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My paper delivery guy died unnecessarily

Aug 02, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I pay my paper delivery guy, William, on Sunday for deliveries done Monday to Sunday. So last Sunday, he came as usual. I didn’t see him Monday and Tuesday. He works at the Forestry Commission, so I know when he misses out, he is in the interior. On Wednesday, I called his wife. She told me he died Monday morning.
He complained of feeling unwell. She took him to the Diamond Diagnostic Centre. They gave him tablets, and as usual sent him home. He didn’t wake up after that visit. In my long career as a media practitioner and social activist, if there is anything that has made me hate the politicians that have ruled my country since Independence, is the way poor people die, like when you walk on ants, from the incompetent treatment they receive from state medical service.
I am writing about what happened to William, but the story of unnecessary deaths of thousands (not hundreds but thousands) of poor people who were neglected by state health authorities since Independence remains untold.
My mother died at the Georgetown Hospital in 1985 where the facility was in a most atrocious condition than when a country goes through a civil war.
In 2002, my Chinese neighbour’s restaurant was attacked by a lone gunman. He was shot and bled internally after waiting hours on a bench at A&E at the Georgetown Hospital. Three years ago, a ten-year-old student was kicked in her stomach by a fellow student. Her parents took her to the Georgetown Hospital. They gave her pain tablets, sent her away, she died the next morning. The little girl was bleeding from internal organ damage.
The death of poor folks who seek medical attention from public medical service is a crime against humanity in this country. And my psyche will be further damaged when the election campaign starts. These very souls who cannot afford to pay private hospitals will be the ones shouting party slogans like if they are going mad. These are the ones that will hurl nasty insults at the opponents of their respective parties. These are the self-destructive souls from the lower income classes that will prostrate themselves on the roadway willing to die for their idiotic, philistine leaders who are less civilised than the beast of the wild.
I read in the print media where a little boy in Essequibo went into the hospital with pain to one of his heels. They did to him what they did to my paper guy. Took a cursory look at him – open your eyes, push out your tongue – then tablets are given, and death comes the moment after.
People in the 21st century do not and should not die from minor ailments that the lower income folks perish from when they go for medical treatment at public facilities in Guyana. And there is no end in sight. You read about these deaths and you wonder if there are humans that rule this land. How could leaders over a forty-year period allow its poor citizens to die just senselessly like this?
This country has some frightening doctors whose incompetence is so sickening, that many of them should have been charged a long time ago for manslaughter. Through their neglect and incompetence, poor patients die. To date, this country has heard not a word about the doctor who looked at the girl who was kicked in her stomach. The Ministry of Public Health ordered an inquiry. Where is the report?
No one has bothered to enquire about the report, even though this country has a Rights of the Child Commission. I ask readers why. I know the answer. It’s because that kid came from poor parents in Charlestown. You have some women’s groups in this land who are just obsessed with getting publicity. So if that schoolgirl was from a middle class family, all hell would have broken loose. They would have picketed the Ministry of Public Health day and night. Next day they would be on the front page of the print media and interviewed on television. I call that masturbatory activism.
I find our President an amusing gentleman (no apology whatsoever for the use of the term). He took public umbrage at the decision of one of the most powerful authorities in Guyana – the Chief Justice. When she gave her decision in a constitutional matter that went against the state, he reacted by saying that is her position, he has his own. Yet this President has never uttered one word on the colossal incompetence of some doctors and magistrates paid by the taxpayers of this country. Goodbye William! Wish I could have helped!

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper) 

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