whereiswesstun

Internetted in Guyana

2006-01-25T00:28:00.000-04:00

Ahhh.

I have the internet now. In my house. On my computer. No longer will I be out of touch with people (except for when I'm lazy). No longer will I be disconnected (except for last night, when the internet was out for the entire country). No longer will I get tired of reading and playing guitar only to turn on tv and see that the only things on are Full House reruns and that one program where some guy reads the local obituary for an hour or so. I am finally master of my own time-wasting destiny, and it's pretty cool.

This also means that I will start posting pictures on my blog starting next update. For real this time. In the meanwhiles, you guys can email me or get online to chat and I might even actually respond!

Aside from trying to use my new powers for good and not evil what have I been doing? Well, since I got back from Colorado life in Guyana hasn't changed too much. It's still the rainy season down here and it's still raining quite a bit. Last Monday my school's courtyard was flooded out and school was cancelled for the day (take that snow days!). Some places in the country have had some pretty bad flooding, but I'm still dry in Essequibo. Overall it's good to be back. I guess. (Enthusiasm is key)

One big thing that's about to change down here is that we have a whole new group of volunteers dropping in at the beginning of February. This is exciting for us current volunteers because it means we get new friends.

In fact, I have a feeling that some of these new volunteers have been dropping by this site. Traffic has gone up lately and I'm getting hits from all over the US. I don't know how they found me, because if you search for "Peace Corps Guyana" I turn up at around the 120th link. But if you guys did somehow find me and have questions about being a volunteer in Guyana, get on an instant messenger and ask me.

And if you're a friend that I haven't seen in 6 months, (or even if I have seen you) get on instant messenger and say hi. Heh heh. Do it.

Yeah.

Getting wet

2005-12-04T16:21:00.000-04:00

Well, I've been trying again to keep in touch with everyone. I went to the internet cafe 4 times this week trying to get connected. The first two times it was down for no reason, but the last two times it was closed because of flooding. That's more like it. Hopefully they'll get it back to uh . . . normal soon. Right now I'm at another cafe that I rode a few extra miles to.

Why was the internet cafe flooded in the first place? Well, the rainy season kinda started and we've been getting some heavy rain lately. We've also been getting some light rain and some of the medium kind. Aside from the internet cafe being closed and my clothes not getting dry though, it's actually been kinda fun. Just a couple days ago I realized that it was the first of December and that it shouldn't typically be 88 degrees outside in the shade. I've never ever felt cold in this country but I've felt the most not hot ever since the rain started early last week. The temperature dropped to an icy 71 degrees and all my students started wearing sweaters. Brrr. Yeah whatever you wimps.

Speaking of my students, they finished up their finals last week. We still have one more week of school coming up though, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me but hey I'm flexible. It really seems to be a week for the teachers to get all their paperwork done but the students are still coming. Maybe we can play some games like 'who can pick up the most pieces of trash' or 'who can erase the most chalkboards with their face?' I'm looking forward to it.

What I'm really looking forward to is coming home for Christmas. Not that I can't wait to get out of Guyana. It's just that I'm stoked to see everyone back home. And good news, I did buy a laptop and I'm going to pick it up when I come home so that I can get stuck in the rain on my trip back and waste a few hundred bucks -I mean so that I can keep in touch more. Yeah that's it.

I gotta get going. I'll catch you guys during Christmas vacation (if you live in Colorado and know me and dont avoid me). Hoo ha.

I'm not dead

2005-10-23T16:28:00.000-04:00

Yeah so I'm not dead. At least I don't think so.

I originally wanted to keep up this blog so that the question "where is wesstun?" might be answered and not raised. So yeah uh well I didn't end up moving for another 3 weeks after I thought I was going to, and then when I did my internet mooching prospects dried up and then I tried going to the internet cafe 3 different times and it was always closed even though I was going during 'business hours' and then I got busy and then I remembered you guys after a couple more weeks and thought about what a punk I'm being for not keeping in touch and then I tried again but it was closed again and then I finally tried again today and hooray they're open! I'll do the best I can to summarize my recent life in a few paragraphs without any more run-on sentences.

