I began writing this in August and have just realised that I never finished it. How terrible! I'm very sorry. As a way of an apology I will also write a few words about how much the trip has influenced my life now.
It's August now and I decided to write about the whole of July as opposed to just the two weeks I had in Guyana. This is partly because of a lot of thoughts that have been going through my mind in the last fortnight.
During the last week of school, as I said, the Grade Nines were sitting their National Exams. Monday was a holiday, so on Tuesday they sat their Maths exam. I saw the paper and it looked promising - most of the questions were about things we'd spent a lot of time on. I asked a few students how they think they got on - they mostly said it was easy and they thought they had passed, so that's a good sign. If I'm brutally honest, I'd just like to point out that it isn't very likely this many people have passed, as they say that after every exam.
During this week we had very few of the other students in classes, and unfortunately as teachers we were encouraged to tell the students to go home. As I was somewhat unwilling to do this, I wanted to give a few of them games to play some of the time, but there is very little in the school to give them. Emily and I did manage to do some activities with my Grade 10 class and this seemed to go down very well. We split them up into three groups and gave them activities to do. The most popular was a game where students have to make it across the classroom without touching the floor using only two chairs for each group of 8. They really enjoyed playing this and, though it did take them some time, they stuck with it and completed it. I was having fun even watching them, and there were students lined up around the outside windows just watching and laughing with us, which was a lovely sight.
On the night of Friday 6th we had a leaving party for myself, Emily, Fiza, Lisa and Candacie. There were quite a lot of people there, and it was great to say goodbye to people we had known for the majority of the year. That was the last time I danced forrรณ in Paramakatoi - I'm already missing it so much!
After this I spent the week visiting people, saying goodbye and drinking an awful lot of cassiri. The day before I left, Emily had organised dinner for me at our friend Monroe's. We decided to have a fire and roast chicken over it, and he is better at setting fires than us, so we agreed to have it there. In the end it was Monroe, Candacie, Emily and myself, each of us bringing something to eat. Emily also surprised me with an early birthday/leaving cake which was delicious!
After leaving Paramakatoi, the plane landed in Monkey Mountain, then flew to Mahdia, the capital of Region 8. In the end we were there for about five hours whilst the planes were doing shuttles in and out of villages in the region, and I eventually reached Georgetown around 6pm. I took a taxi to the flat to find some of the other volunteers already there. Many of them were planning to go travelling around the Caribbean or South America, or even just within Guyana itself.
Though I considered travelling with some of the other volunteers (since Emily had decided to remain in Paramakatoi until mid-August), I had a lot of trouble communicating with them whilst I was in Paramakatoi and therefore couldn't organise anything, and I wasn't really interested in being a tourist at that time. In the end I went home on the 17th of July, a month before I had originally planned to leave. It meant that I was going home alone, but my reasoning was that it meant I would have time to work and gather some money together for University, as my parents were sort of freaking out about the financial implications of that decision.
So I was brought to the airport by Kala's daughter Rishon and two of the other volunteers. My bag weighed under 23kg despite the plastic bag of farine and three hammocks I'd squeezed into my luggage. After a short wait in Cheddi Jagan Airport in Georgetown I flew to Barbados again, where I had a five hour wait for the next flight. Exhausted as I was, I ended up lying on top of my bags and drifting in and out of sleep for that time. I then got the plane to London and from there up to Inverness. The amount of thoughts rushing through my mind on arrival were too many for me to tell you about, and quite honestly too much for me to even remember. I recall Project Trust telling us on training that reverse culture shock was something we would be likely to experience, and that pretty much sums up how I felt.
What I do remember is the warmth and gratitude I felt towards my friends who had come to meet me in Inverness airport. They brought me biscuits and fresh strawberries. Strawberries had never tasted that good before in my life, and I doubt they ever will again. My parents were obviously there, too, and it was lovely seeing them. A year of not living with them and just experiencing their kindest of sides through their parcels and letters did wonders for our relationship.
I went home and unpacked and passed on my gift of a hammock to the family and that was the end of that. The parenthesis ended and I continued with my life.
As if.
I have now been back in Scotland for 10 months. I would be lying if I said I didn't compare my life here to that in Guyana on a daily basis. I am always surprised to discover that there are people who don't know that I spent a year of my life living in Guyana. I guess I have finally passed the annoying, “Well, when I was in Guyana...” stage, though I am sure there are people who would debate that claim.
I cannot count the ways in which my
experiences in Guyana have changed my life. I remember being told
recently that there are some languages in which the conditional case
doesn't exist, that is, they do not describe how things could have
been, would have been, might have been or any other alternative path,
but they only say what was, what is and what will be. It made me
value acceptance and progression a lot more, and consequently I have
since tried not to wonder where I would be if I hadn't gone to
Guyana, though there are a few obvious changes.
