Holiday Musings

Dec 13, 2009 Editorial

Well, school’s out and the little darlings will all be home – getting into their mothers’ hair, no doubt, but yet welcome if for no other reason to help in the frenetic preparations that mark this season for most Guyanese, irrespective of their religious affiliations. In the last week of school, the children would have participated in the usual Christmas Party – now politically correctly dubbed, “End of year party”.
The Christmas parties are normally funded by contributions from the students and it is not uncommon for many of the poorer ones to skip these parties because their parents just don’t have the cash. In the old days it used to be in kind – eggs for the cake, for instance, but those days are long gone.
To tell the poor child to attend the party regardless of contribution is a non-starter: these children have their pride and will rather not attend. What is the solution? Maybe schools can sponsor fund-raising activities specifically for their end of year parties.
While change is a fact of life, some changes are deliberately introduced in imitation of practices that may be common in the developed countries. But maybe some innovations are not for us if they are not in tune with our ground realities. A spreading novelty is for students to “exchange gifts”. This is another contrived situation that places our poorer children – remember we are still a nation with a poverty rate of over thirty percent: that’s living on less than US$2 per day – at a disadvantage – not to mention embarrassment.
Talking about embarrassment, there was an announcement on TV a short while ago that named specific children that could collect gifts from a “Needy Fund”. Wasn’t this a bit insensitive? We hope that alternative, more discreet method of contacting beneficiaries of charitable endeavours in this season of goodwill will be utilised.
On the note of poverty in this festive season, public servants must be very happy with their six per cent retroactive wage increase that will be paid out before Christmas. There was a time when to be a public servant was the height of aspiration for the ambitious Guyanese. No more. The gradual but inexorable erosion of their salaries since independence – halted of late but still meagre in comparison with their peers in the Caribbean – has taken the shine off from the profession. Some may retort that their salaries perhaps are quite reflective of their productivity and production – but that would be out of line in this season and will not be tolerated.
On the other hand, sugar workers – especially those in the fields – are quite down in the dumps. As we pointed out earlier in the week, their three per cent wage increase (negative actually, when inflation is factored in) will not even be paid before the end of the year.
For them at least, the more things change, the more they remain the same: they have always been relegated to the bottom of the barrel in the grand scheme of things – and there they remain in 2009.
Traditionally, even in the days of slavery, the workers would have been given food, drink, clothes and days off, to make let off steam during this season. In more emancipated times, the “back-pay” – and later the Annual Production Incentive (API) and retroactive wage increase (“retro”) provided the fillip for a “Merry Christmas”.
It was not necessarily the religious imperative that made the Christmas season so dear to the masses of Guyanese. The colonial planter understood the psychology of the manual worker driven to mind-numbing continuous labour for months at a time. It would appear that our local managers that have filled the shoes of the departed colonials have missed the implications of the deferred payout.
It is not just the merry-making – but the only opportunity to have a lump sum of money to purchase a curtain or linoleum to brighten up a room and a face. To end on the subject of children off from school, it is our sincere hope that all parents, even the sugar workers and others left mired in poverty, will reach within themselves, show the resilience and creativity that our people have been famous for, and give them some fun.

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