Anthropology

Thoden van Velzen has been traveling to Diitabiki for fifty years. As a young anthropologist, he spent a year and a half learning the language and becoming acquainted with the culture, and since then he has made a great number of return visits. On his most recent trip to Diitabiki, he brought a student of his, a linguist, to study how the Ndjuka language has changed. Memory of the rich polite forms and various greetings for different types of people has all but faded, except in Diitbaiki, the village of the paramount chief. Even here the younger generation rarely uses formal speech.

Thoden van Velzen and his wife have written several books on the Ndjuka. In the Shadow of the Oracle describes and gives the background of Ndjuka politics and their belief system. During my first year, In the Shadow of the Oracle taught me many of the cultural nuances that, as I am not an anthropologist, I had not picked up.

I talked with Thoden at length while he was here, and depending on the subject and who was around, we switched freely between English and Ndjuka. When he lived here, van Velzen was not allowed to have a dugout canoe, as it was considered obvious that foreigners would be thoroughly inept at such activities. The culture has indeed changed significantly in the last fifty years, and the formal events no longer draw the crowds that they used to.

The legacy of Thoden van Velzen has affected the Ndjuka perception of why I live in Diitabiki. Many people assume that I am here to learn the Ndjuka language, and they feel a little frustrated when I do not learn all the forms as enthusiastically as they expect. The chiefs have often called me to observe formal rituals, and have helpfully described the significance of what they do. Many Peace Corps volunteers come with the expectation of teaching other people, forgetting that from the villager’s perspective, the American is the one who needs an education.

Dr. van Velzen’s recommendation to me and to Peace Corps in general is to prepare new volunteers by teaching them about the specific villages in which they will live. Indeed, since volunteers serve a mere two years and even staff work at the most three years in one country, there are few opportunities to build more than a surface knowledge of the places we serve. My final project will be to write down all that I have learned for the volunteer who follows me.

Junglenomics

Wherever rice is cooked in Diitabiki, it is cooked in abundance. A cultural rule is that the pot must have something to eat too, and therefore, a lot of food is thrown away. Nevertheless, almost every day, someone asks me for food. The reasoning behind this phenomenon may provide an answer to why the West has poured trillions of dollars into developing countries with little results.

Insight A: Saving is a foreign and mistrusted concept. Without refrigeration food needs to be consumed quickly. A fish or a tapir must be sold, eaten, or given to someone else right away. Staples, on the other hand, rice and cassava, are planted in abundance, and waste (whatever the pot doesn’t eat) does not mean less for the future.

Insight B: Culturally, planning ahead is unnecessary. I grew up with leftover nights and being told to finish what was on my plate. Ndjuka kids grow up being told that it is rude to eat all of what is cooked because if someone is hungry, you should be able to give them something. Many people anticipate that they will be able to find something to eat if they need it, so few plan ahead for what, if anything, they will cook on any given day.

As an aside, cooking more than what I can eat to give food away is one facet of life that I have decided not to adapt to very often. Unlike my neighbors, I do not have a farm; I need to bring much of my food from the city when I fly in, and paying for extra kilos can be very expensive. I am limited in how long I can stay at home by how long my food supply lasts. In addition, I do not want to contribute to the culture of dependence on outsiders that I see around me, but I try to help in durable, sustainable ways. Though I explain my actions to my neighbors all the time, people think it is strange and probably even rude that I should have a stock of food and not give it away or at least sell it.

Insight C: A stable way of life, not growth and improvement is the principle concern of the Ndjuka. Because a community engages in subsistence farming, it does not mean that they can only grow enough for themselves or even far more than they can eat, only that they do not grow food to sell. Once again, providing what you need for yourself with extra to give away and asking others to give you what you do not have are a normal way of life. There is no economic growth because there are no markets and nothing is saved, but rather, everything is consumed right away. In the West we assume that if people work simply to feed their family they have no alternatives. In places with few jobs available and plenty of land for the population, people feed their families by growing food. The process of preparing a farm becomes an expected male role, as much as mowing the lawn is in the States, and failure to work the ground is equivalent to letting the grass grow for a year. One family, even if they need to carve a new farm out of the bush each year, can easily grow enough to feed several families, but since everyone farms this way, they do not sell anything. A large farm simply serves as a mark of industriousness.

