More memories of Suriname

A couple of other memories of Suriname, my dad had found a place where there was a little ramshackle hut that was on the road to Paranam, he found out that you could stop there and he could get a bag of 100 oranges for very cheap and they were really good oranges, and he learned that about every other week he would stop and get a bag of about 100 oranges and about 50 grapefruit, it took about two sometimes three weeks to go through all that fruit. We found that we kind of had to hold back on eating fruit too much because it was wrecking habit on our systems. But we enjoyed the fruit it was delicious. He could sometimes get a whole bunch of bananas, bananas actually grow up they don't hang down they actually grow up. One time he got stock of bananas, unfortunately, they all become ripe at the same time. He didn't do that again, but it was fun to have a whole stock of bananas there in the house. 

When we were living in Suriname, we were introduced to cockroaches that were plentiful, and that was not so wonderful, and later on, when we were living in Jamaica, I noticed that cockroaches were huge and there was a lot them, you just had to get used to them. 

So, we were there in Suriname for about 20 months. We actually lived in two different houses while we were there. We started out in a three-bedroom house. Since we had five kids, in a four-bedroom house when it became available, then we moved over to that. 

One of the things that were kind of interesting - that they didn't have Christmas trees there in Suriname, so we got a little metallic silver Christmas tree that you’d put together, but we couldn’t put any lights on it because we would have been electrocuted. We had this little metallic Christmas tree. 

When my dad was working for Alcoa, every year he would get 30 days plus travel time to the home city of your choice in the United States. And they would pay the airfare one-way for your family and you would pay the other way. Every summer when school was out, mom would load up all of the kids, and mom and dad would fly into Salt Lake City Utah and we would spend a month with families: Grandma's and grandpa's and aunts and uncles and other members the family. Also going camping that was something that we enjoyed doing. That was very fun.”