July 15, 2009

I am not sure my flight plan home could have been less conveniently planned. I had put a bunch of thought into a good itinerary, but by the time our travel agency got around to buying the ticket, the itinerary had devolved to absurdity. There was actually a leg from Houston to Dallas and I had to collect my bag, go through customs and re-enter the airport not once, but twice, during tight layovers. But the airlines over preformed. My low expectations[1] of Caribbean airlines were vastly exceeded and Continental was consistently early. I am not sure why I tend to select anything but Continental when given the choice. They have fine on-time arrival rates, good service, comfortable seats, never seem to be full, play multiple free movies, and still serve food. I don’t travel to the southeast much anymore, but they have definitely moved up my list.

The highlight of the trip home was flying over the Caribbean islands. The pilot went out of his way to pass over the islands and I had a window. The calcareous depositional environment was exceptionally clear. I feel like I understand limestone a lot better now. And it was pretty. I can see why people vacation here.

Let me wrap up with a couple random thoughts and stories to round out the day.

We found this sign that could be a sound entry to the FAIL blog.

And Mark took this picture of a bird cage on one of the light poles. It seemed like an odd place to keep a pet, unless it was a public pet or mascot. We remained confused until we went to Kester’s friend’s house for dinner Friday night and he had 2 similar birds in similar cages. Apparently these are competition birds. They have sing offs. They pit the birds against each other and compete them on a number of criteria (# number of chirps, length of song, volume). There is even a kind of morose ‘sudden death’ component. Apparently it is not uncommon for one of the competing birds to simply drop dead of exertion. As I began to understand I said, ‘Oh, it is a song bird competition.’ Our hosts found this very funny. Apparently it is far more serious than my pithy description made it sound.

I have spent most of my down time preparing for the class and exploring Georgetown with Mark, but I have worked through several biodiversity lectures provided to me by an Ecology and Evolution prof from UCD. The professor specializes in South American rain forests, so it has been cool to be learning about the unparalleled biodiversity (and the causal mechanics) of this biome from such a proximal position (even if I didn’t get to the forest itself).

Mark and Nazeem (the student I got to know the best and just a really smart guy) got in a little good natured debate about where driving was more dangerous – Guyana or the US. They both happened to know the annual auto death numbers from their countries, but when they did the math as a percentage of population size, the automobile death rates were nearly identical. We reasoned that the more chaotic driving system in Guyana probably produced more accidents but there were far fewer fatalities since velocities were so much lower.[2]

I have decided that I feel so uncomfortable walking with traffic because there is a very tight social contract in Guyanese culture that I have not bought into. In our system, we demonstrate that we are not going to hit someone by staying far away from them. But in Georgetown, where streets are narrow and cars share the road with horses, bikes and pedestrians, space is a premium. So the optimize the use of space with a tight social contract of trust. The pedestrians have the assurance of said social contract that, though the cars may get close, they will not be hit. Two cars can essentially play chicken in a passing maneuver that would be prosecutable in the states, because everyone agrees to swerve at the last minute. In a sense, there is something kind of beautiful about this. If we re-cast ‘chaotic driving’ as ‘a high level of social trust and cohesion’ it puts things in a little different perspective.

The picture in my room is of a big pile of sand in a river. This seems odd…for anyone but me. Since computing the amount of sediment a river can move is the one thing I am supposed to be an expert in, it seemed oddly appropriate. Mark had a waterfall.

I lost a coffee bet to Mark. The bet was: Could you fit 2 Mississippi’s into an Idaho?[3] It turns out you can fit 1.8 Mississippi’s in an Idaho. I owe Mark coffee.

Well, thanks for coming with me on these two trips. The chance of future work is there but is a little remote, so I am going to retire the blog here. But of course, I have still not been to the waterfall or the wild life sanctuary.[4] The legendary golden frog still eludes me. And, it is rare to work on a flooding problem that has recently displaced a third of a nation’s population. I think there is a lot of good work to be done and adventure to be had, so you never know. More significantly, this was my first deployment with the CMEP team, who do disaster readiness for our allies (or those we would like to be our allies) all over the world (and I think it went very well), so other opportunities are not outside of the realm of possibility.

The keys to HEC keeping me long term boil down to 1) do I get to do cool research type work that no one has ever done, 2) do I get to live near a major college campus and make a tangible contribution to a effective and contextualized college ministry and 3) do I continue to get to be involved in work overseas where creative water problem solving could dramatically improve the quality of life for some in the two-thirds world (usually far more so than state side work on well established water infrastructure). So far, it looks like we may be in Davis for a while, counter-intuitively, because I get to spend so much time away from Davis. And, it needs to be said, that my wife is pretty remarkable for affording me these opportunities when we have two children under the age of two.

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[1] Based on previous experience.
[2] I related this to someone recently who replied, yeah, but what is their rate per mile. This gave me pause, but I’m not sure we should get computational credit for being such an auto-centric culture. Living war away from work and play simply increases our risk even if our vehicles are safer.
[3] Guyana is approximately the size of Idaho, which is how the conversation started.
[4] I decided not to tack time onto the end of my trips in part because of the inflexibility of our travel agency and in part because it was extremely heroic of my wife to let me go in the first place, so I wanted to keep my absence as short as possible.

July 14, 2009

Last day of the class. We were 6 sheets of card stock short of being able to print enough certificates. This was cool because it meant that a lot of people came to the class (we had planned for 30, but at least 40 had come to at least part of it). Unfortunately, the driver took us to 4 different copy shops and we didn’t find one that was just opening until 8:30 – when we were supposed to be at class. So we were late. But this was a Saturday and everyone was there. It is always validating when we offer training and it spills into a usual day off and people come anyway. It demonstrated that they were finding it valuable.

