Tragic death of a woman

Aug 15, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

When you read about the tragic dimensions of the lives of our fellow Guyanese in foreign lands, trust me, these things break your heart. You are deeply hurt. I once met a young lady from a respected family whose life was almost destroyed over her sexual relationship with a visa officer. She told me she thought he would have given her the visa, but in the end all he wanted was all types of sex.
She entered UG after her disaster, graduated, applied for Canadian self-sponsorship, married and is now a happy Canadian resident. Why didn’t she do that in the first place? Carpenters were holed up in Barbados, living in primitive conditions, only to be rounded up in the night under the Thompson Government and deported back to Guyana.
These stories are just the tip of the iceberg. Guyanese face humiliation and loss of dignity in the Caribbean islands. These are countries that have less than ten percent of the wealth that inheres in this big territory. If you take away the bestial political and ethnic mismanagement that characterize Guyana’s history, this place is a rich land whose wealth could be harnessed to provide a comfortable future for its people.
There has to be a quick solution to our ethnic and political perversities before more tragedies as what happened in Trinidad keep proliferating. I read that a Guyanese woman hung herself in a detention centre in Trinidad. Why was she arrested and why was she not sent back to her homeland instead of languishing in a detention centre? She wasn’t eighteen or twenty so she could have used her robust youthfulness to endure her imprisonment. She was forty-eight and maybe was completely depressed.
Not much has been published about this woman. We don’t know if she has children. But surely, it was an unnecessary death. Please forgive the words that are about to flow if you think they are encapsulated in an attitude of arrogance, but what was she doing on an island of 1,980 square miles while her country is so large and so rich? Couldn’t she have shaped a living for herself and family in Guyana?
When I read about this death I was overcome by the contradiction of sadness and rage. Why do our people have to be treated like this in the Caribbean? Why are we running like mad to and want to stay in Barbados, an island that is a mere 166 square miles?
This suicide has really pained me, because our people have no right to be locked up in a detention centre in Trinidad when the flight takes an hour to get to Timehri airport
Do we know how she was treated in the prison? Was she assaulted by other inmates? Was she bullied? Did the prison authorities just turn a blind eye to her condition? Knowing where she came from, they probably couldn’t have cared one bit. She was Guyanese. Do you think her death will be investigated by the Guyanese authorities? Do you think there would be any communication from the Guyana Government?
Times like these I remember the story of Amanda Knox, an ordinary American university student with no connection to wealth and fame in the US. She was on an exchange programme in Italy, where in a night of sex and drugs, she was accused of the violent stabbing to death of her British friend in the university hostel. She was convicted and jailed.
Amanda Knox became an international celebrity overnight. The power of American society came down on her side. All the major television networks and newspapers and powerful politicians publicized her case, insinuating that Italian justice was flawed. The evidence pointed to Knox’s guilt, but the American nation said that Italy cannot jail an American citizen. This was no rich girl, no heiress, no pop star, no woman of status, just an ordinary girl, as ordinary as they come. But for America, she was from the US and therefore she must be protected.
The unfortunate death of the Guyanese woman in Trinidad is going to pass as just another statistic in this country. No one from the Government is going to ask the Trinidadian authorities for an explanation. Perhaps they will not get an answer if they do. Regional authorities are so contemptuous of Guyana in the past forty years that complaints to regional governments are tossed in the bin.
What an irony of life. In an integration movement where one country is larger than the entire grouping and whose wealth exceeds every other unit in the family of nations, the citizens of that land are the pariahs in the family.