Greetings from the Porter lounge at the Island airport in Toronto. I’m grabbing the first flight out to Ottawa in order to make my class today. (So if any of my students are reading this, you’d better show up!)

When I was living in the USA in the aftermath of 911, one of the unique perspectives granted me was the blatant discriminatory treatment given to travelers of my skin colour. It was a relief to return to Canada where such practices are rarer, or at least not as obvious.

Indeed, it’s a mantra among many of we hued folk never to take a flight through the USA if we can avoid it, in fear of the humiliating disrespect shown by customs and immigration troglodytes.

Yesterday’s return to Toronto, via Trinidad, from Guyana was a bit eye-opening and disappointing. During our 20 minute layover in Trinidad, I and my 5 White compatriots had to walk from one section of the airport to another. Within a span of less than 5 minutes of this walk, I (and only I) was singled out for a “random” security search TWICE.

Once at the gate, there was a youngish Black woman screaming at the top of her lungs, complaining about her multiple “random” searches, as well.

Well, that was Trinidad, right? Maybe some dude matched my description. Or maybe someone was having a little fun. Who knows. Surely, a more serious and advanced nation like Canada would be fairer.

Hmmm. During our departure from Toronto 2 weeks ago, I (and only I) was singled out for another “random” search. At that time, I actually complained, and miraculously the security dude (another abashed brown guy) apologized to me and, in a moment of fascinating brown solidarity, decided to take the next man in line instead. He happened to be a member of our
party, a white dude. But had I not voiced my displeasure, it would have been me… again.

Upon arrival to Toronto last night, we were met by an extra barrage of passport control officers right off the plane. (I think the Trinidad flight is known as a drug gateway). My White compatriots were waved through without incident. But I, holding up my Canadian passport, was stopped and was asked, “Are you Canadian? What are you doing here?”

Because, as we all know, only White people can be Canadian, and only Canadians are White. Maybe she assumed my passport was a forgery.

After we passed customs, we went to wait for our bags. There was another line of thugs in uniform there. Again, my White friends walked right through, but I was taken aside and interrogated.

“Where do you live?”
“What do you do?”
“What are you doing here?”

You would think the Canadian passport and the answer, “I’m a professor at the University of Ottawa. I teach global health and epidemiology and I’m returning from a huminatarian medical mission in Guyana with my colleagues, those fine looking young doctors and nurses over there”, would warrant a pass. But no, more menial and frankly irrelevant questions like, “Where were you born? ” arose.

Miraculously, I was not selected for a deeper search of my possessions. But I had already identified and set aside my bags from the group possesions, in full preparation for that eventuality.

Sadly, this is not my first enounter with what appears to be racial profiling at Canadian airports. The practice appears to be accelerating.

I have lived in this country since I was 2 years old and have been a citizen for 3 decades. I have paid a shitload of tax dollars to this country. I speak idiomatic, accent-free Canadian English, demonstrably better than many native-born Canadians, and am functional in our other official language. I am a 41 year old University professor who does not dress outlandishly. I have no criminal record. I sit on several corporate Boards of Directors and am a visible, active member of Canadian democratic society. Through my business activities, I have employed fellow Canadians and have contributed to the growth and health of our economy. I have proudly worn the maple leaf as a representative of my country abroad, as a participant in official Canadian projects and as an honoured guest of foreign nations. In the media of Guyana, the nation of my birth, I am referred to as “Canadian”, not “Guyanese”. I have given much to this country, arguably more than others of my generation, and I have been vocally grateful for the bounty that this country has given me.

Moreover, yesterday I was returning from a humanitarian mission in the name of Canada, an activity that brings further distinction and honour to this nation.

What more must I do to be recognized as Canadian? And what of those non-White Canadians less publicly active than me? What must they do?

Yes, customs agents are universally dickish, and I suspect they are selected for their dour personas. But I suspect more that they are indoctrinated into their paranoia by an official training programme. I would really love to observe that programme sometime.

I think it’s about time they started selecting their targets based on behaviour, rather than skin colour.

Reclining in the Tower hotel, digesting rum and Chinese food, watching CNN and blogging on my phone.

Today we zipped out to Kaieteur Falls near the Brazilian border. It was my second time, but no less fun. Kaieteur really is a natural wonder of the world.

