An Opposition supports the government!
Hello readers: after you’ve taken in other columns, commentaries, and voluminous letters offering serious, scientific dissertations and analyses, I herein invite you – especially the over-sixties who will hopefully interest their youth (Dot.com) – to reminisce once again on what Guyana’s fifties-to-seventies “Augus holidays” were like.
(What a long opening unjournalistic sentence as I recall my own childhood with a little help from the late jovial Charlie DeFlorimonte.)
To begin with we of the forties/sixties did not speak of “vacation”. We defined our annual longest school break as “Augus holiday”. At least our worried parents and guardians did! Almost eight weeks with children out of school!? There were no televisions, cellular phones, computers, internet or other technological past-times. Except radios and cinemas. So what were parents – and of course, the children – to do? Here’s just a sampling – Georgetown city-based style.
Mind you, I realise fully that these remembrances will only evoke loving nostalgia amongst our own over-sixties-to-nineties. (Hopefully, as written a few sentences above, today’s under-forty Dot.com generation will also appreciate the seniors’ innocent, clean, sometimes mischievous long Augus’ holidays.)
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Toys, games, pasttimes, foods…
Not that children from lil ABC to sixth-standard then at home didn’t do some August-things during the whole year. It’s just that the long holiday had so much more interesting context.
Country-“Boo-Boo” children visited the towns from their rural/hinterland homes. To Georgetown city children – relatives or not – the country-visitors even had their own particular body odour! Not offensive but different, specific. City children going in the countryside were wide-eyed with the varied, safe, enjoyable delights.
Children went to “outings” and “treats” before there were “camps” and “Bible Vacation Schools”. Nobody “went to school in Augus’” until the seventies/eighties.
Charlie reminds us of our home-made toys for August: buck-tops, wood guns with help from kind “joiners”; slingshots with fork from trees and cycle tubes for “rubber“ slings; spinners and dangerous rakes from milk/sardine tins; and both paper and light-wood boats if not paper windmills.
The girls played numerous ring-games and the fellows continued from school with such games as chink, cush, holes, jumming where marbles “taas” and buttons were priceless.
For the older folks August still managed to provide them with out-of-town “excursions” – journeys by bus or boat with music, food and strong drink. A few children were lucky to be taken along. The older “children” would go hunting in country backdam or crab-hunting on sea shore “beaches”. Bush cooks produced sweet nutritious – and hot – local dishes, sometimes replete with “wile meat”! Bird-racing was taught to the younger lads as was swimming in numerous canals.
Next time, later August. I’ll continue this excursion to August past – the night games in yards or on streets; the “sweets”, cakes and yes the end–of–August clean– outs. Fear over those medicines mixed with curiosity over the new classes at school. Until …
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The cocaine-cannabis economic sector
Frankly speaking, coward that I am now at my age, I heed advice not to constantly delve into the workings, the dangers, the obvious status of the illegal drug trade now seemingly ever present in our society.
I’m patiently warned about the obvious characteristics: it takes financially- comfortable senior players to fund the economic business – trade of cocaine – transshipment – the secure entry point on borders, cost of boats, small planes and payments to couriers; “executive management” of procurement and distribution inclusive of maintenance of overseas travel to suppliers. The sector is well-managed.
So like the rice, sugar, bauxite, seafood industries, the cocaine–ganja (Marijuana Cannabis Sativa) industry is mighty lucrative for some; deadly dangerous for others and always inviting to youth, the needy and the criminal minded. What do you think of the roles of the Police and the Judicial system regarding the existence of the Cocaine/Cannabis Sector in Guyana? Discuss…
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Fulsome opposition support for the government!
“Even though sometimes we may have contrary views, these views do not mean that we want our country to be destroyed”.
“The seriousness of the pandemic has outgrown politics…my party will endorse and support any initiative that benefits the people; it must have equity as all must have equal opportunity to share in the benefits of that initiative”.
The “old men dream dreams”. But Frankly speaking I’m too realistic a senior citizen in this land today, to hope to hear words as those quoted above coming from Opposition Leader Harmon. The distrust is too deep. It is fuelled by the politics of envy, greed and lust to control some oil-rich destiny.
The uneven, non-sustained lack of collaborative outreaches can also be traced to a PPP government still not properly “recognised” by a PNC opposition. Events of post-election 2020 have ensured seeming unending hostility. The PPP “conditions” for any form of political cohesion merely mirrors the PNC’s intransigence.
The quotes at the top of this section are from St Lucia’s Opposition Leader Pierre at a “Recover St Lucia initiative” in November last when the Opposition joined government, business interests and civil society to collectively tackle St Lucia’s challenges engendered by the Covid pandemic. Poor us.
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Ponder during/after emancipation…
●1) What do you imagine Guyana would have been after colonialism if the freed slaves had persevered with land and agriculture, along with their love for trades and “professions”?
●2) What did our First Peoples think of Emancipation in 1838 and beyond?
●3) Keep your eye on Agri Minister Mustapha! Multi-millions of dollars being spent on excavators and all types of anti-flood equipment in the Pomeroon, Berbice and elsewhere. Promises being kept. Let’s monitor.
●4) Our “Augus holiday”, their “summuh”. One of my daughters now in Puerto Rico. Covid or no Covid?
But notice how many show us their vacation spots on FB? To share joy? Or just show-offs? I’m jealous?
`Til next week
(allanafenty @yahoo.com)