It’s called Timehri now, but in the 1950s, when I worked there for three years, our international airport was called Atkinson Field. It was a small community but a sociologist’s dream. To begin with, it was quite isolated. To visit “the base”, as Guyanese called the former American airfield, you needed to show a pass, obtained in town, to a guard at the Madewini gate entrance.
In that small community of perhaps 200 people, there was an amazing array of nationalities: American, British, Guyanese, Polish, Scottish, Chinese, Barbadian, Trinidadian – they were all part of the Atkinson canvas. I worked at B. G. Airways as a dispatcher for
