Dear Editor,
I am compelled to write this letter in support of the ongoing strike action at the University of Guyana because I have felt the burden of being employed at the university.
I taught there for one academic year. It was a time of mixed emotions, few high points and lots of distress. To be honest, the only good part of working at this institution was interacting with my students, seeing them persevere under extremely strenuous circumstances and witnessing their commitment to completing their degree on time. What I saw within my students was a desire and passion to learn so great that they were willing to endure less than adequate conditions just to acquire a degree from the University of Guyana in the hopes of a better life this degree should bring.
I, however, left that campus every night broken and depressed. For the one year I worked there I had to endure too much for a young professional fresh out of university myself with student loans to re-pay and family responsibilities to shoulder. I had to wait almost three months to receive my first pay cheque. I asked on several occasions why it took so long for my first salary to be processed and was told that ‘this is how the system is set up,’ and there was nothing I could do about it. My only option was to borrow more money to live on until the university decided to pay me. This was creating more economic depression for me, but I needed a job and had to endure those circumstances with the promise of better days ahead.
Then there was the situation with my office: I was issued one at the end of my first semester of teaching. Now as a lecturer, I was supposed to maintain a presence on campus daily for office hours, to prepare my lectures and to perform any ‘service’ duties the university required of me. How could I do this without any office space and when the university had no adequate facilities that I could use as an alternative until they were able to allocate an office to me? The saga with the office space continued for a while. When I was finally issued an office, I almost ran from the campus screaming in horror. Firstly, there was no functioning lock on the door; the desk they found somewhere on campus and placed in the office for me was in poor condition. The entire desk was filthy, the drawers were filled with rat and roach droppings, and the legs were rotten. This led me to believe that they pulled this piece of furniture from the dump and placed it my office. The curtains at the window were so old and polluted that every time they swayed with the wind there was a thick layer of dust consuming my room. I was not issued a fan for this hot room I was in. Naturally, I requested a new desk, for the curtains to be cleaned and for a fan to be placed in the room. Naturally the response was that the department or the university could not afford to purchase me a new desk; the cleaners were not paid to wash the curtains or to sanitize my desk, and a fan is a luxury they could not afford to give me.
I actually needed a new door frame and the university could not afford to purchase that. This meant that every day I had to take all my personal belongings including heavy books and my computer home with me. Since I was a recent college graduate myself, I was taking the bus with my heavy bag back and forth each day. I will not elaborate on the fact that my office chair was an old off balanced chair that was abandoned from some classroom and then issued to me. I had to take my personal computer to work with me each day, which is quite normal at the university; however, the wifi service was extremely slow. Many days I could not connect or was locked out of it all together as the password would change and the lecturers would not be notified.
Now let me speak of the restroom facilities. I’d rather not paint that graphic picture, but let me put it this way: It was the most unsanitary, unhealthy, most traumatic experience of my UG career. Worse yet was being locked out of the staff restrooms after regular working hours on weekdays and on weekends and having to use the public facilities.
Now, let me get to the issues relating to doing the job I was being poorly paid to do. I taught three classes each semester. Two of those classes had between 50 to 60 students each, and this is standard at the University – some would even say that I had a lighter class load than most. Now any educator knows that maybe 20-25 students per class size is optimal and that any class size larger than this would require that the lecturer have an assistant. Preparing for my lectures was challenging to say the least. I had to contend with a lack of and outdated literature from the library, poor wifi to do research and the constant blackouts on camps.
The department I was in seemed to be chronically out of everything I needed for my lecturers. The printer was routinely out of paper, ink, toner etc. I could not get exam papers printed in a timely manner for mid-term exams, I could not get chalk for the black board, markers for the white erase board, etc.
My students, God bless their souls, would have to sometimes seek out desk and benches in other empty classrooms and bring them in for my lecture because there were never adequate seating in my classroom or half the furniture was broken. On rainy days, half the classroom would be wet. On other days, it was just dirty.
What I observed while there was that many of my colleagues were overworked, stressed, underpaid and did not receive the respect they deserved. Many of them wanted to engage in more research, produce scholarly work, to do more for academia in Guyana, but simply did not have the time and support they needed to do so. Upon inquiry, this has not changed.
These poor working conditions took up so much of my time, that I had no real time to do any required research for the university. Honestly, how could I dedicate any time to independent research when I had to review over 100 poorly written student papers, find time to sit with them individually and assist them with their writing styles, teach them how to correctly reference their work, grade group presentations and mid-terms and prepare lecture notes, all the while competing with the GPL blackout schedule both on and off campus, the poor wifi, the ancient library catalogue, the unhealthy working conditions and poorly paid support staff who rolled their eyes every time they saw me coming to ask for chalk, or paper, or to print, when anything that I needed was never available leaving me, in turn, to purchase these things with the meagre salary that I had to wait to receive?
I endured for one year, long enough to at least see my final year students compete their final semester. I hope and pray that I taught them something that they were able to use in the real world, and I commend them on graduating from the University of Guyana with nothing less than the power to endure. I left the university for the chance at a better job, better pay and for an opportunity to make a positive contribution to my beloved country without all the stress than comes with working at the University.
My heart does go out to the students who will suffer as a result of this strike action, but I beg of them to open their eyes and see that this action, if successful, will benefit them in the long run.
Guyana, we are holding ourselves back. This strike is long overdue and well merited. Both the UGSSA and the UGWU have legitimate concerns and I beg both parties not to stop until their needs are met. They are not asking for the platinum standards of education, they are asking for the core necessities, for their human rights to be respected after labouring for so long under inhumane conditions.
Yours faithfully,
(Name and address supplied)