So I really did move finally. Oh man. Unpacking all my bags for the first time since I've arrived was a sweet thing. I even found some stuff that I brought but I don't remember packing. It was kinda like Christmas. I live in a studio sorta deal on the bottom floor of a two story house. The family I'm renting it from lives upstairs. It's actually a pretty awesome setup as far a Peace Corps housing goes. I have my own entrance to the house, my own bathroom, shower, kitchen, bedroom, living room, patio, stove, oven, refridgerator, tv, sofa, armchairs and hammock. Yeah, I can get used to this. It's kind of amazing the range of housing luxury that Peace Corps volunteers here in Guyana can get. There's a volunteer living less than 10 miles away from me who has to put up with a pit toilet, no electricity and no running water for the next two years. Whew, I dodged the bullet on that one.

You'd think that after moving into such a swankily luxurious apartment I'd direct my efforts outward and focus all my energies on improving my community. Well, yeah, I might get to that later. For the three weeks I've been living at my new house though, I've actually been keeping myself a little busy with home improvement. Even though my house was totally stocked, I still didn't like the idea of being the main course for an all-they-can-eat mosquito buffet. Another volunteer here in Guyana told me that she likes sleeping under a mosquito net because it's 'romantic.' I think that's kinda like saying that gunshot wounds to the head are romantic because the color of blood reminds me of Valentine's day. I guess the romance wore off for me. So yeah I've been plugging up every mosquito-sized hole in my house with mosquito mesh. I finished last week. I've been sleeping without a mosquito net over my bed now for 5 days. Oh baby.

Hmm what else? Oh yeah I've been teaching at a Guyanese school for 8 weeks now. I kinda left that detail out. When I last talked about this I said that I was worried the kids were just going to run around screaming for the first week because of having no schedules. Well, they only did that for a couple days because they put the class schedules together quickly this year. Hooray. Now they run around screaming in an orderly fashion at scheduled intervals.

I actually really like teaching here. I was scheduled to teach 4 science and 2 math classes, and I'm having a good time with them. In some ways, the students are harder to control in class than American students, but they're also easier to impress, so it all balances out. I'm teaching at a secondary school, which in terms of student age is equivalent to a high school back home. In terms of coursework though, I'm basically teaching junior high material.

Not everything about teaching here is easy. Some of the student names have been tough to get down. Most of the black people here in Guyana have western-sounding names like Stewart or Keron or Notorious SML or something. Watch out for those Indian names though. I have one student named Vijay Nandhalall. I won't tell you how to pronounce his name exactly, but if you say the first name and the last name together quickly like he did when he introduced himself to me the first day, it sounds like a certain part of the female anatomy followed by " 'n doll all." I honestly thought the kid was giving me one of those I.C. Weiner or Seymore Butts jokes. That's his real name though. And that one's easy to remember because it's crazy. I'm still working on some of them.

Anyways the owner of this internet cafe is looking at me like he's going to be rich so I better get going before I go broke. Thanks everyone that commented on my last post and I'll try to catch up with you guys when I come home for Christmas. This not-being-able-to-keep-up-with-people nonsense has got to stop. I'm thinking of trying to pick up a cheap used laptop or something while I'm home so I can take this internet shortage issue into my own hands. (And so I can play video games. Don't tell the government.)

I'll try to post at least once more before I make it home for Christmas.

A month of . . . uh . . . chillin'?

2005-08-28T19:06:00.000-04:00

Ok, so it's been a bit since I updated last. That's not because I've been busy. Oh no. The trouble for the most part has been my internetlessness. That honestly should change once school gets going, because in a couple weeks I'll be moving again to my final location, Abram Zuil. Mooching should be a little more convenient there because it's near a school with an computer lab.

What I'm really looking forward to though is simply having my own space. Even though my host families have been cool enough, I have to say that living out of a suitcase for 3 months now has lost it's romantic appeal. So yeah I'm stoked to move, and actually move IN this time. That moving action should happen in two more weeks. First though, I'm actually going to have to do some real work (Hey, I thought this was the Peace Corps), because school starts tomorrow. I've been asked to be there by 8:00, and uh . . . that's all. Oh baby.

