We had a busy day of interviews in the course of which I met a former Peace Corps Volunteer. Talking to her (as well as with a current Peace Corps Volunteer later) reminded me of what an excellent group of people we Peace Corps Volunteers are. They showed a similar combination of wisdom and hope; despite knowing the challenges for themselves and Guyana, they were cheerfully committed to their work.
We also spoke to some CSWs (Commercial Sex Workers—a lot could be written about the names we apply to people who engage in sex in order to get money, whether for basic necessities or something else, but I’ll leave that to others, at least for now) and of course that’s not a common experience, especially since we were speaking (in an oblique way most of the time) about their sex work. Supposedly men will pay double for sex without a condom, and considering the poverty and desperation involved, I’m not surprised that many women accept, even if those we talked to insisted that they would not. One way to explain the man’s recklessness is that such men know they are infected, but another explanation is “cognitive dissonance,” that such men separate themselves from the entire experience o f “picking a fare.”
Because Sunday was an off-day, we went out for dinner at Celina’s, the only restaurant in Georgetown with an Oceanside view. The water here is definitely the Atlantic rather the Caribbean, and it has the same gray-green color and generally foreboding look as it does in, for instance, Maryland. We waited a long time for our food and I got to feeling a little quiet and sullen. (As opposed to quiet and happy, my usual mode).