Progress in a wading suit, Seetha’s Bar and Parbo

Also we’ve received great interest of the embassy of the Netherlands in Suriname, where they experience the same kind of problems. Therefore a presentation was soon arranged and that meant another day of traveling overland and a visit to Suriname and Paramaribo itself.

Our week started with an ambitious planning for fieldwork in the area of interest for our project: South Ruim-veldt, which is not so difficult to pronounce. We’ve the luxury of our own private driver: Mr. Pearce. This man knows his city and steps in if we want to go to a not so friendly part of town. Also some measurements are required in the discharge channel. Luckily we’ve welcomed Martijn, who joined us this week. That meant that he had the privilege to put on the wading suit and explore the silted up channels. Our structural guys inspected all the outfall structures on the west side of town onto the Demarang river.

Since we’re complete, we decided that a celebration was in order. We’ve developed a nice habit of closing the day with some El Dorado rum, which goes in like lemonade by now. So after some glasses of the golden spirit, we paid a visit to the local venture named Seetha’s Bar. The place can be described with a lot of neon light, soca music and heavy dancing, friendly people. They were so nice, that we even got offered a guy’s motorcycle while we was holding every post he could find with one hand and a never empting cup of rum in the other. The next day we took things easy and we had the change to be tourist in our own city. It’s nice that Georgetown is not to big yet so you could see a lot of the city in one day. We paid a visit to the Guyana zoo (not recommended, quite depressing), the botanical garden, which is a nice large park where the Guyanese spend their Sunday afternoon. We also paid a visit to the St. George church, a large wooden neo-gothic building and Bourda’s market, which is a little busy market place where you can by almost everything.

On Thursdays morning, a minivan driver, called Mike woke us up in the early morning in order to take us to the Suriname. It was a bumpy ride and it was quite difficult for a some team members to get some sleep. At the border we were dropped on the ferry, only to be picked up by his Suriname counterpart Roy.

Arrived in Paramaribo, we stayed in a nice guesthouse “De Kleine Historie”, where we could talk Dutch. We had a first meeting with the ambassador and his staff at the embassy. They were very friendly and interested in our project. Afterwards we gave a presentation on our progress in Guyana at the residence of the ambassador to a group of people which consisted of people from the Surname ministry of “Publieke werken”, water focused NGO’s, students and consultant companies. After the presentation a small discussion started which continued in the backyard of the residence in a purely recognizable Dutch style, complete with ‘bitterballen’, pieces of cheese and Parbo beers. It proved to be a valuable afternoon. But we did not leave Parbo before we’d experienced the nightlife of Parbo and some plates of roti. Returning back to GT, we looked back on a very fun visit.

Next on the planning is further fieldwork in Ruimveldt and keeping all our stakeholder informed of our progress. But that’s for next time.

Thanks for following all!