Stabroek, particularly around Demico, the bus parks and the market, is a hub displaying snippets of Guyanese life. It is a spectacle of vendors, shoppers, commuters, taxi-drivers, minibus operators and touts. Small businesses give the area much of its life. Mothers and fathers, the young, middle-aged and the old are all able to make a living in a Guyana that is still too far from a reality where all or most of its citizens can say they are financially stable.
The pavements are the homes or resting places for the forgotten, the rejected, the neglected, and the self-saboteurs. Men and women, dirtied and smelly, stay waiting for the day their time will come–it may bring deliverance, death, or both. It is an area that I often study and am fascinated by the drama that occurs there daily: vendors soliciting sales; taxi drivers seeking customers—and often overcharging; mini-bus touts and conductors competing for lone passengers, sometimes managing to tug some poor soul who probably is too tired or not confident enough to tell them to take their hands away; and overcrowded minibuses after 9 am, when school children are supposed to be in school, yet are seen ‘doubling up’ as they bounce to the latest dancehall music.
