The screams of the nation’s children should wake us. Young children burning in fires should shake us. The twenty of Mahdia 2023 taught us painful lessons, but still the risks remain for children of this nation. In low-spirited places even the children are not spared.
Death announcements no longer show the faces of a majority elderly, but the young among us seem to be perishing at an alarming rate. We can ask, what great evil hangs over this nation? Who embraced only the darkness so that the light would be dimmed?
We know that often when we see headlines informing us of tragedies, that recklessness, negligence, and arrogance play a part. The plight of the Guyanese people is certainly not only because of supernatural forces. However, when day after day, flesh is burnt, penetrated by bullets, chopped, strangled, mangled, and drown we must begin to question ourselves.
Is this nation suffering because we do not love ourselves? Is it because of our willingness to accept this society which continues to evolve into this ‘animal farm’ where all people are not treated equal and there is no balance between light and dark or good and evil? It should be sobering and there should be an awakening when we accept that even our babies are not spared from the wrath of this nation. We should wake but instead we continue to walk in arrogance, and consumed in the degeneracy that has left us divided, weeping, and bleeding.
Let us look at some of the tragedies that occurred recently. Leroy Archer, a three-month-old baby perished in a fire in Enmore, East Coast Demerara on Thursday. He was new to this world, innocent, and to be killed in such a manner is heartbreaking. In such cases, what do we say to grieving relatives that would ease their pain? How does a mother stand strong when her child is burnt to death? How does a father pretend that he is strong to not only bear the mother’s pain, but also his?
It was only days before when four-year-old Junior Anderson was also killed in a fire in Sophia. There are so many questions when children are trapped in houses and left to burn to death. Children playing with matches, parents wiping sweat from their brows, collapsing under the weight of life’s demands only to have to bury their children.
The recent incidences of children being killed in fires should wake us all about fire prevention. Every Guyanese home should have smoke detectors. If the poorer people cannot afford it, the government can do a good for this nation by helping them to obtain them. We must supervise our children, make constant checks around our homes to make sure there is no faulty wiring or equipment. Too many lives are lost in fires.
The children dying this week in fires, was not where the weeping stopped. Twenty-year-old Navin Seenauth and seventeen-year-old Daniel Boodram drowned after they disappeared while swimming at Unity Beach. Their bodies were found floating. The wails of loved ones, echo across the land.
However, it was not only those lives that water claimed this week. Fourteen-year-old Joel Adams also perished at the National Aquatic Centre. There have been conflicting reports surrounding his death. One where it was reported that the child back flipped into the pool and a lifeguard jumped in to rescue him. Other reports stated that the child never back flipped in the pool but was pulled from the water and attempts were made to resuscitate him.
The coldness expands as young people and children continue to suffer. Six-year-old Jeremiah Gustave was also shot to the head this week from a stray bullet. He was with his mother who is a food vendor when a motorcyclist approached and shot at a man. The man escaped but the child was shot. Recklessness, cruelty, there are too many damaged and deranged people in this society that has been bleeding for too long. Young men trapped in a nefarious cycle. I hope the child makes a full recovery.
It was not only that child who was hurt because of gunshots this week, however. Twenty-seven year old Simon Shawn Anthony, a transgender sex worker was also killed. The trans community is a small fraction of our society and because of rejection, poverty, and discrimination some of them turn to sex work. Another sex worker said that there were working in the King Street area when they saw a heavily tinted vehicle that circled four times before the now dead transwoman approached the vehicle. The transwoman was shot several times, collapsed, and died.
Many in this nation are cruel and cold to people in the LGBTQ+ community. Even the murders of people within the community do not stir compassion in them. They try to justify the murders of innocent human beings by saying they deserved it because their lifestyles are abominable according to the doctrines, they believe in. Often these are some of the same people who do not measure or acknowledge the depravity they engage in. This nation continues to bleed because we do not love each other.
This week we also saw a convoluted police report about two brothers, Marvin and Ellis Joseph, ages seventeen and thirty who were chopped to death at Parika. It was reported that they were attacking another young man, and accidentally chopped each other and both died from their wounds. The other young man is in the hospital.
We laugh at ourselves often even as we continue to cry and bleed. Perhaps laughter is the only thing that keeps many of us sane as we try to detach from the anxiety, pain, and suffering. The bleeding of this nation can desensitize us.
Even foreigners are not spared in this land. A Venezuelan woman Evelyn Alfonzo Alves was also murdered this week. She was shot to the head and her body was left on the road like she was nothing. The respect for human life in Guyana is on a constant decline.
The nation bleeds, the nation cries, the nation is in trouble. Are we going to continue weeping and bleeding or will we stand and make the changes so that our children do not continue to die, and our people do not continue to disregard the lives of others?
