“What I saw made me embarrassed to be a human being.”

Jan 12, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

If you read these words anywhere in the world coming from a journalist, UN official, visiting politician, medical doctor, nurse or a scholar on a research project, you would definitely think that he/she is referring to a country that is at war and what they see are just horrible manifestations of the tragedy of life.
Guess which country that quote refers to? Bet you would not believe it. Yes, your own land of birth, Guyana.
These words were written by a visiting Catholic priest and given wide coverage in different newspapers in the United States. Father Dennis LeBlanc who runs a counseling service in the US traveled to Guyana in October last year on a voluntary stint with the St. Joseph Mercy Hospital and St. John Bosco’s Covent run by Guyanese heroine, Sister Mary Noel Menezes
The priest has traveled all over the world but thinks that Guyana is the worst, miasmic-stained country he has ever seen. Let us quote him; “there is no relief here from the poverty, pain, unemployment, corruption, garbage…these are not temporary problems that come and go like our seasons … they are their (sic) perpetual state of affairs…”
Here is the part that made him feel that Guyana was not a civilized land; “I will say that the filth, squalor, poverty, and disregard for humans (sic) life made me embarrassed to be a human being. “
LeBlanc ended his description of Guyana with the following expression; “It was a sad and depressing experience.” He said he is not coming back
If any journalist from China, the US, Europe and elsewhere read LeBlanc, they must believe that Guyana is a country at war and war’s ravishes have left the land a dead piece of earth with just filth and garbage and death. Not one soul on Planet Earth reading LeBlanc would believe he is describing a country in the English-speaking Caribbean that houses the headquarters of the Caricom integration movement and is in the process of completing a Marriott Hotel
I have argued on this page the past five years, but especially last year, that once a visitor comes to Guyana, sees those mud-filed gutters, the forests inside the alley-ways and the ubiquitous mountains of garbage around Guyana (not Georgetown alone – my visiting in-laws couldn’t believe the farm of pigs roaming in a ocean of garbage right at the western entrance of Rosignol a few years ago – still have the pictures) they would declare Guyana as a failed state
This is exactly what Dennis Le Blanc did, only that he did not use the concept of a failed state so popular in the literature of political theory. Can any of us as Guyanese use our imagination to understand what the priest was looking at when he saw Guyana? Imagine someone from Japan, South Korea or Scandinavia where the surroundings are impeccably clean coming to Guyana and witnessing what the priest saw?
I am saying most unambiguously that such a person would demand a flight out of Guyana immediately. Human beings do not live in such a country where there are no violent upheavals. They will bear the environmental atrocities during the war, knowing that after the war, things will get better. But as the priest said in that article, what he saw seems to be a permanent state of affairs in this country
Every nation has its fools, but when a country is thinly populated like Guyana and you have so many fools, then maybe the country has become a national circus. There are idiots in this land who are so shameless that they announce that the investment climate in Guyana is being unduly affected by crime, crime reporting and political disunity.
Who would want to invest in Guyana when they see what the Catholic priest saw? Ask yourself as a human being, if you take a few million American dollars and you travel to another territory to invest that money and you see inside that country what obtains in Guyana, whether you would put your capital in such a country.
I did not meet the Catholic priest when he was here, but I am positive that if I had a discussion with him, I may have endangered his health when I revealed to him that the UN Environment Committee made the then President of Guyana, Mr. Jagdeo, a Champion of the Earth. The priest would have had a heart attack. Of course the conferring of such an honour on Mr. Jagdeo when he was President, given the ubiquitous filth that overran Guyana under his presidency, only goes to show that the UN is not without its quota of fools too.

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“What I saw made me embarrassed to be a human being.”

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