Dear Editor,
In every country there are communities with a thing or things that are indelibly etched within and have become part of the psyche of those communities serving and distinguishing each in a particular way. The mining town of Linden is no exception.
We thought that the siren/horn had formed a permanent fusion within the community, having been blowing for donkey years at specific intervals.
Introduced by the Canadians/Demba, the then owners of the Bauxite Company for the main purpose of turning bauxite workers on and off of work, the siren/horn soon became the community’s clock. They functioned not only for bauxite workers but also regulated the lives of the entire mining town of every place, work, school, housewives, boat men, farmers; the town lived, played, worked and slept by the horn/siren. The intervals at which they were blown were 5:30 am., 10 to 7, 7 am, 11am, 112:20 pm, 1230 pm and there was a 6 o’clock (pm) horn.
But there were yet other functions as well; to herald in a New Year, whenever a senior staff of the company or a prominent member of the community died, to sound an emergency and the death of a Head Of State. In his book “Mine Workers of Guyana” Odida Quamina noted that the horn in earlier times had performed other meaningful functions such as a fire alarm, times of distress, giving notices of accidents or persons lost, “which were indicated by long and short blasts at 10 – seconds intervals, and a 5:45 pm horn was introduced as a warning that malaria mosquitoes were on the rise and it was time to return the children home.”
Lindeners do welcome the new Chinese Company Bosai and are wide eyed at the things they are projecting, but the local high ranking managers of the company need to inform them of what the horn means to the town, its history and impact on the lives of the people. Obviously, the Chinese do not know and maybe are just getting rid of whatever they consider obsolete to them!
Voices raised before against efforts to stop blowing the horn/siren, when it was briefly stopped, will once again have to be raised now that Bosai Company has ceased blowing it.
The horn/siren in our community is unique, just like all our streets that are named from woods.
Yours faithfully,
Frank Fyffe
