Katie's story, part one: The numbing

Paul and Katie Watkins

By Katie Watkins, Guyana, 2006-2008     

     A Guyanese newspaper stopped the door of the hotel room as it swung open. Looking down the hallway of our temporary refuge, I saw a copy at the foot of each door, complimentary gifts for our patronage. 

     “12 Killed in Bartica Massacre.” “Security officials clueless after Bartica Mayhem.” “Murderous Rampage Stuns Bartica.” The oversized boldfaced headlines looked small when paired with the photographs vying for front page space. The bodies of our neighbors had been transferred from the police vehicle to a wooden speed boat for transport to the capital. The picture showed a team of men in plainclothes and latex gloves passing the bodies into the boat.

     Drops of blood speckled the bow of the vessel, inches from the flip flop sandal of one of the workers.  One arm spilled over the edge, its stiffened elbow resting on the ledge of the boat. 

     Clusters of women embraced one another, wives and relatives of the slain. A pair of plump arms wrapped stoutly around a torso, her hands squeezing tightly. No captions were needed below the faces. A woman’s wailing screamed from the page, her breast muffling the cries of the woman she held against her.

     Paul and I had rarely talked about our observations, or our emotional reactions to what happened around us. During our first weeks in country, we had shared a sense of self-consciousness, feeling somewhat inferior when we compared our past experiences and backgrounds with those of other eighteen volunteers. Both products of blue collar families, our parents’ jobs as a nurse, mechanic, and aluminum factory worker made us feel out of place in the presence of our peers, many of whose parents held prestigious positions as college professors, doctors and lawyers.  

    For one of the “getting to know you activities,” the facilitators had pulled lines from our resumes and compiled them on a piece of paper. We were then asked to talk to each other to find out from whose resume each fact had been taken. Later in our hotel room, Paul and I laughed as we recalled the enormous achievements of our cohorts. “Spent a summer at the World Bank.” “Managed a urology practice.” “Traveled through Southeast Asia and worked at an orphanage for children with AIDS.”
     Paul and I joked that our being accepted must have been some sort of mistake. “You ‘worked at a day camp and wiped asses in a nursing home’? What a loser!” We finally settled on the theory that we must have filled some sort of  “Midwest White Trash Quota.” 

     This insecurity faded fast, as we realized past experiences provided few useful strategies in this new game we were playing. One afternoon, Paul sat reading on the veranda, his favorite spot of our host family’s home, where we spent our first two months. Across the street, a man walked unsteadily along a zinc roof and fell over the edge, his head cracking against the pavement of the ground below. 

     Hearing the crash, a group of people scurried to gather around him. The group screamed at a taxi driver who refused to transport the injured man. He did not want the blood and dirt to soil his meticulously well-kept cloth backseat. Finally, the driver complied with what had quickly turned from desperate pleas to threat-filled commands to take the man to the hospital. Paul sat and watched from his perch above, stunned, as the bloody, unconscious body was heaved into the backseat of the car. He heard the driver cursing as he slammed the car door, pressed hard on the gas pedal and sped off, spraying the bystanders with dust and pebbles. Paul sat motionless on the veranda, the entrails spilling from the man’s cracked skull onto the ground an image inscribed in his memory.

     Once while waiting for a boat, I watched a group of four men stumble through the sand, lugging a tattered wooden coffin. They stopped halfway up the shore to meet another group of men who were carrying an empty coffin of the same size. As if trading cargo, the men opened the lid of the coffin, pulled out the dead man, and flung the corpse into the replacement coffin. The men exchanged pleasantries, laughed and slapped each other on the back, parting ways as if old friends. I looked around, sure that I could not be the only person who had seen this event as grossly disturbing. A woman held a toddler on her lap, drinking a Coca Cola through a straw. A man ate plantain chips and talked on a cell phone. Business as usual. 

     Laughing to myself, I shrugged, chalking it up, as I did often, to another, “did that really just happen?” moment.

     It was indeed, an entirely new world. In this bizarre and unfamiliar place, what was once weird was now typical, what anywhere else would have been macabre was commonplace. It was all normal. Normal was a half-naked drunk man dancing jovially in the street at two in the afternoon, a stampede of spitting donkeys blazing through the town on their way to an unknown destination, a family of five somehow piled on a tiny motor bike puttering up the dusty hill.  

     Normal was babies killed by jaundice, men who went to the bush in search of gold returning instead with AIDS, piercing epidural-free bellows of 90-pound fifteen-year-olds heard a half mile away. Normal was walking down the street to buy bread and hearing, “Oh baby, me wan’ fuck you bad bad.” Insanity was normal. Death was normal. Pain was normal. And this new normal had become my home.   

     Dropping the opened newspaper onto the dresser, I felt morbid when I thought of the tiny details I had noticed. The arm flung over the side of the boat. The sandal scooting over droplets of blood. The short pudgy fingers of the howling woman. This keen sense of scrutiny, a personality trait of which I had once been proud, had dulled over the course of the two years. 

     I came to Guyana an observant explorer, eager to absorb all that was around me. I came wanting to soak up every sensation, every smell, taste, sound, and emotion. But I soon learned to prioritize my responses, taking in only what was necessary, numbing myself to the rest. I developed the ability to filter my experiences, a way to avoid making sense of the senseless. 

     Being hard became our means of getting by, an anesthesia that allowed us to exist without bearing the pain around us. What Paul saw from the veranda marked the beginning of a steady process of desensitization, an expertise we shared but must have decided was better left unacknowledged. 

     He told me later that what he saw that day had been a turning point in his experience, that what he witnessed had somehow changed him in a way he could not quite explain. “I just knew that life was going to be different here. Chaos and pain and destruction became a reality and I knew I would probably be seeing more of it, that it would become normal. I was living in an entirely new world, unlike anything I had seen before. I knew I would never be the same again and it felt strange.”

     Paul’s premonition, though difficult to articulate at the time, turned out to be quite accurate. Experiences we could never have imagined became a part of our everyday lives. The open newspaper on the dresser echoed that, telling the stories of the people who’d survived, piecing together small details two days later.

     But we didn’t need their accounts to know what happened. We were there.

Coming next, part 2: ... Tapping our feet to the festive beat of reggae music blaring throughout the riverfront bar, we finally allowed ourselves to relax.  Generously treating one another to rounds of beers, we talked and joked and laughed away any stress or worry that might have remained from the day, and symbolically, from the two years. Peeling the cool soggy label from my bottle, my thoughts wandered from the group and I paused briefly to take it all in. 

     I thought of the two years, packed full of tragedy and heartache and, equally, with joyous memories like this one. My eyes met Paul’s and we smiled slightly, as we often did in crowds. Our affection had always been discreet. This was our secret acknowledgement, so subtle that only we were meant to notice it, so special that only we could understand it.  “This is it,” I thought. “This is how I want to remember it.”