Cultivating the Guyanese society calls for a keen sense of where we’re at, and where we could be as a nation. We must see, feel, and know the society’s heartbeats. We must understand what Guyanese face in their daily effort to make a living.
This may sound quite easy, and many of us would say we know the society well. But encountering the public spaces, rubbing shoulders with cane-cutters, labourers, market vendors, minibus drivers, conductors and touts, and teachers, nurses and other public service employees, reveals a society where people suffer from the lack of decent public spaces.
Guyanese know what a modern, 21st century society looks like. We see it on TV. We know what the developed world offers its residents. Our relatives and family in the Diaspora tell us.
And when we look around us, here in our own homeland, we see so much that frustrates people: from potholes and floods when it rains, to the limitations of the National Library in Georgetown.
Ongoing blackouts, low water pressure in the city, poor potable water quality, crumbling roadways – these things continue with hardly a complaint anymore from Guyanese. We grow numb. We see our society and accept things as they are, feeling it is normal everyday life.
When the roadway along the East Coast and West Coast corridors sinks, we let it go, not even caring to erect a sign warning motorists that the road is severely uneven.
On Hadfield Street in Georgetown, just across from Parliament, and right in front of the headquarters of the Opposition Leader’s office, and outside the law office of House Speaker Raphael Trotman, a series of muddy potholes makes navigating this main throughway a nightmare of incredible dread.
How ineffective could our Opposition Leader be, how unseeing could the Minister of Public Works, or Cabinet, be to see Hadfield Street and turn away with no corrective action?
We talk about these things, and then forget and move on, and no official pays any attention.
Why are we like this, perpetuating our own under-development?
Like our middle class Guyanese, our State officials move from air-conditioned offices, lavish homes, and secured, walled communities, to their multi-million dollar imported vehicle. Do they not see the state of the Guyanese public spaces? And if they do see, don’t they feel the desperate need to correct the anomaly? How could we perpetuate an image of our Guyanese society being so under-developed?
They fail to see and feel the heartbeat of our land, and thus things fall apart with hardly a stir. Immune from the chaos, boxed-in in our little coves of routine, secured from the street and the poverty and the inner villages that crumble under the oppression of widespread illiteracy, high unemployment and severe under-employment, the ones who could make a difference seem to no longer see, feel or care.
In the new housing developments, such as Tuschen on the West Coast of Demerara, and Diamond on the East Bank, we see sparkling new homes, smooth, paved roads, and what promises to be the new Guyana, where we could enjoy a modern middle class lifestyle.
But along the main roadways, too much remains in a state of disrepair. Things fall apart even as we build.
We cannot fault the Government for failing to budget massive amounts of State funds for roads, public schools and health care centres. Aided with international loans and grants, and big spending in the National Budget, we see contractors receive huge sums of money to build things.
Yet, our public spaces remain pitiable, poor and a burden on the Guyanese. A simple thing like walking the East Bank Demerara public road is an exercise in enormous faith, especially when it rains and floods swamp the curbs.
While the private sector pushes ahead with its modern buildings and decorative private spaces, our public domain remains an ugly eyesore.
Most middle class Guyanese escape the paucity of our public spaces, including avoiding the cussing and loud brazenness. These live in comfortable homes, lavished with imported material, and drive through the country in air-conditioned cars. They immunise themselves from the public chaos.
But we cannot afford to shut ourselves away from the reality of the society. We must see what’s really going on out there. We must feel what the young Canje 30-year old cane-cutter feels when he works a low-pay job shift in the back-dam under broiling sun to come home and face his young wife, unemployed in their small cottage on a lot they got from Government, and their five toddler kids.
The family wants what they see on TV. But they barely scrape by to shop at the grocery store, even with livestock and a vegetable garden.
Living inside the pocket of poverty, such a family, in its daily struggles, becomes invisible to the Minister and the middle class Guyanese. Such a family depends on occasional remittances, second-hand clothes from overseas relatives, and a public school where failure is expected, and success surprises.
Our Guyanese society suffers from three problems: widespread illiteracy, as any public school teacher would attest; gross poverty in the inner villages, behind the façade of lavish buildings along the main roadways; and severely incompetent management of public spaces – roadways, the main markets, public transportation parks, recreation areas like the National Park.
These eyesores we refuse to see, feel and know. Our illiteracy crisis continues with hardly a stir from the State; our gross poverty crisis, despite gradual relief, still sees too many Guyanese suffer; and the demise of our public spaces, and public utility services like electricity and water and care for our vulnerable – destitute, insane and weak, including women and children – remain astonishingly mismanaged.
It’s like if we do not at all care where we’re at as a Guyanese civilization, and where we’re heading. We allow our society to drift in languid passivity. We work to elevate ourselves above the gross poverty and the widespread illiteracy and the chaotic public spaces, either seeking to migrate, or live immune to the society around us.
