I
was in Miami airport recently, waiting to check in at Caribbean Airlines, and I ended up in an intriguing conversation with a Guyanese, living in Florida, who was travelling to Trinidad on business. It was revealing in the sense that this young man, who did business in Guyana, was clearly very familiar with all the trauma connected with life here, and we laughed together at various episodes in that vein, some his, some mine, we had encountered in recent years.
As the conversation wound down, he turned to me and said, “There is so much of Guyana I love and cherish, but I couldn’t live there. Every time I go there I end up seeing or hearing things that confirm that. Ironically, look how close I am in Miami, and at the same time, look how far.” I agreed with the irony of what he was saying, but then he paused, looked at me, and said. “How are you coping? How are you dealing with it?”
I offered the standard explanation, we hear it all the time, about choosing to focus on the positive, but at that point the intriguing aspect of the conversation came to the fore; in concrete terms, not rhetoric, how indeed was I, and others like me, coping? What mechanism was at play there? I had a few theories, but I wasn’t sure.
Back in Guyana, that Miami conversation kept returning to my mind over the next several days, but no particular light dawned, no substantial answer came. And then, almost one week later, driving in Georgetown, there was a van waiting at a side street and I stopped to let him out; he was exiting a one-way street, but as the van started to move, a third car suddenly appeared to my right, tooting his horn, and made a left turn across me, into the one-way street, skirted the van, and kept going. Both the van driver and I were astounded.
We looked at each other, with an unbelieving shake of the head, and he shouted across to me, “Dis is Guyana, Buddy”, waved thanks and drove on. With the encounter fresh in my mind, it struck me, almost immediately, that I had just heard a possible answer to the coping question I had heard a few days earlier.
It also reminded me of a Tradewinds performance at Thirst Park, during the hard 1970s period in Guyana, where, ironically, I had asked a young man from West Dem the same “how are you dealing” question, and that he had given me the same blanket response of “Dis is GT boy. Yuh have fuh lef it suh, or yuh run mad.”
Over the next few days the more I thought about the attitude the more plausible it became. Instead of being driven to distraction and despair by the strains of life here, it would seem that Guyanese have taken an attitudinal approach which, in the face of the problems persisting, treats those things as part of the package, as part of what you have to accept as a given. For many of us, and possibly me, that is our principal coping mechanism. There may be others family connection, business interest, involvement with a project, inheritance, wishful thinking but in each case that wider acceptance of our problems, found in different ways in different societies, serves as a balm, helping us to ride through the bumps to cope. We see the fracture, recognize it as something unchanging, and rather than bashing our heads against the stone wall, we simply step around it and keep moving.
The more I think about it, the more evidence I see. How is it possible for a major international hotel being built here to have a number of Chinese construction workers squatting in an empty area of the building while a dispute over their wages is going on? We may need a Christopher Ram to weigh in on this for the various illegalities involved, but the question obvious to all is how come this shocking display is taking place, and indeed accepted, in this new bastion of our tourism industry? Various contortions and explanations will certainly come forth from the various interests who may be involved with the issue, but an aberration like that (and Guyana is rife with them) will ultimately only make sense, and allow blood pressures to normalize, if we acknowledge the “Dis is Guyana” (DIG) diagnosis as a chronic situation.
How, for example, could our governments, in various incarnations, be moving money around like dominoes to diverse accounts and with no consequences for anyone resulting? How can we have the major hospital in the country, operating with two Financial Officers (sharing the load perhaps?) with nothing being done to regularize this anomaly?
How can we have minibus drivers, and even private cars, making a detour to the left at a traffic left, doing a quick U-turn, and then calmly sailing through the facing red light?
How is it that a coconut tree is cut down at the side of a major street in town, and six weeks later the trunk remains at the side of the road, rotting as it waits removal? How we can have a highly-placed officer in our government going for 20 months without reporting to anyone?
The answer in each case is palpably the same, ‘DIG’. Perhaps, in this new communication age, we could benefit from Dennis Dias creating a smart-looking ‘DIG’ logo, pretty 4-colour job, maybe with the inevitable young lady blatantly showing some leg.
Printed on bumper stickers, and selected billboards, it could become a hot tourism item for folks with imagination, and it would also save a lot of chat in that the next time we get the “how are you coping question”, we simply point to the logo and calmly go back to our Banks. Indeed, there are multiple applications.
While he didn’t ask my advice, I am suggesting to Freddie Kissoon that he rename his popular newspaper column ‘DIG’. After all, Freddie’s rightful delineation of issues bedevilling our society have been going on for some time and with little or no rectification in sight, he could rightfully explain, in bold letters across the column, ‘Dis is Guyana’.
It would also be a boon for our harassed Immigration Officers. When a short-tempered New Yorker at Timehri starts arguing about some travel issue, the Immigration Officer would simply smile and point out the nearby ‘DIG’ poster. Even if the visitor didn’t care for the language on the display, the lady’s leg would do the trick; smiles all around.
Remember now, Dennis; I’m the one who came up with the bumper sticker idea, so the first one is for me.