We started with a couple demonstrations and then I introduced the hydraulic model[1] of the local system. I made a little avi of the regional flooding below. I had given them a list of tasks to try with the local model and they spent the day (until 3:00 getting used to it). Then we passed out the certificates and the class was done. We got a couple of comments that when the students showed up they were discouraged because the manual looked intimidating and the math looked hard, but that both Mark and I are very clear teachers and made it simple. I’m not sure how wide spread the sentiment was, but this was encouraging given the quasi-language gap.



After the class Kester took us on base to the officer’s club for beers. We talked about his career goals and his vision for putting together an interagency water modeling working group. He also said that I was on TV this morning. I am a little surprised, since I half thought that it was just a print media interview.

After that we went back to the hotel and met Dave. More than a dozen US personnel will be coming in for the exercise in the next day or so. Mark and Dave had enjoyed traveling together before and Mark was looking forward to him joining us. We had plantain fries and fish appetizers at the hotel and then walked to Buddies.

One interesting conversation we had at buddies regarded ‘bush meat.’ We had seen road signs for ‘bush meat,’ which, essentially, is mixed meats hunted in the jungles and savannahs of inland Guyana. Dave said he wasn’t that interested because it probably included the meat of something that shouldn’t be hunted. Mark replied that he wasn’t that interested in eating monkeys. This is a data point I had never considered in the late David Foster-Wallace’s thoughts about meat disassociation. In Consider the Lobster, DFW posits that the closer an animal is to us on the cladistic diagram, the more likely we are going to have a separate name for its meat. Consider, we eat chicken, duck, rabbit but not cow, pig or sheep (which are beef, pork and mutton). But there is something about the anthropomorphic qualities of a monkey that infuse its consumption with creepy cannibalistic overtones. But, since I believe that monkey is qualitatively, rather than quantitatively different than humans, if it is not endangered, serve it up.

On a less philosophical topic, I also posited that sloth struck me as possibly less appetizing than possum, the most disgusting meat I have consumed to date. This turned out to be an unverifiable claim to my dining companions. Sometimes I forget that not everyone has tasted every mammal that wanders the woods of their child hood wanderings.

Dinner was good, again. We got home, and I set my alarm for 2:30 am.
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[1] I am not being redundant here. There are two different models. Hydrology answers the question ‘How much water and when?’ Hydraulics answers the question, who is going to get wet and how deep will it be?’.

July 13, 2009

(Note: I am home, but I have posts for the last three days that I will continue to put up here.)

Today was probably the easiest class day. We switched from hydrology and hydraulics, which is what Mark and I both work on and teach regularly. We are essentially teaching the software we write. I did have a couple extended conversations about individual projects and think I was able to provide helpful input. Here are a couple of pictures of the class room and teaching.

After the class we had planned to go with Kester to eat at one of his friends houses. Kester picked us up an hour late, which was not a huge surprise, especially given that he has a huge week coming up next week and went back to work after dinner.

The friend served two big pots of food. One was chicken curry, which was very good. The other I did not recognize. They called it a Pepper Pot[1]. Apparently this is what every house in Guyana makes for Christmas. The chicken curry reflects the South Aisian descent of our hosts, but the pepper pot is fundamentally Guyanese.

It was an Amer-Indians (Guyana’s native peoples) dish. According to our hosts the Ameri-Indians used to just keep a stew pot cooking with a local sweet root and some hot peppers in lieu of refrigeration. They said ‘Whatever they got in the jungle, a pig, a monkey, a snake, it went in the pot with everything else. And they just kept adding to it. It was never finished.’

They served roti[2] (a nan like flat, dense, unleavened bread) to eat with the curry and bread to eat with the pepper pot. No silverware. The breads were the eating utensils. Apparently, the bread is made with donated American grains. It sounds like we have been offering grain for a while but wheat bread wasn’t catching on. So they experimented with combination rice/wheat breads for a while until they found a mix that caught on. It was very good.

Kester’s friend ate with us but his wife served the meal and then did not join us. This struck me a odd, until it came out that they were Muslims. There was Urdu script on the wall and on the way out he told me a story about the tree in the front yard. Apparently it was a date palm grown from a date his mother had brought back from her hajj to Mecca.

On the way home, Kester took us by his mother’s house so he could see his son and we could meet his extended family. They were very warm and welcoming. His son was very cute. Going from Kester’s colleague’s house, to a house that reflected Kester’s background, however, demonstrated how far he had climbed socio-economically. We were particularly honored that he would bring us by to see his son. His son is just over 2 years like Charis. Mark took a picture and showed him, and he pointed at his own image and said his name. It was super cute.

We got back to the hotel around 8 with a lot of work still to do. We didn’t get to bed until 1ish.

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[1] This was unlike anything I had ever had before which made it a cool cross cultural adventure. Unfortunately, it also made for a couple days of gastrointestinal adventure. Worth it.
[2] I ran into this in both Nepal (we called in Chapati in Nepal and I got to ‘help’ make it) and Africa, which our hosts suggested. It is interesting in Guyana because both major populations, those of African descent and those of South Asian descent, enjoy roti as part of their cultural heritage. Kester said the only difference was which syllable got the accent.

July 9, 2009

Mark started the day going over the ‘time of concentration’ calculation again. It is a complex computation that takes about an hour and can’t really be done well by computer. It is a little unfair to him because when we divided up the lectures and workshops, we didn’t foresee that this workshop would essentially include 2 hours of calculation from the front. But we are talking about cutting his bridge hydraulics lectures to make more time for the students to practice with the local model.

