Dear Editor,
My wife and I attended the funeral of an old family friend recently, up to the interment in the Le Repentir cemetery. Some dozen yards to the tomb we passed a few persons around a vendor. I had to leave to attend to some other business and return. Later that evening my wife passed on the complaint of the lady vendor – that she had hailed out to me and I had not bothered to respond to her; she wondered why. She wanted to ask me whether I did not like how our cemetery looks now, and not only the cemetery, but all of Georgetown and its environs.
I take this opportunity firstly to plead for forgiveness from that lady – my thoughts were elsewhere. I wouldn’t ever want to miss a chance to stop and chat and engage with a fellow citizen – we need many, many meetings of bodies and minds to nurture feelings of common membership. Secondly, I want to express to her openly and publicly, my unconditional commendations and congratulations without any reservations to each and every one of the very many, who all and together made this great transformation of our cemetery and capital city. It is truly something to be proud of; well worth drawing attention to and talking about; celebrating what we have done – an indication of what we can do; something to be maintained – so let there be no falling back.
There would be much to learn and arrange and for our own attitudes and behaviour to change. My engineering background reminds me of continuity and rates of flow – storage at homes and regular movement from point to point to final disposal before any bin overflows. The unsettling sight of heavily littered grounds the morning after the crowds of Mashramani, Easter Monday and the pop-artiste shows should be no more. We have to get back to cleaning up the area where we have picnicked before we leave, taking our scraps with us in our empty picnic baskets – that’s what they did even two thousand years ago at the Sermon on the Mount. The measure of our change would be the absence of garbage and used containers in our drains and canals. And we, getting better each day in accord with the old GTT jingle, can make our cemetery, our city, our country steadily better day by day.
The vendor lady’s jabbing did set me thinking: We of the PPP/C, we too want better people in a better country. One could read in her probing, what would you do to help? The thousand or so century (cabbage) palms which lined the avenues of the cemetery need replacing. On the roads out of Miami, one would pass hundreds of landscaping services offering century palms and other trees – I had a place to start. Messrs Ramzan Ali and Wesley Kirton, good friends of mine and of Guyana in Florida, and Ms Peggy Chin of Brickdam, Georgetown join me in working to provide to the city council, a significant portion of the palm plants required. We welcome all who would want to join with us.
Yours faithfully,
Samuel A A Hinds
