Coming up to Christmas
on Kate in Guyana (Guyana), 18/Dec/2009 12:29, 34 days ago
Quite a few volunteers are going home or overseas for a Christmas break, but I am staying put in Georgetown as I don't feel I can afford to spend the money at the moment. I have arranged to stay over for the actual Christmas bit with a good volunteer friend locally - she says she will do the cooking so that sounds OK! I am teaching her to play bridge, so that will give us a bit of a hobby. The weather here is still hot humid and sunny, we have not had a rainy season because of El Nino - it is just a bit cloudy on some days and can rain heavily for half an hour or so at times. You know about it if you are caught out in it though. So the Christmas experience will be quite different from the UK, with outdoor events being the order of the day.On Tuesday there was a Christmas event in the park run by the mobile phone company. There were beautiful fairy light decorations strung between the trees, and entertainments of various kinds on the bandstand - carols, gospel singing, speeches by the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, prayers by Christian and Hindu religious leaders, and a visit by Santa. The statistic is that 95% of people in Guyana have a religion, and from my experience that means a very strong religious belief - in a multitude of varieties. The zeal of young people is particularly striking - in the UK it would be small children dressing up as angels, but here it is teenagers who lead.Last night our choir sang the Halleluia Chorus at the end of the Carol Concert in the Catholic Cathedral, which went pretty well. Then the second half of the evening we had our own practice working on the big piece we are preparing for our Christmas Concert on the 27th. It is a bit ambitious - the idea is to sing along to a backing CD but we have practised with someone playing the piano - so now the conductor and the choir are trying to make sense of the changes in pace on the recording, and also pick up enough rhythm to get the entries correct - if you miss it, then there is no adjustment like you'd get from a pianist! I am enjoying the challenge of the music, I have borrowed a recorder from someone in the choir so I can go over my part at home and try to learn it. It is also good to be busy at this time as many other things take a break over the Christmas period.