A look at Rose Hall

The best part of Rose Hall is 4'10" "Geeta. I call her precious!


She took off the day to help show us around Rose Hall where she lives. She is helping us look for an apartment for the new couple missionary from Texas, the Myers, who are moving to Rose Hall in September. They are depending on us to find them a clean apartment with electricity, a flush toilet and AC. Can it be done? We'll see....



Here are the church which is bulging at the seams to hold the 100+ members that attend every Sunday, and...


Two of the four elders that serve in the Rose Hall Branch.



And here is where the four of them live... in this downstairs apartment!


Here's one of the many unpaved side streets,



And the entrance to the huge inside market. Expect to see just about anything inside for sale!

We walked inside and I just started snapping my camera fast because we had only a few minutes to check it out because we were busy transferring elders to their new apartments. We had two of them with us.

A little bit of everything.

Why does the purple eggplant always looks way better than it tastes?

I see okra, bora, shallots, pumpkin, celery, and that's all I recognize.

Lots of crazy stuff for the hair...

Sorting shrimp?


This is always my favorite part...the fishhhh! Notice how serious the women look. This fish business is serious business. More of those fishy ladies.

If I wanted one of those things hanging on the left, I'm wondering how I'd try it on...
I guess I'll forget about buying one.

Picture perfect red hot peppers and I don't know what else.

Greens...my favorite color!

Well, that's the end for the moment. We'll be back tomorrow to Rose Hall to check on an apartment with electricity, flush toilets and what else? Oh yes, AC!

Checking out Rosignol and Bushlot

I ordered vegetable soup and here's what they brought. I don't recognize any of the ingredients. I added a a little hot pepper sauce and loved every bite of it!

The brown things in the middle are some kind of chewy mushroom I've never tasted before.


See the 3 cute elders at the left of this photo. They are Elders Sarager, Bullock and Falatau and we met them in Rosignol to eat lunch together in celebration of Elder Sarager's 20th birthday.


They are even cuter close up! Elder Falatau is from Tonga and is learning to speak English. He has been here a year and speaks English well.


See them, again, in the Chinese Restaurant ordering their food. The restaurant is on the main street right in Rosignol. Looks pretty nice, don't you think?

After lunch, we walked the 20 minute walk to the Rosignol chapel and I'll show you the sights we saw as we walked.

Here is the main marketplace and it is almost deserted. It is very busy every morning with vendors selling fish, chickens, fruits and vegetables. But, it is after lunchtime now and the vendors have pack up their "stuff" and gone home. There is only one woman who stays out there all day selling her fruits and veggies in the hot afternoon sun.

Here's a little dirt side road we could look down as we passed by. None of these neighborhood side roads are paved.

Do you feel like shopping?

I bought a skirt for $15 in this store a while back.

This store looks like it has mostly jeans. Long jeans are very popular here even though the weather is soooo hot.


As you can see, the clothes are hung outside to entice people like me to come in and take a look...which I have been found to do on occasion!



This cart is used to load stuff around. Somebody owns it and he is paid to be a "mover". He might be moving anything from pineapples to furniture. He is the only horsepower that moves the cart.

Where did you come from and who do you belong to?

Here is a little building that houses a barber shop. I didn't see anyone inside so I thought it was safe to snap this photo. As soon as I did, I heard someone yell at me from out of nowhere!


At last we made it to the Rosignol Chapel that occupies the first floor of this big building.

And here is what it looks like inside. It is pretty spacious. You can see some of the classrooms that have been partitioned at the back of this photo. There are a few more classrooms behind where I am standing. Notice the ceiling fans. There are probably about 8 of them and they are really noisy.

When we arrived the chairs were all askew and I got to straighten them before our Joseph Smith fireside started at 6 pm.

Sicily, Cynthia and Coleen are 11, 13 and 15. They met me at the chapel so I could teach them their first keyboard lesson before our fireside. They arrived late, so I had the 3 of them play all at the same time. We couldn't find the electrical cord so they had to play the keyboard with no sound! It was a pretty unusual lesson. Their father is 6'7" so they are pretty tall, too.

Here is their daddy. Can you believe that his "call name" is Tall Boy? Many people here in Guyana have a "call name" which is completely different from their real name. The real name and the "call name" usually have no similarity.

These three men are inside the temporary Bushlot chapel after church has just ended. There are about 50 who are meeting as part of the Bushlot group and it will soon be a branch. It is about 20-30 minutes by car from the Rosignol chapel. The church is really growing in Guyana.

Here are some cute girls after sacrament meeting in Bushlot. The little girl refused to look at me and the girl on the left was embarrassed, too.

