Thoughts of a minibus traveller

Dear Brilliant Woman, It is raining and I am walking around with the camera trying to get a picture. I want to use the picture for the text of an letter which I would never write to you personally. Thank you again for offering me work. I am in awe of your intelligence and the work you have done.  I know that working with you will be an important intellectual exercise for me. In normal times,  I would have been able to push myself beyond boundaries, to be excited about doing things which I have not done before. That though, is in normal times, times when the depression could be managed easily and I could shift the dark clouds aside or forget about them and then manage the mind into things which could be useful. I felt foolish when I asked you to cancel our meeting after I had agreed to the meeting. But I am exhausted mentally and I know that I would probably embarrass myself more in the conversation. I also know that I would be even more ashamed to withdraw the work...

There is one thing more beautiful than a clean shiny window which needs long sticks, flexible hands and body to clean it. It is the tiny raindrops which kind of glisten on the nice shiny window with everything looking and sparkling nicely. For about 15 minutes though.. because as the raindrops dry the little specks of dust which form the core of the beautiful And if you are managing depression, cleaning windows and walls which you know will be dirty again at some point in time. some sooner than others, will take longer. A man I did work with praised my emotional intelligence. I thought he was joking the first time, but he was serious . The assignment ran late and I was cursing  all the time I had planned to rest, and to recuperate and to clean and so got shorter. I am glad he did not hear the curses. It was not his fault really. He wrote "The emotional intelligence, commitment to work excellence and professional style you exhibited during those tough periods of this p...

I glad fuh de lil wuk. I find de socks and de ole faithful shoe dat Kubu de expert shoemaker had resoled two times. I got meh shirt in me pants.  PUn de road.. mo' driver signalling me if I want taxi, so I mussee could pass fuh a consultant who dress up nice going into public officials buildings, as opposed to when I have two salt bag after market and nobody bodder to ask except de drivers by de market. Meetings in sequence. Nice order. Lunch time come up.  I know I had said, sometin bland.. like a lil pastry or suh which aint gun lef no taste in de mout. My foot kerry me tho' to the hole in the wall place which not far from my next meeting venue.  The balls of coconut chokha are nice, tempting, right in front deh.  There are some odder bland tings... I whisper .. 'you have dhal'... hoping dat if he seh 'no , it done' you could seh.. arite.. Yes.. man, we have dhal, white rice, brown rice.. you tell me.. dey had bhaji.. i could have had de plain bha...

The last part of the weekly cleaning is mopping the tiles downstairs. It is a nice kind of feeling.. as this is the signal that the four hours or so work has completed and the house 'light up nice' and so.. at least for a couple of days until you know it is getting time to clean again. Restless nights around a workshop which was difficult to do left the body in a kind of pain. Mosquitoes which fed on my body and might have exchanged zika for nourishment balanced the nice feeling of breakfast near the  back track operations on the Corentyne. roti, aloo choka, baigan choka, salt fish .  The car man driving from Berbice bridge to Georgetown was doing 120 and 140 Km/h and my body still has the toxins from the stress of that speed driving and the man's assurances that he normally makes Gt to skeldon in 1 hour and 17 minutes. I thought of saying no to one of the paid assignments, but when wiping the tiles I thought, okay,, so far so good, day is going good.. you can do...

" Hi vidya..please continue the column." the message from the editor said .  I asked for one more week off as I tried to get my head around the whole writing wuk. The column is The Co il - on the Guyana Mosquito I am grateful for the work but there is anxiety about the work since this writing thing is accidental. The last coil I wrote is called Living with Stagnation.   I was bothered by being in a rut and writing about the same things , sometimes in different ways.  Circumstances enabled a pause in the writing, with the editor asking for resumption before I expected. No one asked me 'whuh happen to de Coil'. I could feel a way that the absence of new Coils did not cause any national crisis. I am more concerned about the loss of income which came about from my inability to put words together. There is a routine, a cycle.. Coil published, obsess about the feedback (or lack of feedback), start thinking what to write about, or take a picture and write aro...

