The transformation is gratifying

Nov 15, 2015 Features / Columnists, My Column

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A Jamaican lawyer came to Guyana to meet with some deportees who still believe that they were wrongfully sent home. This lawyer, with a counterpart, came to Guyana to meet with the deportees and opted to examine their case. The turnout was amazing.
One of the people who was there remarked that he never realized that so many people whom he actually saw walking the streets were deportees. The thing that got me was the fact that these people wanted so badly to go back to the United States. That country is no bed of roses at this time, but neither is Guyana.
However, I think that it has something to do with access to drugs and the other hustle which is very difficult in Guyana.
But the deportees and their problems are not the concern. It happened to be the way this female lawyer viewed Georgetown. She blurted out to me that Georgetown is so clean. Then she compared it to Kingston, Jamaica, and to Brooklyn.
I started to say something about her having come to Guyana a few months too late, when my colleagues silenced me. They were basking in the accolade. Indeed, it was nice to hear people say something good about the capital which until recently, was literally buried in garbage. Such was the case that people actually referred to Georgetown as the Garbage City.
I recalled when former Minister Jennifer Webster undertook to clearing a garbage pile that had developed on Water Street just outside what was once the Guyana National Cooperative Bank. With help from the Guyana Fire Service, she removed tons of garbage only to see the pile return a few weeks later.
Today, something has caught on in the city. Once garbage is removed it is not returned. One Saturday morning as I was heading to the laundry, a guard pointed out a pile to me. It rested in an area that had just been cleaned. The guard said that a ‘junkie’ had dumped somebody’s garbage there but that he, the guard, would see to it that it never happens again.
I was not there, but I learnt that the junkie got a licking when he returned some time later with another set of garbage. I hasten to say that no more garbage has been dumped there. That isn’t all. Some order is being restored. There is no more haphazard parking. I suppose many of us will have to use parking lots and walk to where we have to go.
Traffic flows easily in the Bourda Market area and along Regent and Robb Streets because of the ban on parallel parking, and because of the pickets erected outside Bourda Market to inhibit parking. That is not all. Merriman Mall is an entirely different place. The other night I saw families with little children on the mall playing and enjoying something on a large screen. They did not have to go to the seawall.
These things lift the spirit; they make people take a whole new approach to life. I am willing to bet that performance in the offices has been enhanced.  Somebody talked about the cost of the cleanup. I hasten to say that had the cleanup been effected over the years, then there would not have been any talk about cost today.
One former Minister was moved to say that he was waiting for an outbreak of disease in the city. As fate would have it, he is no longer a minister, and there has been no outbreak. Even flooding that had become perennial has been reduced. People talk about water flowing in alleyways that they did not know existed.
So where has all this sense of beauty been? Where was the pride? The drive is to ensure order. The muttering about the 2:00 am curfew is subsiding because people now go out earlier. That was once the case until some people decided to relax the regulation and allowed for lawlessness.
But in the midst of all the drive to make Georgetown and the rest of Guyana somewhere to enjoy, we still have some distasteful episodes. Young gunmen seem to be playing games with the society. They target any and everything. And the society is actually encouraging this.
Just this week, a man shot and killed a wanted man who was living in plain sight of the police. Did the police know him? The society surely did and said nothing. No one gave the police a tip, choosing instead, to live and as they said, mind their own business. That is the attitude that is encouraging criminals.
People who came home are now saying that they will not come back. Those are the people with money that will surely help to develop the country. If we chase them we suffer.
And while I lament the attitude of sections of the society, I also lament the passing of a friend, Angela Johnson. She avoided me like the plague, because she was working with the previous administration. She did not want to be associated with any negative publication that I might produce, because she did not want to be picked on by her employers.
She was still my friend. She died yesterday, a young woman just preparing to enter her golden years. The word is that she was a victim of breast cancer. If that is true, then she was one tough cookie as they say. It would suggest that she knew that the end was fast approaching.
I am told that two weeks before the end she went home with a promise to work from there. The end must have been painful, but my friend did not cry out.
Rest in peace Angela.

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