How to Be a Better Birder: Travel Stories

By Michael A. Ketover

With his first book, Better Birder, Michael Ketover emerges as an exciting voice in travel writing. Ketover, an expert in poverty reduction and social justice, chronicles inspiring, outrageous, and mundane assignments in international development work and his reflections on the resilience of the poorest of the poor. These interactions reveal his flaws and slowly remake him into someone better than he used to be. With the theme of watching birds woven into each story, Ketover focuses on each locale's birds and the joy he hears in their songs amidst scenes of disrespect, lunacy, and violence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 7, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469741017

Book preview

a jabiru stork

Walking down Vlissingen Avenue, orange flowers bursting in the flamboyant trees above me, I noticed the hawker holding copies of the Stabroek News. The headline read: JAILBREAK! MURDERERS LOOSE IN THE CAPITAL. I bought the paper and flagged down a #42 minibus, which slammed to halt just inches from me. I pushed my way towards the back of the van to a seat with a window.

I read the article, saw the black and white mug shots of the escapees, and looked out the window into the canals lining the road. White lotuses in early morning bloom covered the dark water. Despite the window, I started to sweat immediately.

According to the article, the men had crafted spears from mess hall forks and pieces of shop scrap metal and the confronted guards dropped their guns without a fight. No one was killed in the bust-out, the article reported. No reward was offered for their capture—no money was available for rewards and such. The men, all convicted of unrelated murders, were armed with their forks and considered dangerous.

As we buzzed by tall royal palms on Homestretch Avenue, past the old racing grounds, I read quotes from the Director of Prisons, a guy I knew. I had recently been spending time with him in his office on the second floor of the Georgetown Gaol, a big floor fan in the corner churning heavy air. The Director’s comments to the reporter were noncommittal, spoke of lack of funds for proper security and training of the guards, and seemed curt.

His Director’s office overlooked the grounds and provided a view of the hoards of inmates there. I negotiated with the Director for time to spend with the juveniles who were housed at the prison. Yesterday afternoon, about an hour before the jailbreak, we had agreed to a weekly short session with the incarcerated youth. This hopefully would lead to regular literacy and numeracy training with them.

He was honest with me. The kids are floundering. We have no money to do anything but feed them. Whatever you and your organization could do to assist would be appreciated. Spend some time with them. Anything.

We arranged a date and time to meet the youth for the next week. I looked very forward to meeting the young men. All were thirteen to seventeen years old.

Five are in for murder, he noted as I peered down from his open window into the grounds of the ancient British colonial jail. The large floor fan pushed around stale warm air.

***

Two days later the escapees were off the front pages, probably gone for good into the bush down from Linden, off the paved roads and into the lawless jungle where a man can kill another for a slight and move on, unhassled by cops. They were gone into the land of porkknockers and bucks and malaria and pythons. Another headline: MAYHEM AT CITY JAIL. In a half-page color photo, a bare-chested man on top of a decrepit building inside the Georgetown Gaol waved a machete and screamed something to the photographer. Four men were stabbed to death in a riot in the main courtyard at a time when the prisoners were out of their cells and mingling, reported the journalist, due to some sort of retaliation. The reporter related that the disturbance began at lunchtime in the prison cafeteria. The Director had advised me to eat lunch before I came to meet the kids.

The food, he said dryly, you would not eat.

A sentry marksman, according to the article, shot the man on the roof, a notorious troublemaker even while a prisoner, dead. His body fell into the courtyard, draped over a chain-link fence. I wondered if my permission to enter the courtyard would be revoked by these events, and then, whether my safety would be in jeopardy in there. The Director’s comments to the same reporter were terse.

I waited for the weekend to pass before I called the Director to check the status of my date with the young prisoners on Thursday. He took my call from his secretary. I was pleased to hear his voice full of energy and vigor.

We’re expecting you, he said cheerfully.

OK. I’m bringing that other guy we talked about, too. We’re anxious to meet the crew.

Yes. The crew. He paused. Thursday at 1:00. See you. We did not mention either incident. He wanted normalcy to return to the prison and did not need to talk with me about either the bust-out or the mix-up, as the papers described the troubles. And I wasn’t going to bring it up.

