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.

Protein

The jungle has many advantages but good nutrition, unfortunately, is not one of them. Many children have big bellies, which I recently discovered occurs when a lack of protein forces the body to consume the abdominal muscles as a source of amino acids. Since Peace Corps volunteers live with the people, we face some of the same challenges, though with multivitamins from Doc and a basic knowledge of nutrition we are better off than many.

Volunteers go to great lengths to avoid the scraping of their muscles in place of protein. For my first few months, I amassed a stockpile of beans, peas, lentils, and canned meat. Other volunteers have become small-scale chicken farmers to add eggs to their diet. I literally plan my meals around different protein sources or to make up for pasta night (Thursday). Even so, I estimate that I only eat a little over half the protein that I need.

Protein must be bought or caught, and on my Peace Corps allowance, caught meat is more desirable. Desperate about the potential loss of abs, I went to Tomahawk, a hunting and fishing store in the city. Volunteers are not allowed to use guns, so as far as obtaining meat, the fishing section was for me. The clerk needed to explain practically everything. My dad took me fishing when I was young, but even then I seemed to catch more ducks than fish. Well, I suppose it was actually two fish and one duck, but still. Eventually I walked out with a simple rod and reel, extra string, a few hooks, some weights, and working knowledge of how to tie a fishing knot.

It did not begin well. On my way home from Tomahawk, the line became impressively tangled. I learned a lot about knots that day. After much cutting and reeling and un-reeling and experimentation, I figured out how the reel works. Casting, however, was a splendid failure on my first day out, yesterday, and today, I realized that I had to hold the line before swinging the pole.

Nevertheless, meat came. Today I caught my first fish in eighteen years. It was an eleven-inch piranha, naturally. Such are the everyday adventures in Amazonia. As I reeled it in, I yelled excitedly to my friend, “Look, I caught a fish! What kind is it? Can you eat it?”

“Yes,” he said, “ Yes, you can eat it, but watch out, it can eat you too!”

He then helped me clean my prize, of which I was also clueless. So, tonight I will have poached piranha…if I can figure out what “poached” means.

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.