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.