I kinda get the impression that the kids all just run amok the first week or so, because when I asked if I should prepare a lesson plan or something (for whatever science or math class it is that I'm teaching) they just told me not to worry, 'the students don't pay attention very well until they get schedules', and that doesn't happen until the second week of school. Yippie. I guess I'll be uh . . . observing the uh . . . education process this week to get myself familiarized and then I'll be given classes starting sometime later.

Aside from doing nothing to prepare for school and not moving yet, what have I been doing you ask? Well, I really do read and sit in a hammock a lot. Sometimes though, when the mosquitos are bad, I sit under my mosquito net and read there instead. Yeah, life is hard alright. It really is good to be starting school tomorrow, because I'm not sure what I'd be doing if it didn't.

Here's a capsule list of my precious few accomplishments since becoming a volunteer:

1. I bought a bike.This was actually a big one for me because even when I move, I'll still be a few miles from my school so a bike is kinda critical. I wanted to find one that would actually maybe last two years though, so I had to make an effort to avoid the standard bikes for sale all along the coast, which from their weight and feel seem to be made of some sort of pig iron/lead composite alloy. Cutting edge. Literally, ha ha. I didn't like those pants anyways. So after quite a bit of shopping I found one dude that was selling a couple bikes with aluminum frames. I asked him if he knew what kind of aluminum it was made of. Turns out it's the 'metal' kind. That's a relief. I ended up getting one of them.

I've only had my bike for a week though, so I still need to explore most of the dirt roads in the area. I'd like to find a road that goes into the jungle because getting attacked by a leopard sounds like fun. I'll keep you guys posted on this one.

2. I've chilled with my host family.I've been doing a lot more with my current host family than I did with the last one. My first homestay family wasn't even around very much, because the father worked evenings and the mom had classes most weeknights. This one has a lot more time to hang out though, so we've been doing that. I've been following them around when they go out, and they've introduced me to a bunch of people around the coast. They like to play Scrabble too, so I'll be coming back to chill with them sometime when I move out.

3. Ha ha. You think I've been busy enough to do three things? Consider this: I've been reading so much, that when another volunteer friend finished a Star Trek novel that he was working on, I snatched it up immediately. Yes, I've now read a Star Trek novel, and I've only been doing this for a month. It doesn't get much worse than that, no sir. Here's to school starting tomorrow. (cheers)

The End of Training

2005-08-02T16:49:00.000-04:00

Okay so . . . when I said "more next week" everyone knew that I was using secret slacker code right? If you didn't know, "next week" is slacker for "at least two weeks from now or maybe never." You'll know in the future when I'm using secret slacker code and when I'm not by guessing correctly.

Incidentally, secret slacker code is similar to Guyanese Creole in many respects. The only difference is that many of the words are slurred to the point of undeciferability. For example, the Guyanese phrase "ee kumin' by we jus' now" translates to "he's coming over in two weeks or maybe never" in English. Sweet.

Anyways I've been kinda busy lately. Training is over, and I swore in officially as a volunteer last Friday. We had a big swearing-in ceremony in Georgetown that took up a few hours. There were a few speeches of varying dullness and then everyone in our group swore to 'uphold the United States Constitution', whatever that means. I take my ceremonies very seriously. After that we had a swearing-in party with any other volunteers in the area that felt like coming and with our host families. When I turned on the TV the next day I noticed that the entire ceremony was being broadcasted on the Guyana TV news station. Apparently the US and Canadian ambassadors attended. Huh.

The last two weeks of training went by quickly but were a little stressful. The week before last was teaching practice week, where we practiced teaching on unsuspecting Uivtlugt students. We were split up into groups of two and each given a class of about ten real live students who were lured by the promise of free snacks. Honestly I have to say that teaching these classes was a big challenge for me. I think the problem was the subject matter we were asked to teach: life skills. Our first lesson was about role models. Hooray. Anyways I survived. I'm glad I signed up for teaching science and math in the long run and none of this sillyness.

