Life of a Wife

Spending two months in Guyana was certainly an exciting prospect for me last fall. I have wanted to do mission work for years and I finally got my big chance. The timing was perfect! I was all excited about volunteering at BMMC, even though I didn't know exactly what I would be doing there. When I got down there it hit me, the crazy realization of how unskilled I really am. I was terrified! I'm not a nurse, or a teacher, or a construction worker... I was in a quandary. What was I to do?!

After spending a couple weeks down there I began to understand that there was a place for me there, despite my little self-appointed dilemma. As hard as I was on myself for being so "unskilled" I was kept remarkably busy. I think I could go so far as to say I was even helpful.

Being a Seventh-Day Adventist school, the college is very adamant about keeping Christ as it's focus. As such they have worships every morning and evening. All the staff members take turns leading out. Right away, Michael and I were asked if we would help with this, and soon we were in charge of worships every Thursday.

It is certainly interesting to observe the various styles different people use to lead out in worships. Most of them, in my humblest of opinions, were a bit slow for me. Not that worship needs to be a time for entertainment, but I like worships that you can really get excited about. That's why I tried to tie in an activity with each of my worships. It kept the students awake, and I know I had fun. I hope they did too!

By the way, if any of you have any neat activities that can be given for worships, I would love to get some more ideas. My poor little pool of creativity is running dangerously dry!
Anyway, moving on...

Aside from worships, my work began almost immediately upon arrival as Michael and I noticed what a wreck the house we would be living in was. We moved into one of three little duplex houses. There was nothing inside it and too much outside it!

Along with putting up curtains and a mosquito net, laying a couple wilty mattresses on the floor, and constructing some very unprofessional furniture, I also helped Michael clean up the piles of junk that were strewn all around our little duplex. It seemed that whatever building projects had happened before we arrived had each ended with any left-overs in piles.

Besides the piles of wood, there were weeds absolutely taking over under and around our house. That just wouldn't do. There is definitely enough jungle around Guyana not need our own private jungle overtaking our house! I was kept very busy that first week making our little house as much of a home as I could. It was actually pretty fun!

The challenge of weed pulling was avoiding getting dozens of ant bites during the process. Colonies of tiny biting ants live within the root systems of the weeds, so naturally when you disrupt their home by pulling the weeds they swarm all over the place. For some reason, as soon as they touch your skin they feel the need to bite. You'd think they're not getting enough to eat or something!

Those ants definitely kept us on our toes for quite a while. Since their homes were demolished they made themselves quite at home in our house. I spent much time sweeping them out of the house every day. We also had to thoroughly brush off our bed each night to clear the ants off before we went to sleep. Even with that we had several unwanted visitors at all hours of the day and night that would find their way onto our tasty flesh and chomp away to their heart's content. Nasty little critters!

Luckily that didn't last the whole 2 months. I don't know if it was the ant poison that one of the other missionary teachers gave us or if the ants just found a new place to live, but eventually we had our home to ourselves again. What a blessing!

Maintaining the cleanliness at home in general was a constant job for me. Besides sweeping the ants, since the campus is composed all of sand I found myself sweeping at least two times a day (usually more) just so we could admire our lovely wood floor. The brooms in Guyana are little hand held deals made out of some kind of palm I think. I do know that they are a real hassle to use (for me any way). It probably isn't so bad for the very short natives, but I have to bend over the whole time I sweep to reach the floor well. These brooms are also only held together by a tightly wound string aroud the base, so the individual bristles tend to start slipping from the bunch. Perhaps I'm just doing things wrong. Who knows. I guess I will get better with practice. Until then, I will continue to ask Michael to give it a try when I get sick of it! :)

The next wifely duty I got to figure out was laundry. Yikes!
Guyana is an extremely warm country and not a day goes by that you are not drenched in sweat just by living. The manual labor that is quite common down there definitely adds a nice touch of dirt to the sweat of your brow. Needless to say, laundry must be done often!

The nearest laundry facility was a little walk through the sand, down to our creek where I would have the missionary experience of washing my clothes by hand. I was very grateful that this wouldn't be my first time washing by hand. I had done three months of it on my canoe trip in Canada. Yet some how I am still not that great at it. Oh well, I got it figured out (more or less) in no time and did the best I could. Hopefully this is a skill that I will soon be inspired to perfect! Until then, at least our clothes will smell clean! :)

While I was, on a rare occasion, able to help Michael with his building projects, I was mostly assigned to a crazy variety of random jobs that I was painfully suited for. The first of those was kitchen duty. I am sad to say that my attitude towards kitchens is very sour. I do NOT like cooking! For some reason it terrifies me. I have this crazy mental block that I don't know what I'm doing (which is mostly true) and that I will mess everything up (which is sometimes true). But I was available, so into the kitchen I went.

Luckily the school has a couple ladies from the village that come in four days a week to do the main cooking. So my job wasn't to "cook" per say, I was just the little helper. I got to do a lot of chopping and peeling of things, cleaning up around the kitchen, and dishes galore. I didn't mind the cleaning bit at all, but I'll tell you what, trying to chop things with their dull knives is a frightening experience. Kind of made me wish they had a better first aid kit in the kitchen! I guess I just get to practice a little extra caution while on the job.

