Me in Toronto, my child in London and our country
Kaieteur News – My daughter got the first brush with danger in her country after she recently returned from graduate studies in London. I knew one day it was going to happen. It’s going to happen to people who are powerful, powerful with money or authority. By authority, I mean top politicians, judges, army and police officers and diplomats.
It was last Friday. I took my daughter and the family dog up the East Coast to show her how Guyana is rearranging. I told her from our home on the Railway Embankment in Turkeyen that, to the end of Region 4, big Chinese supermarkets dot the landscape.
So we started our journey to see a changing Guyana. We saw traffic cops blocking random people. I told her that the adviser to the Minister for Home Affairs, Harry Gill, has promised me that he will ensure that that does not happen. We saw a rapidly deteriorating Railway Embankment that is going to destroy small cars like the one I have.
On our return trip, at about 05.05 pm, just outside my home – Railway Embankment and AS Road, there was complete chaos. This guy with a sandwich in his mouth turned his head over to our car and my daughter screamed and I called him to stop. The pile was large and drivers could not move. Guess why?
For four years, (yes four, I live there so I know), the signals have stopped working. In 2019, one night, I carried out a severe punishment against Minister David Patterson, who was the subject minister at the time. I yelled out; “Repair the traffic lights up the road.” I was replacing my friend Raymond Persaud, an engineer at Ogle airport whose house is next to the AFC head office. Patterson was having beer in Raymond’s small shop in front of his home. Patterson never repaired the signals, but found time to repair a gold bracelet on his hand.
When my daughter screamed, thoughts of how I felt how she would change when my wife and I dropped off at the airport came to my mind. I knew it would change because that’s what happens to all of us when we mix with other cultures of other countries. After leaving Guyana for postgraduate study in Canada, my life was forever transformed. I was never the same after I lived in Toronto. I saw how different the peoples of this world are.
I left Guyana with my wife, who was already open to other societies because she had studied in Canada before. Then I was a person who knew nothing about the world except Georgetown where I had spent my whole life. I was a Marxist, in favor of Cuba, thinking white people were basically racist and proud of being Third World, Caribbean and dark complexion.
Canada expanded my horizons. I met nice White folks who wanted to do me good. I met teachers who were genuinely sympathetic to non-white people. I saw a university culture at McMaster University and the University of Toronto that was basically gracious and positive, hardly what I saw when I was an AS student. I saw governments in Canada that were democratic, accountable and transparent. Living in Canada and seeing how governance was being practiced, President Burnham in my eyes was nothing but a monster.
I know how I became different after Canada, and when I saw my little girl leaving for the United Kingdom, I know I won’t see the same psychological makeup of that child that my wife grew up with mine. I know like her father in Canada, the UK will redo it forever. So he said, so good! The first email we received was the nice treat at the airport. He said the immigration officer had just checked his student visa and put the stamp in her passport.
Clearly, he knew she was cleared from the Guyana side so why bother with the questions. Not so in Guyana. If an Icelandic student comes to Guyana to attend AS, even with a visa, immigration will grill that person. He / she will have to tell our immigration officer which side of the road the Icelandic people drive on. AS lecturers and students are rarely accommodated. The second email we received was how easy it was to open a bank account. And the emails were a tribute to how bureaucracy works smoothly and how nice Londoners are. She came back to Guyana and almost lost her life outside her home because in the 21st century, traffic signals don’t work. What’s psychologically terrifying about this nation’s collective psyche is that every Guyanese see that horror as normal life.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)