Right now, I'm chilling in the goofily-titled town of Adventure on the Essequibo coast. Adventure is a village a few miles down the road from Golden Fleece and Zorg, but I'll only be living here for about the next six weeks. In Guyana, the Peace Corps puts all the volunteers that they can in secondary host families for a short while once they go to their sites. I guess the idea is that it'll help us get tight with the community a little faster. So now I'm living with another host family, and this one has two boys ages 9 and 11. They're cool. In a couple weeks I hope to get some pictures going on this blog so you guys can see what all the places and people I'm bumping into look like.

So that's about where I am right now. I'm now an official volunteer, at my site, living with a new family, and pretending to be working. Since I'm a teacher though and school's out my workload isn't very exhausting just yet. School starts late in August and until then my job description is going to be something along the lines of "read books in a hammock and get ready to do stuff." After the last two months of running around though, that's just fine with me.

Belated Q and A and Stuff

2005-07-18T16:07:00.000-04:00

Oh baby.

It's good to be back from wherever it is that I went, even though it was also good to be gone. I'll talk about that in a bit.

For the moment though, this update is going to be a Q and A session as promised. I'll sprinkle questions such as 'where have I been' and 'why is cheese tasty' randomly throughout to keep things unorganized and hard to follow. Enjoy.

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Q: Wes, aside from using a mosquito net and simply being rediculously manly, what are you doing to avoid malaria and stuff?

A: I was a bit misleading in my post where I talked about my mosquito net and how it was going to keep me from catching malaria, because I made it sound like that was my only line of defense. Actually the Peace Corps has been doing quite a bit to keep us safe. Since a week after coming to Guyana, I've been taking a drug called Larium, which is supposed to be very effective at preventing the disease from being established. That's kind of a story in itself because the drug is supposed to have the side effect of causing funky dreams and can supposedly be psychotically destabilizing but so far I've had no trouble ha ha. DIE!!DIE!!! Sorry about that. Anyhow some of the other volunteers have felt sufficiently weird to change to another drug. Since I always feel weird though, I'm not sure I'd know the difference.

Regardless, malaria is supposed to be almost non-existent on the coast of Guyana and is only a big risk in the interior. I don't want to spoil anything but I will say that I my permanent assignment is on the coast down here so you guys should be able to come see me without fear.

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Q: Wes, are all the streets in Guyana paved?

A: Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Not exactly. The state of most of the roads down here is not as bad as you might think though. In the post where I'll be at for the next two years for example there's basically one paved road that just runs along the coast, and most everything from there is dirt road sprawl. That one paved road is in pretty good shape though so getting around isn't huge trouble. Nevermind the fact that you have to take a boat to get to this road.

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Q: Wes, my life has no meaning without reading your blog. Why has it been so long since your last update?

A: Well, I said last week that we were finding out what our sites were last week, but what I didn't know was that we were being whisked away to visit our sites that Friday. So I didn't really get a chance to tell you guys where I was going until I got back a week later, and then the internet was down for 3 days because of blackouts and stuff. That and I don't really like you guys.

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Q: Wes, what is the food in Guyana like?

A: I think this question alone will be a good topic for a few updates, but I suppose I can give a brief overview of Guyanese food from my experience. Guyanese food is comprised of 4 basic constituents:

1. Rice
2. Stuff
3. Oil
4. Stuff fried in oil

Is your mouth watering yet? Mine is. Honestly though I pretty much had to use category #2 to make this answer manageable because there's lots of food down here. There's lots of Indian food, so there's no trouble finding roti, curry, dahl, or any of that swell stuff. Lots of fried food. Lots of tropical friuts and vegetables. Not a lot of restaurants. I really was surprised to find out that Guyana isn't really a restaurant culture, so Guyanese food is really what you end up cooking for yourself, and I'll get to this in the future. Overall though, I've had a good time with Guyanese food so far.

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Q: Wes, what's the countryside like over there? How 'bout that vegetation and jazz?

A: I've spent all my time on the coast of Guyana so far, where it's pretty flat. I understand that the country gets pretty hilly in the interior though. The coast has lots of palm trees, lots of green stuff, and lots of rivers, but I don't think you can call the coastal area a rainforest. The actual rainforest starts a few miles inland, and I'm still waiting to explore it a bit.