Insight D: Money, to many people in less developed countries, is like anything else: if you have it, you use it right away; if you have too much, you give it to others. When someone goes to the city, they spurge on far more than they need, distributing the excess among the village once they return home, and this is expected. Saving food, money, or anything else is greedy. Similarly, to much of the world, development is the result of some countries having more money than they need, and therefore, giving it away. When the aid gets to less developed countries, they either use it or assume that it goes away, so the effects of development do not last very long. Economic growth is simply not an acceptable behavior in many cultures.

In this mindset, development is a great and potentially insurmountable challenge. For development to work, aid must be invested or used to buy durable goods such as machinery that will spur growth by increasing income in the future. Development is not simply a handout, such as giving someone a fish, but an investment, such as giving someone a fishing pole and teaching them how to use it. In places where this concept is counter-cultural, development only contributes to a dependence on others.

Instead of serving as an instrument of change, development often reinforces a culture of deterioration and creates a dependence on a new, regular source of resources. When cultures that rely on tradition as a way of life encounter development aid, they find a new resource, such as a fruit tree, which may reduce the amount of effort people need to maintain, but not always improve, their original living standards. This is key. Just as stability, not growth, is a goal, if people can maintain a certain standard of life, that is good enough. Something new may not improve their life, but rather act as a substitute for working for what they need. In fact, many people in less developed countries realize that if they actually improve their standard of living, horror of horrors, development organizations may no longer pour their resources into the community. In this way, development has the potential to severely harm a lot of people.

The best way to help improve living conditions in less developed countries is to begin a fair, legitimate business that supplies things that people need, that teaches people the value of saving and investing, and that circulates and invests money within the community. The free market is where I have seen development success in Diitabiki, and I believe it is the only way to effectively combat poverty anywhere.

A Loss of Endurance

Someone ran away with my baby. One Saturday as I approached the dock, I noticed that my canoe was not where it should have been. This had happened once before, when someone without a boat had needed to go somewhere. After a few hours, it had not been returned, however, I went searching for it around both sides of the island. After combing Diitabiki without success, I called friends in four villages to look for it and even sent out a radio message to the whole river that my canoe had been taken. Alas, several days went by with no news. I feared an elopement.

Sometimes people really need to get somewhere but do not have their own way off the island, and they become desperate. Ba Jotie told me a story about an old chief who had a canoe that people would borrow all the time. No matter what he said or did, the boat would disappear whenever he wanted to go somewhere. Eventually, he bought a chain and locked up the boat. One day, however, he found that someone had hacked the chain out of the canoe with a machete and had borrowed the boat yet again.

On Tuesday I had nearly given up. Ba Agasi, a basia, or chief’s assistant, told me that he had also lost a canoe, and we decided to take a motorized boat out together to search for our missing watercraft. As we were leaving, a woman yelled for us to keep an eye out for yet another borrowed boat. Boats are often taken without permission. One of my fellow volunteers painted his boat electric orange, so “no self-respecting Saramacan would be found in it.” By the time Ba Agasi and I reached Mooitaki, twenty minutes by motorboat downriver, we found all three of the missing boats. The Endurance had been stowed in the reeds out of sight from the shore. Before I even arrived back at the dock, I stopped at the local store and bought a chain for my boat. Now, as long as no one takes a machete to the Endurance, she should be secure. We spent a lot of time together in the next few days.

A Note on Updates

Arriving in the city for the first time since late September, I have updated my blog with stories from the last three months. While long, these articles discuss some of the greatest adventures I have yet experienced, which of course, are best read chronologically. New pictures of Suriname and Diitabiki can be found here.

The Great Adventure: Part III The Journey Home

We set off for Diitabiki from our campsite near Apetina on December 8th, around noon. As the Endurance was the widest and sturdiest of the three dugout canoes, she took on the majority of the cargo. Loaded far heavier than the other boats and very top-heavy, steering my canoe felt like piloting the Exxon Valdez. The Endurance lived up to her name, crashing into rocks but surviving without a leak. Though after four swampings, Taylor gave her the nickname, “the submarine.”

We traveled about six miles that first day and camped on an island, facing the narrow side of the river. Raphael caught a huge Lowie, a type of catfish, and we stayed up late cleaning and cooking our catch. There was very little downtime during our journey. We would canoe until about four, set up camp, fish until dusk, build a fire, clean, cook and eat fish until about eleven, sleep, eat breakfast, tear down camp, and set out again. Survival and a steady pace made for little rest.

