Christmas

Panama City

The canal

Christmas Fitness Party

White Pudding

My house

Bluff Beach

Chilling in a hammock

Happy Christmas

The Kunu tribe

All the houses were decorated for Christmas and I think they had more decorations outside than inside. People put their Christmas trees on the balconies and wreaths on their doors. I also went to my fitness Christmas party. There were two more unusual foods there; white pudding - which is a bit like black pudding and chicken foot soup (it is literally a soup made of chicken feet!)

I spent a fantastic two weeks in Panama with my family over the Christmas holidays. It was so lovely to meet up and catch up properly – the phone doesn’t suffice. We all met at the airport in Panama City. Two things stuck me about the capital – how developed it was. I am not use to seeing anything higher than a two storey building and yet we were surrounded by skyscrapers. Secondly it was cold. I am a little worried about returning home if I thought a country in the tropics was cold. A friend had sent out a Christmas blanket which was used each night! 

We spent a few days in Panama City and visited the Canal; a very impressive piece of engineering. We headed up the northern side of Panama and stay on the San Blos islands. Our island was really small around 100 m by 200m. We stay in wooden cabins over the water. The area is owned by the Kunu tribe and the women wear beautiful bright clothes. 

Afterwards we caught a bus to David and onto Boquette. Bouquette was named as the number four place to retire to in the world and is full of retired American. It was up in the mountains and really beautiful. We celebrated Christmas here and did lots of outdoor activities plus saw how coffee is made. 

Finally we headed back up to the Northern side to the Boca Islands. It was a chilled out Caribbean place with great beaches. We went snorkelling and saw some amazing coral and another day found several starfish in the sea. We celebrated New Years Eve here before heading back to all our different homes. 

Coming back here did feel like returning home and it was nice to come back. It shows how settled and attached I am to Guyana. I had decided I wanted to stay here for a bit longer but the VSO programme is coming to an end with only the Canadian part continuing. There is no funding for me to stay. I did look at some other options but decided that things were meant to be. So the plan is to work until the end of the Easter term and come home after the Easter holidays. 

The new term has had a frustrating start. Our computer systems are down which means I cannot access any of my work (I know I should have backed it up else where but you don’t expect a whole network to go down!) I and others have also questioned how much impact we are having or how much change is going on – sometime it does feel like you are taking one step forward and two back. The red tape can be incredibly frustrating as well as the way work is done here. Why many things can be changed and helped from our level, until Ministry start to make big changes in the system things are going to continue. We can advise on those decisions but politics plays a huge role and people won’t rock the boat even when it means they are running a failing education system. 

But then you run a workshop with teachers and they enjoy the activities and plan how to use them in their classrooms or you watch a great lesson and it makes it feel worth it. Today a teacher said to me “I feel so good that I make you proud of my teaching”. And that cancels out all the other stuff!