I guess this is as good a time as any to describe why we are here. Next week there is a big emergency management exercise. The Guyanese will be simulating a hypothetical flood event and trying to coordinate a response. I have constructed numerical models of the river and watershed that will be used to predict how much flooding will occur, where it will occur and how bad it will be. We are here for the previous week, to train them in the software and get them familiar with the model I built. The short term goal would be that they could use the model to predict flood impact. The long term goal would be that a small, interagency team would emerge from the class that could model additional systems for flooding and water supply objectives. The sustainability plan involves three professors who are taking the class and will, presumably, teach it as part of the hydrology curriculum. I think the long term benefit here has a pretty high likelihood, primarily because of Kester. He has a plan. He made this happen, and always seems to have something cooking.

Today during tea break we were interviewed by the local media. I am not sure if it was TV or print but there was a video camera and they took some footage of Mark reviewing the workshop. They primarily asked about our purpose, what we are teaching about and if there is more training planned.

The students spent a good chunk of today just working with the local model I constructed. This was the major change we made to the schedule. We dumped a couple of the more theoretical lectures and invented 8 tasks for them to do with the local model. I think this was a significant improvement of over the original agenda. It was much less directed and I feel like the students did very well. I think it also demonstrated the utility of the model since they were simulating the actual 2005 event which brought flood disaster preparedness to the forefront of the national consciousness. There were a couple of things that didn’t go as planned, but, on the whole, the exercise was really valuable for a workshop written quickly over beers (and fake beer). It was a fun day because I am pretty proud of the model (which I banged out in under a week, though it is more of a month effort). There is a screen shot of the hydrologic model above. While Mark lectured I tried to convert my steady flow hydraulic model of the local river into an unsteady flow model with remarkable success.

After class we had the driver drop us off at the zoo. It is part of a big botanical park. I went last time (see previous posts), but it was still very fun. A couple of the animals were out that were not out last time including many of the small cats. The Ocelot is my favorite and two of them were out.

We were also impressed with the Harpy Eagles. The sign says that they seldom fly above the jungle canopy. The mental picture I have of eagles soaring on the wind surveying the land for a meal just don’t work. They mainly eat monkeys, sloths and Cotamundis (with the occasional large lizard). Seems like an ecological niche more commonly inhabited by owls (which the zoo also had). But these are enormous birds (up to 25 lbs). (This also led to the realization that Mark and I were both big Piers Anthony fans as adolescents).

The other interesting thing was that one of the monkeys was clearly on the outside of the exhibit. There was a monkey on the lam. We saw him through multiple ceiling bars and there was no roof enclosure.

After the zoo we walked through the approximately half mile park only to find the east gate locked. But, Mark remarked, I have yet to see a fence that can effectively keep people out, and sure enough, there was a person sized hole not far from the gate.

We walked back (again, about half a mile). A horse trailer offered us a ride. We considered it but I hesitated to long and probably for the better. The embassy has a strict no bus rule but is silent on the issue of horse pulled trailer. I have to believe that we would have been violating the spirit of the law, even if we were within the protection of the text itself.

As it became clear we were approaching the hotel we ate at what seemed to be one of the last places. It was clearly a dive, but had ‘Snapa’ (Snapper) on the menu and we decided to ‘go slumming’ a bit. But there was nice open outdoor seating on a major street so it seemed safe enough. We were not yet aware just how much that was the case. There seemed to be immediate confusion regarding our desire to get food. It became apparent (to Mark[1]) that food was not the primary, or even secondary business the establishment was peddling. It seemed the confusion regarding our order was almost intentional. It was as if they wanted us to order something they couldn’t ask us if we wanted[2]…and we later debated if one of the things we could have requested was the ‘waitress’ herself.[3]

If the food was their primary business, they weren’t very good at it. But we had been told that Chow Mein here was, in fact, noodles, but a different kind of noodles than Lo Mein. And they were. It was a spicy egg noodle. It was pretty interesting, which is really the only way I can describe the entire dining experience. We ate relatively quickly and didn’t linger long.

After that we went to a grocery a couple blocks away. There were other white people there. I think the first I had seen all week. I bought camera batteries and a Cadbury nut and fruit chocolate bar. The last time I had one of those was in Kenya. Before that, the last time I had one of those was in London. I don’t know if international travel generates a very specific craving or if these are only available outside the US…but it sure is a good chocolate bar and I didn’t eat much of my dinner.

We went back to the hotel and set up the laptops at our favorite patio to work in the mild, costal, night air. We got some work done, but the internet was not working and I faded fast. I was in bed by 10.

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[1] Throughout the trip Mark has simply been more observant than me. I don’t know if he looks around more, while I get fixated, or if he just knows what to look for, or is just more of a scientists, constantly taking in and processing data…but there were many phenomena that I would have simply overlooked, including the dinner situation.
[2] We were left with the feeling that our desire to order food and a beer, sit down, eat it and leave was, somehow, a strange request for a restaurant to honor.
[3] Upon careful analysis of the data, we have concluded that the answer is probably a disturbing yes.

July 8, 2009: The Sea Wall

Teaching went more smoothly today. We finally figured out the problem with the computers, but were able to buddy people up on working computers. My office generally believes in doing workshops with a partner. It builds class cohesion. It forms governmental networks. It requires fewer instructors and the students work through problems together. It is just pedagogically superior to each person working alone. But the Guyanese were proud of securing each person their own machine so we did not buck that…but after all of the computers were working again, I was glad to see many of the partner groups remained.

It was probably my hardest day of lecture, with 2 very technical lectures in the program I don’t write. But it went pretty well. Mark lost power during his lecture. This is something that happens teaching overseas. Fortunately it happened during a lecture (and not a workshop) and the generator kicked in quickly.

