A woman will work hard in the house of someone else as a domestic but many times she cannot rest when her day is over; instead she has to hurry home to strip brooms to sell, or prepare for her night job as a security guard, or in some cases, sell fish.
This is what was recently discovered by Red Thread in a survey of 151 domestic workers, all of whom, whether full time or part time, were forced to find additional sources of income as they were unable to make ends meet on what they earned toiling in someone’s else house.
“The situation in Guyana for poor people is really ridiculous; poor people cannot come out of the poverty that they are in, they are buried in that,” Halima Khan of Red Thread told the Sunday Stabroek in a recent interview.
And it is not just the domestic workers who are suffering but the poorer class of people in general, and sometimes entire communities reflect the stark reality of how persons struggle just to put food on their proverbial tables.
“We didn’t chose to live here; it chose us,” were the words of Kalowttie Bagwandatt, one of about two hundred people who live in ramshackle homes in Pigeon Island Squatting Area.
Given a choice Bagwandatt and her numerous neighbours, most of them children, would not have elected to live in conditions that exposed them to the germs around their homes and in the faeces contaminated drain into which the latrines leak. During a recent visit to the community which revealed how many Guyanese continue to live under dire conditions, the woman and her neighbours told this newspaper how they longed for an opportunity, so they were not forced to use public, dirty, bacteria-infested latrines. An opportunity, so they were not denied access to basic amenities such as roads, water and electricity, and would not be required to depend on one standpipe and have to fork out money they did not have to purchase water to complete normal household chores.
Pigeon Island Squatting Area is only one of the many communities where residents live under extremely difficult conditions, but there are similar communities such as Barnwell North Squatting area and the infamous Plastic City. Barnwell is bereft of all public amenities where children are forced to walk for miles to get to school, and when it rains often have to stay home.
And then there are the cases such as that of Molly James, who along with her son was brutally murdered late last year, as they lay asleep in a camp-like structure they called home at Moblissa on the Linden-Soesdyke Highway. James and her seven children, including a seven-month-old baby, lived in what could only be described as abject poverty.
While there are numerous instances of abject poverty that struggling communities and families endure on the coast there are far worse cases in interior locations and riverine areas which are hidden from the public glare.
But yet Guyana is one of the countries that has been accredited by the United Nations with achieving Goal One of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ‒ the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.
While Guyana may have reached that goal under the UN definition of extreme poverty, economist Dr Clive Thomas says this is nothing for the country to pat itself on the back for. The UN definition of extreme poverty, he explained, is the same for war-torn and ravaged countries in Africa as it is for other parts of the world.
Speaking to the Sunday Stabroek Prof Thomas noted that there are two definitions the UN uses to identify extreme poverty and both have to do with income. The first relates to whether citizens lack the income to enable them to purchase basic food items and whether they have access to health and social services, and education. For this to be achieved the UN estimates that their earnings must be US$2 per day. The second definition has to do with persons living below the poverty line, not being able to afford basic food items and earning US$1 a day or less.
No statistics
In the specific case of Guyana, Prof Thomas wondered what information and statistics had been used to arrive at conclusions about extreme poverty. He said there had been no regular study conducted in the area of poverty for a long time, noting that the last one had been undertaken by him for the UN back in 2000.
“There has been no comprehensive study done since then…” Dr Thomas said, adding that the conclusion that the country had eradicated extreme poverty is based on a partial estimation and did not really address the issue of poverty.
He went on to say that a comprehensive study had not been done because the government is not amenable to this, and as such there can be no comparison of the country’s poverty situation. Such a study, he explained, would be a humongous undertaking and could not be carried out by a private citizen, as the services of the Guyana Bureau of Statistics would be required; this would necessarily involve the government. The government would not readily accede to this kind of proposal, the professor said, because the administration wants to control all such enquiries instead of looking at ways to improve the country’s planning and development.
“To talk about poverty and basing your information on no proper study to my mind is ridiculous,” Dr Thomas said.
And he adverted to the fact that there is still a large percentage of the population which does not have access to something as basic as potable water, and the water that is provided is in many cases polluted and unfit to be consumed. He pointed to some areas where citizens use water from trenches and creeks for all human purposes, including the depositing of faeces.
He feels that the main reason the government is so staunchly against a comprehensive study being done in the area of poverty is that it would reflect that many citizens in the Amerindian communities live below the poverty line. He posited that 78% of the Amerindian communities live below the UN definition of extreme poverty since in most cases they do not earn but depend on subsistence farming, and nothing is being done to ensure that their lands remain fertile.
He said Guyana should engage in a study such as the one recently revealed in Trinidad & Tobago which stated that more than 20 per cent of the citizens of the twin island republic are living below the poverty line while eight to 11 per cent are reported to be undernourished, despite this country’s high-income status. The information was revealed in the ‘National Report for Trinidad and Tobago Civil Society’s Review of the Progress Towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDG).’
