Imbotero – Across the Venezuelan border and back

Jul 06, 2014 News

---

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

By Dennis A. Nichols
Most coastland Guyanese have probably never heard of a place called Imbotero. Last week’s ‘Countryman’ was about the

historic, yet conspicuously-modern city of Berlin. The settlement of Imbotero on the Barima River in our country’s far North West, is as removed from Berlin as crab is from crab oil.
Remote is a good word to describe its location but, in Guyanese parlance, ‘behind God back’ may be more fitting for this area of maybe a few hundred people, at least back in October 1979, when I was appointed to my first acting headmaster posting there at St. Cyprian’s School, along with my wife and then eight-month old son.
The mighty Barima River, into which flow the Kaituma and Aruka tributaries, wends its way north-westerly until it forms a confluence with the Orinoco River Delta in Venezuela. But the Guyana part of it ends at Imbotero, which is also the name of the creek that separates Guyana from its western neighbour at our northernmost point.
On each side of this small serpentine creek, were/are two police outposts on the Barima, manned by Guyanese and Venezuelan security personnel at their respective locations. The creek as I remember it, averaged 20 to 30 metres in width, and people who were from mostly-related families, lived on both the Guyana and the Venezuela side.
The school itself, back in ’79, was a shaky wooden building to which the old teacher’s house was joined by an equally unsteady walkway. This interconnected structure and the piece of land on which it stood, was surrounded by swamp, smaller waterways and the creek itself, so that it was practically an island, although the nearest neighbour, the Cox family across the creek, was within hollering distance. As I didn’t have a boat, the only practicable means of transportation, my lungs were constantly exercised in this fashion, which usually resulted in a youngster towing a corial across the creek for my use.
There were alligators in the swamps and jaguars in the nearby bush, but the creatures that really scared us were the mosquitos, the most aggressive and rambunctious that I’d encountered up to then. Two weeks into our stint at the school, my wife could no longer take the torment of their biting, zinging, whining presumptuousness, and promptly left, taking our infant son with her. The Ministry of Education found a substitute for her, a young man I knew from the area. I think he spent a day, maybe two, at the school, didn’t turn up the next day, and ended up shortly after in San Felix, Venezuela. I’ve never seen or heard from him since.

So there I was alone, without electricity, water, communication and transportation, performing my headmasterly duties and teaching about 60 students in eight classes. At the time though, there were workers doing repairs to the building and some of them lodged in the school and in a small area in front of the teacher’s quarter.
We quickly became friends to the point where we shared meals, and I ate fried green bananas for the first time. That was during the day. However by dusk, I was under my net, battling the mosquitos and humidity, unable to sleep for the next four hours at least (insomnia) and thoroughly miserable. Morning, and the Christmas holidays, couldn’t come fast enough.
The schoolchildren in and around Imbotero were an interesting lot, partly because I couldn’t figure if they were actually Guyanese or Venezuelan, or both, as there seemed to be some blurring of nationality barriers. The names and language appeared to be a mixture of English, Spanish and Native Indian.
This notion was strengthened by the rumoured existence of another school located at some point across the border, run by Venezuelans, for children living in the area. It was said that they attended whenever a teacher was sent there, which I heard was not often. I didn’t stay long enough to verify its

existence, but would hear talk sporadically about the merits of the ‘English’ school as opposed to the ‘Spanish’ one.
The only shop in the area that I was aware of, was on the Venezuelan side of the border, and I went there occasionally to buy small items. It was an odd and often disquieting experience to paddle a small canoe from the school out to the Barima River, cross its frightening expanse, then pull upriver and cross the other half of the creek to get there; especially knowing I couldn’t swim to save my life.
On my first trip I had to stop at the Guyana police outpost and show my passport before proceeding across the creek where I repeated the routine at the Venezuelan outpost.
After a while, they got to know me as the school’s headmaster and I was allowed easy passage across the border. I found out, not surprisingly, that the shop was operated by a Guyanese who, if not living on the Guyana side, at least had relatives who did. (Incidentally I was thankful that there seemed to be no animosity or tension between the two outposts while I was there. I heard that sometime after I left, shots were fired from a Venezuelan boat just across the border at a Guyanese vessel no doubt engaged in cross-border trade, but it did not encroach on Guyanese territory.)
There were alarming tales told by Guyanese fishermen and ‘traders’ who were at some time or other, stopped by members of the Venezuelan military on river patrol, and given a beating known as ‘planas’ with the flat blade of a machete that was first bent back, then released with great force across the chest of the alleged transgressor. Nevertheless, brisk trading flourished in the late seventies and early eighties after the Guyana government had banned the importation of several food items including flour, one of the main commodities smuggled in from Venezuela during that period.
For me as a Guyanese teacher and patriot, it was quite disconcerting to see some of our students carrying Venezuelan exercise books emblazoned on the outside with a map of that country showing the entire county of Essequibo, their ‘Zona enReclamacion’ as part of Venezuela. I said nothing, preferring discretion to disharmony, but it was then I realized how serious our neighbour was when it came to their border dispute with us. I wondered what they thought of Dave Martins’ “Not a Blade of Grass.”
I love the hinterland, but two months at Imbotero was enough. As I closed school on December 14th 1979, and headed out of the creek, I knew there was no going back, and took a last, lingering look at the ramshackle school and teacher’s house that had been my home and workplace for that brief interlude in time. I heard that the school and the teacher’s house have since been rebuilt. But I wonder – have they drained the swamp, tamed the jaguars, relocated the alligators and silenced the mosquitos? If they have, well…I may go back one day.

---

---