I get a modest monthly American Federation of Musicians Union pension cheque which I deposit in the bank here, but it takes 30 working days, yes 30, for foreign cheques to clear (money laundering; fraud, etc, is the reason you’re given) which means, taking in weekends, foreign holidays and ours, that it’s actually closer to 45 days.
Then there is the bank’s own clearance system here which adds more time to the equation, and finally there are the days when “technical difficulties,” the bank tells me, shut the whole process down here and abroad. The upshot is that I am often waiting as long as 60 days for that cheque to clear; I can’t get a penny of the money – for two months.
Can you imagine how much profit these banks are earning in interest that we never see from these cheques they’re “holding” for us? My pension cheque is small potatoes; imagine what they’re getting from the big depositors such as business and government and investors? The disparity is a disgrace – there must be considerable revenue involved in that manoeuvre – but I mention it here as an example of a truism: these overarching conditions that come along to complicate your life are often in the category of things you can do nothing about – you just take a deep breath, or two, slam your car door hard, and move on. That’s it. You have to shift gears mentally and accept that this is a situation involving entities beyond your reach, and while you’re free to get as upset as you like, the situation will not change. The better approach is to slide your expectation for a cheque clearance from 7 days to 75 (with a sardonic laugh, of course) and move on with the rest of your life.
Another example: someone who is a bit of handyman would be familiar with wood dowels – pencil-size lengths of rounded wood that are used to join boards or to strengthen joints. They’re common in hardware stores in North America, but they don’t exist in Guyana. Many hardware store employees here don’t even know what they are. You ask for dowels, they send you to a store selling – you guessed it – towels. It’s an item from Mars. Wood dowels here have to be made by someone turning a lathe, which takes their cost to the point where only folks laundering money can afford them. Complaining to the hardware store owners doesn’t help; there’s no market for dowels here. So, again, you accept the inevitable and either make your own dowels painstakingly by hand, or you stop joining boards. Fretting over the absence is pointless; move on.
If you’re involved with a house in Guyana, you know the problems with tradesmen: they don’t return calls, or they return the call but don’t show up, or, worst of all, they show up but they leave you with sloppy work – the concrete not level; screw heads jutting out that are not countersunk; the wood facing painted before it’s sanded; we all know the lapses. So you complain to the guy, and you turn to a different tradesman the next time, but you get the same sloppy finish. After you go through several raggedy jobs, the bulb lights up: this is not an aberration; this is the norm. It can happen of course that in this search you might suddenly encounter a tradesman who actually gives you the good finish. It can happen, but you can go grey in the meantime waiting for that fellow to show up. So for now, you take a deep breath, accept the reality, take on the countersinking and the sanding yourself, and you move on with your life.
Where am I going with all this? Here’s where: airline passengers from Guyana become incensed with the airport security clearances they encounter travelling north. We go through a security check here; transiting Trinidad, another check; if your flight then transits Jamaica or Barbados, another check there. People become enraged. Every time I fly I hear them complaining, often to each other but sometimes to the security staff. “I was just checked coming on the plane; I’m just passing through your airport; why are you checking me again?” At Piarco recently, a frustrated Guyanese man berated a Trinidadian security officer. “What is this nonsense? A big country like Canada doesn’t have this rule. So Trinidad is better than Canada?” The Trini officer gave him that cold Laventille stare and said, “Look padna. You don’t have to travel you know; you could stay home.” The comment may have been harsh, but there is an unexpressed truth behind it. As I told the Guyanese later, getting upset with the Trinidadian about that rigmarole is pointless, because the security stipulation in play there is not coming from Trinidad; it is coming from the country of your final destination, North America; it is those countries, the ones to which we travel, who impose these conditions of passage, which are taken by them more seriously, and enforced more rigidly, than by us.
Airline passengers are cleared through our security here and land in New York where contraband is discovered; luggage checked okay onto a plane here will turn out to have somehow acquired false bottoms in transit; Caribbean suitcases arrive in North American airports, properly tagged but unclaimed, and packed with drugs.
We pass cocaine through airports in make -up, in fruits, in bottles of fruit juice. In short, the airport filters we operate come with man-made gaps, and the North American folks recognize that, so they say: “We’re happy to have you come and spend your money in our country, but we’re going to insist on a security check every time you get on any plane headed here.” If you’re not happy with that, you can take the Trinidadian’s advice and stay home. In the simplest terms, even with all the media fury and government protests being aired, until our initial airport security in the region, including Guyana, improves, those checks across the region will remain. Get used to that; take a deep breath when next you have to take off your belt and your jacket and your shoes one more time, and move on with your life.
