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Sweet potato shock – how will people live here?

Jun 10, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

Sweet potato is $650 a pound in Guyana. This was what this local ‘ground provision’ went for at the Bourda Market during the week. I repeat for this to register, it is domestically grown sweet potato, not foreign (‘white’) potato. In fact, the foreign product is cheaper at $600 for 16 oz. Somehow Guyanese manage.
If it was sweet potato alone, the substitutes would suffice in helping families get by. But, to sing the current song, everything has gone up; and not just up, but UP, as in really, up, up, which locals have this habit of repeating a word to pound home their point. Other ground provisions are ‘dare’, though not as sharply, which only adds to the nutritional, physical, and psychological distresses of Guyanese. I say it, ask it, again: how are poorer Guyanese getting by? The poor is never the skimpiness of a statistical outlier in a society like ours, but the majority. I expand on this sweet potato thought and sharing (and the rest) today to see if I can get somewhere, shed some light re the plight of our poor people. I know of them, happening to number among them, long accustomed to sharing moments and some more with them.
Five pounds of sweet potato for a family with three children, and the buying for a minimum wage worker for the week is over. The $3,000 spent on that ensures a meal of a pound of veggies a day for those five adults and children; that could be all to it. Fish is out there in the atmosphere, and I speak of prices, not flying fish; while chicken went up, and so also most other basics, better identified as no-nonsense essentials. Who is coping, and who is not? Surely, many Guyanese are hurting. Badly.
I must wonder how much rice and bread they can access. I let pass transportation and all the other crushing conditions of living in this richest, but toughest, of lands. If there is illness, there is the other trouble of getting to the hospital. When the landlord comes around, I had better not be around. Or here at all.
Editor, I focus on painting the simplest picture of what it means to be poor in this fabulously rich society. So they tell me, with inspiring talk about GDP, economy, and the next Dubai. Or about that other construct labelled breadbasket; not when my brothers and sisters, too many of them, don’t even have a damn basket. Today, I waste no time or space for those scorned contraptions that we have called governance and leadership and equity. Perhaps another time, but not today, for the weight of the moment is suffocating.
It is at hours like these, then the best in the best of us comes out. Concern. Caring. Compassion. I write not with pen or mind now, but with heart. We live with the boorishness of billions here and more there, and I stare at the hungry. I can’t be the only one seeing them, feeling for them. This is neither theory nor concept nor any of all that happy, self-reassuring, comforting talk. This is of reality involving real people with real troubles in real hard times. It is punishing for the poor. The world says we have democracy and prosperity. I think we may, but for whom? How is it that I observe, am touched by all this poverty? I can’t be alone, and I am one of those not feeling it. Mysteriously, for some reason unknown to me, I do feel it sharply. The question will not go away, but gnaws and nags: how do some, many, citizens of this country manage? And I only spoke to this sweet potato story. Will things get better, with supply chain, war, pestilence, weather the rage? Will somebody up there watch out for these people? I beg. Please have a heart. Hear. Help.

Sincerely,
GHK Lall

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