I really want to emphasize how many rivers are in this country and how totally flippin' humongous they are. To get to my site, I have to cross one river that's so big across that it takes about 30 minutes by speedboat. Yeah.

I'll get to this more in the future, but for now, the countryside is pretty nice looking and that's all you need to know until I post pictures and you see whether or not I'm a big fat liar.

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Q: Do most places have power?

A: Actually yeah. A few volunteers are being sent to places deep in the interior where they have to make do with a kerosene lamp at night, but most of the major populated areas have at least semi-constant power. My site only had two blackouts during the last week when I visited. Snazzy.

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Q: Wes, what is the favored mode of transport in Guyana

A: There's a ton of minibusses on the road that move around at about 4 thousand miles an hour and play reggae music on loadspeakers. There's a few taxis and every once in a while you'll see a non-taxi car that could easily become a taxi if you stick out your hand. Honestly though minibusses are everywhere. It's pretty much the mode of public transportation, even though they're completely privatized

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Q: Wes, why are your responses getting progressively less funny?

A: I'm getting tired of working on this post, which is going on too long anyways. I'll save the questions I didn't get to for later and just say where in Guyana I've been assigned for the next two years.

I've been assigned to work at the Johanna Cecilia Secondary School on the Essequibo coast. The place is going to be really cool. I spent all last week there at a place called Golden Fleece, which is near the lovely towns of Zorg and Abram Zuil for those of you looking this up on your maps. (Ha ha) Yes I'm going to live near a town named Zorg. Yes I'm serious.

More next week. Thanks for reading.

Happy July 4th Day!

2005-07-04T19:09:00.000-04:00

Hooray it's a day of independence, unlike all those other days. Ironically today I'm back to being dependent again as I'm back from Uitvlugt and living once again with my host family. It's more like a day of unindependenceness, especially with there not being any fireworks here and all. Those of you guys that are having a fun 4th of July back home need to have some extra fun for me, figure out a way to convert that extra fun into cash or something, and send it my way.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that my 4th of July down here has been totally lame - on the 2nd the US Ambassador invited all the Peace Corps volunteers to his mansion to chill and swim in his pool, and today we all got to hang out at the Peace Corps Country Director's house in Georgetown. This was all cool but even with the hotdogs and hamburgers and brownies we're being showered with it doesn't quite feel like the 4th, so enjoy your explosions and picnics if you've got them.

I know that I can't get away with not telling you guys how Uitvlugt is, so here goes: Uitvlugt is about as cool as you could expect any funny sounding 8-lettered Dutch-named Guyana locale to be. Uitvlugt is about a half hour west of Georgetown, and it's not exactly a metropolis, but there's more there than I expected. I stayed with a volunteer named Eric, and he's just finishing up his two years and is about to head home. It was a great week just because it felt good to have some independence. On my first night there, we had some other volunteers from the area over and we made some pizza. Meeting some volunteers that are actually in service and not just training like me was good because it gave me a look at what it's really like being in the Peace Corps down here.

Most of the week was laid back because Eric's job was teaching, and school pretty much got out the week before I came. This was bad because I didn't get to see much actual work but good because I really just felt like relaxing anyways. Eric's house had an excellent veranda with a hammock that I got kinda attached to. I said goodbye to Eric at the party today because I probably won't see him again. Take it easy if you ever read this Eric, and thanks for letting me chill at your place.

This week we're back to training as usual. It's a little different and exciting though because I should know where they're going to put me in-country by the end of the week. I'm really excited to find out where I'm going.

Looking back at my previous posts, I realize that I've talked alot about what's been going on in Guyana but I haven't said much about Guyana itself. Since I could talk about pretty much anything though, I'll let you guys narrow it down for me by asking about what you want to know. My next post will be a 'choose your own adventure' post in which I'll answer questions that you guys ask me by commenting on this one. So comment and ask questions about Guyana, and I'll get back to you.

Arrr.

