The grind
Here’s my absolute favourite conversation from work this week:
Me: Hey Wanda, how was court today?
Wanda: Good, I got my client released form a murder charge.
Me: WHAT? How are you so chill about this right now. This is huge!
Wanda: It’s just a preliminary inquiry. But he was locked up for three years, so it’s nice that he’s out.
Me: Again, why aren’t we celebrating?
Wanda: Andrea, we have trials every day. This isn’t a big deal.
(PS, Wanda is so busy, this isn’t a big deal to her, but this was a substantial hearing and was reported in the newspaper the next day.)
I, like many of my friends, recently watched Making a Murderer and freaked out over it, frequently yelling at my laptop about procedural fairness. Here, it’s pretty standard to go to prison for 3 years (or more) before you even have your preliminary inquiry to decide whether there’s enough evidence to have a trial.
Do you feel like that’s somehow ridiculously unfair? Try this one on for size: If someone in the family is caught with weed in the house, the entire family (well, everyone 10 and over), is arrested. And there’s a mandatory 3-year sentence. Sometimes the children are excused, but only if it looks like they really didn’t know about drugs.
To me, these things seem shocking. But this is the system that works here. There’s a zero tolerance, hard line for crime. It’s not at all the system I’m used to, but this is the system that Guyana has put in place, and obviously the judiciary understands the needs of the country better than I do.
Court is also beyond shocking. They pretty much have 3 or 4 trials going on simultaneously, in the same court room. The magistrate will hear witnesses for one matter, and if they’re having trouble locating the next witness, they call up another matter. And when that lawyer says he needs a minute, they’ll look to see if that pesky witness was ever located, or just move on to a new matter and set both aside for a minute. For all this efficiency, the magistrate herself (who, by the way, is in her twenties) has to transcribe every word the witness says (by hand!), so the testimony is actually very slow. That doesn’t stop them from blowing through trials in record time. The entire process is a fascinating whirlwind.
My new digs
I moved out of my hotel on Wednesday and into my (not so move-in-ready) new house. It still needs to be painted, cleaned, and supplied with kitchen necessities (including a fridge). But it’s a beautiful space and super secure, and once the work is done, it will be one hell of an apartment. It also comes with a dog (Shadow), who is staying here until Joy comes to pick him up and bring him home. He’s a shit guard dog, but a total sweetheart, and that’s just fine by me.
I had to move in early because I was informed (ex post facto), that I would be paying for the hotel room the Clinic put me in. Because this had a considerable impact on my super tight budget, I moved out before the end of my booking and into the apartment immediately.
My roommates are two nice, older men who seem like genuinely kind and ridiculous people. I’m not going into more detail about them only because they’ve asked me not to include them more than necessary in my blog.
But I would like to take a minute to complain about my other roommates: the mosquitoes that feast on my flesh every night. They’re the worst, and the bite marks are huuuuuge. Lizards, what up with that – your entire purpose in life is to eat insects. Get out of my shower and get to work.
The new day-to-day
My daily life is drastically different from anything Canadian. Public transit, food, my neighbours – I feel like I’m perpetually adjusting. Quite frankly, it’s exhausting, but exhilarating at the same time.
Public transit is run through minibuses. I ride one to work in the morning and home in the evening. It’s a pretty easy system, and they literally come every few seconds. You get on, sweaty $80 in hand (50 cents CAD), and find any spot to sit in. When you get close to your stop, you just yell out your intersection, and they stop and let you off. On Friday, I got a free ride because the driver liked chatting with me. People here are pretty amazingly nice.
Food has also been such a change. I miss vegetables, and once the kitchen gets set up, I’ll be doing a lot of vegetarian dishes. In the meantime, I’ve been living on rice and curry (I know, poor me). But it’s not a super healthy diet. Also, I definitely found a chicken foot in my lunch on Friday. Wanda told me it’s ok to eat, but I’m still working up to that.
The fruit here is unreal. There are these fruits called Golden Apples – think like mangoes but kind of…appley? Anyway, we have a golden apple tree in our yard. And a mango tree. Take a minute and stew in your jealousy.
My neighbour is a very intelligent, very wealthy, very powerful man who was a key advisor to a previous president and that’s definitely all I’m going to say about that. He asks me a lot of questions about where I studied in Canada. Most of them are, “Where did you study in Canada?” He also has parrots and about 5 dogs, and they all make quite a racket.
The women who work for my neighbour are amazing. They are so kind and so sweet. They feed Shadow, and they also feed me sometimes, knowing that I have no way to cook food. This is what they gave me for lunch yesterday (it was delicious):
I would just like to add that I miss everyone back home a lot. Family, friends, Cam – I think about you every day, and now that I have Internet (horrah!), I should be easier to reach.
For now, I’m going to make popcorn (because, honestly, what else can you make without any cooking supplies or utensils that doesn’t need to be kept in a fridge), watch a movie, and get ready for my next week.
guyandrea 