November 15

The pictures are of the New Amsterdam Chapel, and a peek over the seawall. It was rather disappointing to look at the ocean. That is it at about Elder Langford's shoulder.

Last Friday was a national holiday. It was Diwali, a Hindu festival celebrating light. It is to be celebrated on a day when there is no moon anywhere in the world. They light up their houses like Christmas and in Georgetown they had a light parade where truck were decorated all over with Christmas lights. They build a throne on each truck bed and a little girl sits there absolutely motionless for the whole thing. She represents the goddess of light. We missed the parade, because we were told it was on Friday and it occurred on Thursday. Our neighbor down the street had a decorated truck and we got to see it go by our house (speakers blasting Hindu music) Boy, they love loud speakers in Georgetown!

It is starting to rain. We have had rain every day for the last four or five days. It doesn’t rain all day, but when it comes down, it is in huge drops and the sky just opens. Last Sunday afternoon, we were out with the Canje district supervisor (Sister Bibi), her seminary teacher and institute teacher in the Canje branch visiting homes where students should be attending CES classes. I wish I could photograph where we went, but we have been cautioned about looking like tourists so I have to be careful what I photograph. We parked the car on the street and found a path between two houses. We followed the path and behind the two houses were more houses. The fourth one down was the one we were looking for. We passed chicken yards, duck yards, goats, dogs and cats, men playing cards under houses. I have to explain that houses are built on stilts. The living quarters are on the high floor. The bottom is dirt. Some people live in the dirt floor portion and rent from the people above. Anyway, we found the fourth house and on the way out, the skys opened up. The sisters we were with whipped out their umbrellas, but Wayne and I left ours in the car. We were soaked by the time we got into the car, but we still had another house to visit. This one presented the challenge of mud. I got muddy feet and you should have seen the floor of the car! Next time, we take umbrellas and wear oxfords or get long boots, which is what the Guyanese wear. The sisters washed their flip-flops in a puddle before getting into the car, but I didn’t have flip-flops.

We’ve decided that Guyana is the perfect place to have an ugly dog contest. Someday, we are going to stop and take pictures and put them on the blog and let you vote.

When we were driving through Georgetown, last week, Wayne said, “Wow! This is so much fun!” We had just had several near misses. “It is sheer terror – people pay money to be terrified like this. Where in the world can you go 35 or 40 mph and miss oncoming traffic by less than 6 inches.”
We stopped at the sea wall and peeked over for the first time. We probably won’t do that again. The sea was a long way out and there was a lot of mud and trash between us and the sea.

My birthday was on the 6th, but we celebrated on the 7th. We went shopping on Regent Street. It was like going to China Town in San Francisco. We lasted about 45minutes and I found a wonderful handbag. Then we went to the produce market and found lots of vegetables to try to cook. There is spinach only it has a lot of leaves growing on a long stem, bora beans taste like string beans only these really are stringy. You can cut them into ten pieces to make them look like string beans. We found an egg plant, broccoli, onions, a pineapple, watermelon, tomatoes, lettuce and cucumber. We had a vegetarian dinner and loved it. The Whites, Tanners and Larsens came over for brownies and ice cream. We swapped Guyana stories and laughed ourselves silly. It was fun.