80 hours in Guyana

May 12, 2002|Tom Haines, Globe Staff

GEORGETOWN, Guyana - It was hot, still, at 11 p.m., and we were standing there in our boxers, in the dark, looking from behind the hotel room curtains at two guys talking quietly with the driver of an idling 4 " 4. Dim lights cut the scene only at its edges.

Paranoid? Maybe. There was nothing wrong with the men, really, as they laughed and chatted in the street.

But listen to this, a story that Lennox, the cab driver, told us on the way into town: That very morning, five bandits, escaped from prison weeks earlier, had surfaced again, armed with machine guns and sniper rifles, maybe grenades. They went after a woman gardening outside her home. They carjacked a 4 " 4 out by the American school. The evening before, another couple got carjacked a few blocks from this hotel, in the center of a national capital that is not much bigger than Worcester. On the radio in the hotel lobby, callers to a talk show said the police were no better, quick to kill, out of control.

Yet, in the next morning's early light, young girls passed beneath our window in white shirts and dark skirts on their way to a breezy, wooden schoolhouse. Friendly men pushed carts full of hard, green coconuts, sliced the coconuts open, and served them with a straw.

So what were the rules in this place? What was fact and what fiction? Was it worth it to find out?

We sat there, behind the curtains, facing a traveler's dilemma. How do we take this limited context - these first hours of darkness and haze and bad news - and move beyond, into the sun? If we were to join this world, we would feel, within minutes, a connection as sweet and pure as the clear milk in one of those bright green coconuts. We would learn that truth boils in a murky place, like the rice pudding bubbling above a wood fire behind the Radha Krishna temple, set on the corner of Quamina and Camp streets, a few blocks from the center of town. And we would learn what it means to be "84-for-3 before lunch."

We had come here, to this city on the north coast of South America, for 80 hours. It was a spontaneous trip, plotted a week before, when I had called Greg Scholl, a childhood friend and avid photographer. I suggested that he and I go somewhere, anywhere, and explore the place visually. Greg thought a minute, then said, "Guyana."

Guyana was settled by the Dutch, colonized by the British, and has been independent only 36 years.

Today's Guyanese are few - only about 700,000 - but they are richly diverse, descendants of East Indians, Africans, native Amer-Indians, Chinese, and Europeans. They speak English and worship in Christian churches and Hindu temples and Islamic mosques.

The country's interior has pristine, threatened, tropical terrain.