I just realized that Venezuela is going to the polls soon, as Hugo Chavez bids for an end to term limits and gives credence to American charges of dictatorship. I am reminded of a drunken Amerindian we encountered in Kamarang a few days ago. He was ranting about Chavez’s virtues,
particulary of how Chavez is, in his opinion, the champion of the the oppressed against the Americans and the “white people”.

The big news today, however, is a follow-up from yesterday’s farce. The transportation of the two patients, resulting in a car crash, made page 2 of the newspaper this morning. The article reported that “there were no injuries”, completely missing the point that these two Amerindians, flown in from the bush for medical care, have been doubly traumatized in a world they do not understand.

When one of our number, Bekkie, went to see them at the hospital, she found a pathetic, tiny woman with a bruise on her face and a pain in her chest and no one tending to her needs. Her husband with the hip issue had been more-or-less cared for, but she had been admitted with minimal care.

In fact, she had not been fed in a day, and no one had offered her clothes or a towel. It seems the hospital only feeds you if you have your own plate. So Bekkie bought her a new nighty, a cup and plate, and a towel.

These people are impoverished, traumatized and have no one to care for them. In many ways, it would have been better for them to have stayed in the interior and suffered with their illnesses. As the Amerindians say, people come to the city hospital to die.

I am sadly reminded of the snake bite woman who was flown here and who died of the bite. Her final hours must have been horrific, spent alone and terrified in an unfriendly, dirty and alien place. It would have been better to leave her to die in her village, surrounded by love and care.

This place needs advocates for the poor and remote. Soon.

Greetings from the lobby of the Hotel Tower in Georgetown, Guyana, where I am miraculously able to access free wifi (while mosquitos eat me alive).

What a day.

Last night, I craved rain. So a local taught me a rain summoning chant: “Mike mike musawa!” I repeated it three timesd and the heavens split open to crap down a river of unending rain. In the morning, I washed in the raised and blackened river, as nameless flotsam floated by.

I presented my snake boots to our boat captain as a gift, and was immediately beset with personal requests for more boots from everyone else in the vicinity. One 10 year old girl, who claims she wants to be a scientist, implored me, “You must remember us!”

We left Waramadong on schedule at 7:30 am on an emormous bark canoe. But this time we took with us an old man with a broken hip, who had to be lifted on in a sling, his wife, a woman with a broken arm, another abused woman with human bite marks on her arm, her baby, another woman and her baby who suffers from a strange flaccid paralysis, and a random selection of rivergoers.

Arriving in Karamang at 9:30, we were abashed to find the weather disfavourable for an aerial pickup. We lingered for hours before our two bush planes could land. Most of us, and our bags, left for Georgetown in the first plane. But two (thankfully not me) stayed behind to carry the man with the broken hip into the second plane.

You need to understand that these are remote river folk. None of them had ever been in a car, let alone an airplane, before. And now they were being compelled to fly to the nation’s only city at a time of great medical distress.

Well, most of us arrived in good order and headed to the hotel to wash up. The second plane, however, was delayed 2 hours. Upon arrival, no ambulance was available to take the man with the broken hip to the hospital. Instead a station wagon was found for him and his wife, while the others went on to the hotel in another taxi.

Both vehicles took the same route. But the hotel bound vehicle was stopped because of an accident up ahead… the station wagon had crashed! The man with the broken hip was thrown forward. His wife crashed through the windshield, earning an enormous hematoma on her face. A miscreant from the crowd then attempted to steal their meager belongings. The taxi, too, was totalled, removing the sole source of income for the driver. (There is no real insurance here.) In one brief moment, three lives were altered, possibly permanently.

You also need to understand what a nightmare Georgetown public hospital is. People will attend to your basic medical needs. But no one will ask about your emotional disposition or if you understand the system or if youu have a place to go. There is plenty of tragedy to go around.

Once more I am huddled in my tent in Waramadong village on the Kamarang river, a distant stone’s throw from the Venezuelan border, frantically squishing monstrous and nameless jungle bugs like the big sissy that I am. Outside, a torrential downpour is sending the river into frenzies as gorgeous sheet lightning frames the otherworldly flat mountains near the Venezuelan border.

Today was our last working day in Guyana. Tomorrow morning we are scheduled to pack up our tents and take a motorized canoe downriver to Kamarang, whence a bush plane will fly us the two hours to the capital city Georgetown.

But what an eventful day it has been.

