A New Year’s anecdote – We still good!

Jan 07, 2018 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

Time rolls on, and is leaving our country behind. That’s how it seems to some Guyanese, and if you take their gloom and doom talk as a yardstick to measure our progress as a nation then we’re doomed as the proverbial dodo to extinction. But we are not hapless birds, and Guyana isn’t Mauritius where the creature became extinct.
As humans, we have advanced brains, reasoning, and a powerful instinct to survive; as Guyanese we have a country blessed with bountiful resources and a dearth of natural disasters. And though lawlessness and mediocrity seem to have settled here permanently, there are still lots of good, ordinary Guyanese with good intentions for one another, and for Guyana.
Every day, and everywhere, if you look about you with discernment, you can find them, but we take so much for granted that we often miss the little interpersonal and socializing acts that can lift our spirits, brighten our day, and yes, advance us as a people. Sometimes it’s all you need – a pleasant respite from the harsh political and economic ‘wisdom’ of the experts.
I keep finding these little vignettes of life in Guyana, as I did a few days ago, at the Western Union office in the Medicare Pharmacy building on Hinck Street. It had been raining intermittently and my spirits weren’t that lively. There was a depressingly long line there. (About two dozen people I guess but because I somehow expected three or four, it seemed an endless wait) I heaved an inward sigh and joined it.
There were also a few women sitting whom I assumed were also waiting their turn. Among them was an elderly-looking (not old) woman accompanied by three young children who were using the spacious waiting area as a playground. The fresh and childish delight in their voices and their constant movement around the winding queue could have been an annoyance to some in the line, but it obviously wasn’t. The Christmas season tolerance and goodwill seem to have wafted over into the new year.
Behind me, a young man with a Jamaican accent was on his cell phone. After the conversation ended, another started, this time with the woman mentioned earlier. Those of us in proximity couldn’t help but overhear the dialogue. It was lighthearted, and the woman, evidently in a good mood, at some point asked the young man how old he thought she was.
Probably realising how touchy many women are about that particular subject, he seemed taken aback at first, but her mood was so infectious that he soon got into the spirit of the gaff. After a bit of hemming and hawing, he suggested “About 52?” She smiled broadly, then turned to an older man behind him and asked the same question. The answer was a cautious “57?”. She then brightly announced, with at least a smidgen of pride that she would be 65 later this month. Their response was suitably impressive.
Human nature craves interaction, so the dialogue continued over the next twenty minutes or so. The woman’s enthusiasm, maybe of just being alive, healthy and happy on the first working day of the new year, seemed to overspill on to the rest of us. She revealed that the children, still romping exuberantly in the open space, were three of her fourteen grandchildren. It stood to reason! She expanded the conversation to include her own children, and then tactfully but pleasantly introduced race into the narrative by letting the young Jamaican know that the grandchildren were ‘mixed’ adding words to the effect that they were ‘some of me and some of you’. She was East Indian and the young man was Black, and I guess she was letting him know that any difference in fact made no difference – to either of them it appeared.
As the dialogue was going on, I had my own uplift. Despite the pleasantries, I was still feeling despondent over the length of the queue. Then an attractive, smiling woman, maybe in her thirties, approached me to confirm if I was who she thought I was. She then revealed that she was an ex-student of mine from the Anna Regina Secondary School where I’d taught some 23 years ago, and said she was ‘really happy’ to see me. She hugged me and we laughingly chatted for several minutes while recalling the names of some of the children in her Form Three class I had taught. Like the older woman, her mood was infectious, and I responded accordingly. By the time she went back to her place in the line, my own spirits had been lifted considerably.
Meanwhile, the older woman and her new-found acquaintance continued their lively exchanges as the frustration drained from me. I looked around, and couldn’t find one unhappy face; maybe it was just my imagination, but the atmosphere in that ‘money transfer’ office last Tuesday suggested that simple human goodness and tolerance were also being transferred from one person to another by quite ordinary-looking people.
A woman directly ahead of me had inadvertently overheard the conversation with my ex-student during which I had asked about a colleague teacher I hadn’t seen in years. She knew him, and told me precisely where I could find him – something I’d been trying to do for over ten years. Somehow, it all fit in.
As I suggested earlier, it’s amazing how little things can make big changes. The power of small blessings to transform misery into joy should not be underestimated. Some are referred to as random acts of kindness like the ancient ‘pay it forward’ concept which has found renewed currency since 2000.
Simply put, it’s when the beneficiary of a good deed, (often financial) passes it on to a third party instead of repaying the benefactor, with the hope that he/she will continue the cycle of generosity and kindness. Observing noticeably poor persons shopping at a supermarket, and secretly making provision to pay their grocery bill before they arrive at the cashier is one of the more common examples.
Lots of people have incorporated this phenomenon into their lives, often unconsciously, and when I reflect on my own, I realize how often I have been on both the receiving and the giving end of it. I am quite certain that many Guyanese, like people everywhere including the rich folk who can most afford it, have paid it forward at some time during their lives. Of course it doesn’t necessarily have to be material things; you can pass on compassion, positivity, and a spirit of upliftment just as well. That’s what I think happened that rainy morning at that Western Union outlet.
Since the start of the new year, there have been several acts of violence by Guyanese, including murders and suicides. People are hurting, and some have blamed a bleaky economic outlook across the country for their actions. There may be a nexus, but what if before they carried out these acts they had been beneficiary to material assistance and/or the transfer of a positive spirit – could the outcome have been different? Quite possibly, because ungrammatically but genuinely, “We still good…”

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