Here I am!

I’ll get some things out of the way before I begin:  First, my apologies for the lengthy span between posts.  From now on, expect a blog post to be up the first weekend of every month.  I think I might have promised more frequent blog posts a while back, but I mean it this time, really.  If the first weekend of October comes and goes with no post, bug me on Facebook or something.

Secondly, I have decided to password protect my blog.  People in my village are becoming more internet savvy, and even though I don’t trash talk anyone in my blog, it still might be kind of awkward if any of them read it.  Plus stalkers and stuff.  I’ll send out the password to people who I know read it, but if I don’t send it to you, email or Facebook message me for it, or ask my mom.  Expect it to be locked down within the next week or so.

Now, on to the fun stuff! I’m healthy again—well, mostly.  The verdict was inner ear damage, and the ENT I saw said I could expect residual dizziness for the next year or so. I still occasionally get a bit dizzy after strenuous exercise or if I stand up too fast, but it’s nowhere near as debilitating as it was before.  

This summer has been a blast!  I designed my own summer school/camp for kids going into 6^th grade, and they were a great group of kids to work with.  They loved playing Bananagrams and listening to me read them Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and some of them would even ask me for homework! I really hope my summer school met its goal—that is, to better prepare these kids for the Secondary School Entrance Exam so more of them can do well enough on the test to get a scholarship and attend a better secondary school out on the coast.  But even if it didn’t, my kids and I all had a lot of fun!

I was supposed to do teacher training in phonics this summer too, but that failed.  Such is life—especially Peace Corps life.

My living situation has changed since I last posted!  I was having some issues living by myself here, both emotional ones (loneliness) and practical ones (taking care of a house and cooking for myself for the first time…with no TV dinners, take-out, dishwashers or washing machines…and rats and bats and giant cockroaches!)  Long story short, I’m living with a host family now!  My new host family members are Wendy and Benji, a couple around my parents’ age, and Jade, Jason and Josh, three boys between the ages of 15 and 21.  The youngest son goes to school out of St. Cuthbert’s, and the two older ones work out of the mission as well, so the house is very rarely full.   I love my new host family, and their house is awesome!  It’s huge, and I have my own veranda upstairs with my hammock on it.  It’s probably my favorite place in Guyana!  Oh, and then there’s the newest member of the family—my dog, Lady! I gave up on her months ago when she was a puppy (see “problems living alone” above) and gave her away, but she kept finding me again at Wendy and Benji’s house…so Wendy said we should keep her!  She’s a family dog now, which makes taking care of her much less overwhelming, and she’ll stay here when I go home which will make both my life and her life easier.   

Among the best parts of the summer have been travelling and visitors!  Shout-out to Lisa and Pat, who both made last-minute plans to come visit me.  Pat and I went to Oriella, a village right on the river that divides Guyana from Surinam.  Oriella was JUNGLE, and beautiful!  My second jungle trip was a week spent in Region 1, the Northwest corner of Guyana, where some of the volunteers I trained with live now.  Kristen and Harmony and Travis were all great hosts (and great cooks!), and I loved getting to see their villages and going on hikes around a genuinely remote area of Guyana.  

Looking to the near future—school starts tomorrow!  We are not short two-and-a-half teachers, as I feared, only one-and-a-half or perhaps only a half!  Regardless, I am not playing substitute this term;  I’m teaching a remedial reading program, which I am quite excited about.  My groups are all chosen and phonics teaching guides have been pored over, but it’s anyone’s guess what will actually happen once school opens.  I’m getting used to that quality of everything Peace Corps—the feeling of flying by the seat of my pants—and it feels more comfortable than it used to.

Plans to come home for Christmas are materializing—tentatively, I will be home from December 13^th to January 2^nd. Between now and then…I love comments, Facebook messages, Skype dates, snail mail and packages, so stay in touch!  Miss you guys!!

My Mysterious Jungle Illness

Word has probably gotten around to most of the readers of my blog, but for those who don't know--I'm sick.  Not mortally ill or anything like that, but whatever illness I do have is very stubborn.  It started with a fever, weakness, headaches and dizzness over four weeks ago.  It seemed to resolve itself after about a week, but a few days later all the initial symptoms came back.  Once again, the fever only lasted a few days, but the dizziness still hasn't gone away.  I've been out of work for almost a month and have seen two doctors here, neither of whom were able to find anything conclusively wrong with me.  My bloodwork came back completely normal, my blood pressure is normal, all that jazz.  What's not normal is that I get dizzy every time I stand up, when I walk, if I look up, climb stairs, roll over in bed...you get the gist.  The prevailing theory (prevailing in my mind, at least, after some internet research) is that the virus that I initially had (when I got the fever the first time) disrupted something in my inner ear, leading to what is known as BPPV.  Supposedly this goes away on its own after two months...

