Fruity Aubergine and Rice

To balance out a really boring post about school, I'm making a post of the delicious recipe we created the other day. I haven't been able to try much local food because it's not especially veggie friendly, but luckily, there are loads of FRUITS! So this is my fruity recipe which we had for dinner the other night:

Ingredients

• a pineapple - preferably fresh, cut into chunks
• a banana - quite yellow, chopped in rounds
• coconut milk - I used about 150ml
• mild curry powder
• a few cloves of garlic, chopped
• aubergine
• chinese cabbage, chopped into big leafy sections I have no idea how much I used, but it was kinda a quite big bunch
• tom yum soup mix - anything similarly hot and a bit sour will do

Fry the aubergine in a wok or big pan. When it starts to go soft, add a big sprinkle of curry powder. Keep frying. Add coconut milk, pineapple, banana and tom yum soup mix(according to taste). Cook until everything seem pretty much done, the banana has probably disintegrated by then. Add the chinese cabbage, cook for a couple of minutes. Serve with rice.

I think a handful of cashew nuts would probably be good added to this recipe when serving, and the spice is to adjust however spicy you like things.

Starting School

Last week was my first week of proper work.  I’m going to be working 12 hours a week across 2 schools- La Canopee, a college, and Les Barbadines, a primary school. There’s six hours in each – in the college, that’s concentrated in one day starting at 7.30 am, and in the primary, across two mornings.

On Monday mornings I start at 7.30 with a 6eme class (yr 7s in the UK – kids in their first year of secondary school) .I haven’t met this class yet because of various unusual things that have happened. Other than that I have already met most of my classes, I have four 3eme classes (kids in their last year of college), two 6eme classes and one 5eme class. There are several teachers that I’m with for a couple of classes. 

The ‘introduction’ in all classes was to have students ask me questions in English about myself. “what is your name?” “where do you live?” “do you have a boyfriend?” “do you have any pets?”. They also asked some weirder questions that were topical to what they had been studying.. “do you believe in aliens?”. Someone asked ‘do you like French Guiana’ – when I replied that I LOVE French Guiana everyone cheered.

I’ve had a second lesson with a few of the groups now. In some I worked with the teacher in the classroom and lead an activity while the teacher was keeping order a bit- in other groups I took half the class for half the lesson to go and do an activity. I did the same activity with each class but with different levels of difficulty and follow-up activities.

In the primary school, it was pretty different- I turned up having been told the students had never learnt any English, with the intention of teaching them to say ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and ‘my name is’. It turned out that in a couple of the classes certain students already spoke quite a lot of English (and some spoke none) so I had to sort of improvise. Having now done another two mornings there (I would usually see the same students twice in one week), it’s getting a bit easier.

This week, I took them outside to do a ‘class instructions’ kind of activity and then back inside to do vocabulary learning. 

You have to constantly be really loud and make a lot of movements to keep their attention, and any time you ask the kids to do anything half of them will have finished whilst your still trying to explain to others how to it. It’s tiring, and really hard trying to give the impression that you’re in charge- but when they all start saying “aaaah j’ai compris!!” to each other, it’s pretty cool to see them getting excited about having understood another language. 

All of my lessons so far I’ve taught only in English. With primary school sometimes, when you have a classroom of really confused faces, and various students offering their interpretation of what they’re supposed to be doing, it’s good to be able to listen out for someone with the correct interpretation and get them to repeat it for everyone – but most of the time you can explain just by gestures, demonstration, talking slowly.

First Post

It’s been about ten days since I arrived in Guyane, and I have decided to write about everything to let you know how I’m doing and to give you a taste for Guyane too I hope.

I arrived Saturday before last, until Sunday I was lodged in the Maison de L’education at Cayenne with the other assistants. I shared a room with Aimee and Kate, two American girls who are both amazing. We went to get phones the day I arrived, and spent a lot of the week exploring town, visiting the schools we’ll be working in, swimming at the beach, which is a ten minute walk down the road.

So I think I should describe what it’s like here so you can imagine it.

The most obvious thing to describe is the weather.  It’s hot (around 33degrees most days, 20 at night). It’s very humid. Before you come, people tell you it’s always cloudy, that it rains all the time, and that you will be ravaged by hoards of mosquitoes. In fact it is the dry season, so it’s hotter than average, it rains very little, and there aren’t many mosquitoes. The sun sets very early (around half 6) and rises around 6 am. At night, it’s still warm enough that you sweat plenty and don’t need to wear a sweater or even long sleeves at all.  The sun burns very brightly and for someone like me with fair skin you burn up after only a couple of minutes in the midday heat.

Everywhere is a mix of somewhere French and somewhere not very French-which I guess is not surprising. There’s a large population of immigrant and 1^st generation people, apparently a lot of kids speak French at school and another language at home and someone is as likely to come from Brazil, Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Metropolitan France, even Reunion, as they are to have been born in Guyane. 

Town is quite spread out, hectic roads with an alley for motorbikes, scooters and bikes, a ditch on each side to catch the rain which when it falls is torrential (apparently). There are old Creole houses, modern French bungalows, huge apartment blocks, shacks made of wood and corrugated iron. Everywhere there are palm trees, mango trees, fields of tropical plants. The sea is warm and very sedimented, it’s so full of fish that fishers just throw a line and pull fish in every ten minutes or so.

When you fly into Cayenne the first thing you see, before you can see the land, is the blue of the ocean becoming the blue-brown of the coast as the rivers drop the fine Amazonian soil into the sea. The runway of Rochambeau airport is in the middle of the forest, you feel as if the tips of the wings should be touching the trees. I think one plane flies in each day from outside Guyane, and then back, and lots of small planes link Cayenne with isolated  towns and villages so far into the forest that you can only get there by spending a couple of days in a pirogue or a couple of hours on an internal flight.

So that’s just an introduction, I hope you can picture it a bit and soon I will add some more about Cayenne, work, food, maybe some photos too.

A bientot

Ella