We’ll just have to learn to be our brother’s keeper

Jan 24, 2013 Letters

DEAR EDITOR
A few days ago I had my ‘lightbulb moment’ and, when I read Freddie Kissoon’s recent column about Guyana’s road to uncertainty, my deduction about our beloved B.G. (Guyana since 1966) made sense.
I then compared Guyana to a family of several children whose mother had departed the household for one reason or another, leaving the children to fend for themselves. As many may agree, a mother makes a home, and if a home has a good and responsible mother, then the family, on the whole, is secure, will thrive and is set for life.
Then, for a family to feel confident, the youngsters must get along among themselves. Many years ago, I knew a woman who died after a brief illness, leaving several children, the youngest a baby, the eldest a young woman barely out of her teens. Intelligent and responsible, the daughter had to take charge, and did such a fine job that the family ‘survived’, and the father was able to confide to friends that ‘God had given that daughter to him’. That was down to her mother’s personality and training.
That, to me, is Guyana’s position today. Guyana seemed not to have an entirely suitable, capable or acceptable ‘mother’, i.e. caregiver, since the Union Jack/Union Flag was lowered in 1966.
I think it is understandable for Mrs Jagan to ‘shower praise on Mr. Obama’, and I do not think it was ‘stupid’ of her to ‘barefacedly refuse to emulate’ Mr Obama. She could hardly do that. Let us not forget that Mrs Jagan was not a born-and-bred Guyanese – her status in the community was derivative. She would forever be ‘an outsider’.
On the other hand, she, like both Barack and Michelle Obama, was American born and bred, and, if memory serves, she and Michelle O. were both originally from Chicago’s tough South Side and presumably had similar experiences early in life, on the grounds of their ethnicity. It stands to reason, J.J. was probably ‘thinking American’ when B.O. won.
I often admired her tenacity, and wondered how she managed to cope without her husband and, at times, the feeling of rejection on the part of a nation she hoped to help. Many of us who left our homeland years ago know what it feels like to be on the outside looking in, and could empathise with her.
As I see it, Guyana may be likened to a home without a mother, being seen as an urchin drifting along in ‘uncertainty’, hoping to find a satisfactory solution to its problems, but “It didn’t happen last year. It will not happen this year”. In fact, it may not happen for generations to come. We’ll just have to learn to be our brother’s keeper.
Geralda Dennison

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