On the second day of our on our own we stayed on a massive island, most of which is underwater during most of the year. An ethereal landscape of sand, pools, and huge boulders separated two groves of trees that stand permanently above water. Howler monkeys filled the air with their hollow, eerie, and inexplicably resounding roar. The roar of the howler monkey can be heard up to seven miles away. It is the archetypical sound of the deep Amazon, and not at all what you would expect any primate to be capable of making. In hearing it for the first time, one can only imagine some terrible creature out on the hunt. In this setting, surrounded by water and truly impenetrable jungle with the roar of a hundred monkeys surrounding us, I felt very remote. While exploring the island as a possible campsite, we discovered an abandoned Amerindian hunting post in the smaller of the groves, with fames perfect for hanging hammocks. Raphael and I stayed on the island to fish and caught seven piranha between us. I was on cleaning duty that night and pulling out fish guts until about ten o’clock made me wish we had not caught quite so many.

That evening, Taylor saw a single, red eye of an animal in the grove where we had tied our hammocks. Ignoring thoughts of jaguars, Charles took his shotgun and, unable to see any other part of the animal, shot at its eye. It turned out to be a Hay, a small deer-like creature. How it came to live on an island, I do not know, but it was delicious with brown beans and rice.

On the river we encountered innumerable challenges. As we had no guide, we would stop to ascertain the safest passage downriver when we came to major rapids. Carving our way through the rainforest took time, and we made between five and eight miles progress each day.

At one point, Charles and Taylor, believing the upcoming rapids to be mild, told us to wait as they went ahead. Both Ryan and I assumed that if the passage was indeed easy, we were to follow in a few minutes. After a few small rapids, we saw Charles at the edge of a gigantic rapid yelling over the rushing water, “what are you doing!” As the current was too strong for us to get the Endurance to the bank, Charles told us to keep right to avoid a huge submerged stone. We, as Charles had, navigated the monster successfully, but the sheer height of the waves filled both canoes with water over the seats.

At another rapid, we slid onto a submerged rock, but the current was too strong to push the Endurance back, so I let the water twist us off the rock by turning the boat backwards, and Ryan and I turned sideways to navigate. We found ourselves whitewater rafting in an overloaded dugout canoe, going backwards. I directed the front of the canoe with my paddle, while Ryan poled from the rear, until it was safe to turn back around.

It rained every day, and all but two nights, challenging our ability to keep clothes and hammocks dry. The rainy season had officially begun while we were in the depths of the jungle. Late at night, while enjoying filets of massive peacock bass on a rocky hill, a couple of us walked down to the sand, where all three canoes had been dragged on shore. They shouted, “the boats are gone!” and we ran down to the beach just in time to see the last boat floating away, carried by the current of a nearby rapid. Heavy rains had caused the river to rise by about a foot in an incredibly short amount of time. We found all the boats but resolved to keep them tied the rest of the time.

The next day we passed Gaanboli and began to see an occasional boatman. The river was so full of rapids that we made only four miles that day. Ted and Raphael needed to fly out of Diitabiki by the 16th, and we had planned to arrive in Godolo by the day before and secure a ride for them to Diitabiki. But on the 13th, and only halfway to our destination, we found an Ndjuka boatman to take them to Pashtone, the mining camp to find another boat from there back home. We bid them farewell, and the four of us continued on our journey.

We made phenomenal time during the next two days. Based on our average of five miles a day, we estimated that it would take three days from Pashtone to Godolo. Charles, Taylor, Ryan, and I made thirteen miles the day we left Ted and Raphael. The next day, we met an incredibly long series of shallow but challenging rapids, which Ryan and I navigated expertly…up until the very last significant rapid of our adventure, when I hit a rock and swamped the boat. As I bailed and retrieved our floating cargo, Taylor celebrated the event with a rousing chorus of The Yellow Submarine. Despite the rapids and the spill, we made about twelve miles that day, passing Gololo and camping at Doo Wataa, the widest part of the Tapanahony River and on the home stretch.

The next morning we were greeted by Kate, one of my Peace Corps colleagues, traveling with a UNICEF worker and some donors to Godolo. Having been greeted in English, and in familiar territory, Charles decided that our excursion should be over rather than spending an extra night at Doo Wataa as we had planned. After lunch we took the last five miles to the Lon Wataa archipelago and Diitabiki on Wednesday, December 16th, arriving merely hours after Ted and Raphael had flown back to the city. It had taken two days to arrive at Apetina, and a full week of canoeing to return the sixty-five miles home through the unknown.

It was a relief to arrive back home in Diitabiki. We had traveled into the depths of the Amazon, and survived without guides, catching and hunting our food, and carving our way through the bush. Based on our pace during the excursion, home was still two weeks away from the first village to employ any means of transportation other than dugout canoe.