One of the striking things about the Guyanese culture is our disposition to improvise, to use our ingenuity, to use our wiles, to try and overcome. We find replacements for parts that cannot be sourced; we improvise different materials when the foreign one is not available; we get around problems in daily life by coming up with inventive solutions or compromises, even somewhat shady ones, in order, as Guyanese would phrase it, “to get through.”
It is a condition I came to recognize vividly living in North America. I saw it in myself in items for my house I would try to repair instead of replace; in my inclination to improvise when a tool wasn’t handy; something my eldest daughter, Luana, born and raised in Canada, would remark on. Living here again, looking at things through that lens, I see the condition is alive and well.
There is an enterprising vendor (somewhere up the East Coast) who has given her business a unique kind of mobility by building a kind of enclosure around the front of her motorcycle, with space on both sides of the handle bars for her to display her goods. She can change location in