So, next steps.  The second doctor I saw, when he couldn't diagnose me with anything, recommended that I be sent back to the U.S. to see a doctor there who can perhaps find something wrong with me. Peace Corps Headquarters needs to make this decision, and supposedly they met about it today.  I should know what they're going to do with me by tomorrow, although I have a feeling that if they send me out of the country they'll send me to Panama and not back home.  I'll update as soon as I find out what the deal is.

To answer the most common questions I've gotten: Yes, I've been eating well, yes, I've been hydrating, and no, I'm not feeling stressed out or depressed.  If anyone has any suggestions for how to keep myself occupied without electricity, I'm all ears, because after a month of being sick I'm kind of bored out of my mind.

Miss and love you guys!

My School

In St. Cuthbert’s Primary School, there are no walls. Grades 1 through 6 are seated in classrooms separated by chalkboards. Unsurprisingly, the school is loud. Teaching in this atmosphere takes some getting used to, and not just because of the noise level.


In theory, each grade has a teacher, but in practice this is far from true.

The grade 1 teacher is wonderful—she’s an experienced, trained teacher who is from the coastal area of Guyana. She’s volunteering in a program that sends teachers to “hinterland” areas like St. Cuthbert’s that are notoriously lacking in trained teachers. She teaches her first graders phonics and spends extra time with them after school and on Saturdays to try and get them caught up to the level where they should be. Unfortunately, she is only stationed at St. Cuthbert’s for one year.

The grade 2 teacher is currently on one month leave. In Guyana, after a teacher works for four years, she qualifies for one month leave with double pay during the school year. A nice perk, I suppose, but it causes some problems in a school system without substitute teachers. Fortunately, she will be back on Monday.

The grade 3 teacher is currently enrolled in a teacher training college. This is good for the school in the long term, since only two other teachers in the school have any formal training, but for the moment it means Ms. S’s class has no teacher three days a week.

The grade 4 teacher is also the headmistress and therefore my supervisor. The headmistress of a school is not supposed to have a class to teach as well, but the official headmaster is attending university, so Ms. B has taken his place while still teaching grade 4. As headmistress, she must travel out to town at least twice a month, sometimes as often as twice a week, to negotiate burocratic affairs with the Ministry of Education. On these days, her class has no teacher.

The grade 6 teacher has decided he will work “out in the bush” this term. This is what most men in the community do for work. It usually means prospecting, for gold or other minerals, and it pays better than a teacher’s salary. Sir O does not plan to return to the primary school for at least a few years.

The school has very few reading books and even fewer textbooks. There is no copy machine, no gym or music or art teacher, no playground, no cafeteria. (Both teachers and students go home for lunch.)

There are general guidelines as to what should be taught to each grade for each term, but it’s a bit difficult teaching, for instance, addition of fractions to a class where many students still need to count on their fingers to add 2 + 2. And, how to teach prefixes with a list of words including “uncomfortable” and “displeased” when half of the class can’t read the word “please”?

This is school. It’s a struggle, but on the bright side there is much room for me to make an impact. If when I got here everything was perfect, then there wouldn’t be much for me to do! As for what I’m doing—for a while I was floundering, trying along with whatever teachers were present to address the understaffing problem, sometimes teaching two classes at once. Staffing issues seem to have stabilized, so I am free to go on with my plan: teach the grade 3 class Tuesday through Thursday when Ms. S. is out at college, and conduct pull-out remedial reading groups on Mondays and Fridays. Currently, I am just doing diagnostic assessments to figure out what level the students are at. An analysis of the results will allow me to choose students for my reading groups and decide exactly what I will teach them.

I am really excited to start teaching phonics! I never thought that I’d be excited about phonics, but that was before I was exposed to what Guyanese teachers refer to as “guided reading” or the “see-and-say” method—that is, simply memorizing “C-A-T cat, D-O-G dog,” and so on. Most of the students in my school don’t know what sounds any letters make. I aim not only to teach some of these students phonics in my remedial reading groups, but also to teach the teachers how to teach phonics. This will be one of my first efforts at what Peace Corps calls “sustainable development”—community changes that will continue on even after I have returned to the States.

