A Weekend to Remember

After having caught up a little on sleep I am able to sit down and write about our first youth gathering and our first weekend spent in the villages; a weekend of many experiences, lessons, and lots of fun.
Saturday night started a series of weekly youth gatherings combining discussion, writings from different religions, and the arts on a series of subjects related to religion and society. Our first topic was "true religion". We were a small group of two Baha'i youth, our friend Jules, and one of our neighbors. The discussion was focused on understanding what everyone thought of the term "religion", what it's true essence is, and the role it plays in society and in our individual lives. The best part of the evening was that there were so many opinions shared but there was never a slight bit of conflict that arose and in the end everyone concluded that the world's religions are not actually that different and that they should be the cause of unity. After the discussion we spent a little time trying to understand the history of the different religions and then worked together to create a collage of different religious symbols. Here were these six people, all with different opinions and definitely from different backgrouds, working together to create something beautiful that we all agreed on. Symbolic eh?

At about ten o'clock, we packed everything up, grabbed our backpacks and hammocks, and drove out to Wagi Pasi, a village about 15 minutes out of town, where we would be spending the night. We were already quite tired and were looking forward to just being able to go to sleep....no such luck! As soon as we got to Alieni's, our hostess and had put our bags down we were informed that there was a birthday party down the road and we HAD to go! So at 10:30 at night we walked down a pitch black road to another area of the village. After Denissa and I switched our rings over to the ring finger (to avoid uncomfortable situations) we found a few people we knew and danced the night away! The music went from pre-recorded to spontaneous drumming that would last for an hour. You could just lose yourself in the rhythm and the energy! The rings unfortunately didn't help much so we decided to go back at around 3:00 (we were completely exhausted too). Then came the greatest challenge...putting up hammocks for the first time ever in candlelight at 3:00 in the morning!

With quite a bit of help from Alieni's sons, Vaizal and Euginio, we finally got them tied up and collapsed into them...well, I wish it had been that simple. Sleeping in a hammock is not as easy as it sounds. For one, we were sleeping in an open hut so we had to use a mosquito net slipped around the hammock, which gives you about an inch of breathing room. But you must also find "the position" in which you can have a comfortable sleep...it involves lying at a certain angle at which point the hammock straightens out and you don't wake up feeling like a smused banana. It was challenging and I am sad to report I was quite unsuccessful, but we had fun, which is the most important! After all, we will be sleeping in Wagi Pasi every Saturday so by the end of the year we'll get it.
Thankfully, we got to sleep in but by 10:00 it was so unbearably hot we had to get up. Struggling out of our hammocks, we were greeted by Sebastienne, the 8-year old daughter of our host, who accompanied us down to the creek where we washed up. Our bottles of shampoo caused quite a commotion, as did the sight of wet bakra hair (bakra is word used for white person - i.e me). It's strange enough when it's dry but I guess it's even stranger when it's wet!
We went back to our hut (seen below)


We had a breakfast of bread and tea surrounded by about every child in the village, and then, since we were all extremely tired, we all (myself, Denissa, Sebastienne, and some of the sons of our host) crawled back into our hammocks and sang songs for about an hour. We were taught a prayer in Saramaca (one of the languages spoken here and made up funny stories. It was the perfect relaxed Sunday.





Respect calls for us to visit people in the village so we went around greeting people in our broken Sranan Tongo (another language spoken here, much easier than Saramaca, but which everyone speaks). My favorite visit that morning to the matriarch of the village, Abanti, who lives up on a hill. We had met her before and the news that I was from Congo had sent her into a fit of clapping and laughing so she was extremely welcoming when she saw us. We spent a few minutes talking about how she found the Baha'i Faith and answering questions about Canada and snow, but then she settled back into her hammock and fell asleep and we felt it would be appropriate to leave at that point. After visiting the sculptor's hut and getting a quick lesson, we ate lunch, this time surrounded by fewer children (I guess the novelty had worn off). We thanked our hostess and left to take her sons to another village quite a ways away where they teach a children's class. While we waited for them, we met with some of the villagers to have a French class at some point next week, and then sat in the sculptors' hut, where about 6 men work on wood crafts.


We had the most interesting and random conversation I have ever had in a combination of English, French, Dutch, Sranan Tongo, and an invented sign language. It was fun, but did make me think about how important it is that we develop a universal language which all people can learn in addition to their mother tongue; not as a way to eliminate diversity but rather to facilitate the sharing of cultures. It is sad to think of how much more we could have learned from these men, and Abanti, and all the other people we meet every day, if we were able to properly communicate!
When the children's class ended, a prayer meeting was held in the hut where we were, at which the children are encouraged to tell what they learned that day. We drove Vaizal and Euginio home and raced back to our 7 o'clock Sranan Tongo lesson.
Yawning and eyelids drooping, we prepared for today's lessons and collapsed into bed, grateful for the straight surface but missing the fun of our hammocks and the breeze of an open hut.



Lesson Learned:
The Western world has developed so many tools and objects to make physical life easier, but they have sped up the pace of daily life to the point where we have no time to enjoy the relative ease with which we can live it. Every time we try to slow down it only feels like things get backed up and pile up more. That society must work together to slow itself down and take time to appreciate the little things in life - taking time to just sit with friends, without having to worry about work and appointments; allowing children to just wander, without rushing them to this class and that practice; sitting and meditating about our purpose on this beautiful planet and what each of us can do to keep in beautiful for the generations to come.