On becoming an adult in French Guiana

For a few months, part way through 2012, I landed an awesome job, which would take me to places I'd never have the money to get to by myself, AND take care of some of the logistics of getting to those places: A Horse-Gift Opportunity Not to be Looked in the Proverbial Mouth.
And so I took part in the survey "Becoming an adult in French Guiana".



The mission

French Guiana has a not unnoticeable level of population growth: 1 in 2 is under 25 and fecundity is nearly 3.5 per woman. There is plenty of immigration (as mentioned in a previous post) and I would say demographics are a little difficult because it's so easy to cross borders. In some communes, populations have tripled since the early 90s, and schools are opening fast in an attempt to keep up with demographic changes.
All this background to explain the rationale for this survey - there is a feeling that these young people are poorly understood and that to serve them now and into the future, some attempts must be made at comprehension.   So, we were dispatched, a 17-person team with a 66page survey, across the entirety territories of French Guiana (conveniently and inevitably missing out one or two communes). With one hour per interviewee; we would seek to understand economic situations, ambitions, cultures, relationships to friends, family, partners and children, educational needs, beliefs.....obviously, an unattainable goal, with an apparently noble aim. This was to be carried out with 1600 young people, sixteen to twenty five, with various quotas to be filled in different locations of age, gender, occupation, commune of origin.. The results would then be analysed and passed to the relevant beaurocrats and politicians, certainly, ultimately, to be largely ignored (?).

For the first few weeks, we asked questions in educational institutions: Collèges, Lycées, the University, in FG's biggest towns: Cayenne, Kourou, St Laurent. This was a captive audience, booked in to take part by their teachers and mentors, educated and supposedly francophone. The survey was written in an unwieldy academic manner that meant little to even us the surveyors, so we perfected our techniques of question translation, which I had always been told was a no-no in previous jobs. Still, the survey would have been a field of empty leaves without this technique; so we proceeded.

After the initial captive audiences in schools and university; we would interview young people registered with various institutions for workless young people; pole emploi (essentially the job centre) and mission locale (sort of like a job centre but just for young people). This phase would continue into the more remote parts of French Guiana, to the rainforest communities of Amerindians and Bushinengue along French Guiana's two river borders, the Oyapoque and the Maroni, as well as to the rural communities of Mana, Iracoubo, Sinnamary and Roura. We would then return to Cayenne, Kourou and St Laurent to interview young people not involved in education OR in formal schemes for the workless; and finally we would interview young people in work in the private and public sectors.

17 people. 2 months. 1600 surveys. 80,000 km2 of rainforest, rivers and towns.
Play yourself some dramatic surveying music and wait for the next instalment.

Name change.

Oh to think of the heady days of 2010, when toucananas seemed like an excellent name for a blog. Those days are long gone, so I've updated my blog's name to reflect my there-and-back-again journey. The aim is to legitimise writing on more varied topics and to prevent the terrible-name-shame that floods me each time I update (it seems likely this same terrible-name-shame was likely at least 80% of the appeal to me of my blog's original name in the first place).

Peace


edit: it turns out my first ''name change'' attempt was already the name of several blogs. This one doesn't feature on the first few pages of google to any significant extent; which is good enough for me.

Police and thieves

FG has a reputation among the metros (people from mainland France) as being lawless, and there's no denying it can feel wild west.
The presence of the various forces of order are felt universally on the territory, and their ineffectiveness is universally commented on. Gendarmes-  military police, Police municipale - community police, Police national, BAC, Douane - customs... Babylon, as anyone who's crossed them may call them. Various unpleasant characters in all of their ranks (in the interests of fairness, surely some good cops among them too)
In Chicago, a shabby neighbourhood along the stinking crique in Cayenne, you can buy any drug, sexual service, weapon, you could dream of, more at risk of being mugged than being arrested. Dealers sit openly on street corners, they'll cheep for your attention as you pass. At night, small bars open, playing bachata, zouk, compa, dancehall. Creoles, Brazilians, Haitians  Dominicans, Guyanese, Surinamese meander from one bar to the next. Inside, old and young couples dance under dappled light in dark bars and lone men eye up groups of women like hungry dogs. Rum, Heineken, Guiness and Desperados are bought and drunk, from behind the counter or from tired Dominican grannies in backstreet houses.
Edge and Chez Fédé (known universally as 'shitty bar') are two joints popular among the young of Cayenne's neighbourhoods, playing booming dancehall (endless PULLUPS). The air is heavy with smoke from cigarettes and joints, you enter confronting the gaze of revellers lined back to the wall on either side of the room, dancing alone or backstyle, gently or vigorously. As long as the place is full there's atmosphere - joyous and tense. Fights can, and do, break out at any time on a Friday or Saturday night down la Crique. In the midst of the first row of bars, along the canal itself, where scooters buzz past and fancy cars cruising for something illicit drag by, a large open space, in the evening filled with vehicles, dealers, men. This is where things blow up, when they do. As it ''heats up'', some people will leave, some will crowd around whatever action is erupting, others standing back waiting for it to cool down again.

