Reading, over the weekend, a short but insightful account of the impact of the ongoing countrywide heavy rainfall on the South Rupununi village of Karaudarnau, afforded the Stabroek News by the young village Toshao allowed for a sobering insight into the gulf between the lifestyles – if indeed such a term is appropriate here – of ourselves, coastal dwellers, and those other Guyanese, Amerindians, mostly, domiciled in the same territorial space as us but, nonetheless, dwelling at a distance sufficiently far removed in terms of way of life, as to cause it to seem as though we live in different worlds.
We, coastal dwellers, on the one hand, and our Amerindian ‘fellow Guyanese,’ on the other, in terms of our respective environmental circumstances, live poles apart, governed by the same overarching constitutional arrangements but, in truth, not sharing a great deal else in common. Important ground rules separate us, to the extent where in some critical respects, we are strangers to each other, different people from different worlds.
The differences here transcend considerations of socialization. They have to do with the nature and quality of our respective lives and the differences in the respective challenges that we face, we in our environment and them in theirs. Those differences, truth be told, are sufficiently stark as to cause one to think, sometimes, that our worlds are different. What we think is, in some important respects, not at variance with reality.
Do we, coastal dwellers, not feel, in more instances than we might concede, that we have far more in common with the ways of others, people from other geographic spaces, than with our Amerindian countrymen and women leading a ‘separate kind of existence in that aforementioned same geographic space? Does our travel and our socialization not reflect this? And might the separateness of our existence, not, to an overwhelming extent, cause us to ponder the notion of common goals reflected in that all too familiar one people, one nation, one destiny refrain? Does the utterance not, all too often, derive from rote rather than from conviction?
Last weekend found our youthful Toshao preoccupied with giving leadership to the best possible response that could be mustered to salvage the distressing conditions that have been left behind at Karaudarnau on account of what is probably the still incomplete rampage of the seasonal rains. When we spoke with him he promised that once he had attended his first Council Meeting after his election as Toshao, he would furnish us with a Brief on conditions ‘on the ground.’ True to his word (which is more than often can be said, frequently, for functionaries at the coastal level) the brief was sent as promised.
It was as clear as it was clinical, articulating with a pointed unfussiness the nature of an emergency the scale of which might have taken our coastal bureaucrats considerably more time to muster. Consider too, that were Karaudarnau located in Georgetown the requisite remedial tools would probably have been trotted out with alacrity. At Karaudarnau, when the rains pounding the community are inflicting a mind-boggling toll, there are no remedial tools to be had. Response must derive, for the most part, from forbearance and from strength of will.
Our Toshao’s measured account of the havoc that the rains have inflicted at Karaudarnau communicated a message of self-reliance and stamina, born of an understanding that promises of a coastal response could not necessarily be looked to for timeliness. In the critical immediate aftermath, of the downpour and its attendant havoc it was down to him and his community to make a difference. His understanding of this, based on his familiarity with precedent, was particularly impressive.
What he had to say might even have essayed a thinly veiled rebuke of the ill-informed assumptions that we, coastal dwellers make, about how the affairs of the hinterland should be administered and what is good and right for the contemporary residents whose ancestors had fashioned a way of life for themselves long before the rest of us had ever set foot here.
Some of what our insightful Toshao had to say struck a chord which even the tone deaf could hardly miss. He wanted lessons to be learnt about how houses should be constructed and drains dug in hinterland communities and he wanted approaches to the wider development of such communities to take account of considerations that include the vagaries of weather patterns and the crippling extent to which sustained rainfall compromises the movement of residents of Karaudarnau to Lethem, where everyone at one time or another, might have some important errand to perform. Our Toshao appeared too to be, none too subtly, making the point about the gulf between the condition of the health services in coastal Guyana and those in the South Rupununi. He did so carefully, deliberately, reminding that all of this, the rains, the flooding and the subsequent as-best-as-one-can effort to repair the disruption, dislocation and displacement were, in fact, a cumulative effort which, up until then had benefitted from no significant central government input.
In his note, too, our Toshao reminded in his unobtrusive way that all of this, the deluge and the salvage effort, was unfolding even as the community was seeking to create a convivial environment in which its Covid-19 victims could self-isolate safely. He goes even further, throwing in poignant reminders about houses that had had their walls removed by the ferocity of the downpours and of the cattle that might have survived the rains but failed to make it through the subsequent hunger and disease that had set upon them after they had become separated from the farmers.
In an odd sort of way what was, in effect, a simple letter that sought to put the flooding in parts of South Rupununi into perspective struck a much more far-reaching chord, proffering a compelling reminder that we remain, in fact, and notwithstanding our self-delusionary indulgences, a country of separate parts, that separateness underscored by the yawning gulf that underpins our existence, our respective, environmentally different geographic spaces.
Who knows whether the letter to us from our Toshao at Karaudarnau was not, in essence a poignant reminder that we still have a long and challenging road to travel to make that ‘One, People, One Nation refrain a great deal more than just wishful thinking.
