Dear Editor,
Sweet potato is $650 a pound in Guyana. This was what this local ‘ground provision’ went for at the Bourda market during the week. It is domestically grown sweet potato, not foreign (‘white’) potato. In fact, the foreign product is cheaper at $600 for 16 oz. Somehow Guyanese manage. If it was sweet potato alone, the substitutes would suffice in helping families get by. But, everything has gone up; and not just up, but UP, as in really, up, up, which locals have this habit of repeating a word to pound home their point. Other ground provisions are ‘dear’, though not as sharply. I say it, ask it, again: how are poorer Guyanese getting by? The poor is never the skimpiness of a statistical outlier in a society like ours, but the majority.
Five pounds of sweet potato for a family with three children, and the buying for a minimum wage worker for the week is over. The $3,000 spent on that ensures a meal of a pound of veggies a day for those five adults and children; that could be all to it. Fish is out there in the atmosphere, and I speak of prices; while chicken went up, and so also most other basics, better identified as essentials. Who is coping, and who is not? Surely, many Guyanese are hurting. Badly. I must wonder how much rice and bread they can access. I let pass transportation and all the other crushing conditions of living in this richest, but toughest, of lands. If there is illness, there is the other trouble of getting to the hospital. When the landlord comes around, I had better not be around. Or here at all.
Editor, I focus on painting the simplest picture of what it means to be poor in this fabulously rich society. It is at hours like these, then the best in the best of us comes out. Concern. Caring. Compassion. Will somebody up there watch out for these people? I beg. Please have a heart. Hear. Help.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall