Passage by Water

Where I’m going, we don’t need roads. In fact, we don’t have any. Diitabiki has two possible modes of entry, air and water. Flying is convenient, reliable, relatively safer, faster, and only slightly more expensive than traveling by boat. Given the options and my thirst for adventure, it is surprising that I’ve flown at all.

As expected, my first boat trip to my site took a full three days. On Thursday, November 6th, I and two other volunteers in my region left early in the morning to find a van to take us to the town of Albina on the Marowijne River, which separates Suriname from French Guiana. We arrived at about noon, and though we found someone we knew, his boat was full, and there was no oil besides. So we did what we have learned to do when presented with impossible situations; we sat down and talked with people. As usual, this opened the necessary doors, and by 2 PM, we found ourselves with free passage on a boat heading our way.

The broad, dark river lined with high walls of deep green Amazon Rainforest was beautiful, as always, though very treacherous with the low water and exposed rocks in the dry season. For larger boats, such as the thirty foot dugout canoe on which we rode, the rapids presented a major challenge. At one point, we saw a boat of similar size recently capsized and a small fleet of canoes helping them salvage floating barrels and boxes of goods. The choice to leave my computer in the city was a good one.

Well after dark, we landed at a campsite along the river. The camp consisted of a tin roof with low rafters to which about thirty of us river travelers tied hammocks and hoped for few mosquitoes. At sunrise we rose, quickly stuffed our hammocks in our bags, and set off. With no traffic on the river in the morning, the dark water perfectly mirrored the jungle on the banks. We passed rugged, cantankerous looking structures on pontoons harvesting sand from the riverbed in search of gold. At the largest of the rapids, I helped the crew unload several oil drums to lower the weight of the boat as we ascended the surging water. We arrived at the first of our sites at the point where the Marowijne separates into the Tapanahony and Lawa rivers around midday Friday, spending the afternoon and evening exploring and visiting and spending the night in her house.

The next morning the two of us remaining found a boat to take us down the Tapanahony as far as the Futupassi. Gaanolo Sula is an impassable cataract on the way to Diitabiki. Travelers are forced to portage along a footpath, known as the Futupassi to continue, and this we did. For the final leg of our journey, we found a boatman from Godolo, beyond Diitabiki who brought us to our sites. I finally arrived home at about 3 PM on Saturday, November 8th, three days since we set out.

On A Mission

While I was in training, four months ago, heavy rainfall caused a major flood on the Tapanahony and Lawa rivers. As a result, the five of us in the area were unable to visit our future sites before we swore in. The Surinamese Red Cross distributed food to the area as most of the farms had been completely destroyed. While very much needed, however, the food distribution did not address the long term effects of the crop damage.

After coming to Diitabiki in August, Red Cross decided to partner with Peace Corps to assess the food situation on the Tapanahony a couple of weeks ago. We flew to the capital from our sites for a five day training on food security to help us judge the vulnerability of our communities. It was an international mission, and Red Cross workers from Belize and Jamaica joined us in Paramaribo. We also teamed up with other organizations such as the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), which had far more specific expertise and had been working in the region for a long time.

After training, we went for three days to the region. There were a few challenges, such as the Red Cross volunteer assigned to work with me spoke Dutch and Sranan Tongo, and I speak English and Aucan, but we were able to find some good information, some of which was surprising to us even after living there for three months.

Partnering with other organizations is one of the aspects of my service that makes me most excited. Even in the short time that I have been here, I have seen organizations come to my site for two or three days and leave with little long-term effect. Most development workers do have a genuine concern for the people they work with, but without the ability to spend a lot of time in one area, it is hard to make ideas stick. The hope that we have is that Peace Corps volunteers living in the hinterland can help reinforce the efforts of other organizations to make them last. As a rule, I am skeptical of the effectiveness of any development effort, but I try to do my best and keep the effectiveness of the results in mind so that I can learn about what does and does not work. Soon I hope to work more with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), IICA, and UNICEF. We will see what we can do by working together.