Brokoday!

The Ndjuka have a unique way of remembering those who have passed on. Memorials called Brokodays are times for bright colors and celebration, presumably of life. Brokoday literally means, “broken day,” suggesting a break from the norm, the all night party that ends at the break of dawn, or perhaps the irony that though death is a somber affair, they celebrate life through it.

For the past week, Diitabiki has been hosting a Brokoday for the people of the village that died during the past year. On the first day Captain Baja, my counterpart, send a boy to tell me to come to the other side of the village with a chair and a machete. We diced sugar cane into tiny pieces with our large knives. I steadily got faster and more precise with my work until I acquired three blisters and was ordered to stop. That afternoon, we crushed the chopped sugar cane to make juice in a long troth, dancing to traditional music as we rhythmically pounded the mortars. We then boiled the liquid, drank it, and enjoyed a meal.

The next day I was called to the meetinghouse, where great masses of smoked fish, cassava bread, rum, and soda had been gathered from villages throughout the Tapanahony. We sent a basket to the Gaanman and divided the rest among ourselves. Later, the young people took a flotilla of boats onto the river. One such boat carried at least sixty people and was equipped with a sound system and loudspeakers. We raced through the water in unconventional patterns, and some boats suffered minor collisions.

For the next few days we busily worked on finishing the stockpile of food. Even today, five days after the Borokoday started, we still have provisions left over. Brokodays can last up to a week depending on how long the food lasts.



Brokodays, as I have since learned, follow a specific format. The first day is called “mortar,” during which men cut sugar can into small pieces, and women pound the cane in a large trough to make sugar water. The second day is called “the wood has arrived,” during which everyone piles into dugout canoes, cuts wood and brings it to the village. In recent years, however, this tradition has changed. Now people load wood into boats, goes out on the river with food, music, and dancing, and brings the wood back again. The third day is called “distribute food,” during which food gathered for the Brokoday is cooked (theoretically with the wood gathered the day before) and taken to specific points throughout the village. The remaining days, which can be up to four depending on how much food they have, are called, “set the table,” during which the chiefs pour libations to those who have passed away and then everyone feasts.

The Emissary

Unexpected adventures arise when we make ourselves available. Shortly after getting back to Diitabiki in January, I unknowingly accepted an invitation to accompany a special envoy from the paramount chief of the Ndjuka people to the government development agency. While a relatively minor diplomatic event, the conference proved an extraordinary point in the dynamics of globalization and intercultural relations on a local scale.

Taking a trip with both of my counterparts to a development workshop sounded fun, but it soon became very interesting indeed. Captain Baja, my counterpart, came to pick us up in a large boat, which puzzled me until we started adding to our number. We paused at numerous villages on the river, generally picking up a single representative of each. Peculiarly enough, all these men were captains, the chiefs of the villages. At a certain point we mounted a full-size Surinamese flag to the boat, heightening our profile. As a good look later confirmed, the boat itself was owned and commissioned by the Gaanman. As I learned at the workshop, the Gaanman had sent his cabinet to confront the development organization on their failure to consult the traditional leadership before beginning their major project.

In the village of Stoleman’s Island, the hosts proposed a bold plan for a multi-structure development facility, taking into consideration future improvements such as a paved runway and inter-village transportation network in a village where dugout canoes function as the primary means of transportation. The plans seemed immense indeed. While providing a democratic open-forum and brainstorming session, the hosts seemed apologetic that the exercises were “white man things,” rather than the traditional meetings through which the people usually reach decisions. After the event degenerated into a series of complaints for previous ineffective projects, the emissary spoke. The chief claimed that the organization, by failing to convene with traditional leadership, elicited negative reactions to its attempts to help and closed doors to future projects by creating a legacy of unsuccessful initiatives.

Development projects often make a lasting but seldom positive impact when made without regard to the particularities of a people. Traditional authority and local culture, while treasured in the Ndjuka capital of Diitabiki, largely has eroded in its neighboring villages due to careless outside influence. The lack of a secondary school on the Tapanahony forces continuing students to board in the city, from which few return home. The emissary provided an important reminder that we must carefully consider our actions in a cultural context for our own success and the good of the people.

A Tropical Christmas

My family came to visit me for Christmas. They were to fly into the international airport after midnight on Christmas Eve, then travel about an hour to Paramaribo, where they would sleep for a few hours, catching a flight to my site in the morning …entirely on their own. My fellow volunteers thought I was crazy to put my parents through that, but my family knows how to travel. Besides, with all my meticulous planning, what could go wrong

Everything. A stewardess became ill just before their flight out of the States, delaying the plane for nearly two hours, long enough for them to miss their flight from Trinidad to Suriname by ten minutes. They called at 12:30 AM to tell me they were stranded for twenty-four hours. As they would no longer be able to get to my site, the next best option was for me to meet them in the city.

While this was not fun at all, it was one of my finer moments in terms of disaster management. I packed for our subsequent trip to Trinidad in the middle of the night, found a last-minute flight on Christmas eve to Paramaribo, spent all morning on the phone for accommodations, transportation, and a general rescheduling of our vacation, flew to the capital, bought food for Christmas dinner, booked my family on a tour to a rain forest adventure park, checked into our hotel, arranged wrapped presents for my family in the room, and found a taxi to take me to the airport to meet my parents and sister.

For all the ruin and disaster, Christmas came after all. After opening a few presents, mostly books as usual, I took my family on a tour of colonial Paramaribo. As I mentioned, we took an expedition into the interior consisting of hiking in the jungle, kayaking on the river, and flying through the canopy and the river on a zip-line course. On the river my sister hemmed my speeding kayak into the bush, forcing me to abandon ship to avoid some particularly nasty thorns. Wendy, naturally, would tell the story a different way. After climbing back into my kayak I overheard my dad tell some others, “He’s the one that lives here.”

We also spent a few days on Trinidad, where my parents lived for a year in their first overseas experience. My sister and I met some of their friends from twenty-five years ago, and now we can place the setting for many of our parents’ stories. Of course we also enjoyed the beach, and I was quite pleased to have warm, running water, a double bed, and plenty of food. I did not even need to wear a belt for a week or so back in Diitabiki.