COUNTRYMAN – Stories about life in and out of Guyana, from a Guyanese perspective

Apr 06, 2014 News

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NORTH WEST PEPPERPOT!
By Dennis A. Nichols
Guyana’s North West region – a vast area of heavily-forested highland and sand hills, pristine beaches, (including our world-famous Shell Beach), pockets of savannah, mangrove swamps, and a labyrinth of serpentine rivers and creeks – just the place for a dream-struck, adventurous, young coastlander fresh out of the teacher’s training college – Me!

From the Venezuela border settlements of Imbotero to Yarakita, from the Rio Orinoco to the Moruka River, Region One is a place of rugged and enchanting beauty. One of its rivers, the Aruka, a tributary of the mighty Barima, became my home for eight years in the ‘70s and ‘80s. My life has never since been the same.
I had graduated from the CPCE in June of 1976. Less than three months later, I found myself in a large, motor-driven corial, chugging its way up the Aruka from Kumaka, and after a 45-minute journey, depositing me at the tiny, wooden, two-bedroom schoolhouse next to St. Dominic’s All-Age School, a dilapidated, open-sided building, about 40 yards from the river.
Incidentally, my initial journey to the North West was by airplane, a 90-minute flight from Timehri to Mabaruma, via Kamarang. For the first time I had a glimpse of the grandeur and vastness of my country, and the denseness of our jungles. It was overwhelming, almost mystical. Subsequent trips, however, were overwhelming in a different way. I could use several paragraphs to describe the heaving, pitching, stomach-churning trip by sea on the Lady Northcote, made worse, for me, by the nauseating odours emanating from the kitchen and engine room, but I’ll let this sentence suffice.
Region One was a strange, new world, bewitching from the outset. And it was a world I had ventured into voluntarily, after hearing my sister, Grace, then a Ministry of Information correspondent, speak glowingly about the region, with names like Papaya, Waini and Hosororo, that had my imagination doing somersaults. My sister and I were somewhat kindred spirits, and if she had been captivated by the North-west, I knew I would too.
I was greeted at the school house by its other occupant, a young male Berbician teacher with whom I instantly connected, and who was only too willing to give me a short, but intensive history of ‘the river’ a history replete with anecdotes of romantic trysts with nubile river girls. Still single at the time, I was mildly intrigued but rather skeptical the first evening we chatted. I found out later, he was basically telling the truth, although it seemed to me, with some embellishments.

Over the next few months, before the Christmas break, I became well- acquainted with ‘the river’, meaning the area, the people, their customs and general way of life; especially the schoolchildren. During the first week or so, I kept staring in amazement as they arrived at school, from the five year-olds to 15 year-olds, all paddling their corials/canoes, all barefoot, all protectively cradling their paddles, which they fetched into the schoolhouse, leaning them against the walls or sticking them between the beams supporting the structure. In my teacher training days, I’d never seen anything like that.
The Aruka River is home mainly to the Warrau tribe of Amerindians, although many of the people there were of mixed race, including blends with Black, East Indian, Chinese and White. I was more than a little surprised to hear surnames like Walker, Peters, Melville, Fraser, Ramsammy and Pierre.
Many of them were farmers growing and selling yams, sweet potatoes, ginger, corn, and of course, the ubiquitous cassava. A few were shop owners, and almost every family included someone who could hunt and fish, as their ancestors had done for hundreds of years. I loved living and working among them, and soon found myself fitting in ‘like family.’
It was in the North West that I first ate wild meat. Deer and accouri were my favourite, but I also ate bush cow, (tapir) bush hog, labba, turtle, and a bird named maam, with relish. It was there also that I had my first ‘real’ pepperpot, not the dark, rich stew I knew and loved, but a thinner, lighter broth that gave me a much clearer notion of why it was called PEPPER-pot, a notion that left my throat scalded, my nose running, and my hosts, the Ahlam family, chuckling gleefully.
I was to find out later that this fiery brew is a ‘younger’ version of the national dish, made from the same bitter cassava extract that boils down to cassareep, but used long before it thickens and darkens to a molasses consistency. I think it was labba pepperpot (eaten with cassava bread) that I was served that evening, but the ingredient that struck me as its most identifiable characteristic, was of course the one most closely associated with its name – pepper!
Eating wild meat and soaking up pepperpot were just two of the new things I learnt to do on the Aruka. One of the first was to paddle a corial, a hilarious experience at first that had me literally going around in circles until I got the hang of it. Then it was smooth pulling. From Koriabo Creek to ‘Top Side’ I traversed the river daily, after school, usually visiting friends, but sometimes doing so for the sheer tranquility of it. To this day, paddling a canoe through unruffled waters is one of the most relaxing and satisfying experiences I can ever have.
My new family and friends also showed me how to chop and fetch firewood, fish with wood ants, spring hooks and hiarri (a poisonous vine) use a shotgun, plant corn and yams, drink piwari, and party to country and western music; there seemed to be a party every Saturday night, and a drunken brawl every other weekend, something that could become violent very easily, and which I tried (two or three times unsuccessfully) to avoid.

Looking back on my teaching stint in the North West, I am left awestruck by the fact that I spent eight years in a riverine community under semi-primitive conditions without knowing how to swim, on a river that, while I was there, had claimed the lives of at least four young people that I knew; one of whom I was teaching at the time of his drowning. God must have looked down on me with pitiful compassion, because He saved my life three times there, each of which I put down to luck, or coincidence. But that, along with a dozen hair-raising episodes, is another story. Hindsight is a great enlightener.
However, the thing I remember most about the region is its people; a laid-back yet hardy and enterprising lot who could make do, and make happy with whatever providence gave them, usually as a result of hard work and easy living. And whether it be a bountiful crop of yams yielding a big payday, or a dozen tiny ‘kakanet’ fish grudgingly surrendered by the river, they survived, almost always cheerful; hardly ever contentious.
In closing, let me pay homage to my friend and fellow free-spirit, Lewis Walker, while we both can remember and laugh. He was the one who, in asking me why I seem to get stressed-out so easily, added another question while munching (that’s the right word) on a large red-hot pepper, “You eva see Buck man get headache?” There was no need to answer; I knew exactly what he meant.
It was he too, who fixed himself and me a dish of cassava bread and pepperpot, in about 20 minutes, with two freshly-caught houri, way up the Hanaida Creek where we had gone spring-hook fishing overnight. It was probably the freshest and tastiest fish I’d ever eaten. And the enterprise of setting spring hooks in the silent dead of night and later retrieving the fish dangling from saplings two feet over the mirror-placid creek, while on lookout for alligators and ‘water dogs’ with torchlight and shotgun just after midnight, was surreal – simply the most perfectly unforgettable experience of my eight-year hinterland sojourn.
Thanks North West, for the pepperpot!

(Dennis Nichols is a teacher, journalist, creative writer, and winner of the 2000 International Short Story Competition, run by the U.K – based Commonwealth Broadcasting Association)

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