As it awaits the rollout of the government’s social service programme for vagrants, the Guyana Post Office Corporation (GPOC) has stopped using sprinklers to disperse homeless persons from around its environs.
Stabroek News reported on February 5th that the GPOC had installed sprinklers around the perimeter of the building specifically to rouse sleeping vagrants and to force them to move from the area.
“Like since y’all come and me aint know if somebody talk to them or wuh but them aint wet we up and thing no more,” one of the vagrants told Stabroek News last Friday.
However the man said that one of the workers of the GPOC went to them the day after the story was published and “buse out”, also querying as to who were the persons that spoke to this newspaper.
And as she condemned the wetting of the vagrants, Minister of Social Protection Volda Lawrence last week announced in Parliament that a Georgetown Resuscitation Committee has crafted plans to have many of the homeless persons taken off the streets.
Once these persons are screened, many will be sent to the Hugo Chavez Home for Reintegration and Rehabilitation on the West Coast of Berbice. There, she said, government will ensure that they are rehabilitated and receive life-skills training to foster reunions with their families and communities and use their newly-acquired skills to gain employment. This year a sustainable poultry, fish and vegetable farm will be established at the Centre.
“There are still many of our vulnerable citizens who are not captured by the many available State institutions established to help secure them against the vagaries of modern life. I refer to those vagrants who are now being indiscriminately doused … in a bid to remove them from the streets. This is not our method of handling growing national challenges,” Lawrence said during her 2016 Budget presentation to the National Assembly.
Her Ministry had condemned the GPOC’s use of sprinklers to disperse homeless persons.
The GPOC had told this newspaper that the sprinklers was one of its security measures to ensure the vagrants do not return, especially during busy working hours. Fogarty’s said its sprinklers were intended to clean the pavement area of the rancid odour left by the pavement dwellers.
GPOC Public Relations Officer Telesha Whyte had told Stabroek News “So the sprinkler system, that is a mechanism to maintain control on that area, to ensure that vagrants do not take over… It’s a security feature for us and also ensures the enhancing of the environment… That is an area we have a lot of our operations, transactions, whatever, it is a very busy area for us we are looking at security-wise as well, because we are looking at valuables coming in, valuables going out, so we need a secure area there. In the past, we have had issues with controlling the vagrants out there. Sometimes we ask them to leave and they get violent and so on”.
She added “Sometimes, it becomes very smelly. They do their bowel works there and it is supposed to be a secure area… It is not an automatic system, so it is not a case where persons are going to pass and the sprinkler is going to come on and wet them, it is not automatic”. She said that manual checks are also made before the system is turned on to ensure that water is not wasted.
Whyte said that GPOC is willing to partner with a social organisation wanting to assist with the dwellers, most of whom, she believes, suffer from mental health problems.
