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