Freddie Kissoon column...Carifesta made me buy ice cream

Freddie Kissoon column…Carifesta made me buy ice cream

Aug 22, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Last year I decided that my home would no longer carry ice cream. It was a painful decision to make since I truly love ice cream. I live in the Turkeyen area next door to the CARICOM Secretariat. The exasperating electricity disruption got into full swing last year.

I have no knowledge of how GPL operates. I am absolutely unfamiliar with the technical transmission process of GPL. Which line feeds the Turkeyen district, where that line begins and ends, I do not know. But this I know; there seems to be a perennial problem with the GPL supply to the part of Turkeyen where the CARICOM Secretariat is located.

Could it be Freudian, meaning that the PPP Government, stretching back to the days of Premier Cheddi Jagan was never enarmoured with Caribbean integration? Premier Jagan was not interested in the West Indian Federation and to prove his feeling, he started his own university rather than establish a campus of the University of the West Indies here. Cheddi Jagan made his attitude to West Indian leaders patently clear in the fifties and sixties – they were pro-imperialist politicians and he wanted nothing to do with them.

In the seventies and eighties, Jagan was in the opposition, but the alienation from CARICOM continued. Burnham rigged the successive elections and CARICOM did nothing. On the contrary, CARICOM bankrolled Burnham.

Guyana kept borrowing so much from the CARICOM Multilateral Clearing Facility that it ran out of funds. Eric Williams continued the lending, and CARICOM grew to live with Burnham. Last week the Trinidadian PM invited his Guyanese counterpart to talk about political integration.

The Foreign Minister deputized for the President and the Guyanese people have heard little about Guyana’s role in what Prime Minister Manning wanted. We can assume there is no political integration with Guyana and other CARICOM states on the horizon.

The Trinidadian PM indicated there will be a sovereignty merger between Trinidad and the OECS states. Guyana naturally should have been in that formation. Maybe there never will be political integration after the PPP’s experience with CARICOM.

So one can say the daily blackouts may be a Freudian revenge thing. But whether Freudian or conscious, those who live in the Turkeyen enclave where the CARICOM Secretariat is located have had to put up with electricity withdrawal on a daily basis since last year.

There are times that the blackouts come five out of seven days. But you can be assured they will come, certainly, four days in the week. I have not known a week that has passed without blackout since I moved to this district in April 2007.

The ice cream was the big casualty of the daily disruption. It was natural to stop buying the product. There are times when we rushed to the fridge and ate the whole thing out because you know it would melt. But there were times when you were not at home and GPL did its thing. You came home to a fridge with runny ice-cream.

Well Sunday, August 17, I decided to buy a large tub of the stuff. The timing was perfect. Carifesta is in town and the GPL would not dare give us blackouts.

We had ice cream Sunday night. My daughter was deeply distraught because I did not buy the local brand. I politely told her that though I am committed to Guyanese products our locally made version is just not good. I honestly feel so.

On, Monday, August 18, blackout visited us. We had seven hours of it. It was the longest duration since I moved to Turkeyen. Well, you know what happened to the icy product. But something else happened that surprised my editor, Adam Harris.

Normally, I e-mail my column to Kaieteur News. The blackouts have never lasted way into the nights. They normally start in the mornings. If they come after lunch, they end at around 18.00 hours.

But to use Fred Sanford’s words, “the big one” came on Monday and lasted way past 18.00 hours. I had to take my article to Kaieteur.

Adam was surprised. When I handed him the USB stick he said; “Freddie you did a good thing.” He meant that he didn’t have to search the mail box to look for my column. Well that is it. I am through with having ice cream in my home

This may have appeared as a light article but I didn’t mean it that way. The point of this essay is to show how unchanging is Guyana. When my daughter was two years old, I told my wife Guyana would come good one day and people like my daughter would inherit it. She is now 19 years old and cannot bear the daily blackouts.

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Freddie Kissoon column…Carifesta made me buy ice cream

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