Dear Editor,
I want back my Bartica with seven avenues and nine streets and roads that lead to Caribiese, Byderabo and the “Line”.
I want the T&HD stelling to be a place to greet the coming or wave goodbye to the MV Powis or MV Barima, not a place for execution by a firing squad.
I want back the respect of the District Commissioner Office with moored boats swaying in the Essequibo, an adjoining Police Station and Post Office serving a united community, not a building transformed into a slaughterhouse for gunmen.
I want back my towering clock with greeting faces looking up and down First Avenue and up and down Third Street smiling at lively people, warm and friendly going about their business; not dials foreseeing a time when precious lives would be brutally and senselessly snuffed out.
I want back the innocence of swimming by the bandstand; diving in the bazra for sunken treasure; plunging from M 2-13 Boat House; racing to the beacon, onto the sandbank; collecting shells and some times swimming onto Kaow Island; not dreading the sound of an outboard engine and wondering who they are coming for or how many bodies they have left in their wake.
I want back JJ High School, St John the Baptist, St Anthony’s, Secondary School at the Community Centre; learning patriotic songs, preparing for nation building, embracing good morals nurturing the things of youth; not schools that develop minds that blossom into boy killers with little respect for humanity. I want back football, cricket and stool ball at the community centre; lawn tennis at the hospital compound, table tennis at Hotel Karia, Stations of the Cross and steel band tramping in the streets; not streets that contain pools of blood from those who mistakenly felt protected by an approaching police vehicle, but instead were cut down by a hail of bullets.
I want back First Avenue on Saturday nights not a First Avenue Sunday night OK Corral. I want back the amphibious aluminium Grumman airplane, and an airstrip with soldiers at the ready at Five Miles not unavailable protection for a town totally vulnerable to the most mind boggling form of abuse.
I used to fear I had lost my Bartica with cherished childhood memories to the imported culture of foreign gold miners, to drug traders and money launderers stimulating a parallel economy, to a get-rich-quick syndrome taking priority over a decent education and moral upbringing, to feting and vulgarity embraced above Sunday mass or crusade, to the aspiration to be my brother’s keeper; a forgotten, laughable ethos.
I thought my Bartica could recover from all this and turn back to my idyll.
Now sadly, I think it is lost forever.
Could someone please tell me I am wrong — and let me have my Bartica back?
Yours faithfully,
Derrick Cummings
