When your heart’s on fire, smoke… oops, sorry, dust gets in your eyes

Mar 20, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Every mature citizen in this world has a repertoire of songs, each one of which is attached to a memory which is invoked once the song is heard. For me the group, The Platters, bring back strong memories of my parents’ first child, Gwennie, and the wedding reception of my brother ‘Lightweight’ Kissoon.
When I hear “Smoke gets in your eyes,” “Twilight Time,” or most of the popular hits by The Platters, I remember my sister and my brother’s wedding night.
When I was nine (I am the last of seven children; I guess the black sheep of the family given the number of people who cuss me down), ‘Lightweight’ got married. It was a hectic night for my parents and siblings and no one bothered to pay any attention to a nine-year-old kid. I was left unattended and simply stared at my siblings dancing the night away to The Platters.
It was on that night I discovered one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded, “Smoke Gets in your Eyes.”
When I was ten, my father was out sporting, and my mom was going to a pre-wedding Hindu event called in common parlance “dig dutty” (or properly matakor). It was a Friday night and my mom asked Gwennie to look after me and my six-year-old nephew (named after me) who was Gwennie’s child.
Gwennie left us and went across the road to a paid dance. We were hungry and just skipped over the road to the dance because we knew that is where she goes to on the weekends. The door man was shocked. He knew we were from the Kissson family and went into the dance and dragged Gwennie out. The doorman interrupted Gwennie’s serenade with The Platters.
I remembered “Smoke gets in your eyes” last Saturday afternoon as I gazed at a humongous rice silo in the middle of a residential district. My heart was on fire alright as I journeyed to Cane Grove with Khemraj Ramjattan and Gerhard Ramsaroop to hear about a heartbreaking complaint from Cane Grove residents.
In the song, it goes like this, “When your heart’s on fire, you must realize, smoke gets in your eyes.” I was alight all right with the embrace of the protestors, but there wasn’t smoke in my eyes, only dust
The silo emits an ocean of paddy dust when the factory is in operation and the silo is always in operation. It was a terrible sight to see. All the houses in close physical proximity are covered in paddy dust. When we arrived, the operators turned off the mill. We went into several houses to see this ugly sight. You just touch anything in these homes and your hand is plastered with paddy dust.
The residents told us that the ugliness has been going on for years now and they are tired of complaining to the Environmental Protection Agency and to the relevant Minister. The imbroglio took a nasty turn when, last Wednesday, two EPA investigators visited the site. While the mill was in operation, they told the residents that they weren’t seeing any dust emitting from the silo. Tempers flared, the two EPA officials went to the police station, and two representatives of the residents were arrested.
Khemraj, Gerhard and I asked the officer in charge of the station last Saturday what was the charge. The policewoman said one of the men told the EPA officials that he will thrown a “ganda” (rotten) egg on them, therefore he was booked for threatening language. The man admitted that he did issue that threat.
The situation with this rice mill is strong evidence that there has to be urgent local government reform. We saw documents from the NDC informing the residents that the miller has been asked to install a dust containment system. One letter was dated 2002. We also saw correspondence from the NDC informing the victims that permission wasn’t given to the miller for a number of projects that he has undertaken. The point is, the NDCs of Guyana have absolutely no legal power.
There is graphic proof that the factory has eaten up a part of the public embankment. We saw a really stupid thing that makes a mockery of Guyana in modern times–a response from the EPA that had no letterhead.

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