***

Two weeks earlier I had escaped this armpit of a capital city and traveled southwest to another world. A Guyana Airways 1950’s vintage Soviet cargo vessel dropped me into the magical land of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to the corner of Guyana, Brazil, and Venezuela, into dusty Lethem. The town itself was small and abandoned, like a once popular trading post in the 19th Century American West. Like Tombstone, Arizona used to be, before tourists, I imagined. Like Jerome. We stayed in the one open visitor’s hotel, off the main drag. The open restaurant sold dried flat cassava slices and dried beef. Huge corrals were empty. Lethem was a town of no electricity, no running water, a handful of pickup trucks, one gas station, warm beer, one-story concrete buildings, and local folks of Amerindian descent. Drinking beer the first afternoon, I met a teacher who told me he planned to deliver books to a small primary school library a few hours

south, in a village called Makai down at the base of the Kanuku Mountain Range, the next day. He invited me if I could contribute money for gas. Coincidentally, I read about this village in a recent National Geographic article. The article’s author and photographer, guided by some locals, hiked up the range in search of the nesting harpy eagles, raptors with claws the size of a large man’s hand.

The Georgetown Zoo had a pair of harpy eagles in captivity, in a fair-sized wire cage that was still too small for them to do more than flap their wings a bit. They hopped from one wooden perch to the other, devouring live chickens that the zookeepers tossed in every late afternoon. These two city harpies would bounce from the higher perch to the lower and back again, doing an awfully depressing dance. They were worlds away from their usual mountains; talons sunk deep into the belly of a white-faced monkey, soaring towards home.

***

The drive was slow and the road was unpaved. The heat was oppressive, like a demon’s breathe. I sat in the bed of an experienced, white Department of Education pickup truck, sweating, dusty, sipping my precious hot bottled water. We arrived in two hours to meet the Headmaster, drop off the two boxes of books, and meet some cute, unassuming children. We soon left to drive a loop around the area of small lakes, an area where the teacher, an Amerindian, was raised. This area was pure savanna. I visualized the drylands as the Kenyan Masailands of my books. Tall yellow grasses waved in the hot breezes that blew off the mountain range. Enormous cabbage palms, some maybe eighty feet tall, swayed in the glistening heat, peppering the sides of a meandering stream, the only greens amidst the plains of browns, beige and mellow yellows. Scissor-tailed flycatchers darted playfully through the glistening waves of heat, nose-diving and ascending in pairs. Far off to the east, towards the purple and muted brown mountains, a mountain river

drained into a series of small lakes. The teacher, driving, knocked on the window and got my attention. He pointed to a larger lake in the group, and turned the truck off-road towards it.

The fishing in these lakes is still excellent.

Whaddya catch?

When I was a kid, we used to…

I nodded and only half-listened to him. I squinted, looking into the rays towards the lake. We approached the lake methodically, carefully picking our way between rocks, like on a Moon Crawler. A lone figure stood on the far edge of the lake. It was a large bird. Even from one hundred yards it seemed as tall as a man.

A jabiru stork, I realized aloud. We drove closer and stopped the truck. The huge stork was a stunning creature.

These used to be all over ’round here, the teacher explained. But we hunt and eat them, so now there are few. He was unapologetic. I raised my eyebrows.

The stork twisted its thick black neck to watch us watch it. Ascertaining no danger, somehow sensing this, it turned again and poked its head completely into the lake, submerging its brilliant red throat pouch and slightly upturned black bill. The bird lifted one leg, bent it at the knee, and balanced, a picture of tranquility. It flapped its all-white wings softly.

We sat and watched the jabiru stork for a while. I looked on with reverence, grateful for the opportunity to see this bird. This bird-watching served to ground me.

The teacher, perhaps wistfully, wished he had the foresight to bring a rifle, and told me this before we turned to return to Lethem. ***

I was in another world and another space, completely removed from dreamily gazing at that stork in a clear lake on the savanna, that day I entered the gates of the Georgetown Gaol to meet the youth. The heat was brutal as usual at midday and I perspired profusely. Sweat poured from my brow and drenched my chest and back through my t-shirt. This was all part of the day living on the equator.