I heard that in most of France, Gendarmes work in the countryside and Police in the towns- here, Gendarmes organise check points along main roads, pulling you over to check your papers, your vehicle's insurance or your immigration status. Me, a white girl, I don't have much to worry about, all I've had from them is some sleazy chat up lines and been on my way, even without the correct paperwork. Friends have had their rides confiscated.

Gendarmes have periods of checkpointing; it must be some quota imposed by bureaucrats. End of April, end of December, round the 27th of some months. Sometimes it's not just routine, sometimes you sense there's a motive and a profiling to the whole game; perhaps the trail of some criminal.

One sunday afternoon, on the way back from the beach with some youth from my neighbourhood, one guy spots a checkpoint ahead and we turn fast into backroads. The sky is clear deep blue, dry season, we zip through suburban streets, two to a scooter, drinking, high spirits among us. There's no doubt we'd get searched if we passed the cops, and all the scooters are illegal in some way or other- lack of insurance, paperwork, over the limit, stolen. We emerge onto the main road, checkpoint behind us, passing through to get more beers before heading back the street outside our houses.


The BAC are one of the meanest police forces around.
THEY're the wild west.
The first time I met the BAC, I was driving with a friend towards the bars, late saturday night. Suddenly there's an SUV besides us, a squeel of sirens, and wound down windows with guns pointed.

WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
-to the bars

And that's all. Then they're gone. The BAC deal with serious criminality but mainly they seem to deal in shows of force.

Early evening. Two cops walk up my road, Rene Jadfard, on the borderline of the calm and the 'chaud' districts of Cayenne. They're plain clothes, two huge, hench, rectangular white men, shoulders together, guns in pockets...They don't go unremarked.
The young people in this neighbourhood, mostly under 25, mostly unqualified, mostly first generation or immigrants, are unfazed. Several of them, the ones I see most often, work informally from their yards or apartments as tattooists, piercers and small time drug runners. Mornings, afternoons, evenings, sometimes through til dawn: sitting on steps or plastic chairs on the wide pavement, drinking everpopular Cayenne drinks: Rum, Heineken, Guiness; sharing joints and cigarettes. Boys talk nonsense, bravado and girls, girls talk girl talk.
The two cops walk past, robots to their mission, youths hang, normal.

Sometimes other cops will come hassle here: they know that there's always some vagabonds around they can work some tension out on. They roll up in their car, search all the guys, remind them of their failings, leave them to their business. The guys are resigned - there's no point putting up a fight, just comply and the cops won't even take your weed from you. It's such an old routine, Babylon know what they will get; the kids know it won't change anything. More than one amongst them here are illegal, but they've been here long enough that they're not going to get deported- so this old piece of theatre is played out, once again, on a slow hot afternoon.

Immigration and Migration facts and figures, French Guiana

Two thirds of French Guiana’s population are immigrants according to a report published last week by INSEE* and INED**. The wide ranging Migration, Family and Aging report explores these topics in each of France’s overseas département, in a publication that highlights the differences between the territories.

In contrast to Guadeloupe (20%), Martinique(16%) and Reunion(17%), 62.3% of French Guiana’s inhabitants are immigrants, and unlike the other overseas département, where immigrants are usually born in metropolitan France, the majority (42.8%) were born abroad, with only 13.2% coming from the mainland. A majority of these immigrants have been living in French Guiana for a long time (20 years or more); this trend is especially high among inhabitants originating from Surinam; and least reflected among immigrants of Brazilian origin who represent the majority (37.6%) of those who have arrived in the last 10 years. If the ‘native’ French Guianese population is examined, over seven in ten of those born in French Guiana are first or second generation immigrants – this figure is under two in ten across the French Antilles and Réunion.

The study also examines “natives”, people who were born in French Guiana and “returning natives”: those who were born in French Guiana; left the territory; returned. The latter category are more educated than the average -29% of them hold a higher education qualification compared to an average of 16% in French Guiana- perhaps not surprising given that pursuing studies is the most common reason for ‘’returning natives’’ to have left the département ; this is the case for 29.1% of them, with 22% leaving for family reasons and 18.1% for work.  This contrasts with the average for the overseas département where the main reasons for leaving are work (29%) and military service (24%).