Alarm goes off and rain starts falling - Monday morning and I think what the hell, if I wake up late I can always make up for it later. Reality hits though because other men have woken up earlier and started working.. rain or no rain.. the garbage collectors will around by 7am. First chore is to grate coconut on the old iron grater that has been around as long as I can remember.  There is a comfort in the familiar. Basin, backstep.. and rain is falling and some drops splashing on the step.. but the coconut will make milk anyway so it does not matter. I am used to this. The comfort zone is nice. Using this to ground because I have to take on a small project which is needed 'asap' and I will be using things which I cannot learn asap but I will have to learn them. I do not know if I could grate coconut any other way.. has to be bar grater, back step and basin. I think it would be a nice picture... to write the blog.. go and get the camera and then the battery done. I laug...

Recent experiences of being refused when I asked people for help for myself or for others have had me thinking of reciprocity.  Reciprocity usually involves a mutual exchange of benefits. I still feel embarrassed when I am refused help from people who have told me 'thanks for your help'. I am constantly working on practising unconditional giving and not worrying about reciprocity. The practical application of unconditional giving is making sure that you do not ask the persons you have helped for anything at all. The Universe has a way of working, and benefits come from unexpected places. It would be unfair to think of 'ungrateful wretches' without thinking of all the people who have helped me unconditionally and in realising that benefits come in different ways. These are lessons I have had in understanding giving without expecting returns. 1. There are benefits  There is joy in making (some) people happy . There is that nice fuzzy feeling that comes from...

A woman who smokes said.. thank God, there is something worse than smoking now. There is a new cliche - Sitting is the new Smoking - about irreversible damage being caused by sitting for long periods regardless of how many 'minutes of exercise' per day. The irony - the new pain which prevented sitting  comfortably in lotus position - legs crossed on the floor - made me realise the body is decaying much faster than I thought it would. I thought I was blessed with good fortune - work which required sitting for long times on a comfortable chair which is probably bad for my body. I thought the periodic bouts of daily exercise would counteract the sitting. It seems though, that the body needs to stand up and move every now and then. I have put an alarm on the computer which is where I sit most times. The 20 minutes seem to finish much faster than I thought they would. I don't think I am slouching as much. I get up, try one of the stretches which are suppose...

"Orientation" vs "Training" In February 2016 , I had the privilege of working with employees of STARR Computers on an orientation to Linux . STARR is one of the oldest technology resellers in Guyana and they wanted interested employees to understand FOSS and Linux. The course was designed as an orientation course, rather than a training course. I believe a training course would be designed to transfer skills , and there are different methodologies involved to ensure that the skills can be used by each participant. I was not sure how to approach the course since there are a thousand and one different things which could be taught. I updated an outline which was developed by Andrew Mancey in 2004 and  then modified the discussions to respond to the needs of the participants. One of the reasons for the lack of adaptation of FOSS and Linux is the lack of awareness.  Some persons might 'play around' with a distro, but might not do more unless there is s...

The man in the ticket window said yeah.. you could go up and pointed in the general direction of the jetty heading out to the ferry in the distance. I was tired, but curious about the whole ferry thing and also worrying about late departure, being stuck in the middle of the river and wondering about the minibus from Parika at whatever hour I reach.  But curiosity mostly.. the nice feeling of doing something new, and nice breeze and then of course, saying.. what the hell, nothing I can change at this stage, let me leave it to the Universe long as I am safe and I am not causing any harm anywhere. A woman asked me to explain what I meant about 'adjusting to where I live' in   a Coil where . She was on anti-depressants and she felt that she needed stability, and that change and unpredictability created more problems for her. Another man said that the adjusting, is what caused him , to sometimes be silent about things , his way of adapting. He wondered if the sa...

Man asked as I was eating the dhal , rice and coconut chokha - 'You working today?" and I sighed and did not bother to answer that the eating the dhal, rice and coconut chokha was an experiment in trying to find some inspiration for a thing I said I would write because it was work. Self employment is like that.. I say yes when I could And this was after cleaning, washing, helping with cooking and also trying to think about what to write for the weekly thing which deadline comes up all of a sudden. The Universe  has thrown a whole set of different things, work things which are not related to each other and which seem to require different energy, different questions for solutions, or even questioning the questions to find a solutions. A rare encounter with a private sector client. We want you to find a solution for us and because I am reeling from one thing, and about to contemplate the other thing. I say yes without saying but hey hey.. we might not have defined the pr...