After class we decided to start walking around immediately in the hopes of getting to a restaurant[1] and planning the impromptu workshop for the next day. We ended up within sight of the floodwall and decided to see how far we could walk along it. We ended up walking about a mile west on the sea wall all the way to where it ended at the mouth of the river.

This was definitely a highlight of my time here so far. The water may be laden with Amazon mud, but the cool ocean breeze blowing in, families playing in the ocean, the sun setting on the horizon, all work together to make the flood wall a really fun place.

Most of the sea wall is deceptively wide. We had heard that it is the best place to run in Guyana. Since it essentially looks like concrete Jersey barrier from the side, we greeted this assertion with skepticism. But it is several feet wide, allowing two way pedestrian traffic. If I wasn’t staying up late every night working I would totally be getting up early to run on it.

Towards the end Mark did notice an empty discarded wallet that gave us pause, but we ended up walking out to the end of the pier (see picture below).

There were three fishermen out there and what appeared to be a make shift shack with a small wind generator. This was pretty cool.

While we were walking Mark mentioned that today was his 40th birthday. He said he didn’t even realize he would be traveling on his 40th until last weekend, he was in work, and sent a friend an e-mail on the occasion of her 40th, realized his was immanent, did the math and found that he would be in Guyana.

Just before the floodwall transitioned into the pier is what I will call Guyana’s diplomatic center. The American and Canadian embassy are on the same block as the Pegasus hotel, all within a block of the ocean. It seems like a pretty nice spot. We had heard that the Pegasus hotel used to be the nicest hotel in town. It seemed appropriate that dinner should be a bit of an event tonight given the occasion. So we wandered in looking for a restaurant. It had been my belief that we were not staying at the Pegasus hotel because its day had passed…that it was now an old hotel that was not as nice as the newish one that we were staying in. It became clear that this was not the case. We were not staying at the Pegasus, it appeared, because it was too nice. But dinner was still very reasonable and very good. When we were done, things had really picked up in the lobby. There was a steel drum band and, pretty much, a party going on. It would have been fun to stay, but we still had to write a work shop.

We took a taxi back to our hotel since it was late, dark, and we had walked for about an hour. We felt like we had been taken on taxi rides earlier in the trip (no one has or uses meters) but not this one. It was ~$2.

We set up our computers on the second floor covered porch and worked until ~11:30. The bar was open, so I went to get beers. I thought, Mark should at least have someone to drink with while he works on his birthday. Unfortunately, I was not successful in the objective. Mark got a Banks premium. It is the local beer that we have been drinking. I like it. But they had another type (that came in several brands) called the Malta. I was feeling adventurous and asked for the Banks Malta. My comment when I tasted it was, ‘That’s interesting.’ Mark tried it and generated the same response. Upon closer inspection, I had ordered a non-alcoholic beer. Mark said it tasted like the pre-fermented grain malt that beer is made out of. There was some general comedy in the fact that I was trying to be a ‘drinking buddy’ and failed. But I would have preferred the beer.

Here are a few additional pictures from the flood wall walk and the embassy area.

A statue of the local endangered turtle. Mark’s comment: “It has got to be hard to be a turtle these days. They are slow and tasty. Not a helpful combination.”

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[1] I never spell restaurant close enough to get word to spell check it. It is because I pronounce it rest-raunt. I was talking with one of the students about this and he said, ‘yeah, that is how we pronounce it too.’

July 7, 2009

Got up at 6, showered, ironed and looked at my lecture materials. Mark and I met for breakfast at 6:40, but it wasn’t open until 7…when we were supposed to leave. Our driver waited and we ate anyway. This did not put us behind, since we were the first to arrive by a solid 20 minutes. This was not surprising for the day after a holiday.

It was a good sized class. We have about 30 students. The morning lectures went fine. Both Mark and I talk fast, and we are understanding about 75% of what is said to us, so we need to be careful to speak slowly so we can be understood. It is kind of funny to have a language barrier but not be able to blame it on the language. Everyone speaks English as their first language, but Caribbean vs American dialects are about as distinct as English can be. One of the IT guys joked that we should get a translator to go from our English to real English.

I was looking forward to the workshop in the afternoon. The first workshop tends to be when the class bonds and the course picks up momentum. Things started out fine. The students seemed to be getting it. But then one step in the middle of the workshop simply didn’t work on ~1/3rd of the machines. It was a lab permissions issue. It turns out the same caution that kept the lab nice was preventing a third of our students from doing using the software. Because it wasn’t our program, we were not very successful at trouble shooting the problem. Not a good start. This turned out to be because several of the computers were on a domain server, whatever that means, and was eventually fixed by the IT guy.

After the class, several of the University students took us to their research watershed. They showed us what data they are collecting and asked if there was a way they could use it to compute a ‘runoff coefficient.’ After significant discussion, we decided that it was likely that they could use our software to get at the losses they were interested in but that the analytical approach would probably not work.

Then our driver took us back to the hotel, we did some e-mail and then headed out exploring. We walked 4 or 5 blocks to a place called Buddy’s that had been recommended. But that was closer than we had thought, so we looped around several blocks before dinner. It was dark by the time we finished. Walking through the residential neighborhoods did not seem threatening. The main thing I worried about was not getting hit by cars. There were no sidewalks on most of the roads.

Buddy’s turned out to be a Chinese restaurant. While the two major ethnic groups here are of African and South Asian (Indian) descent there apparently was a substantial Chinese immigration to work the cane fields at one point. So there are many Chinese restaurants. The undisputed highlight of this meal was the egg rolls. Both Mark and I ordered shrimp egg rolls. When they came out, we realized the description was much more literal than we had expected.

They were essentially little shrimp omelets.