54% of young people (18- 34) surveyed said they would be prepared to leave French Guiana for work if necessary, however for a majority of these (60%) this was on the condition of being able to eventually return to French Guiana.  Indeed, it is almost exclusively (99.8%) young people (under 35) who DO leave the territory for an extended period, most of these (72%) are aged 18 to 25, with the most common destination being mainland France.

Among new immigrants to French Guiana there are startling contrasts according to settlers’ countries of origin. 80% of people arriving from metropolitan France already have work before landing on FG’s soil and 4 in 10 benefit from pay bonuses as a result of their migration; for people from South America and the Caribbean, the search for work is the most common motivating factor in migrating. At around one in five, Metropolitans are the least likely to intend on settling in French Guiana, with Haitians and Surinamese (around 69%) the most likely to plan on making French Guiana their permanent home. The former are among those most likely to report having had a positive experience since arriving at 94%, along with 98% of Brazilians and 60% of immigrants in general; despite nearly half of recent arrivals reporting experiencing difficulties since arriving in French Guiana.

*INSEE is the French National Office of Statistics and Economic Studies

**INED is the French National Office for Demographic Studies

The is writted from a report which can be found on this link ; there's lots more information and the report goes on to discuss family make-up trends and ageing trends.

Refuse// The Future is Now

I’m back from Cayenne for the moment. I will continue writing as and when I feel like it. 

This happened a few months ago, near Chicago neighbourhood. Chatman is a neighbourhood guy -that’s Ch like shatman.

I’m at the door with Chatman and a guy in a blue striped tshirt. Monday night is bin night (Wednesday night, and Friday night too). Chatman motions me to look at the truck. Woah, new truck! That’s crazy maaaaan! The new truck is a layed-down cylinder , square mouthed,  digesting dustbins’ contents. 

Bin men wear a futuristic fluorescent yellow and green jumpsuit and a facial mask. They work in a team:  two at the back feeding the machine; one at the front driving. The truck makes regular stops and has mechanical arms that lift bins to its mouth once they have been placed in its talons by the waste disposal technicians.

This vehicle’s tour de force was the unusual movement of its abdomen: the cylinder turned upon itself like a smoothed out cement mixer, accompanied by an intense clonking rrrrohhring noise. Sometimes it stopped spinning. Sometimes it span when stationary, sometimes whilst moving. 

We sit there watching as this machine passes by. Chatman proposes a possible configuration of the cylinder’s interior functions. The machine seems most likely to chew things up inside; to compress things. 

Is this the first time you saw it? I ask Chatman

Yeah.

That shit’s crazy.

The future is now!

Toddler-type wonder ends as we talk and regain our adult, unimpressed fronts.
After that I went inside. 

When you try and imagine the future, there are many things we might have, like complete and extensive demographic records or total, inescapable mobile phone network coverage. The future colonises our lives with machines you never thought of.

I find Cayenne very charming

Cayenne, 2pm, mid august. I’m leaving the appartment a colleague from Collège last year has (very generously) lent me whilst he is in mainland France over the long summer holidays.

The streets of Cayenne are empty this time of day. Cars, and scooters buzz past occasionally. I’m walking up one of the big roads to Place des Palmistes. Tradional Creole houses and more modern buildings on each side.

Recently restored two or three story creole townhouses, colorful and charming, sounds of meals being prepared slip through slatted wooden shutters. Brick and wood are painted two tones, often pastel and a darker hue for highlights. More delapidated buildings have rusted corrigated iron roofs and drooping woodwork, the building hunched; faded and dirty walls blend with swelled, rotten frames; an overwhelming dull grey-brownness that suggests a structure nearing the end of its inhabitability.

These houses have balconies which, towards the evening, will be occupied by isolated old people surveying the street below, and steps up from the street to door-windows where people will cluster to drink and talk and sit at night.

The heat is oppresive and heavy. 

The three or four story skyline of the towncentre is dwarfed by the enormity of the vividly blue sky and its cloud-mountains, white and towering at this time of year. The more modern buildings of the town are dull and utilitarian; built in some period between now and when they discovered that concrete and breezeblock were great materials for building uninspiring functional buildings. Commercial buildings and domestic appartment blocks,they vary from brilliant white to ugly, patchy, tawny colour, presumably a variable of how recently they were built and the degree of climactic prescience of the architect. The embodiment of this is the obstinately un-majestic Majestic Centre, a building that certainly does have some Features but so uninteresting that I can’t remeber anything about it except that it is a mottled grey clour, very ugly.

