I was only in Pikin Slee for 5 days, but it’s an exciting town so I’ll walk through it a bit with some adventures! First, let me describe it. The town is on the side of the river and has at least four landings (that’s a lot). It has, I think, five Captains and innumerable Bascha’s, two official community meeting houses, and enough people for some internal commerce – people sell cassava, bread, eggs, etc even outside of the several formal stores.
There are some people with a lot of money and some people with not much, but most people are doing fairly alright from what I’ve seen so far. Many people have relatively nice, modern houses and others have relatively simple…breezy…more traditional houses like mine. To give you a sense of it, I have a thatched roof over a concrete pad with slatwood walls. Lots of gaps for breeze and anything else that wants in, but fortunately the bugs weren’t too bad at all during this visit at least.
The house itself is about 4 paces by 5 and the concrete and thatch extend out another 2 paces-ish to give me a porch. The concrete raises the house up above the sand that is around my house and that transitions to dirt and grass/brush/gardenisharea in about 20 feet in any given direction. The house has one window, though I may try to do something about that to get some more light and breeze. I have a newly built latrine and washhouse about 10 steps from my back door.
The house doesn’t get much shade and is about 30 feet from a kindergarten, but otherwise it’s a good area. I need to figure out how to get a clothesline going since there isn’t any obvious spot and I also really want to build a pull up bar. Other than that, hopefully I can get my neighbors/woodworking contacts to help me add some additional holes in the house (windows/vents) and close some others. Maybe get some shelves too – all I had for furniture during these four days was 2 overgrown stools and my hammock.
My house is about a 10 minute walk from the river and about a 15 minute walk from a spring/creek that is absolutely beautiful but tough to use for washing more than your dishes and clothes, since it’s only about 10 inches deep. The river is beautiful.
On the first day, I walked around with one of the main Rastas and he introduced me to people, showed me around, etc. Even by the end of the 5 days, I don’t think I’d seen the whole village but he gave me a start that day and then kept it going the next day. On the 3rd day, he had to go to the jungle to cut more timber for the woodshop and so it was a bit of a rough day for me. I hate to beg for food, but my guy didn’t really arrange anything and I had minimal food and zero ability to cook. I knew I could make my way to the carpentry workshop and hang out there until someone fed me, but I’d been there for several hours the last two days and so I was determined not to go there until mid afternoon. My goals were to wander around, talk to some people, and successful get someone to feed me without feeling like a hobo.
It’s amazing how long the time from 8am to 2PM or so can feel, especially when you are running on apples and peanut butter. I didn’t do a great job of the food thing that day, though it got easier later and will be much easier once I can cook for myself (both because I can provide for myself and I’ll be able to offer something to people that feed me in the morning when they visit my house later in the day, making me feel much better about crashing their breakfast). But it got much better once I just resolved to put on my hat, some sunscreen, and start wandering.
It kept getting better as the day went on and my confidence grew a bit. I picked up a posse of kids that helped me find my way around a bit (even though I really didn’t have a destination), but you start to realize that just wandering and talking to people is actually part of my job right now. Kids are also great at helping you get food. I ate coconuts off the tree, appesinas (like an orange), pompelmus (a bigger grapefruit with more nodulized flesh), and also was fed by more moms. I eventually made my way to the workshop and helped with some basic woodwork for a while and ate with my counterpart.
After that, I played soccer with the older kids and men of the community. I did this almost every night and it tended to be the anchor of my day. You have no idea how disorienting it is to have an entire day looking at you where there is nowhere you have to be at a specific time. It makes the days so long and it would only be worse if I were capable of feeding myself in my house and had a chair and electricity (the house wasn’t wired yet).
Just knowing that I was going to be at the soccer field around 6PM at least gave some structure to my day which was surprisingly comforting. And it’s a nice routine that really takes you all the way to bed – play until dark, wash, have some food, hit the hammock around 9 or 10 unless you want to wander around at night.
On this particular day, it was the wash that really turned things around and reminded me how happy I am to be here. There are a lot of hardships and I’ve made sacrifices to be here and it is going to be hard work that has no guarantee to pay off in the ways that I think I want right now. But still. It is breathtaking here.
After the soccer game, it was about full dark so I groped my way home and found my head lamp (critical here! Mine broke the 2nd to last night. Bad news, but anyway). But when I went to fetch water to wash, nothing was coming out of the rain catch. While I was standing in my doorway thinking about what to do and feeling sorry for myself, one of the kids I had met earlier in the day stopped by and asked what I was doing. I flubbed a response since I didn’t really know how to explain it in Saramaccan and didn’t know what I was doing anyway. I asked it back (just polite in this culture) and he said he was going to the river to wash. I decided to go with him.
We walked through the village in the light of a nearly full moon and stars – that kind of light that you only really get to see when humans aren’t interfering. When we came to the river, I had to stop walking because it was too beautiful. The landing is concrete stairs that go down the bank to jetty out into the river, but the river is high right now and so the steps just disappear into quick, black water. You could see it perfectly in the light of the moon that had risen over the jungle on the other side of the river.
Following the stairs down into the river and then stepping out into the water was electrifying. It’s a strong current and though it’s good footing on wide concrete steps, you can’t see anything through the reflection of the stars in the water. It was amazing to stand waist deep in the river, at the edge of a wild jungle with nothing but the light of the moon and stars above you.
I talked about the world with the kid as best I could in Saramaccan, while we both had what amounts to our nightly shower in this part of the world. The quality of the light and the incredible, dense, vibranc y of the jungle, combined with literally being immersed in the river and the culture that is the heart of Suriname – I can only tell you that it was breathtaking.
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