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.