Latest update April 28th, 2026 12:30 AM
Shivnarine Chanderpaul lives in Florida
If you didn’t know that the great Guyanese cricketer has made Florida his home before the final Test match in Trinidad, then you probably are aware of it by now because Tony Cozier announced it during his commentaries. I knew that before.
I am told that he has a small food business in Jamaica. You can’t blame the man for setting eyes on Jamaica and the USA. Top government people, and I mean top policy-makers, seek private hospital treatment and send their kids to foreign educational institutions where the fees are not so small. Many factors come into play when a famous Guyanese decides to make a foreign land his/her home.
This article is in no way a critique of the choice Mr. Chanderpaul had made. I could anticipate someone saying that Usain Bolt lives in Jamaica and so is the great Courtney Walsh and that Curtley Ambrose and Viv Richards dwell in their home state of Antigua. In this country, people are forced into migrating because of family pressure.
There is the case of six eminent business personalities whose wives refused to remain in Guyana. The husbands are still here. I believe most senior media practitioners know who these entrepreneurs are. Below is an interesting article for a Sunday feature in one of the dailies.
There are three very, very wealthy Guyanese whose children would be extraordinarily comfortable for untold years to come in terms of income should they return but they have no intention of so doing. It is sad because as the years go by, these children get married, (in many instances to white Canadians and Americans) and those family ties kill any possibility of settling in Guyana again. What then will become of the vast investments of their parents?
I know of a case of a famous Portuguese entrepreneur whose wife insisted that they migrate with the three kids. Last year, the wife introduced herself to me as I was coming out of Medicare Pharmacy on New Market Street. She recognised me as the Kaieteur News columnist she reads on the net. She told me she and her husband were in Guyana for the first time since they left to wrap up a property deal after which she doubts she would ever see Guyana again.
Here is the interesting part. I asked about the kids. She stated that none of them wants to visit the land of their birth because the in-laws have no clue where Guyana is and do not want to know. There are three daughters-in-law, two from Italy and one from Greece. The point is as the Guyanese children integrate into the foreign territories to which they have migrated, they marry into other cultures. The chance of resettling in Guyana is lost forever.
In the Kissoon family there is such a situation. If there is a journalistic inquiry into the overseas families of prominent Guyanese capitalists, it would be shocking to know how many of these nationalists are lonely men in Georgetown. This writer has been told that a strongly placed PPP leader allowed both of his kids to be born in the US.
Jamaica will always be in the forefront of the Caribbean. They are inflexible when it comes to accepting that their Parliamentarians could have citizenship of other countries.
The rulers will seek photo opportunities (as they have been doing since Chanderpaul and Sarwan came in last Tuesday) until the popular Guyanese Test players leave. But it is sad to know that when he is not playing Test cricket we will not see Chanderpaul in the malls, gas stations and restaurants so we can chat with him and tell him how proud we are of him.
Will Sarwan leave for a foreign home too? Chanderpaul hasn’t got many more years left. Only Sachin Tendulkar is serving longer than him. They are both heading past their middle thirties. Sarwan has plenty time ahead of him. So the fear is that as he grows and grows with his game, he may be lost to Guyana too.
Obviously, this brings us to the question –who wants to stay in Guyana? The rulers extol their “great’ achievements to visiting Guyanese like Chanderpaul and Sarwan but they cannot explain why not one brilliant past Guyanese cricketer lives in the land of his birth. Gibbs and Croft in the US; Kalicharran, Kanhai and Lloyd in the UK. Holding has stayed in Jamaica. Andy Roberts remains in Antigua. You can see Desmond Haynes Greenidge and Sobers in Barbados. And guess who hasn’t left Trinidad? The genius, Brian Lara.
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