A Guyanese businessman with a social conscience is setting an example that has won him plaudits in his own community while contributing significantly to easing one of the capital’s most enduring problems, that of garbage collection and disposal.
Gregory Fraser is the owner of two trucks both of which are contracted to the Georgetown City Council to support the removal of mud, silt and grass generated by the municipality’s desilting of canals and the cleaning of parapets around Georgetown.
Recently, he took a bold decision to place his resources at the disposal of the communities of Wortmanville and Werk-en-Rust in an effort to tackle the garbage crisis in those communities.
Following discussions with municipal officials Fraser takes one of his trucks out of commercial service every other Sunday to make it available to those communities to help in the disposal of garbage some of which has been piling up for years.
The service which Fraser offers at his own expense and which includes two paid handymen to assist in the operation does not target day-to-day household garbage. Instead, the service seeks to tackle the removal of refuse which he says, the Council’s garbage disposal service does not handle – disused items of furniture, kitchen and other appliances long past their best days and forgotten piles of old tyres, zinc sheets and rotting wood which serve no purpose save and except as eyesores and as ideal homes for vermin.
The service is all the more valuable since, according to Fraser, there are no alternative plans for the removal of the mountains of refuse with which the people of the affected communities have simply learnt to live. “It would surprise you to know how much of this kind of stuff is lying around on parapets, in yards and under houses.
Apart from the fact that these things have become an eyesore, they are a serious health hazard. They are there, permanently, for years and the people who are responsible for disposing of them cannot afford the cost of such an exercise,” Fraser told Stabroek Business.
The community-minded Fraser, himself a resident of Wortmanville, has decided that enough is enough. “The people of these communities who already have other major challenges to deal with cannot be expected to live this way forever.”
So, every other Sunday, from as early as 7 am Fraser gets into one of his trucks and, along with his two handymen, places this vital service at the disposal of the people of these communities. He says that on any Sunday the truck makes as many as four trips to the garbage disposal site, painstakingly covering the community, yard by yard, parapet by parapet, requiring only that residents support the initiative by helping to place the material on the truck for haulage to the disposal site.
Fraser declines to say how much the operation costs him, declaring that “money is not the issue” in his mission to give back to his community. “The point is that I believe in what I am doing. Helping people who cannot help themselves has its own payback.”
The operation has been ongoing for several weeks and the volume of garbage is so substantial that it is yet to completely cover the Wortmanville area. At the moment the exercise is focussed on the Bent street area, between Haley and Hardina streets and Fraser is asking residents of other areas in the two communities to prepare for the arrival of his truck.
He has visited homes in the Wortmanville community, spoken with the residents and, he says, “people have responded.” They form small work crews to support the effort to rid their own premises of the encumbrances that have blighted their surroundings, in some cases, for years.
Fraser says he is uncertain as to how long the exercise will take. “There are times when refuse from a single yard will fill the truck so that very often we only cover a relatively small area in a single day. But I am determined to keep it going. It is the least that I can do.” And even as he pursues this singularly noteworthy exercise in corporate social responsibility Fraser says that he is eyeing a few eyesores on parapets in areas of the adjoining community of Lodge which he plans to have removed.
Asked whether he felt that his initiative was deserving of support from other sections of the business community Fraser says that he was not necessarily seeking to “set an example” for anyone else to follow. “It’s a matter of conscience,” he says, “and at any rate I am sure that there are other businessmen who are contributing in their own particular ways.”
Fraser told Stabroek Business, however, that he believes, that there are other practical ways in which help can be extended. He cited what he said was a long-standing sewerage problem in a section of the Wortmanville community. “The people there are desperately in need of urgent intervention from the (Guyana Water Incorporated (GWI)) to remedy a long-standing defect in the system that has resulted in the flow of sewage through the drainage system. “Children in the area have been known to fall ill and although I spoke with the GS&WC (now part of GWI) about the problem more than a year ago they are yet to honour their promise to remedy the problem. If that can be fixed it would be more than adequate compensation for the little contribution that I am making,” Fraser says.
In a society where the general perception of business is that it is solely about profit Gregory Fraser holds a diametrically opposing view. “What I am doing is not only about helping people it is also about good sense. After all, whether you are a businessman or just an ordinary citizen all of us are affected by the common problems of the society in which we live,” he says.