Why do you think Guyanese do so well in all these countries to which we migrate? We show up in the professional ranks, we succeed in business, we end up as professors all over the place, stand out in universities. We’re bank managers, and lawyers, and we star as professional athletes and entertainers. What’s the source of all that? You’ll probably get fifty different answers from fifty different people to that question.
My take is that it is partly the dynamic culture we own that we take with us wherever we go, and partly that we have come through a crucible in this country that has basically prepared us to handle anything they can throw at us outside. Poor working conditions in a plant in Philadelphia or New York? Don’t make me laugh. After dealing with the working conditions you see in GT, that stuff out there is a breeze.
Guyana is a crucible; if you live in it, you become tempered.
Setbacks don’t stall us. When you see the white people getting upset because of a breakdown, our boys are in there improvising. We learned that by necessity back home where, if you wait for the part to come from Miami, or worse yet Japan, your work can be stalled for weeks, so you go to a machine shop in Industry and they make one for you.
In order to survive, Guyanese have learned to laugh at everything. Just last week with the return of the rains and some flooding in town, a Guyanese told me, “Look how sweet this country is: you can come to town and fish.”
We’ve learned to roll with the punches, and we deal with conditions that may deter others in the developed world; we learned that back home, dealing with the lineups when they close the Harbour Bridge; the improvised boards over the trench when water is high; waiting in the hot sun by the Passport Office. We have learned patience and forbearance from situations we encounter almost daily, and these things stand us in good stead in the more competitive business world we find when we migrate.
We have learned not to give up. We have been tempered.
Anybody who has spent considerable time in our interior can attest to the difficult, even hazardous conditions one can encounter travelling there. There are times when you are literally breaking trail.
There is a short video floating about on the internet that typifies the almost impossible conditions of passage we can meet in the interior of Guyana when we venture into the wild. In this particular video, my friend Bernard Ramsay and three of his buddies are shown negotiating his 4WD vehicle over what can only be described as a chasm, some 30 feet below. On both sides, the track (it wasn’t even a trail) leading to the bridge was like a minefield – a span of wet mud with enormous holes and very little traction. Worse yet, the structure over the creek was the skeleton of the broken bridge; a derelict structure with timbers broken and entire sections missing; even a goat couldn’t traverse it. Anybody in their right mind would have turned back.
However, the young men weren’t fazed. Using limbs cut from nearby trees they constructed a wooden substrate through the mud and began slowly winching the vehicle forward along the track. At the bridge itself everything looked hopeless, but then improvisation came into play. Using pieces of the few sound remaining planks, they would jack up the 4WD, winch it forward over the wood, lower the vehicle, move the wood forward a few inches, jack up and winch again – each manoeuvre covering a few inches of progress. Every move was dangerous. Everything was covered in wet mud. At any moment, the whole thing could give way. The vehicle would often be balanced precariously or leaning. Often, it seemed to be on the verge of going over. But gradually, over several hours, inch by inch, the Ramsay crew got to the other side – exhausted, bloodied, beat up, but successful.
Going through those ordeals explains why Guyanese like Bernard Ramsay and his buddies succeed when they migrate. They can handle anything life outside throws at them; they have come through the crucible that is Guyana.
I talked about that in my recent show in St Lucia; about seeing a man on the Railway Road, on a single bicycle, with his daughter on the handle-bars, a small son right behind her on the front of the cross bar, the wife on the back of the cross bar, and the father on the saddle. Four people; one bicycle; going up the road. It struck me later that, if necessary, he had room for one more – on the carrier at the back.
People such as Bernard Ramsay, and the man moving four on a bike, and the banna doing good carpentry with only a saw, a hammer and a chisel, leave here equipped to handle anything the boss man, or life itself, asks them to tackle outside. The TV evangelist Bishop TD Jacques is always preaching about what we gain from adversity, and you see it in spades in this nation. Tough times have tempered us as a people.
A few years back I was the guest speaker at the Florida/ Guyana Association in Orlando and essentially I made the point that, unrecognized by many, our culture had been a large factor in our success in other countries. The resolve to work through tough times; the ability to laugh; the ability to improvise; the ability to persevere; these were all qualities Guyana had instilled in us without our even being aware of the process. In that melee back home we had developed the attributes that were now the foundation of our success abroad.
The next day, I met one of those success stories – a businesswoman who owned, with her husband, a very successful supermarket in Orlando. She pulled me aside; she was quite emotional, and she said, “I heard your speech, and what you said is true. The things that made my husband and me succeed in New York and now here; we came from Guyana with that. I never thought of it before, but I recognise it now.” She had tears in her eyes.
There are many of us outside like that; doing well, tempered by the crucible.
