Dear Editor,
It is perhaps the most peaceful Sunday in Guyana for as long as anyone can remember! I’m talking about your edition of September 6. Your perception of what constitutes news is your educated decision, but my choice for a front-page ‘headline’ would have been your feature relative to “coastal home owners” in Australia, etc. Those from Waini to Crabwood Creek are at risk, so does it matter that you are in this together with the rest of us?
It is perhaps divine intervention that in this month of celebrating the heritage of our native family that your feature on coastal home-owners resonates with the need for all from the coast in Guyana to move further inland now. Beginning with Orealla on the Corentyne, to the Waini there are 12 Amerindian settlements, and of those 7 on the west bank of the Essequibo between Ituribisi and Mabaruma are the ones closest to the shoreline. The reason for this is simple, the west side of the Essequibo is much higher than the coast from the east bank of Essequibo to Corentyne.
‘Coastal home owners face huge losses from rising seas’ is headline news any day of the week in Guyana, and this is stating the obvious. I’m not sure how it is perceived by those whose lives have anchored them in what is now to be seen as the ‘danger zone’ of Guyana. All that is required is the moon’s influence at any high tide, and a rogue wave that will not be known as such by the time it hit the shores of GY since it will have been reduced to just one rush of the ocean from the gravitational agitation of the moon during a high tide – and that will be all she wrote!
Of course who am I to prognosticate on such devastation? And it would seem as though not even the former Chancellor of UG, Dr Ramcharran, writing on what he considers an “emergency” facing the people of Guyana is of any value to anyone in Guyana at the moment. It should be at the very top of the Government of Guyana’s priorities for the people’s sake, and you as the nation’s leading source of rational news should be the gallant bearer of the banner to get the masses clamouring for the GoG to act now to move the nation from the perils of the rising seas.
I leave you all with this from Cecil: “Wisdom prepares for the worst, but folly leaves the worst for the day when it comes.”
Yours faithfully,
Michael Tannassee