For one, I had no intention of going
into University. My aim was to do some sort of technical theatre or
similar in college and then get into the music industry - I still
have the personal statement that I would have put on my UCAS
application had I not made the decision to take a year out. The
University application I made in Guyana was a decision I arrived at
sort of half-heartedly at the time, thinking that I would like to
have something to go back to if I chose to follow that path. However,
as I chatted to the other volunteers and teachers I realised how
fortunate we are in this country, and it became my intention to make
the most of it.
In Scotland, education is free and of
an excellent quality up until the end of your first degree. In
Guyana, the students I taught would have to pay to attend a college
if they wanted to complete A-levels, and also because of the distance
these colleges are from their homes, they would have to pay to move
into a flat in the capital, too. Never mind the fact that the Primary
and Secondary teaching they received until this point was not at an
appropriate level, on top of that, if they went into
University achieving A-levels, any degree that they would graduate
with would only be valid within the Caribbean. When you graduate from
a Scottish University you are given a qualification that is
recognised and valued across the world. What sort of a fool would I
be to disregard an opportunity like that?
Hence, I applied to study Physics, and
was accepted into the University of St Andrews, where I am now, 15
months later, sitting my second set of exams.
In a way my experience in Guyana has
somewhat hindered my capacity to work. I left school very much a
product of our education system: capable of sitting and passing exams
in Sciences and Languages; a memory conditioned to remember formulae
and rules that could be applied to these subjects; and terrified of
failure and the shame of not living up to expectations. I returned
from Guyana with my English vocabulary (never mind that of my other
mother tongue) considerably depleted, my mind struggling to recall
those things I had learnt in my fifth and sixth years of secondary
school and my head filled with questions: “what even is the point
in all this?”, “why do we live like this when there is a much
simpler way of life?”, “do I even want to have a graduate
career?”, amongst many others.
The ways in which that year has
benefited my education, though, far outweigh these. I have developed
an appreciation for the standard of education we receive in Scottish
Universities, at no direct cost to us, as students. I have learned to
work hard and do the best I can and not just make do with “scraping
by”, as I had been doing in school. As a teacher, there is nothing
more frustrating than watching a bright student fail put in effort to
achieve what they are capable of and, as a result, fall behind. The
students you gain more respect for are those who put in the work,
regardless of their ability. I have developed an enthusiasm for life
and people that I wouldn't have had otherwise, and the lack of which
could easily have been my downfall in future, more difficult years of
my degree. I have matured, become comfortable in my skin, learned to
be apathetic to others' perceptions of me, gained the ability to
relax, learned to accept others as they choose to be, learned that it
is OK to be selfish sometimes and formed my own perceptions of true
friendship. I have learned so much more than that, but there is a
brief summary.
And it is as a result of all these
things that I am where I am now. I feel that I have managed to end up
in a stable, safe position after all of that. I know people who have
dropped out of University, I know others who have returned to their
Project to live for a while longer and I have seen people who have
slipped right back into the routine of their old lives as if they had
never left. I feel that I have achieved a happy medium. I am on the
path to a potentially successful future, in terms of a career, should
I choose to pursue it, and in terms of my life's ambition. For the
time being, I want to experience new things and meet more people from
different cultures and learn about other lifestyles. And I am happy
to continue on with my life creating opportunities to do that.
A returned volunteer was quoted in one
of the Project Trust booklets saying, “My Project Trust gap year
has made me want to do something extraordinary every year. I never
want to let a year go by without being able to look back and say,
'Wow, that was a good one!'” and I agree with her completely.
Though I may feel a little tied down to University and St Andrews,
that does not mean that I have to feel suffocated. In the past months
I have made some great friends, some excellent revelations about what
I want out of life and some exciting plans for a summer travelling in
France and Germany, not to mention a years worth of studying. This
trip has been the nudge I needed to get some momentum and animation
into my life, for which I am now excited and motivated as ever.
If you need motivation to make your
life more exciting, you will not regret something like this. Though
essentially you may not want to be a teacher at the end of it (I
don't), or even whatever else you volunteer as, the experience counts
for much more than that realisation. My advice to anyone considering
something similar is simply this: do it. I have been told so many
times that in life we regret the things that we don't do, not the
things we do. I truly believe this, and the sooner you get out of
your comfort zone, the more alive your existence will become.
If you have read this and kept up with
my blog until now, thank you. I hope you have gained something out of
it, too. If you take nothing from it, I'm going to leave you with
this from Steve Jobs:
“For the past 33 years, I have looked
in the mirror every morning and asked myself, 'If today were the last
day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And
whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know
I need to change something.”
Kind regards and best of luck for the
future,
Antje
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| Tug of War in the beautiful Paramakatoi. Credit: Lisa Jardeleza |
