You make an excellent case Joe Coxall for responsible development and enjoyment of the underdeveloped areas and I guess you may aspire to be one of the Woodstock Flower-Power folk! However human beings are terribly unpredictable and MESSY so even though the development plan you advocate is very nice; the devil is in the detail of implementation.

Two examples:
1 The Amerindians are gaining in lobbying strength and if they have their way, (although they only form 7percent of the population) they would claim ownership of about 70percent of Guyana.

2 The PNCR and the PPP cannot work together. In fact if one said the sky was blue; I am sure the other would disagree.

Nice plan Joe; shame ’bout the people!

Splashmins was a tricky move environmentally speaking. But apart from that, I’m all for this kind of development. Anything to get us to better utilize our country and at the same time, ease the congestion along the coastline.

Guyana may not be as resource-rich as we think, but it has enough to be better off that it is. I’ve always believed that the only thing Guyana truly lacks is an excuse.

Anyway the point I was trying to make is that the government need to subsidise this effort whereby groups of people can quickly set up selfsustaining villages, and produce all their needs in orderly fashion and in harmony with the environment instead of the haphazard way you see a half finished house here and there and an old zinc shack in between.

Joe

I tried using this concoction in a piece I’m working on and ran into gridlock. ‘Bhai’ seems to mean ‘brother’ in Hindi (Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai: India and China are brothers). It’s also a sikh title (Bhai Varinder Singh, etc) and a festival of Northern India (Bhai Dooj) with links to Diwali. I ended up using ‘boai’ which just doesn’t look right.

Any word on that creolese dictionary people were talking about? I love our creolese. It is one of the few things that are TRULY Guyana. No one had to teach it to us, and none of us has any difficulty following it regardless of its spelling permutations. Like all ahwe, it baan and grow deh.

He was born into a country that had its borders in tact, and he could travel freely. Now that he thinks Berbice deserves better (as though the ENTIRE country doesn’t), he wants it to secede. He doesn’t understand that the PPP government’s treatment of Berbice mirrors the way it treats all of Guyana. Everything is done ti impree Guyanese so the PPP looks good; not necessarily that Guyanese are satisfied!

With this reality, the best thing for all Guyanese to do then is to secede from the PPP!

Political leaders have a poor track record of development of any kind, that is why they have a host of economic advisers and ministers. Here in the USA, development came by such illuminaries as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates. etc.

Another myth is that Guyana has a lot of natural resources, no we do not, we have some but there are no great demand for our resources, because they are in no short supply.

Since I was about 10 years of age, I was told that the population in Guyana was approx 700,000. It is still that way today. So what is the problem? The problem is hyperinflation. The same population now need a larger supply of money to merely exist.

There has been no new factories and most of the development has been along the line of the service sector economy.

What we do have is lots and lots of land, rain and sunshine, these are the basic elements needed for sustained living. In Israel the residents form settlements known as Kubbutz whereby they go into the arid regions and develop whole communities based on shared services. In Chinatown here in New York, the shop shelves are filled with dried fish the size of my fingernails all the way to a yard long, including dried snails, which is a very expensive delicacy here in the USA. They also have pickled and dried everything.

I have seen pictures on the internet of Splashmins, what a beautiful place- that has been created out of the jungle.

I saw a documentary of a logger right here in America who use horses instead of trucks to haul his logs out of the woods. He said he saves on gas and the horses do not destroy young saplings as trucks would.

There are portable sawmills selling here in the USA for about three thousand dollars. A good mulcher costs about a thousand dollars.

So lets put the pieces together, the government should survey large areas of land next to the creek areas, and come up with a blue print for organised occupation, this settlement should have a large area set aside for lifestock rearing and community development using the Splashmin model, of landscaping.

Start the project nearest to the city environs for convenience and support then allow others to develop outwards. Cut the trees and convert them into boards right there on site. Mulch the branches for compost.

Raise fish and dry every one of them that are not immediately used. Set up a carpentery workshop to build homes, teach the children Google Sketchup, which is a free programme that can be downloaded from the internet, that allows you to build accurate home designs in 3D. Teach them practical agriculture instead of textbook western style agriculture, it has no immediate practical use unless you can obtain their equipment, chemicals and fertilizers.

I read that there are some companies that are teaching a few kids to use various computer programmes, Xcel, Word etc. these are of little use to the kids if there are no jobs.

These kids will do better with MIcrosoft Project and Sketchup. These two programmes are practical and can be applied immediately to village development and efficiencies.

The president keeps lamenting about climate change and the environment. There is nothing wrong with the climate or environment in Guyana, I saw many pictures on the internet of the flooded areas, that has nothing to do with climate change, it has everything to do with chocked gutters, drains and canals.

People has become so disillusioned that it is no wonder that Mr. Roopnarine wants to seperate himself from the rest of the country. Many people of the Caribbean and now hanging their only hope on the first black President of the USA. We cling on to the campaign slogan “Yes we can” like a life preserve jacket.

For all of us Guyanese the question is “Yes we can- Do what?”

Guyana needs a pioneering effort into sustainable living, we have the main ingredients that is land, rain, sunshine and lots of youth muscle. The only thing missing is the leadership and innovated thinking to push this proccess forward.

Joe.

Now so far I’ve seen just one person call for secession. And a few bloggers, of course, gave a kind of skeptical support. But the ‘buyer’s remorse’ implicit in this discussion is obvious. People VOTED for this govt. And now, instead of holding its feet to the fire, they want to quietly walk away as if they never had anything to do with it. And that, I believe, is the real problem. The problem of RESPONSIBILITY.

If we are not responsible for keeping our elected officials honest, then why should they be responsible to us? Let’s all eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow… You know the rest.