Hardly a week goes by without some reference in the media to the depressing statistics of the number of Guyanese who continue to migrate. We can see the reaction to the degrading conditions at home – crime; unemployment; governing traumas; our inability to even keep our capital from looking decrepit – as the outbound flood continues, and our people endure the long visa lines at the US Embassy hoping for good fortune.
Most of them, of course, are simply seeking “a better life” for themselves or their children – one of safety and opportunity and better health care and more of the material goodies, and like their brethren in Jamaica and Haiti and other Caribbean nations many of them will leave these shores, taking their skills with them, never to return.
The loss to our nation has to be staggering. When you speak with many of these people outside, along with the success stories, you hear in their voices, and sometimes see in their eyes, their regret for the path that life took them away from the country they still love. In Orlando, last year, the morning after a Tradewinds dance, a woman from Mahaica held onto me
