Latest update September 17th, 2026 10:25 AM
The place where you meet extraordinarily nice Guyanese
If any group of people on the globe disgusts you, it is in Guyana. Guyana is a place where people have lost all perspectives on what constitutes the essence of life. It is as if the people who populate this land are not really higher animals but some genetic, hybrid material that lacks all the essential values that a human should have.
This is one hell-hole of a country, where the minimum that is expected of a human’s rationality does not exist. Start with social activist, Leonard Craig. Craig said to me; “I need a lawyer for a matter I will be taking Digicel before the Public Utilities Commission (PUC).” I suggested some names. We stuck on one particular lawyer.
When the hearing began, Craig conducted his own defence. What did Craig achieve? When you call another person with a Digicel number and the person does not answer, a message comes on that says; “Your party is not available, your call is forwarded to voice mail.”
Craig contended Digicel charges each person for that message and the phone owner is not aware of it. He argues that the charges should be stopped. The PUC ruled in favour of Craig and awarded him $60,000 in cost, which he declined. My sources told me Digicel was collecting $5 million a day from that message, which it now has to do without.
Since that judgement, not one, I repeat not one voice in any of the four daily newspapers wrote about the service Craig did for Guyana. I doubt people know what Craig achieved. By contrast, go on the seawall and clean up the mango skins, go to the Botanical Gardens and chop down the overgrown eddo leaves, go to the trench on Regent Street and pick up a homeless cat, go to Bourda market and clear the piles of coconut trash, and you will be on all the newscasts with letters in the press praising you every day.
This is the nature of the foolish beast in Guyana. It is not only rationality that the Guyanese people have lost, but their innate instinct to appreciate the difference in values that underpin civilization. Why this has happened I don’t know. But it is tragic and sad.
Maybe the Guyanese people feel that when a company, an organization or person is so eminent or so well known or so rich then according to life, you don’t give them cause to be annoyed or to be vexed with you; best to leave them alone. It is a sad day for a country when its people become so stupid and vapid.
But this will go on in the cemetery named Guyana. No matter how objective and pure is your motive, Guyanese people will remain self-effacing. Take two retail outlets that I patronize quite often – Giftland Office Max and Survival Supermarket on Sheriff Street. I go there so often that the former has awarded me a ten percent discount card and the latter a five percent discount card.
I read that Giftland, in November, will be moving to Turkeyen, a minute walk from where I live. I saw a photograph were hundreds turned up to make applications. I go to Giftland twice a week. On each occasion I see about six employees with the tag on their shirt that says, “trainee.” I go back the next month and they are all gone, a fresh batch is there and the cycle goes on. This has been so for years now. I figure that if all those applicants I see in the newspapers get the nod, then in two months’ time they are all gone.
Don’t get me wrong. I like to shop at that place and will continue my patronage even more now that it is my neighbour. I am just doing what any columnist would do – write on something unusual. Now read this. I enter Survival Supermarket on Sheriff Street not twice a week but twice a day. Every day I am at Survival. And this is for years now. An amazing thing goes in there. I make friends with these wonderful employees then two months later they are gone.
Ask my wife how many times I have complained to her about this mystery at Survival.
You ask any staff of any of the leading supermarkets if they know me from frequent patronage and they will say yes. In the retail trade in Guyana, you meet extraordinarily nice Guyanese. They all know me at Marios, Nigel’s, Mattai’s, Budget Supermarket (where I won a 40-inch TV last December), Rossignol Butchery, and New Thriving,
The employees I met at these places years ago are still there. I don’t have the answer for the mystery at Giftland and Survival. Do you?
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