Paramaribo, Suriname – Fri. May 4, 2007

I don’t mean for there to be so much time between posts but things here have been busy and getting into the city with all this rain is rather hard at times. It rains just about every day here and floods the yard making it hard to get into other parts of the country as we’re actually on higher ground than most and other areas stay flooded for days at a time.

Lucien had an interview at a telecom company today for an IT Supervisor position. Although Lucien passed that point in his career about 5 or 6 years ago and he’s far overqualified for it, I think he抣l still be hired due to the fact there’s absolutely no one in the country with his expertise or experience. He had another offer from a company here in Paramaribo to Web Application Penetration tests offering €100 an hour on a part time basis of 12-15 weeks a year. I think if things go well with these he’dl be very pleased and perhaps can even retire soon. ?

Yesterday we bought a few more movies. There’s a funny thing about the movies you buy here in Suriname, none of them are legitimate copies. All imported from china with horrible Chinglish summaries and fake credits and DVD information on the back you can buy your very own copy of a popular DVD from SRD$4-$8 which roughly translates to about €1-2 each. This makes me quite happy and I’ve already started rebuilding my DVD collection with Chinese rip-offs with humorous back sleeves.

Just a few days ago, I saw something that rather disturbed me, A 12 year old girl sitting outside a children’s house smoking what appeared to be crack. Quite troubling actually and it really made me realize the state that a lot of children here in Suriname are in. The children’s house was old, probably at least 50 or 60 years old, made of wood. Had no closing windows and was leaning quite a bit up on the 4th floor. It looked like it could seriously just fall over in a matter of a few minutes. There was no place for the children to play outside and the street in front of it was full of litter and homeless dogs and crazy homeless people. It most definitely wasn’t a place for children to live and it made me wonder why they didn’t build it out in the country. It also made me think about what I could do for them with the help of just a few US organizations by building something in the country for them so they had a yard to play in and a way to farm to make money. Being that all of the current children houses I’ve
seen are in the city, it makes it hard for me to volunteer because of the distance to them every day. It makes me more focused on helping to open a better one in the future however and perhaps giving some children something better to live in than a place like that.