Club member Andrew Lindsay is in Guyana and sends the following letters

September – letter 1

Greetings from West Bank Demerara, Guyana. The rainy season is over, and it is very hot. Together with the humidity this makes life rather difficult, but we have settled in and I have made my first visit this year to the Rotary Club of Demerara, where I was greeted like an old friend.

Last weekend I went with a contingent from Demerara Rotary on a medical outreach expedition, something the club organises three or four times a year. We took a convoy of 4x4 vehicles into the interior – there is no other way of getting there. When we arrived we set ourselves up in the school building at the Amerindian settlement of Laluni. There were ten doctors – all Cuban – and two dentists, as well as two dispensing pharmacists. Local pharmacies and doctors had provided us with a large stockpile of drugs including paracetamol, steroid creams, antibiotics, anti-allergy tablets, iodine, anti-spasmodics, liniments and cough cures. The settlement and its immediate environs comprise a population of about eight hundred and over a quarter of them turned up. The medical cases had their blood pressure measured and were tested for diabetes before being referred to the medics for their various ailments. The Rotary role was just to be on hand, to record names and ages, to make sure everyone was seen in turn, to fetch disposable gloves and basins of water, and generally to ensure that everything ran smoothly. Upstairs were the two dentists, who were kept busily occupied all day. There were no fillings on offer, and in the course of the day there were nearly seventy extractions - rather draconian and the set-up somewhat rudimentary, though I am glad to say that everything was sterile. There was food too, which had been cooked by various Rotarians and brought up with the drugs in a pick-up truck, so every patient went away with rice and chicken as well as their medicines. I think there is another outreach next month, this time at an up-river settlement, which involves going up the Demerara by boat.

I find this aspect of Rotary life very satisfying. People have needs here in ways that don’t apply in the UK, and I had the feeling of being involved in something immediately useful that was making a real impact on the lives of others. It was quite a humbling experience to see the school filled with people with real and sometimes urgent needs – people who can’t get to Georgetown, and couldn’t afford to see a doctor or a dentist if they did. There were many children among them. By the end of the day their needs had been seen to. It was good to be part of this.

 Letter 2

I continue to attend the Demerara Rotary club. Apart from medical outreach, the other matter that I’ve been concerned with is the teaching of Phonics. My idea was to get together with those that piloted it last time, but people are elusive and I haven’t been able to convene a meeting as yet. I gather it went reasonably well in the sense that people went off and did their own thing, which is precisely what was meant to happen. However there is a lot of interest and plenty of private schools offering ‘Phonics’ at fancy prices. This annoys me. You don’t teach children ‘Phonics’, it is a methodology that you use when teaching them how to read, and there’s no need to charge extra for it.

            I gave a brief presentation for the Demerara Club, outlining how it worked, and I also gave a presentation for the Rotary Club of Georgetown Central – the Guyana parent club from which all others sprang. Everyone is very interested, but I feel I need more time to mobilise people. The Phonics text that I wrote is certainly adequate for purpose, the problem is that it has to be photocopied, and so someone has to be the custodian of a high quality original. There are some photocopying shops, but service is slow, the quality is variable, and the text takes up many pages, so it is still relatively expensive. It looks nice, but I can’t leave a CD of the original because I created the text using a graphics programme that isn’t widely available here. So I have promised to go back to the UK and reformat the book as a MS Word document – less fancy, but accessible to all. Then it’s back to finding volunteers, chairing a couple of training sessions, and letting them loose in a society which is crying out for help. What irritates me a little is that Phonics is hardly rocket science, it just needs a structured approach, which my book provides, and virtually anybody could deliver a reading course using it. Anyway, Rotary in Guyana is acutely aware of literacy as a priority area, and I hope that I can fit in somehow.

            I’ve been invited to talk about Phonics to a group of sixth formers in Queen’s College – that’s the top secondary school in Guyana –  and I accepted this with alacrity because these are exactly the kind of people who will, in the future, find themselves helping those with difficulty reading. I don’t know when this will happen, though.

            Otherwise life goes on very pleasantly – no TV, no computer. I use an elderly laptop and a flash drive to compose and save letters, then go to an ‘internet café’ to send them. This usually means an elderly computer in someone’s back shop – no broadband, but plenty of mosquitoes lurking under the table!

            I’ll be back in touch after the outreach, and back with you all at the start of November. Best wishes to all in the meantime. 

Andrew