There are times I think I hate this country

Jan 09, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One of the inevitable consequences of a battered nation is that its people are so burdened that over a period of time, they give up on obligation to others, obligation to village, city and country where they live, and even obligation to their own being. People just give up on hope and carry on a mundane life. Things fall apart around them and don’t bring out any reflection in them.
There will always be the exception, but essentially Guyanese have become a fed-up nation. People just could not be bothered with the irregularities in their lives. I would recommend to any researcher who is studying Guyana to glue himself to the letter sections of the Kaieteur News and the Stabroek News.
Those pages offer invaluable insight into what Guyana has become. A citizen can highlight in the letter section the most despicable act of human indifference to others, and if you hope that there will be another voice or more condemning letters, you would be dead wrong. The meaning and importance of the description of that letter, of the awful thing that the writer saw in Guyana, will vanish as the days wear on.
You write a letter to the press about a city constabulary officer pushing a vendor into the gutter causing her to lose all her little earnings when her stuff was destroyed, and it meets with no condemnation. You write that a little girl is selling bottled water on the parapet and she is running for her life as the Ministry of Works people, on order of the Minister, hound her down, and this abomination is greeted with silence from Guyanese.
How can a nation in the 21st century remain unconcerned when a mother goes through an emotional tailspin when her only child is thrown out of school in the middle of the term? The child’s only indiscretion is that she was found with her cell-phone. A school expels a little child for the mere possession of a cell-phone and not one citizen can get up and say that is wrong. It could happen in another country, but you could bet your life that voices will be heard demanding the child’s reinstatement.
It is not only that Guyanese have become resigned to their fate, but also the decline in their dignity that they accept. There are stores in this country, particularly National Hardware on Water Street, where the guards examine every single item in your bag at the exit counter. Your privacy is totally disregarded. And people just meekly submit to that indignity.
Commercial banks request two pieces of identity even though a passport is a police document and a National Identification Card is governmental property. Both can only be issued when a series of questions were asked and a birth certificate had to be tendered. A passport or an ID card will not be issued if a valid birth certificate was not submitted. To ask for a passport or an ID card and a birth certificate is silly and wrong. But people just accept this violation and go on with their lives.
One of the ways you can see how badly the fabric of this nation is torn is when there is a physical object on the roadway. No one stops to remove it. They drive around it. You pass that object in the morning; it’s there in the afternoon.
I live at Turkeyen, next to the CARICOM Secretariat. It is a very small community; one road in, the same road out. Three times my wife and I had to stop and remove obstacles in the middle of the roadway. We saw them in the morning; they were there in the afternoon.
Just before 2014 was about to end, I stopped at the western entrance of Merriman’s Mall at Cummings Street to buy bananas at a well-known fruit stand at Cummings and Church Streets. I came out of the car and a gentleman greeted me; “Look the tree is on fire, it will burn and fall.”
Another man said, “The tree on fire, Mr. Kissoon.” Two more persons came up and none responded to my plea to raise a bucket brigade. Other passersby just stood and watched and weren’t prepared to do a damn thing.
The tree was in the Merriman’s Mall at the eastern entrance of Cummings Street. I had to pay a homeless man to help me. He demanded money. Someone lit the tree at its bottom. Within hours, that huge thing would have fallen. The banana vendors pointed to two homeless people as the culprits. Could 2015 see a more caring Guyana? I hope so.

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