4 months of service: Food, the rainy season, and bugs, bugs, and more bugs

So I am officially 4 months into my Peace Corps service. I cannot believe how fast that time has gone by. It seems like only yesterday I was leaving my house in Allentown for the hotel in Philly for my pre-service staging. And yet here I am a real, live, true Peace Corps volunteer in South America. Still sounds insane, right? :)

One of the things that people always ask me about living in Guyana is what I eat. People back in the states probably don’t know what Guyanese cuisine is; I definitely didn’t before I moved here. As a Caribbean nation on the South American mainland with large Indian, African, and Chinese populations, Guyanese food is as diverse and unique as the people who live here. The cuisine is dominated by fresh fruits and vegetables. There are markets and produce stands in every village and farming is a large sector of the economy. Balanger (eggplant), pumpkin, channa (chickpeas), and plantains are definite staples in my diet. Most vegetables here are made into a curry and served with either rice or roti, which is similar to a flatbread. For all my Kenyan family out there it is very very similar to chapatti, and just as delicious :) Chicken and beef are very prevalent but I rarely eat meat here, mostly cause you have to butcher it or cut it yourself (refer to my previous entry about de-feathering a chicken). Also, any precut meat is cut up and sold on small wooden carts on the side of the road or open air stores that are not very appealing to the appetite with flies and dust everywhere. You usually have to soak all meat in vinegar for at least 30 minutes before you cook it to kill anything you don’t want to ingest. I’ve pretty much gone mostly vegetarian since I’ve gotten here, with the occasional piece of chicken, but I swear the first thing I’m eating when I’m back home is the biggest steak I can find :) My favorite thing about the food here in Guyana is the abundance of fresh tropical fruits. Watermelon, pineapple, papaya, and guavas make a weekly and often daily appearance in my diet and they definitely taste much better and much fresher than anything you can get back in the states. My three favorite Guyanese foods are definitely chicken curry, pumpkin with roti, and cassava chips with plenty sour. Don’t worry, my goal from now until December is to master those 3 recipes so I can make them for you all back home :)

Now that it is June here in Guyana we have just entered one of the rainy seasons. There is no such thing as winter, spring, fall and summer here, just rainy or dry. And always, always hot. Rainy season means that is will probably rain at least once a day for three months and the rain will not just be quick showers, but complete and total downpours. They usually only last 20 or 30 minutes but can occur several times a day. You always have to walk with your umbrella during rainy season. (In Guyana creolese instead of saying “I carried my umbrella” you would say “I walked with my umbrella”). Rainy season means that during the rainfall the temperature drops to only 75 or 80 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity becomes tolerable. This is the only time you can reasonable say the words “I feel” and “cold” in the same sentence while standing in Guyana and this is only if you forgot to walk with your umbrella and are now soaking wet from walking home in a monsoon. (This happens to me often.) The one really good thing about rainy season when you live on the coast is that the breeze is usually stronger and more frequent. In a country where air conditioning is a rare luxury and blackouts commonplace (which means no fan), a cool breeze is essential. There really is nothing quite like standing at the sink doing dishes, sweating of course, when all of a sudden a cool breeze blows in through the window and slowly washes over you. You can’t help but stop what you are doing, close your eyes, and savor that brief moment of relief from the heat. You really learn to appreciate the magic of a cool breeze when you live 5 degrees north of the equator. It is something you never quite have the time to appreciate back in the States but here it can instantly change your mood for the better.

Guyana has a shit ton of bugs. There really is no other way to say that which would do justice to the literally hundreds of bugs I encounter on a daily basis. Ants, flies, spiders, cockroaches, mosquitos just to name a few, are literally everywhere. All the time. But what’s even crazier than the sheer number of bugs present at any given moment is the way your reaction to them changes. When I first got to Guyana, I’m sure I swatted at every fly and mosquito and brushed away every ant that came crawling towards my dinner plate. Now, 4 months in, the mosquitos and I have come to a mutual understanding that if they come anywhere near me, I will spray them so hard with Mozipel (the industrial strength Peace Corps mosquito spray) they won’t even see it coming. I barely hear flies buzzing anymore; I just wipe my counter down with bleach for the 3rd time that day and wait for them to fly away on their own. And as far as the ants go….let’s just say that I’m pretty sure at this point I’ve accidently eaten more ants than I’ve brushed away from my food. So I guess I’m not completely vegetarian :) It’s weird to think about how something like bugs can become a normal part of my life when back home you would call an exterminator at the first sign of a cockroach. Luckily I don’t have many in my house but I have seen a few since I’ve moved in. There is no such thing as an exterminator here, it’s just me, a shoe, and a giant can on heavy duty insect repellant and then the hunt is on :)