Volunteer Stories - Jamie
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| As I was flying into Karanambu airstrip, my mind was racing about what I was going to be doing and I could feel butterflies in my stomach. But I think maybe that had more to do with last night’s entertainment and the pilot's flying. Thankfully, I made it without any incidents, and we were met by Peter and Alice at the airstrip as they were dropping off Sienna, a Canadian volunteer I’d met a couple of times before. |
Jamie’s Diary
Thinking up the plan for the obstacle course
My first days in Yupakari were spent thinking about and planning out what it was I could do here.
I heard that the children here were lacking an area where they can play and chill out, and Alice also mentioned that the children here had a knack for climbing over pipes and end up breaking them. So I figured that an obstacle course would be the best answer: it gives things for the kids to climb all over and not risk breaking anything (well, not the equipment anyway … and bodies heal fast enough) but can also double up as a place for them to just hang out when it’s not being used.
Selling the plan to Yupukari
Coming up with this concept was the easy part. Trying to get these ideas across to the local guys who volunteer to help out was going to be the difficult part. To make things worse, I don’t think that there is any concept of an obstacle course here, let alone their knowing the names and ideas behind each individual obstacle. The only saving grace is that they speak English in Guyana. Because of the lack of a basic understanding of the concept of an obstacle course, I decided to use pictures to illustrate what I was thinking of doing. However, in order to do this I needed a computer to search on the Internet for some decent pictures, as my drawing leaves a lot to be desired! But you try reasoning with a 10-year-old boy about why he should stop playing Civilization so I can do research.
Eventually, I came up with around two dozen ideas and a number of pictures to show what kind of thing I was aiming to achieve. I showed these initial ideas to three of the local guys – the crack team father-son-carpentry-combination of Hamzad and Shamir Khan, and one of the teachers at the school, Mark Holden. Mark was unable to participate as much as he would have liked, as the school term started a couple of days after I arrived, but his enthusiasm for the project gave me confidence that I was doing something that the village wanted and would appreciate. After the initial idea was put across, along with the pictures to illustrate my ideas, we then had to decide on only half a dozen obstacles we could realistically build during my 10-day stay in Yupakari.
Obstacles to the obstacle course
The remoteness of this place is awesome. Its nothing like England where people are literally living on top of each other. You have miles and miles of open space as well as an amazing view of the Kanuku Mountains from your doorstep. But this blessing is also a curse. We could only use the equipment we had around the village and had to cut most of our own wood. It’s not too bad, but when you have half a dozen guys to help nail up some boards but only one hammer, it does kinda slow things down!
If anyone is thinking of coming to Guyana, I would definitely recommend it. Don’t be too put off by what you hear from Lonely Planet and the FCO website. Sure there are risks, but to be honest, I feel a lot safer here in the interior of Guyana than I have ever felt in England. And Yupakari and the Caiman project should definitely be on the agenda!