No hospital washroom should be that stink

Mar 19, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Christopher Ram returned my miss calls at 4.28 AM Sunday morning. Chris said he got three missed calls from me so he thought it was urgent. I had telephoned Chris about Nigel’s illness earlier on Saturday. I went back to bed a little later but didn’t get much sleep and then traveled to Ogle airport for the arrival of Nigel.
After Nigel was transported to the Caribbean Heart Institute (inside the Georgetown Public Hospital), naturally, we went to the hospital. After two hours wait, I wanted to use the bathroom. I went to the washroom which was behind the pharmacy.
My God! Are we living in the 21st century in Guyana? The washrooms two thousand years ago in the Greek city states had to be cleaner. The stench was awful. I wanted to throw up. I went back to the bench, sat next to David Patterson, the General-Secretary of the AFC and told him what I saw and about the smell. He thanked me for telling him so he could avoid going there.
Then I felt movement in my stomach. I knew I was going to throw up if I kept sitting. At Ogle I had a small tin of juice with a small slice of baked macaroni and cheese. I don’t know if the tiny breakfast was the reason why I reacted like that to the stench but I was always told that if you encounter an unpleasant smell on an empty stomach early in the morning, then you are likely to vomit.
I left the hospital right away and drove home hoping my stomach will not empty its contents before I reached my house.
I made it. That smell in the washroom really upset my stomach. I will never forget it and probably will do it behind a post on the street by the hospital instead of going into a washroom at the Georgetown Hospital should I want to urinate if I am in the building.
Clean toilet facilities in public buildings are always absent in Guyana and it has been like this for over thirty-five years. I joined the UG teaching staff in September 1986 and I only used the urinals for the twenty-six years I was there. The toilets at UG are extremely dirty. This lack of clean washrooms in public buildings is a gigantic reminder to the citizens of this nation that Guyana is a stagnant country going backwards instead of forward with each passing year.
When Mark Benchop and I were charged for traffic obstruction in 2011, I went once to use the washroom in that particular magistrate’s court. Again for a pee. As I entered the toilet room, I didn’t wait to see what was facing me. This country is a hell hole.
It would appear to me that the politicians in power have this psychological contortion that poor people are not humans but animals. Why spend money for the construction and maintenance of toilet service for animals?
A person’s psychological prism can be a dangerous thing. If one’s psychological structure is nurtured by fiction rather than reality then fiction replaces reality. I have read countless books that sought to explain why the Nazi regime found it so easy to kill Jews. The analyses went like this. The Nazis bombarded their ideological adherents over a prolonged period of time with the propaganda that Jews were unfit animals. What happened then was that in the psychological prism of these Jew-haters, Jews were not humans.
This aspect of psychic destruction was vividly brought out in a scene in the movie, Schindler’s List.
The maid in the home of the Nazi commander of the concentration camps was a beautiful Jewish camp inmate. One night, the commander got infatuated with her and was about to make love to her. As he kept embracing her, there was this sudden realization that she wasn’t human and he almost beat her to death. In his psychology, he was going to make love to an animal.
In Rwanda, the Hutus indoctrinated their people to see the Tutsi as cockroaches. Hutus would roam the streets armed with the mental conviction that a Tutsi was unfit to live.
This is my understanding of how poor people are treated in this country. They are so contemptuously perceived as having less human quality by those who rule over them that the rulers’ psychology rejects them as humans that are entitled to modern facilities.

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