Port Kaituma bustles with taxis shuttling people to and from the small airport, a hyper-busy commercial centre crammed with pickup trucks, SUVs, cars and ATVs, and boats traversing the calm, brown Barima and Kaituma rivers.
Residents say it’s a mining town, serving as the commercial centre for large-scale mining outfits extracting gold and other minerals from the deep jungles of the hinterland.
Guyanese mix with Brazilians, Jamaicans and other foreigners, to live a vibrant lifestyle – hard, rugged and close to the land.
One rainy day last week, people picked through flooded pot-holes on the swamped main street built of sand. Rugged vehicles caked in thick mud and red loam, mixing with pedestrians trying to navigate the narrow road, painted a scene akin to those Wild West American towns of the 1800’s seen in western movies.
Port Kaituma’s residents live in ramshackle houses crammed together like rickety cardboard boxes. The community looks fragile, like drifters passing through and co-existing out of necessity. It’s a place of pragmatic living, where folks do what’s practically necessary, and leave when there’s no use for them.
Hinterland communities look so fragile and temporary, with no solid buildings, no permanent construction. Even roads look temporary, built to serve the pressing needs of today, but not meant to be there tomorrow.
In Mabaruma and places like Moruca, and even in Amerindian settlements like St Cuthbert’s Mission, this sense of permanent development does not exist.
Yet, a lot of these Amerindian communities have existed as residential areas for a very long time, preceding Georgetown and other developed areas of the country.
That they look so fragile today is a testimony to the lack of insight and vision for the hinterland that plagues leaders dwelling on the coastland.
People in the hinterland feel this sense of being neglected. They feel far away, isolated and uncared-for. They say they just exist the best they could, living day by day. Young people strive to grow up and escape the land. They migrate to the coastland, with very few returning.
Yet, this country’s hinterland makes up the most spectacularly beautiful part of the national landscape. The hinterland is where the natural resources lie buried in that so famous Guyanese potential. The hinterland is our El Dorado.
Yet, international gold and diamond mining companies come in to extract the precious Guyana gold and diamonds and forest firms chop up the forests for greenheart and other valuable lumber. But local communities lie passively ignored, living their fragile life in quiet resignation.
Travelling the hinterland is an experience of almost spiritual beauty. The Essequibo River with its wide islands, Bartica with its tranquil, brown loveliness, Charity with its bustling boats all paint a landscape of life at its interesting best.
Yet, the natural beauty becomes a hard life for people seeking to settle into these communities. People need society, social services, organized structures, physical support like roads and solid houses and so on. Communities cannot just live off the land and develop its people to make an international contribution to our global village.
At St Cuthbert’s Mission, the poverty-relief organization, Food For The Poor, built several one-room structures for residents. They call this a housing scheme. The wooden houses are no more than tiny single-family shacks. These are the best houses in the community.
People development becomes necessary. In 2011 the lack of people-development in the hinterland communities becomes glaring.
Along the Essequibo River super-rich coastlanders have built lovely homes, a couple occupying entire islands. On the edge of the Bartica landmass lie some stunning mansion-like resorts, even sporting swimming pools. None of these is local community-owned.
Port Kaituma, Moruca, Mabaruma, St Cuthbert’s Mission, Bartica – these communities promise so much. The tourism potential in each is amazing. People from all over the world would love to travel to these areas, for the pure natural lifestyle and the spectacular beauty of the land.
Yet, in the just-concluded national elections no political party seeking to lead and develop this nation articulated a vision for the hinterland.
While parties campaigned for votes among residents, none seems to have a vision for these communities.
Traveling through the land, talking to the people, experiencing the breath-taking atmosphere of riding a boat through the quiet Pomeroon, these are experiences available to the soul nowhere else in the world.
The developed world of North America lacks this naturalness, this pureness of organic living.
This nation has it, and neglects it, not even looking to see what lies at our feet. The nation does not feel its own pulse, know its own strength, understand its own blessings.
And so the innocent eyes of young children, so cute, neatly dressed in school uniform walking in the hot sun on sandy roadways and paddling in shallow canoes attend school with an eye to migrate to the coastland, or to foreign lands.
Guyana basks as such a peaceful land on the tip of South America, sandwiched between the Atlantic and the Amazon, as the continent’s only English-speaking nation. No natural disaster afflicts the land and the people. In the bosom of the hinterland the Guyanese motherland nurtures the wealth of the people, with precious minerals, agriculture, tourism and sublime living. But the blessing escapes the hands of the people, with foreign multinationals hogging the gold, for example.
The vast virgin hinterland lies almost mercilessly under the assault of “big investment” firms that pump huge capital into the national economy. While these investments make macro-economic sense, the practical reality is that community development remains a dream for the hinterland.
Port Kaituma reflects this in sharp focus. It is a bustling community that lacks a sense of cohesive development, social planning or any sense of society. Its bustling activity speaks more of a Wild West era than a 21st century society.
In fact, it looks like the coastland sucks the life out of the hinterland. And this makes no sense, as floods, a struggling sugar industry and a backward rice industry show that the coastland cannot sustain the national economy.
Port Kaituma, where lies the airport where Jim Jones of Jonestown got a US Congressman killed in 1978, bustles in isolated busyness, and becomes a metaphor of the Guyanese enigma.