Month two of training is almost complete!

Blogging once a month is nearly impossible, because there is so much to tell.

But, here’s a moment: I finish training early and spend an afternoon lying in the hammock on my veranda, reading and napping and watching the kissadees build their nest in the corner of our roof.  My host grandmother wove the hammock.  Timmax, my host brother, is downstairs building a kite in preparation for Easter.  (They don’t dye eggs here, they fly kites.  However, I promised my neighbors an egg hunt this Easter!)  Baby Queenie crawls out onto the veranda and pulls herself up to standing using the hammock, tells me cheerfully, “Ma ma ma,” as she tries to grab the book out of my hands.

Another moment: I walk to visit another Peace Corps trainee, greeting people I know (and those I don’t) along the way.  In Guyana, neighbors are neighborly!   I gaff (Guyanese for chat) for a few minutes with a family sitting out on their porch, and they encourage me to stop by and spend more time with them in the future. A few nursery-school-aged girls follow me for a few minutes in their red-and-white-checkered blouses, holding hands and giggling.  The novelty of having white people in town is slow to wear off for them.   When I arrive at my fellow trainee’s house, she isn’t home, but her host sisters agree to take me to her grandmother’s house—her grandmother has a dog that just had puppies, and I want to adopt one!  I ogle the week-old puppies for a few minutes while Grandma tells me about the different kinds of fruits and vegetables she grows to sell.  The girls take me back to their house, where their mother hacks open a coconut for me to drink the milk.  More gaffing, then I head home.

These moments are priceless:  When baby Queenie reaches out to me for me to pick her up.  When TImmax’s eyes light up as I’m quizzing him on letter sounds and he gets one right.  When I’m walking back to training and two third-grade girls who I taught the day before run up to me and each one holds one of my hands.  When a woman who I visited just to buy vegetables invites me into her home, gives me food and drink and tells me I must visit regularly.  When I cook, Guyanese style, and the results are edible and I can tell my host parents are proud of me.  When I compliment a teacher’s shoes and she offers to take me shopping in Georgetown!  When I walk into a shop where people are liming (hanging out), and I gaff with them and they laugh at my jokes—or, better yet, when they tell me that I’m a mission girl now!

By a mission girl, they mean that I am a resident of St. Cuthbert’s Mission!  That’s right—I’m the one lucky volunteer from our group who gets to stay at our training site for my full two years in country.  One week from today is our swearing-in as full-fledged Peace Corps Volunteers, and while eight trainees will leave St. Cuthbert’s for other regions of Guyana, I’ll come right back home.  I’ll move into a house of my own, only a few minutes’ walk away from the host family I’m living with now.  One of the many perks of staying in St. Cuthbert’s is free and readily accessible internet, so there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to update this blog more frequently; say, once a week?  At any rate, anticipate another post soon!

Two Weeks in St. Cuthbert's: A List

1. I have an amazing host family! Charlene, my host mom, is 25; Timor, my host dad, is 30; Timmax is my five-year-old host brother and Shaqueena—Queenie—is almost ten months old! 
2. I am eating chicken, fried rice, curry, plantains, LOTS of fresh pine (pineapple), fish, bellange (eggplant) and pine tarts!  I can make bake and roti, two different kinds of bread…with a little guidance at least.
3. I have no running water in the house, but a pipe pumps it into my backyard.  That’s what I use for (cold) showers, washing dishes, and making tea—my family drinks it but I can’t be cause my body has no resistance to all the creepy crawlies living in it.
4. We have two dogs named Blackie and Brownie.  Yesterday, Brownie peed on my leg.  Maybe that’s his way of accepting me into the community?
5. Speaking of peeing…outhouses aren’t really that bad.  Unless you get locked inside one, which happened to me once.  Bobby pins and watches are good tools for escape.
6. Speaking of peeing, again…I have a pee bucket called a “tinny” that resides under my bed.  It’s kinda awkward to use but preferable to braving the outhouse at 2AM.
7. We have generator-run electricity from 6PM to 10PM every night!
8. St. Cuthbert’s just got a computer lab a few weeks ago—incredibly good timing, no? Especially since that means wireless internet access in the youth center that we use as a training building!  My host parents are both taking computer classes three times a week, and they’re really excited to practice their typing on my computer.
9. I have two hammocks in my house—my host grandma made them!
10. Aforementioned house is two stories, made of wood…downstairs is a big kitchen and a small shop that mostly just functions as a bar in the evenings.  The bedrooms are upstairs--I do have my own room, but I only have a sheet for a door.
11. Timmax, my host brother, loves playing slapjack and listening to the Beatles on my iPod.
12. Queenie, my host sister, is crawling up a storm, and I’m fairly certain she’ll be walking before I leave.  She’s also fascinated with my glasses, or as Timmax calls them, my “specs.”
13. Lizards hang out in my room at night.
14. I met someone with a pet anteater yesterday.
15. I’ve been to two birthday parties since I’ve been here!
16. My days start early…I run with some other trainees at 6AM most mornings, then I bathe, eat breakfast, and go to class at 8.  I only have a five-minute walk to my classroom, which is a small cement building right next to the primary school (which means that the kids come and stare in the windows at us on their breaks).  Training lasts till about 4:30, when I go home and help with dinner.  By 9:00 I’m exhausted, and by the time the lights go out at 10 I’m usually asleep!
17. Training is on several topics: safety and security, health, cultural integration, and technical training in education. 
18. I’ve taken the 10-minute walk down to the river to swim or bathe a few times with my family.  They call the river water “blackwater”—it’s the color of strong tea.
19. The first time we went down to the river, we saw a snake! It was bright green and it swam across the river, and then my host dad beat it to death with a stick.
20. Next Wednesday, March 16^th, I will find out my permanent placement…and then on Saturday I’ll go there to visit!!  I am really, really, really excited to see the community I’m going to be living in for the next two years.