I got a seafood pineapple, which is exactly what it sounds like, and Mark got the house lo mein. This reopened my little conundrum about how lo mein on the east coast is called chow mein on the west coast. Apparently Guyana fits more with its east coast location.

We got home around 8:30 and did the next workshop, then went to our respective rooms to prep our lectures. Around 10, there was a knock on the door. It was Mark who proposed we restructure the next day and a half of class. I agreed and continued to prep until 11:30. At 11:30 I got online to leave my wife a little facebook note, but found her online, so we IM’d for about 45 minutes.

Monday July 6, 2009

Monday did not start well. We got to the airport in plenty of time, but soon learned that not only had our baggage not been checked through, but my ticket to Georgetown had been canceled for lack of payment. It is hard for me to describe the bureaucracy surrounding international travel with the Federal government. Let’s just say that I abandoned any hope of staying after the class in Guyana for a jungle adventure simply because of the extra complexity it would add to a travel situation that already had a pretty low probability of going well. My office cell phone still did not work outside the US…fortunately Mark’s did. I was able to call the emergency federal travel hotline. After extended periods on hold and being dropped once, they got me a ticket and we made the plane. In retrospect this seems benign, but it was really disconcerting at the time. The moral of the story is that I should never travel internationally with the government without a working cell phone…never.

After that the day settled down. Customs went without issue and we were picked up by an embassy vehicle. A couple interesting things on the trip to the airport. We encountered a bike race shortly after leaving the airport. Two cyclists were just trying to distance themselves from the peleton of ~30 bikers.

We also passed many, many, fields of a dense crop, with no discernable fruit, with plants taller than me. All of my experience in the field in the previous trips were in the rice fields east of Georgetown. This was not rice. It was cane. One of Gyana’a chief exports. I get a warm feeling about sugar cane, since HFCS is so ubiquitous and is turning out to be so potentially detrimental.

There was also one immediately apparent difference between this trip and my last visit to Guyana. We had arrived during the rainy season[1]. The first morning it rained early, hard and often. This is fun. In Buffalo, I knew people who would try to get somewhere warm and sunny every year to break up the dreariness of the overcast cold of the extended Buffalo winter (which could seem to occupy half the year). I have been feeling the opposite. It refuses to rain for 6 months at a time in California. While this is convenient for picnics and backpacking, I think I actually get sunshine fatigue. At some point in July, you walk out your door and say, ‘hmm, another perfectly clear, intensely sunny, hot day’ and start wishing for a good Midwestern thunderstorm. I think Guyana should market itself as a rainfall vacation spot. In the same way that Midwesterners go to Cancun for sun for a mid-winter weather reprieve, Californians could go to Guyana for a little late summer rain. I am mostly being silly, but this is all to say that I consider rainy season to be far from a liability.

Both Mark and I arrived pretty wiped out. I was thankful for a place to sleep last night but two early morning flights in a row, with the time change, still had taken a toll. We decided to eat anyway. I suspect we are the only ones staying at our hotel. One would think that would turn into exemplary service. One would be wrong. Between it being a holiday and low occupancy seemed to conspire against the kitchen being ready to go. But once the food did come it was quite good. We got stir fry (mainly on the advice that it would be quick.

By the time lunch wrapped up it was about 12:30. We were meeting our contact at 2:15. So we tried to nap and were mostly successful despite the best efforts of a rooster just beneath my window.

Then, Kester, the Guyanese gentleman who made this class happen and has taken charge of it, met picked us up. Kester impressed me the last time I was here. He is motivated, affable, organized and seems to just be an effective guy. He brought us to the University of Guyana computer lab where 3 IT guys met us. These guys were all working on their holiday[2] to make the class happen and were all quite good. The computer lab had 30 machines and was in remarkably good shape. I never know what to expect when someone says they have a ‘computer lab’ in another country. In Afghanistan, it was a borderline nightmare. All of the machines were as infected as could be and many didn’t even remotely work. The University of Nairobi was much better by comparison. But the University of Guyana was exceptionally good. It was new in 2004, but the equipment seemed older than that and 5 years is plenty of time for a computer lab to be in disrepair. We had the software loaded and the binders stuffed in less than 2 hours.

This was faster than Kester expected as well. So he offered to drive us around Georgetown which was very cool. A couple of the highlights:

-There is a new conference center that is interesting in two ways. It is architecturally unique and it was built by the Chinese.

-We went to many of the sites I hit on my walking tour last time, but they were still fun. Most of the historic buildings are made entirely of wood (one of the country’s top resources) giving them a distinct look from European or American historic buildings which tend to be brick or stone.

-We crossed the new bridge across the huge river adjacent to Georgetown. The cool thing about the bridge is that it was unsuspended. It was a floating bridge. Like the bridges the British used in WWII, it was built on a series of connected pontoons. There is a railroad track in the middle of it that is used to move the middle portion of the bridge over to allow large shipping vessels through. There is no way that Guyana could afford a bridge that would span a river of this size with enough clearance to allow the big shrimping boats through. The floating bridge is a much more economical solution. Kester said that a similar bridge crosses the Esquibo (Guyana’s largest river) making it possible to drive all the way across Guyana for the first time.

But after we crossed the bridge things got really interesting. Kester stopped at a friend’s house who invited us all in. His friend was a Captain in the Reserves (and had been in the reserves for 18 years) in addition to his normal job. The friend was gregarious and welcoming and before we knew it his wife was bringing us food. It started as a ‘snack’ with a sizable piece of ‘casserole.’ Mark and I tried to come up with a good, concise definition of it later but were unable to. It was somewhere between a high quality, firm, mac and cheese and a quiche. But it featured chili peppers. If you can imagine the best Mac and Cheese possible, and then lace it with some substantial chilies, that is what it was, and it was fantastic.

