LIFE IS A STRANGE JOURNEY!

Oct 01, 2010 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

I lift my head and stare at the sky. I see clouds floating around like lumps of cotton swabs. I continue to stare and see a dark brown cloud darting into view. That was sudden and unexpected. No sign of rain but a small patch of cloud normally associated with rain makes its journey in the sky. Unexpected!
Just like the deaths of those two young women this past week. Who would have expected that these two women would today be dead? No one would have expected that, not even their close relatives, not even the women themselves because their deaths were sudden.
In the first case, a vendor was stabbed in the busy Stabroek Market area. What a place to die! This area is normally overflowing with people. Yet, the assailant or assailants were able to do what they did and still managed to escape.
That entire area needs to be cleared of all sellers and encumbrances. The entire Stabroek Market area needs to be cleared. There should be no one selling outside of the walls of the market, no one selling on the pavement, no one selling on the old bus tarmac, no hire cars, no bus parks, no shops, nothing should be allowed in that square. It is a historic square which should be as it was in colonial Guyana, a large spacious area in which people should be able to move freely. We need that sort of layout back in Guyana, but that is not going to happen because vending and all sort of activities have become a permanent feature of the area and any changes are going to be met with resistance.
No one should also be selling after 4 o’clock in the afternoon, in or near to the markets. The entire market, including the bazaar, should be closed at 4 pm each day Monday to Saturday and closed at 10 am on Sundays. If that were the case and if there were no vendors or bus parks in that area there would have been no need for the mortally wounded vendor to be there at the time she was killed, and perhaps she may have been alive today, for she may have been in the safety of her home or someplace else where perhaps she would not have been able to be harmed.
In the second case, a teacher felt rejected and decided that she could not take it anymore and ended her life. Sad case, but people are placing the blame in the wrong places. They are saying that the police did not take action.
What action was the police to take and would it have made things any better? The police do not have the resources to deal with domestic problems. If they had arrested the woman for causing damage to property in her husband’s home, she may have done something dramatic in the lockups.
So they treated this as a domestic matter and washed their hands of it. Now they have a death to examine, post mortem to perform, and all kinds of reports to write about before the file is closed on this one.
But what were their options in the circumstances. The police should in such situations refer these matters to social workers. Unfortunately, the revolving ministry is not open for business on weekends and therefore they could not refer the matter.
This is why, what we need is for all those retired social workers to be reemployed and a database complied so that when a person makes a report about a domestic dispute to the police, the police can immediately pick up a telephone and summon a social worker to the scene.
We don’t know for sure how the situation would have played out if this were done in the case of the young teacher who killed herself. In fact we don’t even know what tomorrow will bring for us. Such is the fragility and uncertainty of life. Today we can be floating along bright and happy and then suddenly the unexpected happens. Such is life? A strange journey indeed!

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