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Feces and soap in an uncivilized land

Feb 12, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Here is what I found by just random listening. I found that the word “clean” appears on most people’s tongue when they talk to me about their visits abroad. I didn’t think about it but when this aging lady spoke to me yesterday after her visit to the US, and she used the word “clean,” it dawned on me that the word keeps recurring in these types of conversation.
I asked her how she liked New York and as she went on, she said, “and Freddie it is clean.”  I hear that all the time. It appears to me that “clean” is the first word that Guyanese use when they talk to people about their first trip abroad. I was on channel 9 on Sunday night as a guest of the Cuffy 250 Committee, with a student representative and Dr. Patsy Francis to discuss the UG crisis.
You had to hear the words and see the expression of the student representative as he touched on the toilet scene at the UG campus. When I saw what happened at the High Court on Monday, as I watched the operation, I immediately thought of that student and what he would have said if he had seen what I saw on Monday afternoon at the High Court.
I left the Full Court where the appeal in the Jagdeo libel was heard (don’t get me wrong, there isn’t an appeal in the case. Mr. Jagdeo’s lawyers are asking the Full Court to appeal one of the decisions of the judge in the trial and they failed to do so in March 2014 so they want the court’s permission to file the appeal OUT OF TIME), and as I walked down the court step that takes you into the court yard, I saw an army from the Guyana Water Authority (GWI).
I followed them and what I saw was extremely upsetting. Please believe me; I didn’t have breakfast that morning because I had come from jogging straight into the UG picket line, had to pay my electricity bill, get to the supermarket to fill Janet Kissoon’s shopping list, then touch down in the showers, then off to the High Court for the hearing.
The site was loathsome. I wanted to throw up. I couldn’t take it. The overflowing feces in the High Court was mountainous. It was flowing like lava onto to the South Road pavement of the High Court onto South Road itself. The Marshall’s Office was held prisoner to the feces.
The marshals had to use another entrance to leave the High Court. But the marshals were lucky in that they had another exit point the members of the public didn’t. To get to the Marshall’s Office, members of the public had to walk onto the running feces. If you are reading this, I don’t believe you can easily imagine what I saw. What I saw has convinced me that Guyana is not a civilized country.
I must have mentioned the permanent sewage crisis of the High Court more than ten times since I began penning columns in 1988. The sewage overflow in the interior perimeters of the High Court is a permanent state of affairs and a sad reminder that maybe, yes maybe, this country will never enter the modern world. I saw that miasmic disaster of the High Court in 1973 when I attended the murder trial of Arnold Rampersaud. Think of how far back was 1974. That is forty years ago
For God’s sake how could human filth be emitting from the court yard of the High Court since the beginning of the seventies and is still going on forty years after? But this was not the only social insanity I saw. The feces were on the boots and hands of the GWI workers. I asked them if they have disinfectants and other detergents. They told me the standard practice of GWI is give soap only.
This is 2015 with a public hospital system that is hardly credible and all GWI gives to sewage workers is soap. My God! Are we a civilized people? We are not. The GWI workers told me that they recently did a sewage job at the union building of the CCWU and they were provided with boxes of sanitary gloves and chemical detergents.
This article will fade after tomorrow and life goes on in this God-forsaken, piss poor country. The sewage cleaners will get infected, die and no one blinks an eye. Life goes on.

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