One of the most trying times in the kitchen for me was during the three weeks the students were doing their clinicals. Three days a week they would all travel out to the cost to observe and help out in a few different hospitals. Since they had to travel a good distance to get there they had to leave quite early. For the kitchen workers that meant an extra early start to make sure we made enough food for breakfast and lunch. There were several mornings were I had go slug out of bed, sloth up the hill, and start my kitchen work by 3:30. Brutal! It just doesn't seem right to be starting breakfast preparations by the light of a head lamp while the stars are still twinkling outside. Let me tell you, I learned how to nap!

Working in the kitchen sure wasn't my cup of tea, but I did learn a little bit while I silently grumbled through my duties. It was interesting to see the different kinds of food the natives enjoyed eating. The diet down there is wonderfully vegan. They make all their own breads, peanut butter, a lot of rice dishes, curries, stir frys, soups, salads (made with cabbage instead of lettuce. YUCK!) pastas, chow mein, cook up, and hot cereals galore. I got pretty decent at frying up a kind of flatish bread called Bake. It looks like giant pancakes and is actually kind of fun to make.

Perhaps I'm totally ignorant about this, but I found out down there that you have to make coconut milk. I always assumed that it was found in a certain variety of coconut, or in coconuts at a certain point of maturity. Nooooo, you have to make it! First you have to pry the white flesh out of the coconut, then throw it in a blender with a bit of water, and squeeze the dickens out of the blended pulp you get. And, TA DA, you have coconut milk!



Aside from the kitchen, one of the other "duties I get to perform was playing. This is one duty I had a lot of trouble with. It's pretty hard for me to have fun you know, especially when two very adorable children are involved. ;) Just kidding. Most of the time it was totally fun getting to watch the director's two kids, Abby and Joshua, while mom and dad were either teaching or helping with some other project on campus.

Like any good children, Abby and Joshua have boundless energy that runs non stop. They definitely kept me on my toes. They were so funny because they (especially Abby) loved hearing stories beyond all reason. They actually challenged my poor brain quite a bit as they wanted made up stories. They got very specific too. "tell us a story about five lizards," or "tell the one about Kermit the Frog."
What?! For crying out loud! Ok, here goes...

One other thing that the kids fell in love with was their new swing. One day Michael and Gilbert decided to build them a swing underneath their house. The kids were enamored! So after that, of course, their favorite thing was hearing a made up story while I pushed them on their swing. "Tell us the story where Bob the Builder builds a tree house." Good grief!
I liked pushing them though. It was relaxing and I knew they were having fun.


I think my favorite thing I did with the kids was one day when I decided to make them a spur of the moment playground. There was a huge stump that was in the process of being dug up and it was surrounded by a couple of deep pits. I scrambled over to one of the many piles of lumber and grabbed three hefty boards. I proceeded to make some bridges over the pits with the boards and Abby and Joshua had the time of their lives running up and down these bridges. It was fun because the boards were just thin enough that when they stampeded over them they had a nice bounce to them.

While we all played on the bridges, we were pretending that the stump was the source of a great waterfall that plummeted into a vast lake below. Naturally we all had to go swimming in the lake while we were there. We jumped in and "swam" all over that lake until it started getting dark out and the clangy triangle sounded for supper. We were all completely filthy, but beaming from ear to ear.
All I have to say is that if anyone ever wants me to babysit their kids, they better expect them to come home dirty. Don't worry, when I'm involved, it's the sign of a good time!

Before Michael and I came home for the winter, I had one last project that I was put in charge of; planting banana trees!
A banana farmer had donated around 200 baby banana trees, called suckers, to our school. We went to his farm, harvested the suckers, and painstakingly brought them back to our campus. Over the next couple weeks I was some how put in charge of planting a bunch of them.

One day I was working with this Brazilian fellow named Clayson. We planted about 60 little suckers in one morning. A few days later I headed a crew of students to plant another 25 or so. That's all we had room to plant while I was there. I am really hoping that they were able to clear some more land and get the rest of them planted. At any rate, it was sure exciting to see some of those little suckers springing up their new shoots before we left. It will be so nice when they get big enough to produce fruit!

When there really truly wasn't anything for me to do (which basically didn't happen) I tried to sit in on Melissa's classes. She teaches the hand's on medical class where the students get to observe and practice different medical techniques. It's pretty cool stuff. It was even more fun to see the students practice a few of the things they'd learned on people in the village when they did their community service every week. They did things like hydrotherapy, massage, and taking blood pressure. They were also able to share with the people what lifestyle changes can be made to help with simple and very preventable ailments. It's nice becauese the students visit the same families regularly to check up on them and make sure things are going well. It's such a neat thing to see. What a cool school!

When we go back down to Guyana I am looking forward to getting involved in all the same ways, but am also hoping to develop some new skills so I can help in other areas as well. My main goal is to learn a thing or two about gardening. They have a garden down there, but not much is growing at this point. It's hard since not much grows well in pure sand.

Michael and I are planning on taking this project under our wings and giving the earth some tender love and care. The tropics are great for growing things and we want to put our garden's potential to the test!

Until then we will work hard to raise money for our project, learn what we can, and do our best to keep sharing with all of you!