Road Trip!

As a surprise for Dulcie's birthday, we decided to kidnap her early in the morning and make the 2 and half hour drive from Saint Laurent to Kourou for a day of exploring and adventures.
Kourou is well-known as being the home of the Centre Spatial Guyanais (Guiana Space Centre) where the Ariane space shuttle is launched. It is also a former prison colony, and mainland town located closest to the Devil's Island, the famous prison island of the Dreyfus affair and Henri Charriere's Papillon. The French Foreign Legion also has a base in Kourou.
The trip was planned totally in secret and when we burst into the room on Monday morning at 6:00, Dulcie's first words were "huh...what day is it?". By 7:00 (we were hoping to get going earlier but I forgot to check the oil and had to do so at the last minute) we were in the car, Dulcie blindfolded, driving through the South American rain forest with the barely-risen sun shining through the trees.


(Above: Vic and Dulcie; Below: our pathetic replacement for a car stereo and the beautiful rising sun)


When we finally arrived, we were dissapointed to find that the street signs were absolutely miniscule and only on one side of the street so that you only realize what street you're supposed to be on after you've passed it. This led to us being very lost, and when I finally stopped being the man and agreed to stop and ask for directions, we found a fantastic pastry shop. We then found a lovely cafe and had our breakfast, giggling over the fact that nothing in town seemed to be open.
Although it has been raining every single day for the past month, incredibly enough, it was sunny and not a cloud in the sky, but we didn't know if it would last, so we decided to make our first stop the beach.

We spent a couple of hours enjoying the sun, looking for shells, and catching up on our reading. (Left: Vic is pointing at the Iles du Salut, including Devil's Island, off in the distance)



Our luck with weather then ended and as rain clouds began creeping over us, we headed off to find a place for lunch. We wound up back in the same square as we had been in the morning and had pizza and fries (we're all into health food!) as rain poured down.
And now for the guilty admission....there is a McDonald's in Kourou...and there was no way we had driven for almost three hours and were not going to go to it...

Dee and I got McFlurry's (more like vanilla ice cream with sprinkles because the McFlurry machine was broken)

and since the restaurant was empty, we snuck into the play place and completly reverted back to childhood for half an hour.

Upon exiting, one of the customers looked at us with a raised eyebrow and asked "How old are you guys?" We all giggled and replied "Twelve" and then ran off.

We headed out of town and towards the Space Center. I wish I could say we actually went into the museum, but we were running low on cash so we had to be content with pictures of it and a replica of the space shuttle.


It was starting to rain again and since we had very little idea what else could be done in Kourou, we were very sunburned, and running low on money and gas, we decided to head home.
It was a painful drive (my back was very burned), slowed down by a heavy rainfall and nightfall, but we got back to St.Laurent in one piece and early enough to get some prep work done for the week. My account of the day had to wait until tonight though since all phone lines have been dead for the past two days. It's crazy how much we rely on internet and phones and how cut off you can feel when you don't have them!
In the end, we took back three things from our day in Kourou...
1) crazy sunburns

2) we each got a "transformer" action figure key ring (symbolic of our transformative year of service)


3) great memories

For a different perspective on the day and some more pics, you can visit Dulcie's blog at www.deejustine.blogspot.com

Back on the Maroni

This post is way overdue! A slight schedule change upon my return to St.Laurent has left me with even less free time and therefore less time to be spent in front of a computer screen. However...I am back in St.Laurent and all is good! It is remarkable how fast time passes here. The girls and I have started feeling the pressure of the little time that is left here and the need to get the most out of every minute and give as much as we can (hence the schedule change). One thing we have added to our schedule is a two hour workshop on Wednesday afternoons that we like to call "Girl Power"...yes, it is for girls! It is an empowerment workshop for the young girls in one of the more troubled neighborhoods of St.Laurent...it will cover everything from confidence-building to equality to just doing fun stuff "entre filles" as we say here. I am lucky to have a great addition to my schedule which is spending another night in a hammock! Not that I don't absolutely love where I am living but I will be spending my Thursday nights in a really wonderful village where I already teach a French class in order to have more time with the youth there. Because of how late they get back from school, it is the only way to get more time to interact with them, and I'm hoping it will give me a chance to improve on my Saramaka!
I don't really feel like I can recap on the past two weeks of being back in St.Laurent so instead I will simply recap on the weekend and attempt to write more frequent updates from now on!
The highlight of my Saturday was in one of my favorite children's class. Just as we were about to begin prayers, one of the boys, Philippe, shot his hand up into the air to proudly tell me he had said his prayers last night. He was absolutely beaming, not in an "I'm so proud of myself" or "I made the teacher happy" way, but out of knowledge that he had done the right thing. All the other children were silent, as if waiting for me to ask them if they had too, which I didn't, but when we finally started prayers, they were the stillest and most quiet they've ever been. We spent the entire class simply singing songs! They didn't even want to play, but preferred to learn another song. They did not however, pass up on coloring time.

This weekend was the weekend of the spiders! (I have no idea how to spell the sound of revulsion that comes to mind at the thought of what I have to recount)
When we got to Wagi Pasi to set up for the night, the carbet was absolutely crawling with spiders, way more than usual. This led to a very quiet and cautious set up of the hammocks, but when a cockroach mysteriously made it up onto poor Dulcie's back, the quiet was gone...I don't think I've ever seen someone jiggle as frantically...and of course the rest of us were all sent into shivers and ticks at the thought of waking up with a spider on top of our hammock nets (and these are not small spiders). We did make it through the night, but little did I know, that was not all I would have to deal with. During my morning French class, as I was explaining some illogical aspect of counting in French, the entire class started pointing behind me frantically, and when I spun around, I was a few inches from a tarantula the size of my head! One of the men in the class gallantly raced up, whacked the spider and killed it with a carving knife. It was very courageous and dramatic.
When I got home and told the story to Bob, he laughed at how scared I was, until I identified the spider as being a reddish brown color, at which point he said "oh, yes, well those ones do have a tendency to give a nasty bite."...Hurray!

This has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the blog but I don't think I have posted a picture of THE TEAM yet so...here are the ladies of St.Laurent du Maroni.
Victoria (from Paraguay) is on the left, Dulcie is the redhead in middle (from Ottawa), and Denissa (from Quebec) is the beauty with the knife (it was her birthday). [please ignore the cigarette of the stranger walking by]


They are absolutely fantastic, funny, and patient, and we are all so different, it is a true sign of the unifying power of the Baha'i Faith that we all get along so well! I'm am truly blessed to be serving with them.

Yet another week full of adventures and lessons learned has gone by and tomorrow another one begins. Hopefully I will update a little more on them from now on. For now, here is a Baha'i writing that has guided us girls in our consultations here and will continue to throughout our lives:
"If they agree upon a subject, even though it be wrong, it is better that to disagree and be in the right, for this difference will produce the demolition of the divine foundation. Though one of the parties may be in the right and they disagree that will be the cause of a thousand wrongs, but if they agree and both parties are in the wrong, as it is in unity the truth will be revealed and the wrong made right." - Abdu'l-Baha