Sometimes I travel up the Essequibo River to spend weekends in a house set on the bank in a clearing of white sand cut from the jungle. It is not easy to describe its beauty: the peace of the early morning lit by a red dawn; the flights of white birds at evening; the moods of the great river changing; moonlight blazing on the white sand and over the wide river; the feeling of the immensity of this land every way you look.
How many Guyanese know about the amazing beauty that lies in wait for them in their own land? No coral island in all the glossy brochures, no Acapulco tourist trip, can begin to compare with the beauty we own ourselves and so seldom go to see.
But the fact is that beauty has no priority in the lives of most men (and, need I say, when I write men I mean women also) here or elsewhere. Even the mention of the word tends to make practical men squirm a little with embarrassment. This is not without explanation.