But as the conversation topic turned from flooding to food, someone mentioned ‘roti.’ This prompted Mark to ask the totally innocent question, ‘What’s roti?’[3] Before we knew it, despite our protests, we were eating a shrimp and green bean[4]stir fry, because, apparently you can’t just try roti by itself. We felt the standard American emotions of imposition but it was a wonderful experience of Guyanese culture.

After that, Kester was planning to take us out for beer and barbecue as part of the holiday celebration. This could have been extremely fun, but unfortunately, we were both fading fast and still had some prep to do for the next day’s class. We dropped some hints. Kester made another stop of unknown purpose (I suspect he was letting people he was gong to meet at the planned event that we would not be attending) and we headed back to the hotel.

At the hotel, Mark and I worked through the next day’s workshop. We are both hydraulics guys (the topic of the second half of the class). The first half of the class is on hydrology, which we both know[5] but is neither of our specialties. So even though Mark is extremely smart and I have done a lot of hydrology, it still requires some non-trivial prep on our part. After that I worked on my lecture some and was unconscious by 10.

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[1] The driver suggested that, in most years, the rainy season would be over by now…but it started late this year and is going late.
[2] The holiday was Carico day or something like that. Carico is a meeting of the Caribbean leaders with the intent of building a regional consortium like the European union. The goal is seamless travel, free trade and, mostly, a single currency between them (something comparable to the Euro). The idea seems to be that by forming the alliance they will emerge as a substantial regional player comparable to Brazil or Argentina. The Guyanese that I talked to were skeptical that it would ever happen.
[3] Actually, his actual question was ‘What’s the second word you said?’ This question could not have been more innocent.
[4] This is one of the things I have come to enjoy about Guyanese food. All of the meals I have had so far have been served on a bed of thin, sautéed green beans. I like green beans. I think they are, unquestionably, the best green vegetable that exists.
[5] I have taught a joint hydrology and hydraulics class in both Kenya and Afghanistan, so the material is familiar, but is not my daily work, so it still requires some review.

Sunday July 5: I'm Back

So I am back in Guyana and am going to pick the journal back up.

Sunday morning started early. The alarm went off at 2:55am. Amanda and I had stayed up just long enough to see the fireworks from our new street. Davis’ big fireworks display is at Community Park, just down the green belt from us. Around 9:00 our street became a parking lot. We turned out to have a pretty good view from our sidewalk. But even with a relatively modest 10:00 bed time 3 came early.

Charis was awake when I woke up and asking for a new diaper. This was super sweet, since she had fought bed time but was very affectionate and thankful for a mid-night diaper and water. I collected several hugs and kisses before she settled in to sleep and I took off.

I picked Mark up on the way to the airport. Mark will teach the class with me and then stay for another week to help facilitate the exercise (essentially a simulated flood event intended to test the Guyanese emergency response system). He is one of the most interesting guys I know and a seemingly adventurous traveler.

It will take ~24 hours to get there including 12 hours overnight in Trinidad and Tobago. I took no less than 6 people procrastinating my file to obtain this less than optimal flight plan, but we are gong to try to make the best of it and see if we can’t explore Port of Spain for a little while.

We arrived in Port of Spain without incident. I got exit rows all the way. It seems like every flight I have been on in the last two years have been full, except those to South America. I worked through one and a half lap top batteries. I also read a descent chunk of Pinnock’s theology of the Holy Spirit and several biology lectures.[1] The opening welcome to Trinidad and Tobago was a little unsettling. We were greeted with medical personnel in face masks and had to hand in a questionnaire about where we had been and our potential exposure to swine flu. Apparently they are still taking that very seriously down here.

Mark had talked to someone on the plane and gotten a hotel recommendation. Apparently Port of Spain was 40 miles from the airport and not a place to walk around at night. But there was a Holiday Inn in a ‘compound’ deemed safe by this western traveler near the airport. Sold. We took a cab about 10 minutes. In that 10 minutes we passed the scene of a recent accident. As we approached, someone began to exit the passenger door of one of the vehicles in the accident, and a large truck barreled right through the door, sending glass everywhere. We had to swerve to avoid the whole thing. Welcome to Trinidad and Tobago. No one appeared to be hurt but it was a bit of a startling welcome.

We checked into the hotel. We had no idea what the government rate was, and it seemed a little pricy, so we decided to share a room to be safe. It seemed appropriate since we were only going to be crashing for a handful of hours anyway. Then the shuttle took us to a nearby mall where some restaurants stayed open late. They mostly had very western flair…we went to an Irish pub. I was able to get some Kabobs that, at least, seemed localish and we got some T&T beers. Then back to the hotel to e-mail my wife and crash.

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[1] I am working through the Teaching Company’s intro bio lectures and some MP3’s I got of one of UCD’s freshman bio classes in anticipation of taking 2 freshman bio’s fall quarter while working full time and keeping up my preaching schedule.

April 10, 2009: Final thoughts

The trip home was mostly uneventful. My experience with the Georgetown airport was not a good one. There are many, many layers of security checks. Apparently Guyana is the #1 exporter of cocaine to Europe. I (with a couple dozen others) was selected to have my check on hand searched. We had to wait in a line because for some reason we had to be present for the check. The guy told me that it was the large books that he had to look at. Apparently in X-RAY, City of God looks like it could command a small fortune on the streets of Amsterdam.

I got into NY at 10:30 pm and stayed at an airport hotel (for the government rate). It was midnight before I got to bed and my wakeup call was at 4:30 for a 5:00 shuttle. 4.5 hours in a NY airport hotel cost more than 4 nights at the Grand Costal in Guyana. I contemplated just crashing in the terminal, but I wanted to be as rested as possible for my family this weekend, and I did end up sleeping soundly for the 4.5 hours.

