Dear Editor,
It is with great consternation and trepidation that I am now reading about the laws regarding the dollar value of jewellery that can legally be taken through the airport and what this to my mind means for the ordinary traveller, especially when that cost is added to the foreign currency that is on your person.
I have jewellery which came from India and was inherited from my grandmother ‒ beautiful 22 carats galihar, cara (foot ring) and bangles, probably now worth millions of dollars. I also have a diamond set and a ruby set, gifts from more than forty years ago and other pieces of jewellery picked up on my various trips abroad worth how much now? I do not know. Gold has escalated from $75 an ounce when I bought my first piece to over $1000 an ounce presently. Do the maths.
These gems have been lying in a deposit box at a bank and have not seen the light of day for decades. Fear. Fear of choke and robbers, fear of bandits and now fear of a new threat at the airport will leave them buried there forever.
Usually, if I am going to a wedding, goodness gracious, not in Guyana, I love to show off my pieces to the ladies indicating, ‘not because I come from Guyana you think I cannot compete with your jewellery’. It’s a woman’s thing. But now what? My daughter was asked by immigration in Barbados if she has any jewellery in her handbag! I see this as the government exposing its citizens to a new form of harassment and ridicule at international airports. Maybe when travelling abroad we should look cowed, bedraggled and woebegone, just like the mud-heads that they think we are.
With or without jewellery I know that I am beautiful and no government can take that away from me, and so are all Guyanese women. We have a woman’s right to proudly adorn ourselves with our jewellery, either bought or given to us by our husbands, lovers, children or whomsoever. Throughout history women have adorned themselves with jewels ‒ Cleopatra, the Maharani of Jaipur, the Queen of England ‒ but only in Guyana, only in Guyana does this pall of fear of owning and wearing jewellery hang over our heads, and now this new mockery at foreign airports.
I have witnessed thorough, minute searches of Guyanese luggage at airports but not usually of handbags. Now our government has guaranteed not only exhaustive search of all your pieces, but maybe sweeping search of your person also. And women be fully aware that the government will not champion your cause. This is not Jamaica.
Yours faithfully,
Hema Persaud
