Several weeks ago, I wrote a column entitled ‘Knowing the fine fine‘ on the point that to understand the why and the how and the where of conditions in a country you have to live there a long time in order to begin to see all the factors, many invisible, that are operating on the particular aspect that’s bugging you – garbage in town; speeding minibuses; shoddy workmanship, etc.
Having lived now in Guyana permanently for several years, and from close interaction with the nuts and bolts of the society, it is crystal clear to me that a critically serious problem facing us as we seek to improve our condition, individually or collectively, is our failure to prepare.
Everywhere you look in Guyana the condition of a people “not ready, Jack,” as the Bajan comedian Mac Fingall would put, is like a fungus gumming up the gears. It manifests itself in a kind of ineptness, often displayed by persons who should know better and even sometimes in arenas that one would assume to be free of such a malady.
In a recent information segment on television, two civil servants appeared to explain to us the intricacies of some technical income tax questions.
The two ladies may have been prepared by profession for the subject – they certainly knew the material – but they were clearly not prepared to appear on television; they spent almost the entire six minutes or so of the segment, delivering the information, facing each other, turned sideways to the camera. Clearly also, the person operating the camera, either unaware or unconcerned about the problem, was equally unprepared for that task.
A day doesn’t go by in this country without someone mangling standard pronunciation on the media.
Not only have these presenters not been trained by anyone on how to comport themselves for the camera, but no time has been taken to prep them for public speaking. When, as I heard this week, a news reader on TV pronounces the word “donation” with the stress on the first “do”, you know it’s a case of “da is how she does talk”; she has not been groomed or trained by anyone; she has not been prepared.
Our woeful standard of doing things infects almost every aspect of our lives. Recently we had the embarrassment of three major political parties in a national election campaign here each sporting logos that appear to have been designed by a 10-year-old on a lunch break.
It’s there in sport, too. Earlier this month, I heard Wavell Hinds make the point on Sports Max that Caribbean cricketers do not have the required years of playing scores of matches, developing their specialty, before coming to Test cricket. “They are learning on the job,” is how Hinds put it.
In a lengthy and clearly angry outburst he emphasized that instead of developing cricket skills in district or regional games, or as we once did years ago in playing English county cricket, we are often scrambling to acquire fundamentals of the game after being picked for the West Indies team. Hinds is right when he says we will never get back to the levels we once reached until we begin to prepare our cricketers properly.
A four-day camp before an international series is a case of far too little, far too late.
One can apply the cricket analogy anywhere and find the same condition. You see people reading the news who clearly have not been trained.
You talk to a mechanic working on your car and you discover he learned most of it working with his father or his uncle.
There are young Guyanese here working in IT, and good at it, but there are gaps in what they know, and you gradually find out that it’s because they learned largely by doing or watching.
The other factor is that when our young people develop some expertise by individual application, many of them inevitably leave the country to be able to develop themselves further, and, once they achieve the development, they understandably apply it where it brings them the most reward, which is outside.
Once you recognize the condition, you can see the ailment everywhere. Furthermore, the way out is forbidding; it’s the main reason poor countries remain poor.
They don’t have the means to educate, in the wide sense of that word, their people, and when some of those citizens with initiative, demonstrate their capability, the country can’t keep them at home because greener pastures beckon. In fact, HR people from those foreign pastures travel down here to recruit the ones showing potential, offering them the required training in their field at no cost.
A poor country, struggling to meet basic needs, does not have such copious resources at its disposal.
We may have a reasonably good basic education here, but once you get past that our systems of preparation, providing technical instruction or development, are sadly lacking because the economy simply cannot afford to provide them. In both sectors, private or public, the deficiency exists.
Obviously the answer for those who can afford it is to send their children for preparation outside (university, technical school, etc) but that’s the tiny minority. That’s not available to most of the people in a poor country.
You can go only so far on natural ability and desire and on our much vaunted ingenuity. You will definitely rise and be noticed, but sooner or later, and usually sooner, you’re going to be stymied because you really don’t know your subject intimately (mechanics, technology, construction, sport) and you hit the wall.
That’s why our mechanics have to use common sense and guess; that’s why the electrician has to call up a friend to solve a problem; that’s why our cricketers stall when they run into the doosra or even the googly.
They’re hampered by the lack of preparation.
