He went into the Jungle when he was 17

Wow, so a lot has happened since last we spoke! Or whatever one calls this level of interaction. I've been in Suriname for just over a month and I just got back from a week in the interior living with a host family. It was awesome! I was in Asigron - a village of a couple hundred people that has 24-7 electricity, a school, and is only about 2 hours away from the capital. I don’t think you’ll find it on many maps, but it’s in Brokopondo not that far from the main dam on the river.
The village was about 20 minutes off the main (fully paved) road down a dirt/crushed stone lane and when we got there I was surprised. All I knew about it was the facts above and that made a vision in my head that was very different from reality. My first thought was simply - 'Wow. This is poverty.' It wasn't that simple, but I was still surprised by how little impact checking off some of the basic boxes I associate with progress had on some of the basic aspects of life I associate with development.

I'm not going to walk through the entire week, but basically I was living with an older widow and the 10 year old girl and 13 year old boy that lived with her. I had my own house and my own latrine, yup, and we shared a wash house and a Duro Tank (giant rain-fed barrel that is what running water means in this part of the world). 5 other volunteers where in the village and so I usually got a dose of American for at least portions of the day, but the vast majority of the week was spent interacting with and in Saramaccan.

My host mom was a Basia - she's just below the Captain of the Village, essentially a second-in-command in the executive structure of the community. She was a smart lady, though not school educated, and hanging with her made for a great week. A lot of time spent sitting and eating, sitting and watching the rain, sitting and cooking, and umm...sitting. We didn't have TV or radio and I kind of refuse to hide behind earbuds or a book in situations like that, so it was a lot of trying to communicate and also a lot of time in relatively comfortable silence.

I was pleasantly surprised with my ability to make myself understood, but disappointed that I wasn't equally good at understanding - turns out a vocabularly of a couple hundred words isn't quite enough to hold extended conversations. But it is certainly enough to try and I did. It was a good week.

Just to quickly walk through the mechanics of the week, I slept in a hammock and got up at about 6AM. I would either run water from the Duro for a bucket bath in the wash house or walk to the river to wash with the kids and the rest of the community. Then I would eat breakfast with my host mom. Once we finished our tea, this was very important, we would walk around the village to say good morning to everyone we could find. Greetings are very important in Suriname, particularly Maroon culture.

After that we would either roll into chores - sweeping, washing dishes and clothes at the river, etc - or into a larger activity. The biggest field trip we did was to go to my host mom's grounds. "Grounds" are what Surinamese call the family farm land. They are generally a ways away from the village, unsure why at this point, and we had to paddle up the river in a hand made canoe for about 30 minutes to get to the creek that we paddled up for 10 minutes to get to the path into the jungle that we followed for 15 minutes to get where we were going. Grounds are a couple of acres slashed and burned out of the jungle.

My mom grew bananas, cassava, okra, peppers, and various other vegetables. Her neighbor also had Papayas and I had one fresh off the tree. Part of the produce goes to sustenance and my mom sold the rest to one of the big corporations that operates big work camps or in the city. It is tough, hot work in the middle of the rain forest. Your are digging around with a machete, carrying a lot of stuff, and generally sweating. A lot.

In the afternoon, it was generally either raining or too hot to do anything and so we would sit and hang out – often kids or other locals would stop by. It got dark by about 7PM and, after washing for a minimum of the 2nd time that day, I would close my door around 830 and hit the hammock by about 930.

Other cool stuff happened in the week, but I want to get to my point here. In my first glance at the village, I saw poverty. Ramshackle houses, no running (or truly clean) water, and mostly mud or dirt between houses. After a day or two there, however, I realized I wasn't seeing want. Sure, kids had tattered clothes and my host mom had to borrow a fork so there were enough for us to all eat at the same time, but everybody was generally happy and seemed well fed. Life is hard, but it isn't necessarily overwhelming or terrible.

But after another day or two, I also started to see there were needs and wants that people weren't throwing in anyone's face. School ends at 1PM in the interior and the main activity for kids after that was to play Bingo. You can understand why Youth Development work is a huge part of what the country wants and Peace Corps does here. Little boys especially – they were running around, throwing rocks, jumping off things, etc because they didn’t have a constructive outlet for their energy. You could play in the river, play bingo, walk around, or maybe watch TV in some of the houses. They ate up any game I could come up with and would have loved TKD. They play soccer sometimes, but a league and some practices – and some equipment – would have blown their minds.

As I played with the kids and got to know them better, I also started to see a lot of aspirations that the village couldn't answer. More concretely, I also saw a lot of scars. Kids had cuts and sores and little health problems that didn't keep them from having fun and going to school - but certainly have the potential to impac t their life span and their life, as they build up over time.
The kids were what I saw. In a week, my host mom the Basia and the other adults weren’t going out of their way to point out what they thought Asigron wanted and needed – and I am not here in Suriname to work with that community anyway so I couldn’t have done much if they had – but it was still my first chance to see what value I can actually add here as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I’m glad I am starting to figure out what kind of impact I can have.

And in a village that doesn’t have electricity 24-7, doesn’t have a good Duro tank at every house, doesn’t have access to the road and the cities and the corporate villages that infuse money into what was subsistence farming – there will be even more opportunities to hit some of those concrete check boxes that I am very interested in as well.

To circle back to my last post, my presentation went very well and we also had our mid-training evaluation just today. Everything was great - tomorrow we are having language evaluations and then we find out where we will actually be living for the next 2 years! That is very exciting and we will get to see our site this week! On Wednesday we got to live with a current Volunteer for 3 days and then to stay at our sites (by ourselves) for 4 days. It's a time to meet people and figure out what you are going to need to survive in the community and in your house for 2 years. I’m thinking a lot of screening and nails are a must! It's also a time when some people figure out that they don't want to survive here for the next 2 years.

We are more than halfway through training and odds are some people will choose to not swear in and actually do the real Peace Corps thing. I think our group may actually hold strong, but only time will tell. I know I'm excited and feeling good. I miss you all (especially happy wedding to Lou and Yam!), and I hope you can drop me an email or a letter or something when you have a chance! Talk to you soon!