On the final leg (the 1.5 hour Salt Lake City to Sacramento flight) I got upgraded. This seems almost comical, but isn’t a bad way to end the trip, and I got extremely lucky for booking so late…In 6 flights I didn’t have a single middle seat.

So I have a few random pictures and a list of random thoughts I wanted to expand upon to wrap things up:

The other engineer (who is Korean and grew up in Asia) remarked how surprised he was to se almost no one smoking during our entire time in Guyana. He was right. My experience with Asia, Africa and even Europe is that smoking is more common than not. I did not see a single person smoke and, in the abundant trash, cigarette butts were conspicuously absent.

I was generally quiet during the meals. There were up to ten of us, and half were very extroverted and knew each other. They also came from a military culture that was pretty foreign to me. One of them didn’t even know that you could get a Federal job without being military first. But on the field trip I told a story that became a recurring joke and I was asked to retell like a party trick. I mentioned how I didn’t think I would ever buy a Kindle (Amazon’s digital book technology). I just liked books too much. I like how the look and feel and, especially smell. One of my favorite things is to get a book out of the library and discover that in the last 40 years it has only been checked out 3 times[1]. The musty smell of a book like that is the aroma of rarified knowledge…the scent of an intellectual frontier…a sensory affirmation of mastering a topic. I was just telling a story…but to them it was a comedy routine. I might as well have been Mitch Hedberg.

This was the most military thing I have done in my career of receiving paychecks from the DOD (something I have always been just a little uncomfortable with). I was comforted by the idea that there was no possible way we could have a military interest in Guyana and that, even though I wasn’t working for USAID (like the other trips), it was as if I was. Well after many drinks one evening, the group started talking about why Guyana is actually a hugely strategic ally. Turns out there is a really important military reason we are cultivating an alliance with Guyana. You know what…I’m ok with that. Whether or not you agree with our strategic maneuvering, I am doing helpful work for a people who need it with military funds…I call stuff like this ‘riding with the Pirates.’ One of my favorite figures in Church History was Francis Xavier.[2] Xavier traveled the Portuguese empire with reckless abandon. Sometimes, to get where he felt God wanted him, he would hitch a ride with Pirates…actual Pirates. So, whenever I forge pragmatic alliances that I feel mildly uncomfortable with (though I mostly support our military alliance with Guyana) Amanda and I have come to call it ‘riding with the Pirates.’

I had cheesecake every night while in Guyana…Most of the time with cinnamon chocolate pudding. It was fantastic.

Horse pulled trailers were pretty common in Guyana. One of the Guyanese engineers pointed at one and said ‘this is our version of green vehicles.’ Jokes were made about methane emissions and horse power limitations…but he has a point. Hybrid SUV’s are placebos for the yuppie conscience.

The last evening our dinner conversation revolved around hiring a lawyer, ceasing mortgage payments, and leveraging military credibility to renegotiate mortgage principal with your lender (not only for a primary residence but also for rental property). One of my co-workers had done this and at least 5 others were very interested – including 3 rental properties. I was uncomfortable with the whole conversation. Federal bailout funds are making up the difference. Which means that Charis will be paying these mortgages. I understand we have to keep things from collapsing (I think I understand, actually, I have very little idea what is going on despite doing a lot of work to understand it) but it seems that it is not just AIG that is privatizing profits and socializing costs.[3] This disincentives the last shred of fiscal restraint our culture has. I think, even Nic could admit that this is evidence that I still have at least one conservative impulse left.

The hotel played music from the 80’s and 90’s every night loud enough that I could hear it in my room. I wish that we could all just agree to put the vast majority of what was on the radio while I was growing up in a soundproof box somewhere in Nevada. Its really really horrible stuff.

I overheard one of my co-workers describe his recent conversion to Christianity to another one. The story listener asked ‘so would you consider yourself ‘born again?’’ The story teller, obviously unfamiliar with the terminology, replied ‘no it was the first time.’ This made me smile.

The story listener was a really interesting guy. He has a Masters Degree in Literary Criticism[4]. He said that when he was getting it he took a lot of slack for acquiring a ‘useless degree.’ But when he got his first espionage job he knew I had been a good choice. He said that critical, investigative reading (often for subtext) formed the vast majority of his job as an intelligence officer. He recommends studying literature as perfect training for military intelligence.

Ok, with that, I’ll wrap things up. I’ll revive this blog if I go back in July. Otherwise, thanks for joining me to the country that sounds like it should be in Africa but isn’t. It is an honor that you took time to read this little journal.

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[1] This was back when they used to stamp the due date on the inside flap. Computers have almost entirely augmented the library experience…except for this idiosyncratic hobby of mine.
[2] We struggled wildly to come up with girl names, but we have had a boy name for years. If we had had a boy, his name would have been Xavier.
[3] Heads I win, Tails you loose…as this phenomenon has recently been called.
[4] He was also recently divorced and spoke better of his ex-wife than most guys speak of their actual wives.

April 9, 2009: The Zoo

The zoo is a small part of a larger park. So when I got to the zoo with 30 minutes left before it opened, there was plenty to take in. Like most ‘developing world’[1] countries, garbage removal is not a high priority or a strong cultural value.[2] I remember when I was in Nepal, we took the children from the orphanage I was at to the park for Easter. The ‘park’ may not have had houses or open sewers, but it was overrun with trash. Not this park. This park was huge, beautiful and clean. It was also almost empty. My favorite part was this bridge which almost seems like a mean prank for drunk people[3]:

But it did provide a good vantage point for the trees which were teeming with local birds.

