Thirty-nine-year-old Mmiettenna Knights can remember the day as if it were yesterday, when she received the shocking news that her reputed husband, a miner had been killed in the backdam in Region Seven; and she still has several questions as to what really transpired on May 8.
Sylvester Chan well known as ‘Carl’ and ‘Stamma,’ 45, had left his home to work as a bodyguard on April 20, a few weeks later his reputed wife was told that he was dead. He died in an accident that was never investigated by the police even though a report was made and it was only after some intervention that the accident was reported to the Labour Department of the Ministry of Social Protection.
According to Minister within the Ministry of Social Protection Simona Broomes, Chan’s case is just the tip of the iceberg as to the manner in which deaths, especially in the interior, are treated and this, she said, needs to change. While after some intervention Knights would have received some form of compensation from her husband’s employer who was also his friend, Broomes said employers need to understand that all work-related deaths and accidents should be reported to the Labour Department. She also called for workers in the interior to be treated better.
During an interview with the Sunday Stabroek, Knights said she had lived with Chan for about ten years but that it felt like a lifetime and they had so many plans for the future. He left for the interior one day before her birthday and had promised to return to celebrate with her.
“On that day he said ‘baby don’t worry when I come back we guh celebrate’ but what a celebration?” the woman questioned as tears trickled down her cheeks.
“I was at work when I got the message… His boss man wife came and said there was an accident and Stamma died,” the woman said as she recalled that she screamed so much that all the other business owners on the Merriman Mall were alerted. Knights operates a small beauty parlour on the mall.
Chan’s relatives were alerted and arrangements were made to receive the body at Parika and it was taken to Sandy’s Funeral Home. But Knights said what she found strange was the fact that no police officer accompanied the body.
Seeing her husband’s body crudely wrapped in a hammock is a sight Knights would never forget. From what she was told, Chan died in a “freak accident;” he was one of three pillion riders on an ATV bike operated by his employer.
“The boss man said the bike flipped and fell on Carl. He said he didn’t die right away and they got people to lift him to the camp and he was alive and he was crying out for pain in different parts of his body,” she said.
She believes that Chan’s relatives should have been contacted as soon as he became involved in the accident and also that attempts should have been made for him to access medical attention. Instead a police officer later pronounced him dead, according to his employer, and it was from the campsite that he was transported to the funeral home.
A post-mortem examination performed on his body found that he died from blunt trauma to the head and a fractured spine.
Knights feels “something went wrong somewhere” and questioned what system is in place to ensure that persons get medical attention instead of being pronounced dead by non-medical practitioners.
“The system needs to change because look, the accident was never reported to the labour ministry and if it was not for the minister nothing would not have come out,” the woman said making it clear that she was not specifically blaming her husband’s former employer but rather wants to know that a better system is put in place. She also said that the employer played a very integral part in the funeral arrangements for Chan and for that she was grateful.
Months after his death, she still mourns every night for the man she had made so many future plans with. “I can be smiling but nobody knows the pain that I am going through. It is hard,” the distraught woman said.
“Sometimes I just feel he died like a dog, alone crying out in pain lying in a camp. I am not God and I know he could have died out here too but it is just how it happened and I have so many unanswered questions.
“And it is not just me who miss him but his mother, his daughter and brothers is just like so many lives are not the same.”
She believes the public should be educated about their rights and also for employers to understand that they need to report any deaths or accidents that occur on their place of business or during the course of a worker executing their duties off site.
‘Stray dogs’
Minister Broomes said for the years she would have spent in the interior as a miner she would have seen miners die like “stray dogs, like they don’t have owners.” Families, she said, most times are unable to get to the location where their loved would have died and are left with a number of unanswered questions.
“You know her husband died and she did not at first know what really happened and she was just left shocked … She may have been wondering what his last words were. Maybe he wanted some water…,” Broomes said.
She recalled that it was after the Guyana Women Miners Organisation (GWMO), which she once headed, was founded almost four years ago, that the magnitude of what happens in the interior was brought to light.
The minister said that when Knights visited her ministry she cried non-stop when she spoke of the death of the man she loved. Relatives of victims, she pointed out, are left with huge financial burdens and many times employers are not willing to assist. Women are many times the ones to suffer more.
The minister mentioned the plight of a mother two young children whose husband died in a mining pit, and who was put out of the home she had shared with him by his parents, even before he was buried.