At the gate, I passed a few women holding plates of food for relatives inside—husbands, lovers, brothers, sons, fathers, kinfolk. I watched an ebony black-skinned, burly female guard, also sweating buckets, take food from a skinny elderly lady without conversation, like she knew for whom the food was intended. The guard ignored a middle-aged fat wife, whom maybe she didn’t know or didn’t like, and took a few bills from another women, a top-up perhaps, for some favor for her man inside. She hollered in to the gatekeeper who opened the creaking, rusted metal gates just wide enough for the guard to flop her overflowing body inside.

I wondered about this passing of food. Would the guard get the food to the prisoner? Did she eat it herself? Didn’t she eat enough cook-up rice and fried chicken at home? Did she share it with her fellow guards?

I walked into the prison together with my colleague, giving the Director of Prison’s name once at the gate and again at the sign-in sheet. We were not frisked, unlike the rest of the few people coming inside the gates who were being aggressively searched by two skinny male guards. We were directed to the Director of Program’s office and escorted via a long dark concrete corridor. The Director of Programs was a pleasant, concerned man with whom I had discussed our intentions a few times prior. He had expressed doubts that the youths would have much interest wanting to meet or talk to us.

I got eye contact with one prisoner immediately. He came from the opposite end of the shadowy hall. His wrists were shackled behind his back and his ankles were bound with rope. Dragging his feet to keep up with his guard escort, he shouted at me as we approached one another.

Fadda, he shouted, sobbing. Me fadda. Sal-veh-shun deh ’pon me. He emphasized the last syllable of the word ‘salvation’. He was dugla – the local term for a person of mixed Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese blood. He was skinny, skinny, as they say here. In Guyana, the female dugla were often knockouts. And in nearby Trinidad, Lebanese blood is stirred into the mix. The resulting women are often striking, the prettiest anywhere.

I’m not a Father, I replied, trying to keep things light, and am certainly not your daddy. The guard grinned, my fellow American frowned at my glib tongue, and the inmate shuffled away, unsaved and grumbling.

We emerged from the corridor into the bright daylight of the courtyard. I put on my sunglasses, to protect my super-sensitive eyes from the glare off the bleached-out walls and treeless grounds, and surveyed the place. We were surrounded on three sides by prisoners in their cells, by two floors of men howling. The whitewashed concrete buildings were crumbling with rusted metal bars on two sides.

This courtyard was the scene of the mayhem heralded in the headlines last week. I doubted whether a memorial plaque would be erected for the dead inmates. The men noticed our presence within moments. Two white guys without collars walking with a guard was unusual. The inmates shouted at us. It reminded me off the mindless chatter at a grammar school baseball game: Heh battah battah battah, swing battah battah battah! or the incomprehensible din heard upon entering a monkey-house at a zoo. The odor, for sure, was an olfactory déjà vu with the Georgetown Zoo, the same stank of dried, sun-baked urine on concrete and phemerones and unwashed animal groins.

I saw a well-built, shirtless man on the second floor in a building to our right pull out his ample penis and grope it madly, staring at, I hoped, my colleague. The other American looked straight ahead, serious, anxious, and maybe even ill-at-ease. Perhaps he was wearing a game face, I surmised. I elbowed him softly so he’d see the guy yanking himself off.

His cellmate, standing right next to the masturbating man, yelled, White meat, white meat. Gimme som’ o ’deh white meat.

The guard refused to acknowledge the spectacle, which to him may have seemed mundane.

My colleague looked up and then away and muttered, Disgusting. I just smiled and looked around us, searching for more outrageousness and folly.

cassowary

I lost my appetite when I saw the black foot, charred and alone in the dust. Sure it was tv but it was live television, unedited from the capital’s American Embassy grounds. We just came from there, have friends there, some of us had family there. All of us in the room watched the tv screen intently, horrified.

It was lunchtime. People would leave our semi-circle around the tv for a few minutes to go get food and return quickly to watch the carnage. Almost everybody was eating. I noted this to myself as a curious thing. I watched one woman tear chicken from the bone and wipe the grease from her chin. The woman in charge here was a bit spooked, talked of evacuation, ate mounds of white rice with her chicken, moaned. We were told that we were in the Standfast