I made my way to a very nice bridge, island, moat system surrounding the zoo but as I crossed the final, precarious seeming bridge, something enormous, slippery and grey thing surfaced right next to me. I never saw a face or flipper, but it surfaced right next to me several times. I later learned that this is where they kept the manitees and that was the last I would see of it.

So, I love zoos. When I get to travel to a new city I will try to do the following things (in the stated order):

1. Climb a nearby mountain
2. Go to a baseball game
3. Go to the Natural History Museum
4. See something the city is famous for
5. Go to the Zoo

Madison, WI had a free zoo. My first semester there I was single[4] and working really hard. I started a Masters program in Engineering without an engineering degree and, as with almost every stage of my education, I felt like I was just treading water until I was exposed as a fraud and unceremoniously kicked out. I was taking the Engineering pre-recs (for which I didn’t have pre-recs[5], so I was actually had to learn twice as much material as the coursework). Anyway, all of this is to say, I used to go to the zoo to study. I mostly liked being around families having fun but taking study breaks to watch the lemurs is remarkably rejuvenating. I understand the ethical objection to zoos, and I think care should be taken to build them well, but I like them.

So Georgetown’s zoo was modest, but it was the best possible kind. When it comes to both Natural History Museums and zoos, local is better than spectacular. One of my favorite natural history museums of all time is actually Cleveland’s. In addition to an exhibit that featured a song devoted to each geologic strata[6] Cleveland had a smallish fossil collection (which is why I go to Natural History Museums). But instead of collecting as many dinosaurs as possible from Wyoming, the Gobi and Secatachawan[7], all of their fossils were from Ohio. Much of my mental map of the Devonian comes from that exhibit.

Anyway, all that is to say, though modest, the Georgetown zoo was very good. It was composed entirely of animals that lived in Guyana.[8] I grew up obsessed with animals.[9] It is actually a little surprising that it has taken me this long to consider a biology degree.[10] But it seems that the non-North-American animals were blurred in a haze of exoticness. I remember being shocked to learn, at a relatively advanced age, that there were no tigers in Africa. So to experience animals in conjunction with their general local (if not their actual habitat) really accentuates the experience pedagogically and recreationally. The jungles of Africa and South America actually have really fascinating similarities and differences.

So, the zoo started with birds and lots of them. Colorful parrots, oddly proportioned toucans, ominous vultures and austere eagles.

Then came the smaller mammals. I really liked this guy…The Mustelidae

Then, finally, the main event. The big mammals:

I have always liked tapirs (here they call them cows, even thought domestic cows have their run of the streets). But whenever I think of them I think of a hilarious moment in Gibson family oral history[11]. We were visiting Washigton DC (or maybe it was Toronto) and were at the end of a very fun day at the zoo. But I had never seen a Tapir and we had missed it, so we backtracked and found an enclosure that the Tapir shared with a Rhino. I was entranced with the Tapir, but Nic pointed at the Rhino and asked, loudly, ‘what is that big thing hanging from the Rhino?’[12]

I usually really like monkeys, but these monkeys actually creaped me out.

The most famous Gyanese mammal is the ‘giant otter’ which is about half the size of a Sea Otter but was still playful and extremely fun.

Finally, after the otter were the jaguars (one of eight different kind of cats they had labled – of which I only saw 4). They are impressive, but the best moment is the interest they seemed to take in their neighbor the otter.

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[1] In undergrad I tried to do an unofficial minor in the ‘developing world.’ I took Third World Sociology, Geography of the Developing World, Music of the World’s People and History of the Non-Western World. The latter made me self conscious of all the possible ways to refer to the 2/3rds of the world that do not have the material prosperity of US/Canada/Europe/East and North Asia. (Note, I find this so difficult, that that previous sentence of this footnote took me 5 minutes to write – and I still don’t like it.) He went through all of the ways and found them each ethnocentric and imperialistic, deciding non-western was the least offensive, and, therefore, adopting it for his class. This knowledge has left me linguistically paralyzed and requires a paragraph apology for the use of ‘developing.’
[2] This is actually a huge problem in flooding because the floodwater isn’t just physically dangerous, but becomes chemically and biologically dangerous as well.
[3] Alaska politics also comes to mind.
[4] Amanda was student teaching in Texas, we got married the following December and moved back together.
[5] I have always believed that pre-recs are overrated. For being so academically insecure, I sure was cocky.
[6] Each strata actually got its own genre too, so the Silurian was hip hop, the Devonian was country and another was Opera. I remember fantastic pieces like “I’ve been wishin, that I was fishin, in an Ordovician sea.” And the Operatic “O, Trilobite.”
[7] There is a temptation to simply collect the most dramatic specimines regardless of origin in each museum. This ends up with all fossil collections looking more or less the same, however, like a sprawling tract of suburban chains that is indistinguishable in Virginia, Nebraska or California. There is no sense of place or pride of specificity.
[8] There was one pen labeled ‘African Lion’ but it was empty.
[9] When we had friends over and we would go through the strange socialization experiment of reaching a consensus of sixth graders regarding their next activity…my suggestion was usually, I kid you not, write animal reports (which I regularly did for fun and was never selected by a jury of my peers).
[10] I will be applying to UCD’s Masters Program in Restoration Ecology for 2011.
[11] I call it an oral history because, before Dad died, this story got told often. Well the oral history is now text, and I assure you, higher criticism is unnecessary. This story gets the 'highly probable' ink.
[12] In his defense, I remember thinking that the Rhino’s ‘package’ was unnecessarily enormous to the point of impracticality. But I’m sure the Rhymenoseris would disagree.