Thoughts of a minibus traveller

A couple of people said "we should have more like this'  after a couple of events I organised recently and not so recently . I know that people meet up and talk in different settings.  Over the years, I have been a great organiser and participant in conversation type events. Quite a few of them were meant to be long term series to revolutionise thinking and discussion in Guyana but they fizzled out after a few sessions. Some things like my book club are enduring. Many things like the mental health gaff did not get beyond the first session. The things which people liked tended to be those which they were able to learn and or teach and even meet new people. A couple of people have thought of organising different things. There are already Facebook discussion groups,  some public discussion sessions like the Ideas series,  structured religious study groups and rum shop conversations about life , faith, money, love etc  so why bother? I think face to face i...

7 am or so on a hot Saturday morning. Sound of helicopters or so whirring overhead. Are the Venezuelans flying over Georgetown and taking advantage of President Granger not being in the country? I check Facebook and find that it is not the Venezuelan army, but the Guyanese army marching on the East Co ast and East Bank Demerara. People are expressing pride in their soldiers. I hear some of the marches and so passing me. I feel a bit guilty about not being up and about early enough on Saturday morning to go defending my country and so on. Heck, I can’t even defend my yard space against the encroaching neighbours who bruk down the fence and who plan to block up the drains, much less Essequibo against the might of Venezuelan army. I remember the late Mr Randolph Kirton coming to St Margaret’s Primary School – 1980, 1981 or so – around the time that Not a Blade of Grass was playing on the radio and flour was not banned as yet. Mr Kirton explained the Guyana/Venezuela...

The man who brought the starapple said to watch out for worms - apparently somebody had cut one and found a worm inside. He said that his brother has also eaten the worm and the fruit. One of anecdotal fruit myths about the dry season is that things like citrus, pineapple and so tend to be sweeter. There have been mangoes falling from the trees in the yard and while not eating the worms, I have been cutting around the holes left by birds and other creatures which I don't want to think about. Dry season is not the hard guava season. There is an economic slowdown - money is not moving and has not been moving. As with Guyana, there is going to be a blame game about who is responsible for the downturn and when it started. The reality is that we are in the here and now. I am no economist so I can't comment on how we move forward to the economic up turn. What is not clear is having recognised that rice , sugar, gold, oil and so on are not going to help us, how do we decide ...

I tasted Sharbateh Sekanjabin earlier this year.. I did not know the name then, all I know is that it had mint and cucumber in it and it was Persian/Iranian in origins. My mind was on it, as the place get more hot and I glimpsed a pack of mint leaves from Arya Food s in the supermarket cooler. A long time ago I had a mint plant in the yard but it dried up . It is good to know that people growing these locally. There are different recipes. The first time , I left the syrup and it burnt.. or carmelised and I did not realise. Here is what I ended up doing :- Ingredients 1/2 cup sugar (I use brown sugar, I guess people would use white sugar) 1/4 cup water a little more than half of a 1/4 cup vinegar (yeah I know.. next time I will probably use lime or lemon juice with grated rind) 1/2 of the pack of the mint leaves on sale (or one sprig or as much as you want) grated cucumber to 'garnish' - but I left some in the water in the fridge for a while because there i...

There was a woman who used to walk with huge Bible up and down Brickdam in the hot sun. Phenomenal energy - she used to be a teacher and apparently walked everywhere. One time she had asked me why I was more qualified than her to do the job I was doing and I could not really answer. I am thinking of all the mad people I know who have energy. Just as  how I decided that I prefer the body pains over the itching, I wonder what it would be like to dealing with a mental condition which fuels intense activity and has me running down the road over and over rather than one which results  in the unpredictable energy flows.  Mornings when I could get up and move quickly and get a whole set of things done, and then other days when it takes longer to eat an orange. I wonder if the diet is responsible. The sugar thing on my mind because a kind of hangover after binging on sugary stuff and then I think of the last time I woke up after a high energy night and was able to do the m...

Same story,  lady has $100 bundles of sijan in the fish section of the Mon Repos market and I walk away and then I turn back and buy two bundles. It was the same time I did almost a year a go when I first cooked and  wrote about finding resilience in cooking and eating this for the first time . There is something about the cycle of things in writing, not so much as lunacy in doing the same thing over and over, but also in sometimes going back to do things which make you feel good. I had forgotten of course that I had written about cooking the sijan curry. I had to laugh that the reason I am writing this blog is almost the same as writing the last time - the need to be creative with cooking something which I do not cook often and then seeing the finished product and thinking I could write about it because saijan is supposed to be healthy. I had actually cooked saijan leaf bhaji long before I had cooked the saijan, but haven't made it recently as I am not in contact w...

I jump out of the bus with plenty other passengers near the Botanical Gardens and I realise that I still had the money in my hand. Some notes of the first steel band playing. Clouds provide a nice eclipse of the sun so 4pm it is cool. Gardens look nice and clean but some Guyanese can't make it to the rubbish bins. A former work colleague has her stand set up. She is a Jehovah Witness and preaches at the Gardens. Her grandson is one of the bands and she said that last year, the crowd seemed larger. The steel bands are around the bandstand. I ask her if she is not coming in and she laughs and says "I am doing Jehovah work while enjoying the steel pan music" I sit at the edge of the manatee pond. The music is kind of faint and there are some children talking excitedly because they see the manatees. I have not seen the manatees in years and feel foolish that I could not find anything to feed them, though I think we are not supposed to feed them. Imagine that there co...