Our local slum...

Although French Guiana is part of France, the world's fifth largest economy, it is located in South America and is surrounded by utter destitution. Our two neighboring countries, Surinam and Brazil, are facing great challenges to create decent living conditions for their average citizens. To increase the disparities, French Guiana offers free health care, unemployment money and a higher-learning educational system which costs barely nothing. In this manner, French Guiana has become a magnet to attract large waves of poor immigrants from throughout South America and the Caribbean. The problem is that the population is exploding : France also gives every family money depending on the number of children they have... the more children, the more money. Making babies has thus become a business here : pregnancies often start while in junior high school or high school and many families have between 8 and 13 children. (Incidentally, having 8 children pays about 1,500 euros per month... That's the salary I earned when I started my career as a teacher.)

It's all happening too fast. There's just not enough housing being built to accomodate for the rapid rise in population. As a result, people build slums to settle in-- anywhere and everywhere.

In order to go to the grocery store from our apartment,  we have to drive through a slum which is just a few minutes away from where we live. At first, it appears almost normal... (click on images to enlarge)

 Most of the inhabitants here are from Haiti or Brazil which is often proudly displayed.

Some houses almost look normal...

But it keeps getting worse as you go down the street.

As none of these houses have an official address, the inhabitants just buy a mail box and install it alongside the main road. No wonder mail is so slow in French Guiana!

Worst of all are the environmental and sanitary problems of our slums. There's no evacuation of sewege, little running water, and electricity is hacked from city power lines.... as a result, there are often power malfunctions or outages and other residents down the line have to pay for the stolen electricity on their bill.

Garbage collection is also a problem. The city organizes rounds for the garbage trucks to collect what they can. However, many of the slum inhabitants also litter and throw their garbage in mounds along the roadside.

Is the French government capable of handling this situation in French Guiana? What can we do? Help!

The homeowner's blues...

Buying an appartment in French Guiana has been a very disappointing experience. We quickly realized that there was no trusting the lady real estate agent who sold us the house. Her promises of an apartment in nearly perfect shape were either lies or incompetency. Within days of moving in, the apartment began to fall apart.

The toilet leaked; two ceiling lights stopped working; my bedroom window handle came off in my hands; two plugs don't function; Jack's air conditioning in his bedroom stopped working; the garden gate fell down when we opened it...

And now this! One day, Jack and I were appalled to discover our back yard flooded. (Click on photos to enlarge)

Worse still, the strong stench made us think it was sewege water. We immediately called the residence's management and our insurance but unfortunately, as this is French Guiana, there's nothing much to be done.

When the waters had finally dried up, we took another look in our back yard and found the culprit.

A broken pipe!

After some help from our building's maintenance man, we discovered that the pipe brings dirty rain water into our garden. Actually, the pipe should continue into the sewer but apparently it was never attached to anything.

The bad news is that our insurance doesn't cover this incident AND they've told us we're not allowed to touch the pipes that go through our garden because they belong to our residence complex. We're currently waiting for the constructor's insurance company to expertise the problem. Normally, they should recognize their error and correct it. That is to say, normally... as we're in French Guiana we've got little chance and little protection, thus little real hope.