Dear Editor,
Your editorial yesterday, on the non-implementation of CoI recommendations among other accepted policies, brings to mind two of my ‘Rules for Living in the Rupununi’:
4. Make no plans
– based on anyone’s (including your own) stated intentions.
6. Predict what’s NOT going to get done
– just from someone’s statement of commitment to do it.
These are taken from a serial writing of mine a few years ago, to record some lessons learned over a decade of life in Lethem. The subtitle ‘(Or Anywhere Else)’ came from the realisation that my chosen home region is, in terms of human behaviour, but a microcosm of Guyana, indeed of the larger world.
Today your similar observations remind me that the whole of Guyana, at any rate, is subject to these rules or habits, based ultimately on self-serving for the good and easy life.
I make no more moral judgements, Editor, than you do. We both report, in our different ways, consequences and lessons offered.
Yours faithfully,
Gordon Forte