Dear Editor,
More and more people in Guyana today are waiting to hear from the United States Embassy for their final interviews and paperwork to be completed, so that they can run from these most troubled shores. I am sure our people do not take leaving lightly (sometimes for good) the land of their birth, their motherland, their home. But circumstances push many people to migrate to other countries. Every single day, more and more persons are being qualified to take up legal residence in the United States and Canada, and even the Virgin Islands.
The US State Department and Department of Homeland Security websites detail the number of worldwide visas according to countries and regions of the world, and a chart which is updated monthly, gives information on the preferences and visa categories currently being processed.
So much time has passed and so many governments have sat, yet Guyanese are still running away from their homeland. Can you blame them? Can you really blame them wanting a better life for themselves and their families? Surely, venturing into the unknown, to a new world, among new people, has its own consequences, but this has not stopped the thousands of Guyanese who have taken up residence in North America over the past decades. Today, the enormous Guyanese population in New York and Toronto speaks volumes; they certainly tell an interesting story.
What could possibly have sent all these Guyanese abroad over the years? It is decades of mismanagement, corruption, racial tiffs, and brainwashing by politicians that better days are ahead. The times get worse every time they sing that tune. Persons have been fleeing Guyana since the years of dictatorship, and now, under the elected dictatorship, the situation isn’t any different.
There are more applications than actual visas available now for residents of the Caribbean states. Perhaps, Guyana’s population would have been much larger today had it not been for the mass migration.
There are Guyanese who became fed up with the political tug-of-war here and packed their bags. Many names come to mind. Guyanese have found themselves in all corners of the globe trying to find new lifestyles and make ends meet. And many of them certainly have. Life is not easy for many overseas-based Guyanese living abroad, but they certainly see where and how each dollar is being spent. The actualities of a developed nation, free and democratic in every sense of the word, have fuelled their successes and will ensure their economic viability in the future. You see, the diaspora in North America and other places, with just a few years of being resident and even citizens of another nation have been living under different circumstances – not under a dictatorship which muzzles people’s views and ideas, which victimizes individuals when they express themselves in the letter columns, or which punishes newspapers especially when they don’t suck up to the fallacies and propagandistic ideas that flow from administration after administration.
Yes, the countries in which our Guyanese brothers and sisters have chosen to spend the rest of their lives have problems and issues. Which country doesn’t? Which government does not have problems, especially with its people, policies, etc? But there’s a difference between problems that arise as a consequence of the 21st century challenges of these times, and bold-faced dictatorial policies, fraud, extra-judicial killings, unsolved murders, thieving by public officials, mismanagement of taxpayers’ monies, etc. Shall I go on?
I am a young Guyanese and I believe the few experiences I have gotten over the past years have taught me a lot. I know so much about what is going on in Guyana – behind closed doors as they say. No doubt our brothers and sisters who have left these shores are keeping track of what is going on every day here. I am sure that every nasty headline – nasty but true, pains their hearts. “Look what Guyana has come to,” they say. “I don’t think I could have stayed and endured all that,” they say. “And what is the government doing about it?” they ask.
Very shortly, a family of four will be leaving for their new home in New York. Born and bred here, participants in all our Guyanese customs and way of life, I wondered how those four Guyanese would adjust to their new home. I believe they would. If thousands before them did, they are sure to as well. I could have seen the sadness in their faces, especially the children. “Maybe if our Guyana was going somewhere, maybe if we as a family were getting somewhere in life, maybe we might have stayed,” I imagined them saying. None of those ‘maybes’ have worked or can work in Guyana. I believe many of our country’s problems are deeper than what actually protrude to the surface. Many of our problems, like it or not, are here to stay, with no light at the end of the tunnel. You can thank our arrogant politicians for that; from 1966 to 2010, Guyana has been getting worse. Arrogance reigns today right from the very top in this country. So what do you expect? I wonder how many of them go to sleep at nights.
For that family of four, I wish them all the best life has to offer in a new land among new people. Guyana will always be home to them though. Their flight leaves this weekend under the cloud of darkness. They would leave these shores for one last time, to make beds of comfort elsewhere, in a strange man’s land. Little do they know that with a little extra determination and zeal for living, and with the perfect (or near perfect) economic standing, a diligent government that values the working class, a more value-rich currency (all of which is present where they are going), and many hours of work, they would surely enjoy the sweetness of life in what Alicia Keys in her song fittingly describes as, “concrete jungles where dreams are made of.”
Yours faithfully,
Leon Jameson Suseran
