I hate this country from what I saw in the National Park last Friday

Apr 25, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – I grew up on food cooked on a coal pot. When we moved from one location in Wortmanville to another – from Hadfield Street where I was born to D’Urban Street where I grew up – we ate food from a small kerosene stove.
In today’s Guyana, not even the poorest, wretched squatter family uses the coal pot; it is gone forever. That is what life is about. It is moving from one stage to the other which is more modern. Gone are archaic ways of teaching, communicating, engineering, using technology, running a business, building a bridge, etc.
What I hate about this country is the graphic existence of un-modern life existing alongside post-modern technology. If you are from another country and you come to Guyana, if you stay in your hotel room without walking about and only read the newspapers, you would think this is a fast-developing land with modern ways of doing things.
You read about the most luxurious brand name hotels springing up all over the country. You read about investments from big foreign companies. You read about expansive infrastructural programmes. Then, you leave your hotel room, walk down on the terrain of Guyana and you see pathetic, un-modern life.
I say most unapologetically commonsense does not exist in this country. A commercial bank requests a customer to renew his/her data every two years because of the anti-money laundering act. But that customer has a tiny deposit the past 20 years that has not moved.
What does money-laundering activity has to do with that small customer? Commonsense in Guyana has been replaced by asininity. If a bank account with a tiny amount hasn’t shown any activity the past 20 years, how can it ever be suspicious of money-laundering activity? That is not only lack of commonsense, it is downright asinine.
I have given countless television interviews in several studios in this country in which I sat opposite the presenter. On every occasion, without exception, the camera is focused on the presenter so in the final production, you do not see the full face of the guest, only the side of the visage because the guest turns to look at the interviewer who is asking the questions. In the modern world we live in, a Google search can show you how to position the cameras.
I come now to the title of this article. I was with my dog in the National Park on Friday morning. I saw three workers trimming trees with a cutlass. Do not get a heart attack – yes with a cutlass. One of them ran for safety as the tree branch fell. Apparently, he didn’t anticipate correctly where it would have fallen. The modern way of trimming large trees is to use the rope system, with two workers controlling the flow of the fall so workers cannot be endangered.
A national park in commonsensical terms simply means one thing – trees. In the modern world you trim trees in a national park with a chainsaw of different sizes depending on the size of the trees. I bought a chainsaw from a store at the southern junction of Robb and Albert Streets for $10,000.
The National Park does not have a working chainsaw. Our National Park in Georgetown may be larger than the ones in some small developed countries like Ireland, Holland. If that branch had fallen on that worker it was either death or a broken spine.
Please tell me and the world, why the National Park does not outfit its workers with chainsaw facilities to trim the trees? Why must workers climb trees like monkeys with cutlass in hand to chop tree branches in the 21st century? Of course there is going to be a reply and it will state the park does have chainsaws.
Remember I wrote that GWI was not sending bills? The GWI replied the next day and it noted that it does. But I did not receive one for the past three months neither did Raymond Persaud, the Ogle airport engineer who asked me to highlight his plight. Guess what? The very next day we both received our bills. So the park will say it has chainsaws.
Prominent politician, Ralph Ramkarran was so right when he wrote in his column that there are so many areas of life that civil society groups can bring meaningful changes to the lives of Guyanese rather than choosing issues that carry sex appeal. If that branch had fallen on that hard-working labourer, another poor family would have been consigned to blinding poverty. I wonder at my age if I will ever see a modern Guyana.

(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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