Dear Editor,
Monday, April 29th shared the messages from chapter 73 of SN’s continuing saga of Guyanese wrestling with cost-of-living challenges, often travails, in this country. What a neighbourhood was visited this time around in the area close to the grand Arthur Chung Conference Centre. There is the unconscious, but no less savaging, irony of a sleek symbol of one of Guyana’s spiraling architectural grandeur peaking to the skies. But whose shadow dwarfs its surroundings where needing and hurting rue the day. From among the 10 faces and voices of Guyana’s sons and daughters, there came the keening sound of those stricken, those weakening, those grieving that carry on the wind. They arrive on pages and take up residence within the threshold. The medium brings haunting messages that just would not fade away. In coming into contact with the laments of fellow citizens, yet another small group that is dragging in a country of big happenings, there is this sensitivity to, this intimacy with, their struggles, their yearnings for relief. This is the brutal irony week after week of citizens crying wretchedly in a country that is the subject of so much envy, so many calculations of its prosperity that could be, and of which there are some strands. But which are never long enough and strong enough to reach the ones that rummage and forage wherever they can, and however they can, to manage the next dignified footstep.
I read and heard what was interpreted to be the grandest of insulations (“the cost of living is not affecting me in any way…”). God is good. There was the resigned, stoicism in surround sound and Technicolor (“well you (got) to abide (sic) with the cost of living, you can’t change it…”). Resilience of character. And the philosophical (“the cost of living is life. You can’t change life”). The profound overcoming that which is profaning. I bow my head in admiration and in deference to these brethren who are made of sterner stuff that most of their peers. I venture to say sterner than me, and I am in a strange category. In stark contrast, “tremendously” was encountered twice, and it was with the substance of what is grindingly negative. There was “tedious” and “stiff” which encapsulated so many items that must be looked at with a sigh and hollowness in the heart, and with having to move on without partaking. There was mention of that most unheard-of creatures in today’s Guyana, at least on the hardship ends, that presently endangered species called “saving.” Indeed, it is saving the excess that should be, but which is mostly imaginary. When the emphasis is on surviving somehow in a bruising, grueling, cost of living time, then any thought, any kind, of saving is much more than a luxury. It is a miracle. Cost of living struggles are making cripples of many in Guyana. Cost of living traumas are reducing many others in one of the richest countries in the world to the role of statistical indigents and nutritional dependents.
These citizens are neither hecklers nor naysayers pointing to the glaring deficits in postures, the naked weaknesses in the essences of those who owe them much but give them less than they are due. The ones wailing to the winds at the foot of the Arthur Chung Conference Centre are Guyanese feeling pain. Pain with all this patrimony that should not be. The pain of the people amid all this budgeting and spending amounts to the worst of unpardonable leadership felonies. This week it was the Arthur Chung Conference Centre. Next week could very well be some place with the name of Burnham in it. And thereafter, one with Cheddi Jagan somewhere nearby.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall