As Caribbean nationals (a group of women and men) whose stays in Guyana have in the past ranged from two decades to two years, we are constantly surprised by how differently Guyana sees itself compared to how the rest of the Caribbean sees it, yet how similar we all are in a wider sense. We decided to come together to offer our observations on Guyana from a Caribbean satirical perspective in this occasional series tentatively titled ‘Despatches from the Mainland’.
Water is always a good place to start in a place like Guyana. Man, it everywhere and we mean EVERYWHERE. The gods really did like Guyana more than all the Caribbean islands: They blessed it with seas 5 feet higher than the land plus TWO rainy seasons. Talk about showers (and floods!) of blessings! Always a shock to whoever visits Guyana for the first time. Oh mighty waters in the land of too much water, why confine yourself to three of the biggest rivers in South America, the backdams, the canals, the trenches and the conservancies when you can be in other places too – like in our yards, in our President’s yard, under our houses, on our floors, on our footpaths, on our bora plants, on our President’s bora plants, outside fashionable cafes, everywhere and looking nice and clear too except in our blasted taps!
When Guyanese see rivers in Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, Trinidad, you can see the unbridled glee in their faces, and I mean a real laugh like in the rest of the Caribbean – you rarely see Guyanese laugh that much in Guyana. But just mention a river in one of those countries. The full-throated, bordering on ecstatic response is usually along the lines of ‘(suck teeth), you never see river yet, man’, or ‘wha kind of trench is duh’, or if they really want to impress you, ‘Man I swim down the entire length of Essequibo and back in a day!’ Poor hapless small Caribbean island person looking suitably impressed, having not realized that the Essequibo can probably fit all of the Eastern Caribbean islands inside and still have some room left over for Bermuda, The Bahamas, and the Cayman Islands, so put that in your water pipe and smoke it, small islander! Memo to visitors: If the Guyanese man or woman you are talking to looks depressed (green card didn’t come through, beaten up by a rogue policeman and thrown into the Brickdam lockups for no good reason, barrel didn’t arrive, bad-minded people stole their mail in the post office, CANU searched their suitcase and broke their pepper sauce bottle), cheer them up by telling them about how Jamaica or Grenada has some of the biggest rivers ever. I swear you’ll see smiles as wide as the Essequibo itself and thoughts of no pepper sauce for relatives’ curry mutton and hassa and cook-up rice during cold winter nights in Queens will dissipate.
With apologies to all our dear Guyanese cooperative-, progressive- and grassroots -socialist friends/cadres (not to mention all those well-meaning international organizations busy in the region trying to help us achieve our development goals), our humble thesis is that water – not money or revolution or ‘green cards’ or even death – is the great social equalizer in Guyana. Every rainy season, each family is guaranteed its free minimum flood allocation/ration of at least 2 feet height. No corruption, bribery or discrimination on the grounds of race or gender or sexuality is involved, it’s democratic, transparent (well, sometimes transparent!), fair and just: Everyone receives it, AND best of all, no Commonwealth Observer Team or Independent Monitoring Unit is needed. Four things you can be sure of in a Guyanese life: death, taxes, black-outs and floods. And to think, you wasted all those years and money almost freezing your behind to death in Moscow studying Gramsci, Marx, Engels, Che and Fidel in the Sierra Maestra and class warfare at Lumumba University, using big words like ‘Hegelian’, ‘epistemological’ , ‘praxis’ and ‘proletariat’ when the answer was right here 12,000 miles away at home swirling all around your yards! Water…..ahhhhhh…… Your dear, erudite, visionary President should really consider locking up Georgetown, throwing the key over the sea-wall (throw it far out: Too close and it might wash back over with the high tide) and moving everyone to beautiful, safer and higher Bartica. Not even he is spared: Just look at his yard in the rainy season! Not a good impression for visiting Kuwaiti and Norwegian Prime Ministers, really, is it? No matter how much he whitewashes those walls, the damned water is guaranteed to rise (and rise, and rise) and brown it up again. Save yourself the paint money, Your Excellency, let’s hear it for Bartica 2030!
Seriously, between us we have travelled to every country in the Caribbean, poor, medium, big, small, and one of the questions that always stumps us is this: How come, after 40-odd years of Independence and gazillions of dollars, it is only in Guyana that the water deliberately chooses to be brown with questionable things occasionally wriggling? Leaving aside for a moment the ‘we-have-more-silt-than-you-with-all-your-canals-that-you-call-rivers’ explanation, we refuse to blame the government or Guyana Water Incorporated (GWI). They are all pretty decent guys who travel all over the world busting their behinds for the Golden Arrowhead and when they get back they just do not have daily experience of it. They deserve the best as they are working so hard, you see. It’s not really their fault if you cannot afford the bottled stuff. Get a better paying job you lazy layabouts, then you can have crystal clear spring water from the upper reaches of the mercury-free Mazaruni too…
Don’t even let us go into the accumulating loss of lovely white laundry that seems to acquire a nice rust shade in a matter of weeks or months (depending on how good or bad a week GWI is having). How many of you get really angry or blasted vex about this? Never mind about how expensive clothes are. Think about it, if we wanted rust/tan coloured clothing, we’d buy them alright, Mr. Fancy Water Engineer! We don’t want GWI becoming our clothes colour co-ordinator too, OK?. We are paying good money for this stuff, so deliver the goods but hold the fauna and flora please! Now we just have to pop over to the lovely Bhena shoe shop to find some nice tan shoes to match our new…er …‘tan’ wardrobe. Some of it doesn’t look too bad, come to think of it. And what of ever so nice, unfailingly polite Guyanese friends and acquaintances when we mention the new tan wardrobe? Zilch. Nada. Zero. We’re like, how come you guys avoid buying white clothes, it’s a beautiful tropical country, you should be wearing more white, or is that…er…tan?
When we are also in Guyana we look to eat healthy and it’s true we all need protein in our diets every day. But we never thought we would be getting it from our taps. Having nightmares now since the story of that poor old lady in Corentyne whose tap recently offered up a dead snake and big worm on different days. Not sure, did she ever get a rebate from GWI for introducing ‘wildlife’ into the deal? Memo to GWI: Leave wildlife issues to the Zoo, okay?
We know your President sympathizes with us visitors to your lovely brown shores, referring only last week to Prime Ministers Golding, Manning et al constantly moaning about leaky air conditioning units flooding their rooms last Summit. He might like this story: Two visiting consultants ran down, ashen-faced and in a panic to the front desk of a well known Georgetown hotel informing the staff that there was a grave problem in their bathroom. The receptionist went up, the consultant opened the tap, the brown stuff flowed out, a bit puzzled by now the receptionist asks, ‘And what is the problem?”, and went back down complaining to his amused colleagues about finicky tourists. As they hurried out of the hotel in a huff, the receptionist, in his best American accent said, ‘Have a lovely stay in our beautiful country, guys!’…Hmmm…Guyana…..We love you!