Twenty is a nice, even number, so I’ll stop here...I have to go home and cook pumpkin and roti! 

I'm here!

This is huge, and I don’t even know where to start.  I’M IN GUYANA.  It’s Day 3 of training, and I’m sitting in an air-conditioned hotel room in Georgetown, the capital city and home to 1/3 of the country’s 750,000 people.   We haven’t been out of the hotel at all, except for a brief trip on a minibus to a riverside park for our water safety test.  Immediately we could feel the “fishbowl effect”—though some Guyanese people paid us no mind, others were videotaping us and taking pictures.  This will take some getting used to.

I have to be up in five hours for breakfast, so I don’t have time for a long post, but good news: my training site, St. Cuthbert’s Mission, is classified as remote, but it DOES have internet access, at least during the four hours a day when the village has electricity.  It’s a small Amerindian (that is, Native South American) community of about 300 families where I’ll be learning about Guyanese culture by living with a host family.  During my eight weeks there, I will also have a 9-to-5 schedule of training activities, both in a classroom setting and through hands-on practicum experiences.  I even have homework!

There is so much more to tell about—the awesome people that I’m training with, the delicious food (and constant supply of fresh juice!), the odd exchange rate (my living stipend is 40,000 Guyanese dollars a month, any guesses on how much that is in American money?), and everything I’ve learned from my sessions thus far and my conversations with the current Volunteers who are helping with our training.  However, these are things best discussed at hours other than 2AM, especially since tomorrow is a big day!  We’re moving from the hotel in Georgetown to our training sites, where we’ll meet our host families for the first time.  Expect to hear all about St. Cuthbert’s in my next post!

My Mailing Address

I promised an FAQ's post, but the last week has been crazy and I don't know if I'll have time to write it before I leave.  (TOMORROW!!)  So, here's my mailing address so you can send me letters and other fun stuff!


Kelly Cahill, PCT
Peace Corps
PO Box 101192
Georgetown, Guyana
South America

This is only my address for my first two months in the country. After that I'll move from my training site to my permanent site, and my address will change.  I will post the new one up here as soon as I can.

It takes letters about two weeks to get from the States to Guyana, and about a month for them to get from Guyana to the U.S. So be patient, I will write back! 

Make sure to write "air mail" on the envelope otherwise it will be sent even slower. Other info on mailing stuff through the US postal service is here: http://pe.usps.com/text/Imm/fh_022.htm#ep1403195

Don't send me packages, it will be really, really expensive. If you must send me a package for some reason, you can send it through FedEx, DHL International, etc. instead of the post office, in which case you need to send it to the street address instead of the PO Box. The street address for the Peace Corps is 33A Barrack Street, Kingston, Georgetown, Guyana.


That's all for now I guess, I've still got a lot to do tonight! I'm flying to Philly tomorrow for orientation and my emotions right now are all over the place. Thank you to everyone who has made time to see me these past few weeks, I will miss you all more than I can say.