While we are indeed cut off from phones, tv, most radio and all internet, news still travels astonishingly fast. Remember the poor woman who was bitten by a snake? The one whom a colleague and I had to carry up 30 feet of stairs from her canoe to the clinic? She was flown to Georgetown with her worried husband a few days ago. Today we learned that she died there.

My heart goes out to her and her family. The government pays for aboriginals to be flown out for medical care, but not for their return. The impoverished husband is now all alone in the “big” city without people who speak his dialect, facing enormous amounts of racism, and possibly without any way to get himself or his wife’s corpse back home.

We had another snake bite victim right here in Waramadong. But thankfully, after spending a night in the health post (where we have cast our tents), this morning he walked home on his own power.

When I get home, I really must look into some way to get antivenin made and stored locally here.

We also made our final –and biggest– presentation today, this time to 400 high school students. Once again, I pretty much winged it, but it went well. Half way through our condom demonstration, however, we were ordered to move on to another topic!

Which brings us to today’s real drama. In the wee hours, the local principal came knocking with 2 women in tow: one a mother, the other her 13 year old daughter who had been impregnated by an older man. For some weird reason, the mother ran out to fetch the purported father, and a whole little Maury Povich show erupted in our little camp. My kingdom for a paternity kit!

I’m not sure what was resolved, if anything. But the lesson here is that these communities need counselors, community organizers (Gobama!), condoms and a greater intervention by the law.

To bed.

Today was our first full day in Waramadong village, a remote riverbound Amerindian community notable for its gorgeous boarding school of 300-400 high school students who have been shipped in from around the region.

Guess what? We have another snake bite victim: a middle aged man with three fer-de-lance (labarria) bites on his leg. He’s resting in the adjacent room right now.

There’s something idyllic about a place where everyone, young and old, says good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and where children –at least outwardly– are content to be children.

Problem is that there’s a little epidemic of teen sex going on here, which is where we are targeting our message. Enter the great bugaboo of this kind of development work: the community is very religious (Seventh Day Adventists) and are forbidding us from giving out condoms because, “condoms encourage them to have sex.”

People, they’re already having sex! Let’s at least stop them from getting diseases and babies!

Today was punctuated by a surreal meeting with the headmaster and the entire faculty, which lasted well into the blackness of the unlit night, wherein all of their frustrations with the “White man’s world” and development strategies to date came to light. I found myself giving them strange advice: to take control of their situation, to start their own epidemiology projects in order to sue for government support with real data, and to take the initiative in documenting their own heritage, particularly dwindling knowledge around medicinal plants.

But we must acquiesce to their wishes. So tomorrow I will speak to 300 high school kids about condoms… While not providing any.

Greetings from Waramadong (hope I spelled it right.) I am encased in a tent inside the health centre as a bat and all manner of bizarre insect crash against my thin tent wall, and outside a much needed tropical rain finally begins.

This is a community 2 hours upriver from Kamarang, populated entirely by Amerindians, and serviced only by the bark canoes that laze up and down the Mazaruni and Kamarang rivers. There is no electricity or running water here, so I suspect I may have to crap in the woods. Sigh.

The snake bite woman was evacuated from Karamarang to Georgetown this morning as I gave my outdoor talk to adorable school kids. I hope she will be all right.

We are in poisonous snake endemic zone right now and I have decided to donate my boots to the community when I leave.

To bed.

Well, it turns out my fellow travellers are not very observant. There really was someone else on the plane with us– our cook. So no, there was no ghost.

I do have a more serious story to tell, though. This evening, well after sundown, word came that an Amerindian had arrived with a snake bite. Three of us rushed to the landing where we carried a tiny aboriginal woman from a bark canoe up 30 feet of steep steps to the clinic.

She had been bitten by a labaria –fer de lance– 24 hours earlier. Standard bush medicine had been applied: advil and an antibiotic. That’s pretty much given for everything.

She’s presently lyng in bed across the way from us while her worried husband sits by her side. All our doctors could do for her was to give her steroids and antihistamines and hope for the best. We’ll know in the morning.

Greetings from Kamarang, a community of 350 people, mostly aboriginal, set up explicitly to service the mining industry. The only contact with the outside world is via satellite phone (yes, I called my mother yesterday), so I am storing these blog posts on my phone/pda and will upload when we return to “civilization” on Friday.

To get here, we took a speedboat from Bartica to an airstrip further down the Essequibo, then flew in two 8-seater airplanes, for about an hour, toward the southwest and the Venezuelan border.

