Return to Guyana - Christmas holidays, 2007

15-Dec-2007
Georgetown

Well, I made it back, three - four? - months after I left. Right up until I was sitting on that plane, between a bendy-bus driver from Barbados and a dental student from Trinidad, I still didn't quite believe I would do it.

And I'm still not sure I should have. But, I'm here, so...

Delayed by an hour, sitting on the tarmac at Heathrow while a mysterious 'part' is searched for - I checked out of my window to make sure it wasn't a wing they had forgotten. Not that I don't have complete, rational trust in the airlines - recall our first welcome lecture of semester one, four months ago, when they compared the safety record of the airline industry to that of the health services. Not really a fair comparison, given the clientèle of each, but it made its point, in its way.

But it did reveal that I'm not, in the end, a good flyer. Mind over matter, I know, and usually I would be the first to follow the statistics and put my life at relative risk 36000 feet up rather than face MRSA - so I have to come up with some hack explanation to myself to excuse frantically crossing my fingers at take-off and landing. I tell myself it's because everything has its chances, everything its risks, but there are those situations in which you can tip the balance and those in which you can't. So although the chances of coming to grief on a Honda BROS are far higher than in seat 27 of a Boeing 747, at least in the former those chances are skewed by the boy-racers and drunk-drivers (and, in the Rupununi, the lack of brakes) and by being neither you can shift it to the other end. In a plane, as a passenger, there is a brutal equality to the statistics.

But there's more to it than that: it's more than statistics. What the odds are only have meaning when taken with a state of mind, and I believe it is that which has changed for me. A few months ago, anything so remote and far from my control would have held no interest for me, regardless of the consequences. And that, there, is a buck-man attitude: what happens, happens - no need to worry what tomorrow will bring, because it's not here yet. One term back in the UK, and I'm back to plans, schedules, concerns, worries - hopes.

It's easy to mock one, or the other, point of view - either. But the truth is, being what I am, I don't think I can get away without caring - I've tried that, and I'm not particularly proud of my actions (not least, falling out of contact with many of those closest to me back home). Sure, it was fun - wild, free, liberating - as open-minded as the savannah-sky, but at the same time as self-centred as Simon. Perhaps a lot of the troubles in Aishalton come from that attitude.

And troubles Aishalton has in plenty - only two days I've been back in the country, and already I hear " 'nuff gaff" - Manley, slammed in the lock-up on the rumour-spreading of a fourth-form student, as though some had been reading 'The Crucible' a bit too closely; Celine, beating out to 'Town with baby Ikirz on discovering Kid's affair with Deonny; Meshana's father - a troubled man, I knew - hanging himself; Manley Jr.'s half-spoken story of going AWOL. Underneath the reckless, break-neck freedom here, underneath the beauty of this country, I don't believe there is happiness. There is humanity, in all its shades, but at its darkest, consuming itself in a blind frenzy.

And it's not a comfortable position to be an outsider, an observer - a tourist. Perhaps because I know this place, these people, too well - well enough to get beneath the surface, but no further. I watch, and I learn, but am I helping - or making things worse?

* * *

Yes, I am back - I've returned to Guyana, this time strictly as a tourist, for the four weeks of my university Christmas holidays. Right now, I'm still in Georgetown; on Thursday, I will be getting the bus down to Lethem, and from there, the first 'transpie' to Aishalton...