Guyana is hot, but cold to the touch. Under the sweltering heat dreams are dying and bodies are in rigor mortis. Here we have a system that fails our people. One that burns and makes us cold at the same time.
There was a time when events would shock us, but now many are emotionless. The minutes of trauma have added up and became weeks, months, and years of turning emotions like stone. Here we watch bodies going through the motions like weary puppets whose heads hang low, with rotting strings. We have reached a point where glimpses of heaven here are sparse. Religious ones say hell is hot and while the sun and heat humble us, we must wonder.
There was a story in the news this week about a twenty-two-year-old paralyzed young woman who would have been denied access to services and died. It is suspected that she died of a heart attack. The norm now of young people dying of heart attacks has not concerned us enough. But it is not only heart attacks. Daily the faces of the dead are of mostly young people dying by natural causes, vehicular accidents, murders, and other unfortunate events like drowning.
The young lady would have been taken to the New Amsterdam Hospital on Saturday morning after she became ill. It was reported that there were no doctors at the outpatient and the family would have to wait a couple of hours. When she was finally seen, she was sent to the lab to do some tests, but the lab was closed until Monday. The young lady died Sunday night. The family will never know what the results might have been if she had been able to do those tests. Had she seen a doctor sooner and the lab was open, at least the peace of mind that everything was possibly done to save her life would have been had.
How do we take time off from the wellbeing of our people? We are a tortured society and are not learning that we must change. We boast about building new roads, buildings, roundabouts, and beautifying select places. We are complaining about the heat but in some instances where trees once were, concrete structures now stand. In the eyes of some, that is development. But how is building new roads and buildings, but not making the welfare of the people the priority, progress? If our people continue to die because of negligence, how many Guyanese will be left to inherit this land when all the new roads and buildings would have been built? We continue to destroy to build, and the heat continues to humble us, but we are not taking warning.
In what country where development is real its people too often cannot access healthcare and die continuously because of it? Negligence is embedded in this society. The rich will take flights for the best healthcare overseas or lie in the comfort of private hospitals, but in a country like Guyana poverty can mean you die prematurely.
It is not only our lives that are at stake because of poverty and poor healthcare in some instances, but our freedoms as well. Freedom of speech – we have seen instances where there are attempts to muzzle people who speak out about the harsh society, we live in, especially on platforms on social media. Freedom to have a part of Guyana which our ancestors fought and bled for – we have seen instances where Guyanese because they were squatting were treated like the scum. Even ancestral lands like Mocha that former enslaved Africans pooled their resources and purchased, their descendants have been bullied off the land, had their homes and businesses destroyed and animals buried in a daylight horror show in the name of another road.
The freedom to protest is always under threat – we have seen many instances where the police were sent to disrupt or end peaceful protests and people have even died like the three in Linden in 2012.
This week we saw sugar workers protesting in Berbice. For a while, we have been seeing ongoing protests from sugar workers around the country. The group in Berbice this week have been on strike for weeks. They are sugar workers who worked at Rose Hall estate before it was closed in 2017. They were moved to Albion and Blairmont. Now the government wants to transfer them back to Rose Hall and they are demanding compensation. The protest started as peaceful, but it was reported that eventually there was the blocking of roads, the threats to light fires and clashes between the police and protestors. According to reports, sixteen sugar workers face charges. The sugar workers had demanded a meeting with President Ali and Vice-President Jagdeo since the strike began but the demand has not been met.
Some of us must wake up when we think politicians are for us. We must open our eyes especially when events happen, and we see clearly that they are for themselves. Some of the simpletons of this country believe that because on occasions they can hug and mingle with the politicians and shout fraudulent statements like ‘One Guyana’ that all is well in this country. But our daily sufferings tell us the truth. We see the line that separates the rich and the poor becoming brighter every day and it is a minority that are on the side where the oil money flows, and the wealth grows.
Peaceful protests often turn violent in this country when the rights of the protestors to protest are threatened, or their demands are being ignored. It is surprising however that sugar workers would be arrested and charged since there was a time when it seemed like they were a protected group. Perhaps in some ways they still are as we hang on to sugar production at a loss to prevent job losses, because of ego and lack of vision.
The Guyanese population are learning that the poor of this country of all ethnicities and religions will be treated with the same disdain in times of trials. Actions towards the poor often send a message that they are not valued in this society, are expendable and therefore their needs are not important. Yet the poor allow themselves to be divided. The people will faster fight and argue with each other than stand united against the vile. Important issues like what is happening with the oil wealth, the majority are silent on, but will find time to indulge in distractions and foolishness. Perhaps I cannot be too harsh however because living in a society as stressful as this, one needs some sort of relief or distraction to survive.
Guyana is hot, but cold to the touch. Whether we can afford healthcare or not, whether we can speak or not, or protest, there are inevitable events that we all will face. We should look at how death is plaguing this country, the changes in our climate, take a good look at ourselves and think on how we need to change.