Tour de Uitvlugt

2005-06-27T17:01:00.000-04:00

Hey everybody. I'm in Guyana - Again! Not that I left or anything, it just sounded right somehow. Today was the first day of my fourth week of Peace Corps training here, but I'm stoked for tomorrow because this week of training is "volunteer visit week." This means that all of us trainees get to go visit a current Peace Corps volunteer somewhere in the country and just live with them for the rest of the week. We'll follow them around their villages and do our best to make ourselves obnoxious. My whole training group is kinda splitting up and going to different places tomorrow morning. I'm going west of Georgetown to a rediculously sillily-titled place called Uitvlugt. I'm dead serious. The locals pronounce it something like 'eye-flut.' I believe it's Dutch for "place of unpronouncability." You'll have to ask your local flying Dutchman about this one. Anyways the volunteer I'm visiting works as a science teacher at one of the village secondary schools, so it'll be cool to see how it works.

I'm excited about this because it'll be a good change of pace. I've referred to training in Peace Corps as "slave labor camp" in an exceedingly lighthearted joking kind of way before, but that's not really fair to the slavedriv- I mean well meaning Peace Corps staff members that have put a lot of effort into making training useful for us. I honestly do think that training has been pretty useful so far, even if it's just a bit boring sometimes.

My average day in training is either a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. We go to different places for training day to day depending on what classes we have that day. We usually have about 4 1 and 1/2 hour classes a day, and they range all over the board in topics. Sometimes the nurse comes in and tells us about nasty diseases that we might get, sometimes the safety staff comes in and tells us how to look less like rich robbable white guys, and sometimes we even go to different sites in and around Georgetown for tours of important places. Sometimes they takes us to the health center and give us a bunch of shots. This last weekend we were given a special tour of an Amerindian village a couple hours out of Georgetown. All this is good stuff, but it kinda wears on ya day after day for 8 weeks. I'm looking forward to just getting out this next week and relaxing a little.

Looking back at my last post now, I realize the title 'livin' like a parasite' might be a little strange, because it begs the question: Who's the host? Well that would be my host family of course, but the Peace Corps pays them rent to keep me around, so I really pass off the parasitism to you the tax-payer. Yay. Thanks for letting me siphon off a little bit of your life giving blood everyone. And thanks for commenting on my posts. It's cool to see who's checking in. I'll try to update again in a few days and let everyone know how Uitvlugt is, in case you can't make up your mind about your next vacation destination.

Peas out.

Livin' like a parasite

2005-06-21T17:40:00.000-04:00

When I left last time, I was just about to tell everyone about my first few days in Guyana. If you happen to have memorized every last excruciating detail of the timetable from my last post, you'd know that my first couple of days in Guyana were spent in orientation. Orientation in Georgetown was basically training for training. We stayed at a hotel in northern Georgetown and they kept us there for a couple days. They kept us busy during the day with a few seminars such as:

-Introductions from all the Peace Corps staff we hadn't met yet
-Safety
-What to expect from our host families
-What the rules were for during training
-How to manufacture the radium rods for the MEGA-DEATH-RAY-MACHINE without alerting the local authorities

Overall orientation was cool because it let us settle in to the country a little bit in a hotel and with each other instead of just throwing us right into a host family and weird food. The last day of orientation was a Saturday, and we met our host families then. Our group was split into a couple villages near Georgetown (think suburbs) and we were given instructions where to meet on Monday for the first day of training.

The family I'm staying with is pretty cool. They're Afro-guyanese, which of course means that they're all required to have afros by constitutional mandate 14B under penalty of death. It also means that they're Guyanese of African descent. That's not exactly a given here, because there are plenty of Guyanese that are Indian (from India), Portuguese, Chinese, and Amerindian as well. This place is an interesting melting pot.

My family has two daughters aged 5 and 6, and they like to keep my busy. They 'helped' me unpack and I spent the rest of the night just hanging out at their house. Sunday was the same way; Peace Corps wanted us to spend the first weekend here just getting to know our host families. The father works as a server/bartender at a hotel in Georgetown and the mother teaches part-time. The girls both go to school during the day while I go to training. I have my own room and closet, and they hooked me up with a fly mosquito net so I don't get malaria. Oh yeah.

