Dear Editor,
It was my first experience of Linden in the night, and more importantly of Christmas Eve night.
Having parked our car Larry and I walked a fair distance before venturing into the straggling crowd which peered through the half-dark, ritually late-shopping in the cramped river front area where the stalls, shops and other vendors were hopefully offering wares of variable quality to a frustratingly small proportion of cautious buyers of limited volumes.
Yet the space was crowded, with mostly young people, desperately trying to exude an excitement to match the usual seasonal expectations. They trudged back and forth, sometimes caught in chaotic queues that moved slowly, insensitively blocking the proportionately small procession of vehicles whose drivers seemed resigned to waiting – waiting for Christmas!
Young men in the discernible uniform of armless singlets and jeans of various lengths, ambled through the ‘crowd’ on obviously fashionable ‘sneakers’, too often the worse for wear. Women – the more adult comfortable with their obesity; the younger still slim but with the promise (or threat) of weight surrounding carelessly exposed waistlines between tight tops and inevitably tighter jeans, risked open-ended, slightly built sandals, over the uneven terrain.
Family groups, or alone, they jostled each other along narrow and mostly makeshift pathways moving towards, then tentatively stopping at, the market stalls, each of which offered, almost dejectedly, the same items for sale.
Threading through the ill-designed jigsaw of what passed for a municipal market, was hardly a stimulating experience. Hawkers called out from poorly lit facilities, as we stumbled over mounds of garbage the stench of which alone indicated their presence in the dispiriting darkness. There was also the overpowering evidence of unconstructed urinals somewhere in the vicinity.
As we hurried past, on our way back to our parked car we could not help but reflect on the emptiness we had observed in the ‘crowded’ shopping area; the hopelessness which underlay the superficial excitement of a Christmas Eve; the pervasive evidence of poverty even of those who wended their way home, with plastic bags heavy with Christmas wishes and dishes.
This was not the Linden we knew of a decade or more ago. This was not a community to whom with any sincerity one could extend the substantive promise of a prosperous New Year.
The Christmas season with its inducement to self-indulgence, particularly amidst the depression, the like of which just described, has always served to heighten my sensitivity to the inequity in opportunities, lifestyles, and abilities to translate New Year’s promises into reality.
In such a contemplative mood it was more difficult than usual to go to sleep on Christmas Eve night 2006. I resorted to my battered old shortwave radio – accidentally to come upon a programme of western Christmas songs from, of all places, Vietnam. Listening was a soothing and restorative experience. The sincerity of the presentation lifted the spirit and the earlier sense of despair. Sleeping afterwards was less troubled.
Christmas Day at Dalgin, twenty minutes drive from Linden along the highway was a pleasant contrast to the previous night – a neat, flowering and fruitful thirty acre farm, where we joined the Jones family for late Christmas Lunch that eventually lasted into the night – a beautiful, dark night, lit only by a small battery lamp, the brightness of which seemed to be reflected in the clear skies overhead. The almost total quietness was intermittently broken by the rattle of mini-buses racing past at high speed, and risking lives.
Family and friends ate and drank in contentment and in the certainty of indulging in similar moments of camaraderie the next year round.
It was Larry’s first Guyanese Christmas in thirty-five years.
Welcome Home!
Yours faithfully,
E. B. John
