Aunty Baba, 90, wakes up every day looking forward to her calm, peaceful, tranquil lifestyle at her Canje, Berbice home.
Despite decades and decades of hard toil on the land, of walking barefoot through the swishing grass of the vast Canje savannah pastures rounding up her cattle, sheep, horses, she knows there’s one thing she could always count on: the peace and tranquility of life in her tiny village.
Born in 1923, she’s spent all her days in Canje, seeing generations come and go, living now to see her great grandchildren grow up.
Born under a colonial estate economy that saw her building mud dams for British overseers, fetching baskets of mud and brick on her head, packed one by one, under broiling hot sun for pennies a day, Aunty Baba knows what it is to live hard, rugged, rough and harsh.
Yet, she’s come through it all. In those 90 years she experienced so much, seeing her society move from a mishmash of colonialized nationalities from Africa, Asia and Europe to dream of one nation, forging the Guyanese identity into an imperfect effort to build a new society.
She’s seen the mud dams give way to paved roadways and she’s seen the bridging of the turbulent muddy Canje and Berbice rivers.
She’s seen the darkness of her land melt away as electric posts and lines crisscross the space above.
Now, settled into her hammock in lofty breeze, with her old age pension unable to buy her monthly groceries, as she’s too old to plant a kitchen garden or raise livestock, all she’s got to enjoy is the tranquil peace, the blessed quiet, of this land so rich in wholesome living.
But modernity, instead of rewarding Aunty Baba with the peace and tranquility that she so deserves, delivered its own curses.
At nights an inconsiderate religious group in the village bangs mercilessly on booming drums, generating a cacophony of noise and confusion for her.
At midnight, for the whole of last week, the drummers proceeded on a pompous parade through the street, the drums ceaseless in that non-stop harassment of the ears.
For hours and hours this unhealthy abuse of sound, this inconsiderate religious harassment of citizens, this insensitive selfishness goes on and on. Citizens who toil and work the land all day in hopes of enjoying a sound night’s restful sleep, instead endure this awful noise, passive in their protest.
No one complains. No police officer shows up to restrain this wicked noise of a group of banging drummers so bent on disturbing the peaceful tranquility of the land.
Living in the village, still suffering gross poverty despite sluggish progress towards modern ways, is not easy. People go through their days in passive hope that a break would come their way soon – mostly to migrate to join their “happy” families overseas.
For citizens like Aunty Baba, dedicated to the land, patriotic to the nation, persevering through the decades, passive to the passage of time, assaults like all-night drum banging irritate to the extreme.
After the drumming subsides in the wee hours of the morning, fitful sleep takes over, only to take instant flight at 6 am when those other neighbours proceed to turn up the volume on their mega-speakers to blast religious music through the village.
The deafening echo assaults the ears of Aunty Baba early in the morning, and she gives up complaining. It’s no use. No one considers others in their village, so bent are these noise makers on broadcasting their own tastes.
Not content to contain their pleasures to their private environment, they assault the public space with wanton abandon, and no one complains. Police ignore the hours and hours of blasting noise. Citizens endure.
Aunty Baba endures, as she’s endured since as a child she went to the fields to work for a British overseer traversing the muds above the labourers, his whip and shiny horse symbolizing his inconsiderate power over her life.
When the Finance Minister stood up in Parliament last Monday to announce her country’s first billion US dollar budget in history, Aunty Baba shrugged, almost in contempt. She has seen it all before, history unfolding through the past 90 years.
The new generation populates the village, and she watches them with a knowing look.
In all those 90 years her society should have progressed to at least allow its citizens to enjoy the peace and tranquility of lying in a hammock enjoying the bounty of breeze and sleeping with restful abandon.
But this nation fails Aunty Baba in a fundamental way. Despite the talk of economic progress and expensive roads and high bridges erasing the chaos of vast rivers and the new air-conditioned supermarket at New Amsterdam with its imported fruits, despite time transporting her to the 21st century, Aunty Baba still sees the people of the village as she saw them when she was young, when she toiled in hopes that her children and grandchildren would know a better life.
We fail her and our fore-parents because so many villages, like those of Canje, today house people of a stunted literacy, people who, in Aunty Baba’s words, remain “blunt”.
Our nation fails in that crucial imperative of developing our human resource capital.
When we stand at a place in the second decade of this 21st century, and cannot offer Aunty Baba a decent enough old age pension, when she is thus denied the opportunity to shop at that new air-conditioned supermarket because she is too poor, when the religious people of the village live so inconsiderately and insensitively as to blast their noise to such deafening dullness, we fail as a nation.
Over the past two decades, Government, according to Budget estimates spent more than a billion US dollars on educating the citizens of this country. This year alone, $28.5 billion goes to educating the nation.
Isn’t it astonishing, perplexing and puzzling, therefore, that the average citizen lacks the basic life skills to be considerate of their public spaces, given this vast pumping of money into developing our national brain?
Our land, peaceful and tranquil, suffers from this alarming lack of human development, and Aunty Baba, at 90, is living testimony of how stagnant we are from generation to generation.
