THE WORLD WE HAVE LOST AND FOUND

It's Valentine's Day and we have been in Guyana for exactly one year.So this is an important milesone for us...from now on it's on the home run and a good time to look on what has happened to us over the last 12 months. We have lost, albeit temporaily, a way of life in England that immersed us for nealry forty years for an entrance into a way of life that all the TV documentaries, trawls through the internet sites or email conversations could not have prepared us for. The assault on the senses and the routines of daily life have absorbed us for 12 months and in somerespects they have let us take part in a world that we have lost in England..small children as young as 4 walking happily to school, secondary school aged boys in shorts playing games of marbles with intensity, playing cricket using a piece of hard wood for a bat, Sundays where few shops open and the majority go to church......I record these examples not because of a longing for an Arcadian past that never existed anyway but as a stark reminder of global inequality in the way peoples live their lives.....
For there surely was a time in Britain when children with severe disabilities ( e.g. blindness, dunbness,deafness, Downes Syndrome) never went to school ....that still happens here..
Where secondary school aged children walked great distances to school and didn't have any lunch...that is a concern we have with youngsters from the Riverain areas,....
Where adults in their 40's and 50's die suddenly from strokes, heart attacks,epileptic fits because the medical facilities and expertise is not in place...

Nevertheless I have had a great time here in Bartica. I love the place despite the many shortcomings - the rubbish, the beakdown of essential services (water and electricity), the lack of urgency to get anything done.. I like the friendliness of the people, the climate, the rainforest, the wonderful rivers, the astounding variety of bird lifethe boat journeys, the absence of traffic lights or risk asssessments or just being able to buy the sweetest imaginable pineapple or the freshest freshwater fish or a chilled jelly coconut from a passing vendor. And of course our interesting, funny, quirky, resi.lient, inventive, energetic colleagues also doing V.S.O.

Now we have established a reliable internet connection hats off to Skype and the internet which has enables us to keep in close contact with the family although I must remeber to dress properly for the occasion...These blasted built in web cams work really well and reveal our lack of clothing sometimes....well it is mighty hot here every day...temperature at the moment around 30 degrees Centigrade...and even at 7.00am it is in the high 20's. They celebrate St. Valentine's Day here very seriously so Happy Valentine's Day to you. Tomorrow we are off up the river to see our friend Ian , walk around his 10 acre rainforest estate and have a barbeque..
'Ah! Such is life!' mused Mr. Grinling