Guyana’s First Environmental Volunteer (Acting)

A new site means a new home, a new community, and a new job. The job is the most interesting part…

Guyana has its Volunteers split among two program sectors: health and education. The health folks are placed at locations from the large regional hospitals to the tiniest health posts set deep in the jungle. Education folks are placed at primary schools across the country. However, environmental issues are also a prominent concern among Guyanese citizens, and the lack of an environmental sector is a conspicuous gap in the work Volunteers could be doing here. Peace Corps Guyana took advantage of our site transfer to Experiment to utilize my scientific background and interest in environmental issues, and I’m now working with the Office of Environmental Health in Region 5. The Peace Corps staff ultimately hopes to be able to expand and include a full environmental program in the not too distant future. In the mean time though, they only have me…

Even though we’ve only been at site for a short time now, I’ve gotten to see quite a bit of our new community. Experiment is just one of numerous villages spread out in a strip running parallel to the coast. Our “site” is a relatively unbroken string of houses and businesses flanking the highway between Fort Wellington and Rosignol (kind of like the suburbs.) I’ve been working primarily with Sheniza, the Sanitary Inspector at the Rosignol Neighborhood Democratic Council office. (Neighborhood Democratic Councils, NDCs for short, are the headquarters of individual districts within each region; they are essentially like counties within states in the US.) I’ve been shadowing Sheniza as she does property inspections and responds to complaints in and around Rosignol.

Lot inspections involve going house to house checking for proper drainage into the common trench out front, verifying that pit latrines are properly constructed, noting whether a family raises livestock (raising chickens is known locally as “mining fowl”), and ensuring that there are no standing containers of water where mosquitoes can breed and pass along tropical diseases like malaria or chikungunya. (There’s no Ebola here, because we’re in South America!)

Drainage is one of the more important issues we encounter. The vast majority of Guyana’s 770,000 citizens live along the narrow strip of coastal land bordering the Atlantic Ocean. Much of this heavily populated area is below sea level by as much as 2 meters at high tide. The Dutch left behind a series of drainage trenches and a seawall as a remnant of their colonial legacy, but flooding is still a major concern here. In fact, Peace Corps temporarily evacuated the country in 2004 due to widespread flooding. The lack of trash disposal operations often cause the drainage trenches get choked with garbage, which only exacerbates the problem. Furthermore, many of the complaints we encounter have to do with one person improperly draining the water from their property and causing their neighbor’s land to flood.

Another type of complaint that’s more common than I would have expected has to do with donkeys. People complain if their neighbor has had a donkey tied up somewhere to graze for too long or hasn’t cleaned up properly after the donkey has finished digesting its meal. Having to mediate those types of complaints is when I realize just how far from Kansas I am!

The other piece of my newfound environmental work has involved organizing existing Volunteers to form the Environmental Working Group. We are developing an activity book with lesson plans covering all types of environmental issues from local (water quality, mosquito control, and garbage disposal) to global (conserving habitats and biodiversity, climate change). We intend to break off into small groups and stage daylong workshops at schools across the country. The hope is to teach primary and secondary school students about these issues and maybe inspire some of them to study subjects in university to tackle some of these problems in the years ahead.

There are other environmental projects that may materialize over the coming moths. One of them is to clean up the market in Rosignol and relocate it back from the main road. Another is to pass out reusable grocery bags to residents while educating them how to reduce the amount of trash they generate. However, this is Peace Corps, so if there’s one constant, it’s change. It’ll be interesting to see how my newfound environmental placement develops over the coming months…