Definitions
That notwithstanding, Dr Thomas said it is wrong for Caribbean countries to confine themselves to UN definitions, revealing that Caribbean economists and social workers have met and agreed that the UN definition of extreme poverty should not be applied to our countries.
“To confine ourselves to the UN definition means we are comparing ourselves to destitute and war ravaged states in Africa such as the Congo,” Prof Thomas said. He disclosed that that he and his Caribbean counterparts recommended that the region address the issue of poverty from the standpoint of its citizens not earning living wages and being able to reproduce the next generation without the family going into depression.
In respect of education he said the economists and social workers noted that Caribbean countries should not still be boasting about achieving universal primary education, a status that was achieved many years ago. Instead they should be working on achieving universal secondary education.
Some observers have noted that while Guyana may boast of achieving universal primary education the issue remains of how many children who attend school can read or write, how many are unable to learn because of hunger and what percentage of the time they are actually in attendance.
‘Can’t even afford breakfast’
“How can we say we are eradicating poverty, [when] people are still living in poverty? Some people cannot even afford breakfast in the morning to give their children to go to school,” Khan said querying what free education means in Guyana when parents have to buy textbook, find transportation cost, pay for extra lessons and find snack for the children,” said Khan of Red Thread.
She said not all the women they work with are single parents but even when they have husbands they are forced to find an extra source of income because they cannot survive on the salary they make.
She gave the example of the sweeper-cleaners who up to last year were making below the minimum wage, who are forced to work as security guards at night and would even make things to sell, “and they still cannot make ends meet because of the economic crisis.”
Khan queried how persons can live on $35,000 (the new minimum wage) when in most cases their rent is more than that sum.
Another Red Thread member, Joy Marcus, said that while the organisation cannot say whether it is true that extreme poverty has been eradicated, from the perspective of a poor woman their lives are still the same and as such they have not benefited.
“We could only talk about improvement if you start from the bottom up, and once the people at the bottom are not getting the benefit we don’t see how you can call that improvement. You can talk about all the schools that you built and all the roads and all the different things that you built, but you have to look at how it is benefiting us [the poor person],” Marcus said.
Marcus noted that until the government can deal with the economy at the household level they are not doing anything for poor people.
“We look at the budgets and we see most times it is unfriendly to poor people; look at who is benefiting, what is happening to us.”
She pointed out that at times a poor person has to make the choice between paying their rent, feeding the children, sending them to school and dealing with their health. Unfortunately most times health and food come last because “We don’t want to live on the road and we don’t want our children to get kick out of school, and we are trying hard for them to get an education so that some time they could be in a better place than we are.”
Marcus posed the question that if one does not eat properly and is not healthy how could one get an education, and as such there would be no real improvement.
‘Second poorest country’
Meanwhile, Opposition Leader David Granger also queried how the conclusion of the country eradicating extreme poverty had been arrived at, noting that more people are being added to the ranks of the very poor because of unemployment and the absence of new employment opportunities.
He said that while the country may be boasting about this achievement, last December a World Bank report listed Guyana as the second poorest country in the region. He said that it is not how much gold or rice the country produces which is measured by its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but rather it has to do with Gross National Income which compares purchasing power and per capita income.
“I don’t know where the statistics come from about achieving that goal, but go around to communities, not only in Georgetown but also some of the outlying areas and the hinterland areas, you will see extremely poor people. That is an inaccuracy [achieving that goal],” Granger told this newspaper in a recent interview.
The Opposition Leader like Dr Thomas feels that the rural areas are the hardest hit by poverty and that poverty “is quite extreme in some indigenous communities, particularly in riverain areas…”
Like Dr Thomas, Granger also noted that the farmers are still at a subsistence level and are affected by the loss of markets, environmental practices and migration of the population. As such there are only the extremely young or very old people in the communities. This situation, he said, leads to greater poverty because the old cannot maintain the farms and the young people are not prepared to do so.
“So I think many Amerindian communities are still affected by extreme poverty as well as rural communities because in some of the rural communities, the food production on which they rely on for generations is being replaced by fast foods. In places where people had previously prepared traditional meals you find that there are now restaurants there that sell alcohol or fast foods and people have moved away from the production of traditional foodstuff in preference for fast foods,” the opposition leader noted.
The Sunday Stabroek attempted to speak Minister of Human Services & Social Security Jennifer Webster on the issue, but all attempts failed. But last year the government announced that it was instituting a new national minimum wage from July 1 2013 and that this would see an “improved standard of living.” However, while the new $35,000 minimum wage is projected to take an estimated 31,000 Guyanese out of the abject poverty group (those who live on less than US$2.50 a day) they will still remain poor. Monthly food and utility bills for a single person amount to more than that, much less when the minimum wage earner has a family, is a single parent or is caring for an elderly relative. Furthermore, persons earning the minimum wage will no longer be eligible for any welfare assistance that they might have previously had access to.
