I met yet another cool RPCV today, this one working at Catholic Relief Services. Being able to understand and appreciate another culture—while still understanding and appreciating your own— is so powerful. She was very good at dealing with some of our gotcha questions.
Because we were “working so hard,” I didn’t get to eat lunch, but only had a piece of vermicelli cake which is noodles in a sugary sauce with a good sized chunk of cinnamon bark. I don’t know if it’s baked or if it’s just sugar and time that kept it in a solid square shape while I was eating it. Interviewing people does energize me, but I do wish Americans would reconsider their fetishization of working through lunch.
It hasn’t rained as much as I’d expected, but today it rained very suddenly, hard enough to get me wet in the time it took to run from the front door of a building to a waiting taxi, and persisted for at least an hour. We took our taxi to the Pegausus so that we could interview Magda, a woman in her 70s who has been very active in Guyana’s woman’s movement. She had been educated in Britain—including Scotland—and reminded me of Joan’s grandmother Agnes.