A few weeks ago, after eleven at night, on a street with hardly any light and no one in sight, I was asked to vacate a taxi from a popular service in the Ruimveldt area after an argument with the driver. My offence was to question the disparity between the price that was being asked for the drop and the price paid two nights before. In the car with me was a male colleague. We had just left the home of another associate where we had a meeting about a project we were working on. The car was supposed to drop me first to my home and then my associate to the bus park.
However, the driver became so agitated that he suddenly claimed that he was not in the mood to do both drops and so his solution was to ask me to exit the vehicle. Of course, my colleague left the car with me and the driver sped away, leaving a trail of expletives.
As we walked back to the home of the colleague where our meeting was held, many questions went through my head. What if the situation had escalated to something worse? Was I wrong for questioning the fare when I knew I had never paid that price from that location when using the same service? What could I have said and done differently? What was going on with the driver of that vehicle that made him so angry and thoughtless? How could any decent man think to put a young woman out of a vehicle at that time of night with no thought or concern for her safety?
I was also angry; angry because too often these are experiences we have as Guyanese. Our rights as citizens and patrons are trampled and the lines of respect are blurred. In many instances when we question the deficient services being offered to