Here are more photos of what it looks like in the area nearer the Bushlot chapel. It is more rural.

It was fun to watch these goats try to find their way around and through the water.

We love to walk the 102 steps on this bridge to the white house at the back where Bro. Samaroo, the group leader of the Bushlot group, lives.

It's a pretty exciting walk, especially after a heavy rain!

Here's my best photo of the day. Check out this cute lady in red who is wading in her knee-high boots so she can hang out her clothes on the lines to dry. The blue buckets at the right are her "washing machine".

Dark and Slippery

Wouldn't you just love visiting with the cute family that lives inside this little house?


Let me tell you about our experience of walking through the pitch dark down a very muddy and slippery path to this home where Willana, a young woman who was recently baptized, and her husband, Alex, who is currently being taught by the young elders, live. And I'll tell you of the family home evening we shared with them.

I'll even show you a few photos that were taken the next day when we returned to "the dark and slippery path" to see what it looked like in the daylight. (We discovered that the hot sun had dried up all the slippery mud where we had had to tread so carefully the night before.)

Before we left home for our family home evening, the elders had given us vague instructions of where her house was. It was somewhere down a sketchy path through the weeds way far back away from the road. Because of the darkness and lack of lighting, I knew it would be a challenge to find. I wondered what shoes to wear, knowing the way could be muddy and wished later that I had worn my most awful plastic flipflops.

Willana, who was barefoot, met us out on this dirt road where we parked our car so she could lead us to her house. (Notice there are no street lights and noone has electricity.)

She said, "Just follow me,"and off she scampered across a footbridge that led from the dirt road and continued down a dirt path towards her home. We turned on our flashlights and carefully crossed the foot bridge after her.

The bridge was missing several of its main boards and I was nervous I would fall right through one of the big gaps if I weren't careful.

We continued down the path ...

At first it was just a dirt path.

Then, it became a "board" path. (These aren't so easy for me to balance on.)

Here's where we had to make a right turn and suddenly saw the trench! The only place we could walk was right close to it because the ground all around was so muddy and gushy.

I never took my eyes off my steps, only long enough to keep my eyes on the trench that was right along side me.

(Willana's house is finally in view. It is on the left with the yellow door. In the dark of night, we could barely see these little wooden houses and the path seemed to be a network of paths zigzagging us through them to where her tiny house was situated. )

(Notice how close to the trench dad has to walk. Scary....)



(At this point we had to walk these crazy boards. They weren't secured in place and they kept surprising me by flipping up when I'd get to the end of a board and knocking me off balance. And off to the side I would fall.)



(This was the craziest part of the path. Just imagine an old woman like me trying to navigate and balance on these loose boards in the pitch black! Do you see the outhouse off ahead?)

I did a lot of teetering on the boards as I struggled to keep up with Willana. I was wishing I was barefooted so I'd be more surefooted. Dad was behind me with his flashlight.

(Here's the final stretch to the house and dad was bringing her a pineapple.)

At last, we climbed the 9 stairs to her front door, not noticing there were no arm railings alongside the steps and that when we would turn to leave, we'd have to climb back down those same steep stairs (which would now be wet from the cloudburst that came down during the family home evening) with nothing to hold on to.

We had a sweet family night with them and taught them about prayer, played a few games of Guyanese dominoes and got ready to leave. As we made the scary climb back down the wet stairs, I expected to slip and land in a heap at the bottom of them. But I didn't.

Tiny Willana led us back out to the road to our car through the pitch black. This time I went bare foot. The night was so dark and the mud was so slippery. It had rained while we were in Willana's house for the FHE. I thought I was going to slip into the trench, once again!

Some stranger appeared alongside me and held on to my shoulder as I walked. I couldn't have made it back to the car without her balancing me. And then she disappeared into the night without a word. And Willana returned to her house alone without a flashlite.

It was a long walk back to her house from the road. She said she knew the way and probably could make it blindfolded. I wondered how she could walk through there with her two little ones, one 6 months old, that she would have to carry, and the other one 3 years old, whom she'd have to hold by the hand so he wouldn't end up in the trench...especially in the dark.

Life is definitely different here from what we're used to. I heard yesterday that Guyana is the poorest country in South America.

When I got home, I sat on the edge of my shower and scrubbed at my mudcaked feet and sandals. After my feet were clean, I had to scrub out my now filthy shower that was full of mud splatters on the walls and 2 inches of dirty brown water covering the shower floor. I finished the cleanup by having to use the toilet plunger to coax the dirty water down the drain.

I wondered how Willana cleaned her feet after she made it back to her house. She has no bathroom or running water…only a bucket outside in the dark somewhere.

Well, that's a slice of our missionary life in Guyana.