The pavement is cracked and uneven. When I cross a road I step down heavily, the pavement is high and gaping drains open to rush away the water during the rainy season. In August, they just smell bad. Bad smells developing quickly under tropical heat is something the municipality has catered for in offering rubbish collectins three times a week, but there’s nothing to stop the stink of Cayenne’s drains in the dry season. It's not the overwhelming impression of the town though, just a detail of which you are occasionally and unpleasantly reminded of.

The street is not uniformly filled with buildings. Often there is an empty lot.

On the road between the apartment and Palmistes one of these has the skeleton of a small house, overgrown. The rest of the lot has long grass and detritus : a corroding air-con unit; empty Heineken bottles ; inexplicably, a dis-jointed red tractor, furry with rust.

Between houses, an ally held in by a wooden door or a corrugated iron fence leads to small, overcrowded one storey buildings or to yards rammed with mango trees and drying laundry.

In (Suriname capital) Paramaribo, the collonial buildings look fresh and maintained and pavements are either uniformly flat or quaintly cobbled. In Cayenne though, there is an air of past-its-bestness, yellow grey blurry, and vivid patches of green under the intense equatiorial sun. I find Cayenne very charming.

Place des Palmiste is a large, unevenly grassed square in one of the top corners of what makes the centre of Cayenne. At one point it had some collonial role, probably to do with slaves or prisonners. It used to have shitloads of royal palm trees, now it just has quite a few. At night lots of vans come and sell sandwiches and burgers, people meet and drink and eat and play music out of their cars. There are several metal gradins, that is, scaffold seats that people watch the processions from during carnaval and the rest of the year sit in the evening in groups to talk and watch children play on the go-carts that can be rented from the go-cart man.

In the daytime, however, the scene is of a banal urban park on the border of the administrative and commercial distrincts of town : sparse pairs of people in suits carrying files, a mother with a young child, civil servants’ cars bordering all tarmac. Cayenne touches- an addict gesticulating abstractly, sat in the shade of a palm.

Le Fleuve

"Do you know where Emily lives?"
A bunch of kids are playing football in the road. "The third house along, in that road, you can see it from here, she has a dog called Dixie.''
We drive to the other road and the kids have run across the field to meet us. Looks like no-one's in, but the kennel has Dixie written on- this is the house the kids were talking about.
"Why do you want to see Emily?" ..We're going to stay with her and her boyfriend". Confused faces from the kids "There must be two Emilies..this one is 9 years old''. So, wrong Emily...


We're in Apatou, and unfortunately I forgot to ask Emily for her address before leaving. Luckily Apatou is pretty small.
The first people we asked were hanging round a car on the Maroni. We ask a guy with a monkey on his shoulder for help "I don't speak French" he replies in English. The bonnet is open and a guy is under the car.."does your car have a problem?" "No, I'm just looking under the car."

Apatou is on the Maroni river. The population is mostly Boni- they're a Bushiningue people descended from escaped slaves in Suriname (wiki tells me) . Until recently it took 2 hours of pirogue to get to Apatou from St Laurent, the nearest town, but last year they opened a road that gets you there in half and hour or so. Apatou's roads are tiny, so are a lot of the houses - and there's still a sign on the riverbank saying 'Welcome to Apatou'. The village is surrounded by rainforest and crowded onto the bank of the wide, fast flowing river (it's still the big rainy season so lots of rivers are more wide and faster flowing than at some times of the year). On the other side, Suriname - there are a couple of shops that can be reached by boat over there and you can hear the constant drone of the orpailleur's (goldpanners) barge that's anchored where the French police can do nothing, on the Suri side. All around, just the rainforest.

People in Cayenne often talk about St Laurent, Apatou, Maripasoula, and the other towns and villages along the Maroni as ''Le Fleuve'' (the river). The vibe is very different to Cayenne. For starters, there's a different language- in Cayenne, it seems like most everyone can speak French, or a loose Guyanese Creole. On the fleuve, people are more likely to speak Sranan Tongo or English. School is in French, but school is fairly recent in Apatou.

Cayenne is a creole town, from the architechture to the language to the food- Apatou is very different. The older houses are small and wooden, with thatch roofs, and sometimes you see painted or carved motifs of Boni art. People only spoke French when they were speaking to us, otherwise it was Sranan. Someone died recently, apparently that's why there was music all night long in a carbet in the centre of the village. The river has a stream of pirogues travelling up and down transporting goods to settlements further upstream; in the early evening cars were parked along the bank so they could be washed and earlier in the day the banks were where people washed their dishes, themselves, caught fish, where kids played.

We walked around the streets followed by lots of tiny children (they were wierded out by my mohawk) and settled by the river in the evening, drawing in a cahier and just eating the scenery. The other side is relatively flat- Guyane is mostly quite hilly- and the sunset was beautiful over the forest and the river and the cloud mountains.