I'll be with this host family for most of the rest of training, so it's cool that we get along. I'm working through my third week of training at the moment and for my next update I'll tell ya all about that and why it's definetely probably better than slavery/torture.

But for now I gotta get home. So long.

Training and ants

2005-06-18T14:00:00.000-04:00

Alright now I know what everyone's wondering: when you spill some sugar or something on the counter, how do all the ants know it's there? This happened to me yesterday and those dudes were there in seconds man. The explanation is that ants have an innate ability which some in the scientific community like to call "psychic voodoo mystic jedi mind trick power" which makes them magic. And that's how they do it. Just keeping everyone informed here.

Now some people might also be wondering what the hey I've been doing since I left Colorado on May 30th. The short answer is that I've been in training classes most of the time. I just finished my second week of training and I have 6 more, so I'll be busy with that for awhile longer. There've been a couple other things going down though, so here's a quick timetable of what I've been and will be up to:

May 30th - June 2nd: Staging in Miami
June 2nd - June 4th: Orientation in Georgetown, Guyana
June 4th - July 29th: Slave Labor Camp (Officially known as "Happy Training Time of Sunshine")
July 29th: Swearing in
July 30th - 2 Years Later: Do Stuff

So yeah I've already finished my staging and orientation, and both were pretty cool. And even though I refer to training as Slave Labor Camp I think everybody should know that I'm just joking and that training is at least 4% better than slavery.

Staging was basically a bunch of meeting all the Peace Corps volunteers that were going to Guyana (and there was also a group of people going to Paraguay that were there with us) and hanging out and a few sessions on what to expect in country, how not to get robbed within the first 24 hours, how not to die from flesh eating bacteria before we see the doctor, etc. We did some skits and stuff and overall it was a good time.

There were 20 people in this Guyana team and most all of them seem like pretty nice people. Reading that now, it kinda sounds like something that the unibomber's neighbors would have said about him, but oh well I stand by it. Miami is a good place for money spending enthusiasts and there's lots of uh, stuff and things there. Some of us grabbed a taxi and checked out South Beach which was sure uh . . . something and then we left the country.

Our plane stopped in Barbados for a few minutes to let some people on and others off. I hear that a ticket from Guyana to Barbados is just a hundred bucks or so if I can find a deal, so I definetely think I'll try to get over there sometime in the next couple years. When we got to Guyana, we landed at the airport which is basically a runway that's nearby a warehouse/"terminal" that allows everyone to check through customs indoors. High tech. There were a few people on the Peace Corps staff waiting to meet us there. We got down off the jet onto the tarmac and walked toward the "terminal" where we checked though security, got our stuff and loaded onto a couple of minibuses that they had waiting for us. They hauled us to Georgetown and we checked into an undetermined number of stars hotel where they had dinner waiting for us. Sweet. Since it was around 10 at this time though, we basically just ate, heard a few introductions, and crashed for the night.

So now you all know how I got to this country. It's pretty fly so far, but I'm going to have to get the rest of this out later so that I don't go broke here at the internet cafe. Oh and also for those of you guys asking about pictures, they're coming. I might not be able to do pictures on this weblog until training is over just because I don't really have a computer that I can unload my pictures onto so I can resize them and stuff. I'll see what I can do, but for now you'll all just have to use your imaginations.

Thanks for being interested everyone.

Getting Started in Guyana

2005-06-14T17:44:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone who knows me. This is my first post to this blog which I've decided to maintain to keep people up to date on what I'm doing. I've decided to do a blog instead of an email list or something because this is more flexible. You guys should be able to comment on my posts if you want, and I'll be able to post plenty of pictures here also once I get going. So spread the word, go to whereiswesstun.blogspot.com to find out where Wesstun is.

Right now I'm in Guyana, and I've been here for about a week and a half. This place is interesting and I wish I could tell you about it, but that would be too easy. Today I just wanted to set this thing up and see how it works. In the next few days I'll make a couple posts about the last two weeks and tell the true horrible story about the MEGA-DEATH-RAY-MACHINE that the Peace Corps plans to build in order to enslave the entire human race. Someone has to speak out before it's too late, but there's no rush. I'll catch youz later.