Imagine painstakingly planting your yard with fruit trees and celebrating the reward of seeing them bear but just before the fruits ripen, they are stripped from their branches and thrown to the ground. In local lingo, your ‘hard labour gone down the drain’.
Well this is the story of Laurie Greenidge and Ruth Bart who for quite some time have been battling the destruction of their fruits and even the greens in their kitchen garden. But they also have to deal with bricks being pelted on their roof in the dead of the night, preventing the aged couple from having a good night’s sleep.
While most Guyanese spent last week caught up with the controversy surrounding the March 2, elections results and last Wednesday’s confirmation that Guyana had recorded its first death from the pandemic COVID-19, Greenidge and Bart, as they have been doing for quite some time, were fighting to have some peace in their Diamond home.
They have made their plight public before and it was published in this newspaper and according to them the police arrested a neighbour who they are convinced is responsible for tormenting them.
“They arrest him three times, but the police tell us that they need evidence, they need eyewitness, so they had to let him go after some hours,” Greenidge told Stabroek Weekend recently. The problem is that Greenidge is visually impaired and Bart is physically challenged. Their home is pelted during the night so is the stripping of their fruits from the trees.
“The other morning, we get up and she call and tell me that the young guava and mango fruits are on the ground,” he said sadly.
They were happy to move out of their zinc apartment at Friendship, East Bank Demerara where they had struggled to pay the rent. They moved into a home built by Food for the Poor and they had imagined that they would have spent their last years on this earth planting their kitchen garden, picking fruits, and just being at peace.
And it appeared that way when they moved in 2011 but all of this came to an end sometime last year, Greenidge said, when he stopped talking to his neighbour.
“We were friends you know and whenever I get anything from my garden I would give him but then he start to act funny and I start suspecting things so I said you know what I would just ease off of him but like he was not happy,” the hapless man said.
The couple have no children.
“Last week was my birthday and I invited my brother over and a few friends and after the friends left, we went to bed and I tell my brother that they would pelt the house and so said so done. My brother was like, ‘wait this is how you all does sleep?’ and I tell him yes boy no rest for us,” Greenidge further said.
As the two spoke to this reporter the evidence of their distress was obvious on their faces and Bart was close to tears.
“When you see he go out nobody does know I in that house, I does be in there until I hear that bus come and then I would go and open the door,” she said.
‘Brother’s keeper’
And what makes it more difficult for the couple is their belief that their other neighbours are not looking out for them.
“You know what the sergeant told me? That he went around and talk to the other neighbours and everybody was like they do not see anything. But he said it was like people just don’t want to get involved,” Greenidge said.
The couple said it hurts them that the neighbours are not more caring.
“I would want to ask them ‘what happen to being your brother’s keeper,’” Greenidge continued.
He recalled that when he first moved into the area, he did much gardening and one day he was watering his greens when a neighbour commented, ‘once a man, twice a child’.
“I want to know what he was talking about, but you know I felt bad because even though I was visually impaired I was still doing things to help myself,” he continued.
Bart said it was very difficult for them to have an eyewitness account of what happens because it was at night that the roof was pelted. The couple expressed the wish that someone would help them with a camera in front of their home which they believe would help them identify the perpetrator of their misery.
“All we want is to live in peace that is all we want. Is that too much to ask?” Bart asked sadly.
She recalled that initially when they moved to the area they spoke to a few persons and they had this one particular neighbour who they spoke with but a question she posed one day caused them to become suspicious.
“She guh turn and ask if we write we will. I was like that is none of your business and you know we just ease off. I don’t know why she would ask us something like that,” she said angrily.
The couple had earlier related that when they moved into the area, they befriended all of their neighbours, with whom they shared produce from their garden. But after some time, persons began to steal the crops that mostly Greenidge planted. As a result, he said, subsequently they disassociated themselves from everyone in the community.
“It is not that we hate anyone, but we just feel that we have to keep to ourselves. We thought that people would look out for us but not so. So, we are just there in the nights we would listen to the news and so on and then we would try to sleep but now with the pelting…,” he trailed off.
‘Piano tuner’
Greenidge, who has been visually impaired all of his life, is a trained, respected musician and a well-known piano tuner, while Bart is good with her hands.
Over the years she has made a living from selling handcrafted cushions, bedsheets and chair backs. But she said because of the lack of space she has eased down on making anything to sell.
“But we will be extending and then I would start making again. Right now, we just survive on our pensions, I get disability assistance and he is getting pension,” she said.
Greenidge, who is 80, also earns from tuning pianos, but because that is a dying form of music in Guyana, he said, revenue has dried up somewhat though he still gets the odd call.
Every Sunday he can be found at Smith’s Congregational Church as he is the church’s pianist; he also plays at weddings held there.
In a previous interview with this newspaper, Greenidge had detailed that he has been playing and tuning pianos for years. “Piano is my second name, I just love the piano it makes you so creative,” he had said.
His deftness with the instrument and the fact that he has been “tuning and repairing them for years” is even more interesting when one considers that he has been visually impaired for most of his life. At the time he had shared that while he was not born blind, he had weak optic nerves which were improperly managed and eventually led to his blindness.
“But I never allowed it to keep me back, you know. Once I got a taste of piano, I just fell in love and that was it,” he had said.
He had shared that he had travelled to the United Kingdom where he honed the skills he already had. And it was not just the piano (even though that was what he eventually fell in love with), but he also had lessons with the organ and saxophone taught to him by some of the finest musicians.
Giving a background to his life during that interview, Greenidge said that he was born Laurie Evan Rupus Greenidge in Bajan Quarters. The area was so named because it was predominantly occupied by persons from Barbados, who worked on the Skeldon Estate. He had said his father, Laurie Greenidge, worked on the estate but his mother, Florie Bacchus, was a stay-at-home mom. He lost both of his parents at a young age, his father when he was a baby, and his mother when he was seven years old; he and his three siblings grew up with an aunt.
He later attended the Institute for the Blind which in the past was tasked with the responsibility of training the blind and finding meaningful employment for them. At the institute, he learnt to make baskets, cane chairs, trays and other craft items and then he became employed by the institute which in turn sold those items.
While he initially made money from making those items, over the years they stopped being in demand and he depended on tuning pianos.
It was his passion for music and more so in the piano that eventually saw him being awarded a scholarship to attend the London College of Furniture, a polytechnic in East End London, which had a department to train people to repair pianos. The scholarship came through his association with one Donald Jones, who was one of the few piano tuners in that time. It was he who recommended Greenidge to Lynette Dolphin, the then chair of the Department of Culture at the Ministry of Education.
He was married to Paulette Greenidge, who many may have known as Paulette Craig who was a teacher; she died in 1998. He remembered that his wife was also a versatile piano player and she taught music.
He later met Ruth and they have been together for a number of years.
“My experience both locally and overseas I consider beneficial both to myself and the country at large. My work in servicing pianos took me to a number of places in the country and I would have met many persons as well, some of whom I know up to day,” Greenidge had said at the time, a satisfied smile on his face.
But now his just wants to live in peace and enjoy the fruits of his labour.
