Six years ago, within weeks of my return to live in Guyana, I was in conversation with a very well-known Guyanese – someone I admired but had never met – and he suddenly said to me, “Dave, what are you doing coming back to live in this godforsaken country?” I pointed out to him that he was also still here, and we both laughed over the remark. Coming forward to this time, given the litany of traumas that seem to have accumulated on us recently, my friend’s remark, seeming extreme at the time, strikes me as not laughable at all now. Time and again, I am seeing some egregious condition in the society that leads me to ask, “How did we get it so wrong?”
Just last week, doing business in Georgetown, I was appalled to see the state of our once-proud City Hall; from any angle one approaches it, our City Hall looks like a candidate for the dump. The building is simply decrepit. Indeed, with a visiting friend in the car, who was keen to see the city, I drove past the structure and deliberately didn’t point it out as our City Hall. I was truly ashamed. I was silently thinking,