Almost two weeks ago now we arrived in Paramakatoi. The first thing that needs to be said is this: it is absolutely stunning. So much so that explaining it seems almost impossible. From the first moment on, flying over the village and seeing it from above, it had me in awe; rainforest as far as your eye can reach, a design in a small field that spells out ‘Welcome to Paramakatoi’ and then the village itself. For days, every time the locals would ask Catriona and me how we liked it here, our first response would be to say just how beautiful we think it is. Even now, two weeks in, I’m still taken aback every time I look out the window. What can I say, it is pretty incredible.
Upon arrival we settled into our little apartment quite quickly (once we got a couple of hours of cleaning and bracing the army of cockroaches in that is). Our home is really basic but homely and comfortable. There are two small bedrooms, a bathroom with a toilet and a shower (both of which are technically non-functional), a living/dining room and a small kitchen area. We don’t have running water; however, we do have electricity from 4 until 10pm and seen as the sun sets at around 6pm every day, that is absolutely amazing. Having cleaned, unpacked and decorated as much as possible we now live happily alongside all our house mates, which includes two bats we lovingly named Greg and Gregora, countless moths, the odd lizard and occasional cockroach. The amount of food we brought in from Georgetown (see picture!) will hopefully get us through to the end of the term. Getting food here is not easy because our remote location means everything has to be flown in and things at the shops are therefore very expensive. When we started our journey to Paramakatoi, that being a two-hour flight on an 8-seater plane, we were accompanied by 7 cardboard boxes filled with anything we might need. Treena and me are self-sufficient, although cooking on our little kerosene stove has proved to be quite the challenge sometimes and we have had some support from the dorms for a while– we should be getting a gas bottle for our gas cooker soon, but apparently getting one here is incredibly hard and can take some time; the bottle we were supposed to have somehow went missing over the summer.
Because Paramakatoi Secondary School is somewhat central, children from all around region 8 go to school here, meaning that many of them live far away and have to stay at the dorms throughout the term. The kids are great, and already they often pop by after school to say hello, or rather: ‘Hi Miiss’, a sentence I must have heard a million times already. After two days of getting timetables sorted in school I ended up teaching Maths in grade 8 (12/13 year olds) as well as Human and Social Biology and English in grade 10 (15/16 year olds). I am slowly getting accustomed to teaching and although it still feels odd to be on the giving rather than the receiving end of the education system now, I do enjoy it. All of the students, and especially my form class, one of the three grade 8 classes, are brilliant and I am finally learning the kids’ names as well as pronouncing them correctly, which I am probably far too excited about.
So this is life now. Teach from 9 until 3 in the afternoon, then come home and do the daily chores. We fetch drinking water from the spring and washing water from our rain butt, clean the flat, burn our garbage in our garbage pit and cook. Granted, we have had the odd mishap – there were several mini explosions when burning our garbage, we’ve ended up eating absurdly hot peppers we thought were sweet ones and I’ve taken a gracious slide down a muddy hill to list just a few, but overall, I’d say we are doing pretty well. During the week, we spend our evenings reading, playing cards, marking exercisebooks and drinking hot chocolate when we don’t visit people or have visitors ourselves and on weekends we go trekking and exploring, visit locals and play some more cards. The people here are some of the most warm-hearted and welcoming people I have met in my life and visiting each other as well as helping each other is a given here.
Treena and I have been welcomed into the community instantly; we’ve been visited as well as having been invited to visit, and have been given small gifts like bananas, mangoes and local vegetables like plantain. I cannot wait to see more of the area, get to know moreof the people and hopefully even learn some of their language (Patamona). If what’s to come is anything like what I’ve gotten to know so far, I don’t think I’ll be disappointed. With this I come to the end my first short insight into everyday life here in the deep rainforest of Guyana – I hope to give a more detailed update some of the aspects of life here very soon. 
larainguyana 