Dear Editor,
The first time I heard the word, a long ago exotic foreign locale came to mind. It wasn’t one, but two words; my mistake. When the two words were first read, the image of ‘bush’ medicine came. Bare Root wasn’t Beirut; nor was it of creole healing. It was worse: poverty at its harrowing worst. I peer deeper into this sinkhole.
Bare Root: a community forced to live on that scantiest of scant existences. To talk of one full meal a day, or of a nutritional hodgepodge approaching some semblance of a balanced meal is to talk through one’s ears. Probably elsewhere, as in lower down. How do these villagers of a habitat get by in Bare Root? Bare Root is barebones, on a good day. A good day is a rarity for many Guyanese across Guyana; perhaps, when the phone rings to inform of a barrel ready to be picked up. Or an overseas visitor drops off an envelope with a bill inside. One with the face of a US president on it. How do some citizens breathe, stand upright?
After a lifetime of nothing but the barebones existence that Bare Root offers, then what Guyana has is a colony of skeletons. How many Bare Roots are there here? One is too many considering where Guyana is today. The stats are glorious, the elites have helped themselves to most of the rich pickings. It is what that puts them in a celebratory mood. For them it has been an unending season of joy. The army of have nots muddles through life in their forlorn and forgotten corners, while the world rejoices over Guyana. What would some Guyanese do to partake of that glittering Guyana that is as alien to them as Martians?
No Guyanese should be part of an existence that is as threadbare as those who ghost walk through places like Bare Root and other similarly severely distressed areas. Like those who eke out some type of life by sea dams (waterside people) and graveyards (Skull City). Amid all the flowing riches, the raucous crosstalk, I encounter Guyanese far from Bare Root, who have their hands stretched out, and their feet unshod. Any well-set, well-to-do, Guyanese who has an interest in seeing how the other half lives, I recommend they try something.
Get a bag of food and drink (a sandwich and six ounces of liquid), 50 or 100 of such small bags, and visit by the areas of Bourda Market, or the Guyana Post Office, or the main Regent Street supermarket. Right below and around the bright, new towers, there are those wretches of Guyana living in close proximity to the gutter. Dozens in one part of the capital city, scores in others. Expand them and then count them. Their numbers don’t lie.
It is this tale of contrasts: a country of breathtakingly world class numbers on the one hand, and a society with battalions of famished skin-and-bones’ people dotted across Guyana’s economic landscape, on the other. From my perspective, the solution is so simple that even a simpleton would grasp it. A little less from the budget for building would work miracles building up the spirits of those Guyanese who have all but given up hope. A little system and a little structure that deals with needs assessment helps, would benefit the most vulnerable and dependent in Guyana. Bare Root should be in dirt poor countries, not in today’s Guyana.
The world says that Guyana is richer than Croesus. The quality of life and the quantity of food for those who live in Bare Root insist that that is as big as a deception and set-up could get. They live it, they know it.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
