friends.


and .... fresh from the coconut!!!!! who needs cups, really?! this is coconut water at it's freshest. doesn't really taste like coconut, or like water. kind of sweet and tangy.


the green around my shoulders? that's a sweat rag. needed that after the slow trudge up the dune in the midday heat. you can see Eileen is trying to color coordinate her cheeks to match her dress. she got pretty close that afternoon.




this is the school for the area, and the building where we actually had the service, since the old mission building is actually condemned (structurally, not by the church or a former priest or anything).



and this, you will recognize, is princess kate of the lower demarara coconut plantation (which we saw off to our right on the way up) and naturalist, sketching the groves of plants we saw and the shapes of leaves that were unique or new to me along the riverside. i am happy to report that i left this afternoon of gallavanting with NO sunburn, thanks to my silly looking umbrella on our trip up the river. it was only when they broke out the aloe vera that the others wished they had copied my style ;o)

i'm a big, big dork.


it's just the one computer that won't help me with pictures, so here are a few of the ones I told you about last time:

sunset on the seawall
(need i say more?)





at the neighbors (Ram, Julie and Praveena)

and the fantastic altar they created for their ceremony











and Eileen being tricked into posing for a photo on our street. our flat is the first one on the right, sticking out of the corner. i'll get a better picture of it soon. the fact that there are no cars, bikes, babies, dogs, minibusses, motorbikes, tractors or horse-drawn carts going by at this precise moment belies how busy this particular intersection is.







this is the emergency gnat removal squad and pharmacy support hard at work on a friday night.








and this is conductor quasimollymodo (that's a hamel family joke ...no worries if it makes little sense, but we DO highly recommend that you see a claymation christmas to understand it on one level) .
just imagine him flailing his arms with enthusiasm for the song he's directing ... and i'll leave you with that image.

"I just pick up the bucket to do the floors and I'm sweating." - Eileen
"I just open my eyes and I'm sweating." - Kate

yes, it has indeed continued to be hot and we continue to be sticky.

the picture at the left is basically what it looked like the other night during the longest of the three blackouts before we bumped our way into the flashlights and the matches. three in one is the record so far - hopefully never to be beaten.

the visual is lame because the computers at the cafe have stopped recognizing my camera and providing the software i need to upload my images to the computer. in short, i can't share my pictures from here. i'm trying to find a way to get them up - and there are some great ones! please be patient.

you'll see the aftermath when our neighbor's water tank platform collapsed into ours. you'll see the nursing students preparing one of the hospital meeting rooms to celebrate Mercy Day, and the three lovely ladies I work with most days in the hospital, not to mention baby goats trimming the grass in front of our gate and a sunset from the seawall. you'll see a typical choir rehersal, some of the groups from the concert at the cathedral at the beginning of this month (the conductor of one bore a striking resemblance to maestro Quasi-Modo - "i have a hunch they will give us a striking performance" ;o). you'll witness an emergency gnat removal from one of our guest's ears which Eileen's travelling pharmacy drawer was well-equipped to handle. you'll experience a night with our next door neighbors who invited us to a Hindu ceremony and supper at their place, the supper being sanay (sp?) which means you load up a huge lotus leaf with food and eat with your hands (FINALLY, dad, a culture where i can eat with my fingers all i want and have it be perfectly acceptable!!). soon to come will be pictures of the toad house we build for our new residents at the foot of our staircase. we've grown so attached, mostly because we hope they're helping our fight against the mosquitoes.

what you will not see, though, is the wonder of a good weekend. there is no picture to express what a wonderful time we had last weekend. i tackled a never-ending pile of laundry friday (lasted until the following thursday, no joke) and felt like i had ACCOMPLISHED something. we had an ice cream run on saturday afternoon followed by a walk in the botanical gardens. both were delicious and filling. only one tasted like frozen strawberry quik. we had a belated spirituality night on saturday night during which Eileen found a fantastic meditation for us to do. sunday afternoon i put on my professional hair coloring hat and replaced Eileen's "naturally blonde" color. it came out quite well, so there was another feather for the weekend's cap.

then sunday night we got up the courage to go out at night to the Brazilian Embassy for a free film festival. i learned to say good night in portuguese from a little boy at the gate, and then we walked around the building to what looked like space set up for a garden party. it was surreal. the event started with a tourist commercial about music and fashion in Brazil which mostly consisted of mostly naked ladies on catwalks. the following film was a documentary about the atrocious conditions of an all-male prison in Sao Paolo ... the evening was a study in contradictions, i would say. and next time we'll get a bus that's actually going to the correct street, so we won't have to walk where there are no streetlights, and we'll go back on a bus that does not already have 15 people in it.

we were proud of ourselves, nonetheless, for keeping an eye on the paper for free events, and having one work out and be entertaining to boot! spirits were very high, and those are the kinds of days we choose to hold on to!

a coconut husk on a roiling sea
before a sunset glowing up through clouds as high as galaxies, turning the water's reflection an otherworldly pink until it becomes lavender and touches the horizon, far from the bobbing coconut. not only is that a memory of mine, it's sort of how things are going. somehow, amidst the turbulence and newness and surprises and feelings that i can't do anything right, i stay afloat here, and there's always some glowing beauty happening nearby that soothes me and gives me hope.

take last week. i went to the fair and saw no pig scramble, and no prized squash, but found that the scrambler and the gravitron are carnival rides in EVERY country, including guyana. i saw violent physical abuse of a young, sleeping child by his mother, in our hospital corridor, and was too shocked to do anything about it. i also sang well in a concert with a group of lovely older ladies (the title "seniors" would also be appropriate, though they were a spunky enough lot to belie that name) and heard gorgeous music made by other individuals and groups. i hear about deaths from gun violence daily in the paper, and then go for a run on the seawall and everything that is hateful melts away in the laughter of children being splashed by the incoming tide. i meet a man randomly who tells me his life story and about his lack of options in guyana, and how hard that makes life, and i enjoy a delicious meditation guided by my fellow volunteer, Eileen, that leaves my whole body tingling and centered.

it's a strange place, this country. i think it gets stranger by the day. some days i really enjoy that and get into the adventure of it, and others, i would give anything for a breath of fall air as i'm driving myself somewhere on my own schedule, in my own car. i'm sure those thoughts will continue to mingle over the next two years. but here's a lighter reflection to leave you with:

in the deepening twilight, the unmistakable "SMACK, SLAP, SLAM" of a heated dominoes game still rages on. we meander through the dark, white ankles gleaming in the thumping bus headlights, around potholes and stray dogs and groups of boys and men calling to the girls and women safely on their porches. my shower tonight is a straight line of water about 7 feet long and maybe a half inch wide (on a good night). it is an amazing, straight formation that looks far more grasp-able than mere water. the scent of dr. bronner's peppermint soap reminds me of bathing in the woods, and i crawl under my mosquito net in the same exhausted, reverent way i entered my tent at the end of a long day of hiking. as i drift off into a simple sleep after a simple day, our scrumptious BLTs by candlelight (not because of blackout, but just for ambience) and following tea with shortbread warming the center of my belly with their digestive motions makes me smile and feel utterly content.