This past week I found myself once again being asked to explain to someone in the diaspora why I chose to remain in Guyana. I have a Canadian passport, and a British one from Cayman, and of course most of my extended family are in Toronto, in four separate locations. I have choices. The reasons – I’ve dabbled in this before – are various and complex and changing, and after you discuss the irritations for a while you find yourself noting, as I did to the person this week, that in whatever country you live there are things amiss; perhaps not precisely the things we have here, but things.
The bottom line is that, wherever you jump, you will find aspects of life in that place that are taxing you
In Guyana, if you live in town, the saving grace is that you can escape to the Essequibo River, as my friends Ian McDonald and George Jardim do, or to the interior, as my wife does, and you don’t need big money to do that, provided you don’t expect to have the cushy life. For me, Canada is there as an option, but the winter is beyond me now, as I get older, and Annette is only going there, as the Guyanese would say, “if dey jail she.” GT still has the nature side ‒ the landscape, the animals, the waterfalls, the rivers ‒ and while that is a totally different vibe, which calls you to slow seriously, and can even get boring, it also has powerful innate pulls on you that bring you back and somehow anchor you ‒ for a while, anyway.
