Still here, still posting

On Facebook, Joel M. asked, will you be posting anymore?

Sorry. I should at least reassure you that I wasn't in the small plane that crashed the other day in Suriname, killing all aboard. Nope. I've spent lots of time in cars and on motorboats, but haven't seen a plane for some time.

Suriname holds its elections next Tuesday, the day I leave. There are 30 parties here, mostly aligned along ethnic lines. The orange party with the elephant symbol has mostly Hindustani adherents. The red and white flag is the Indonesian party. Etcetera. Flags are everywhere, and so are motorcades of cars slathered in flags and blasting music and speeches from giant speakers.

Actually, the giant speaker is a species I have encountered everywhere on this trip, from the Mexican birthday party back in March when the walls and floors were throbbing to the giant speakers that are just part of the porch furniture for some families here.

Did I mention in my last post that in Suriname, the main synagogue and the main mosqure stand right next to one another? I have to take a tour of these facilities this week, as well as the main n Hindu temple that stands around the corner from the mosque and synagogue. But mosques and Hindu gods and temples are everywhere in this amazingly ethnically mixed country. Just take a peek at Kevin's neighbors:

• behind him, a Javanese man who is head of customs at the post office; behind and to the right, a Hindu family that seems to own a bus company
  
• next door, an African-Surinamese family that sells sausages on the street and have the most falling-down house on the street. I see some of the residents brushing their teeth and washing their hair outside in the mornings
• across the street, Brazilians, the most recent immigrant group to Suriname and Guyana. They are all gold miners. All day long, cars pull up and honk to visit people. (Because everyone has a fence or gate in front of their home, you have to honk to let people know you are outside. If you are walking, you shout a little or rap your keys on the gate)
  
• next to the Brazilians, what Kevin calls "a combination family" of several ethnic strands
• next door on the other side, five women, all African-Surinamese, and a passel of dogs who sometimes sing together at night (that's what their howling sounds like. They are quickly shushed.)
  
• and beyond them, English speakers; a Guyanese husband and Surinamese wife
• and Kevin, from Wisconsin, and Stephen and Anne
  

It's hard to judge, as an outsider, just how deep this diversity goes--whether everyone is truly included in society, whether there are higher classes and lower classes--but to the outsider, it is very impressive!

I read "The Free Negress Elizabeth: Prisoner of Color" by Cynthia McLeod, Suriname's most famous novelist. It tells the story of Elizabeth Samson, the first black woman to be born free (in about 1717), who became one of the richest women in Suriname in the 18th century, owning plantations and slaves, but was spurned by her white peers and couldn't legally marry the man she loved. (You could marry if you were a mulatto, and there were many, very quickly, but not if you were black.) McLeod couldn't research Elizabeth's story until her husband became ambassador to Belgium, because all of the historical archives of pre-independence Suriname are in Holland. When your history is in somebody else's country, you are definitely a colony.

I've also been reading the history of the Lutheran Church of Suriname, and how it morphed from a church of plantation and slave owners to the multiethnic church it is today. Yesterday, visiting an old plantation, and I recognized its owner as the person who contributed the first organ to the Maarten Luther Kerk.

Tonight I'm going to begin reading McLeod's other novel, "The Cost of Sugar," which recaps (says the jacket copy) "the intriguing history of those rabid times (1765-1779) through the eyes of two Jewish step sisters, Elza and Sarith, descendants of the settlers of the 'new Jerusalem of the River,' known today as Jodensavanne, the oldest Jewish settlement in Suriname, which boasts the first synagogue in the Western Hemisphere."

That's the synagogue I hope to visit. This book I'm bringing home, so some of you can read it, too! I am not sure it is available on Amazon.

Despite living in a house with two laptops, I'll wait until I am reunited with my computer next week to start putting up photos. Then you'll see the wonderful trip Stephen and I took to a Guyana rainforest, and all the animals that wander around on the roads in Guyana, and rice drying on the pavement, and mosques where (in Guyana, but not in Suriname) they sing the call to prayer at 4:30 am (audible from the Lutheran camp down the street), and then pictures of typical Caribbean houses, of Paramaribo's downtown wooden buildings, of the song birds people keep as pets here, and of those election flags, and Hindu gods by the freeway, and more.

I leave a week from tomorrow. This week I'm focused on finishing projects for Kevin (writing, organizing, pulling together a conference) and seeing what I haven't seen yet. I'm also trying to arrange a half-day tour of Port of Spain, Trinidad, where I have a 7-hour layover next Tuesday, and organizing my time in Chicago and New York. I'll probably post once or twice more before I leave. Watch for those photos, though. They're gonna be good.