This town is essentially an airstrip, which functions as its main street, with a police station, school, hospital, general store, two guest houses and a series of bars and houses lined up along the airstrip.

We are close to the middle of nowhere. From here, one can see Mt Roraima less than a hundred miles away. The Roraima region is among the rawest, untamed jungle in the world. Its geography dates back to the origins of the world and its flora are pehistoric. The place is so untamed that Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired by the plateau to write The Lost World.

There is raw physical beauty here, enhanced by its remoteness. The general store sees visitors speaking English, French, Portuguese and Spanish, as the mining rush sees all sorts of characters sift into the region.

There was a moment of Zen as a few of us slipped away to swim in the river. There we were, soaking in an Amazon tributary in the outskirts of the rainforest as a jungle storm rolled upon us. Later, safe in our hovel, lightning and thunder bore down upon us, and the weird and wonderful sounds of the forest berated us from all directions. This aint Kansas anymore.

The funny thing is that on the flight here, I would glance occasionally to the rear of the plane where a Black dude in a red baseball cap would wave at me. At one point, he commented how much he hates flying.

What’s so funny about that? Well, it turns out that no such person was on the flight. Either I was hallucinating or saw a ghost.

Tomorrow morning I will speak to the local high school about basic biology and sex education. Wish me luck!

Thank the gods, it rained all morning today and our session in Batavia was cancelled. Instead we planned, packed, recouped and feasted.

Yes, my friends, it’s true. After 5 months of failing vegetarianisn, tonight my protein starved body once more feasted on Brazilian churasceria — all you can east barbecued steak. Oh, my Hindu ancestors are all spazzing out in their cremation urns!

Daily battle with the roaches is made possible only by the nightly sponsorship of our friend El Dorado rum, which keeps me numb and clueless.

Tomorrow morning we take a small bush plane into the interior to offer our weird little missionary health education show to remote Amerindian communities. I’m packing now for what will be several hours of rain-soaked slogging by plane, boat and foot. Luckily my little Asus Eepc fits into a standard ziplock bag, so it might yet survive this trip.

A week ago, a similarly sized plane, also carrying Canadians, vanished in this region. British special forces are here now, as part of their regular jungle training, to help in the search.

Hopefully WE won’t be the first ones to find out where they went!

Okay, off to bed.

Want to know how tired I am? (Okay, replace “tired” with “drunk”). I can’t remember the name of the village we visited today. I think it was called Karao.

This was a community of about 200 people, developed 30 years ago in the wake of the mining boom. Getting there, I finally had a chance to field test my snake boots. Yes, everyone, they really are completely waterproof, as I waded knee-deep in the river and emerged perfectly dry. I proceeded with complete confidence in areas possibly filled with snakes and chiggers.

And yes, I continued to look like a complete idiot wearing the bloody things. But I’m a complete idiot with dry feet, no fear of snakes, and a funny accessory to brandish.

Today’s educational intervention was very well received. I’m impressed by how smart the women of these villages are; they are more knowledgable about certain health topics than many of my university students! One recurring theme that is both surprising and suggestive for my other work is the seeming high prevalence of infertility among this population. This is something I need to give some thought to in the future.

Well, my belly continues to grow and my muscles continue to shrink. I am a shadow of my former self. I’m afraid meat has come back onto the diet (as expected). Now I must slowly slip weight training back onto the slate and beat my body back into shape. It’s pretty embarrassing here to be advocating for a healthy lifestyle while sucking in my disgusting gut. I did manage to join 2 other team members on a challenging jog through Bartica yesterday; I could barely keep up!

We met a couple of fellows from Georgetown today who have put together a street theatre performance to teach locals about HIV/AIDS. They are an impressive duo, both goodlooking young Black men with advanced degrees in economics and development studies, but have chosen to forego immediate financial reward in lieu of preparing this national traveling “health soap opera.” Unfortunately, we won’t be able to see their show tomorrow, since we will be in Batavia doing our own show.

Speaking of all things Guyanese, this week is the 30th anniversary of the massacre of Jonestown. No one here is talking about it.

Off to bed…. or rather off to battle the cockroaches. Two fucking ENORMOUS roaches invaded my room –SHIT! One of them just buzzed my head! It’s a flying beast!– and I was up for hours hunting them down. I managed to kill one, but many more remain. These fuckers are bigger than my hand. Aieee….