Dear Editor,

With reference to your editorial of Sunday, 28th March, 2010 allow me to tell you that when I was a youth attending Central High under the supervision of Rudy Luck and Martin Carter etc. one day while passing through Eve Leary there was this parade of BG policemen and there was this gentleman with coat and tie taking a picture of the parade. We -myself and two other students – watched in awe as the man took the just taken picture out of his camera and then I learned about Polaroid. When we spoke to the man with the modern camera we found out he was an American and he said something about ‘you boys have such a neat little city hidden away here’. At that time people out of the West Indies knew nothing about Guiana – and even now, it is not much different. When I was in Canada last November I visited the Old Curiosity Tea Shop on Markham road where almost everything in that tea shop is of Dickens’ time. The fireplace, the piano, the tea pots, the cups and saucers etc and when I told the attendant I know about Charles Dickens and he inquired where I was from and I told him Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America, he did not know of it even though he knew of Brazil and Venezuela.

And before independence a visitor to British Guiana commented that our zoo then was the best in the Caribbean; well those were the days.

Anyway I am indeed pleased you have used space in your newspaper to bring to the attention of the public the sorry state of the animals and their unnatural habitat in the Guyana zoological park and I hope someone will set about starting a fund locally and internationally to bring back the glory of the Guyana zoo. And after the local government election the people who will manage Georgetown will make an effort to bring it back to almost what it was when I met the man with the Polaroid camera.

Yours faithfully,
W.P. George