Teachers: The human aspect to this step to the streets

Feb 08, 2024 News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – In an effort to put a human face to this teachers’ strike, the personal has to be invoked and tabled.  It should assist those who see politics, or selfishness, or ulterior motives, in what is going on in the cities and counties of this country.  If the critics of this strike are honest with themselves, there ought to be no fear in revising positions-prior harsh positions-after this reading. The first recommendation is to suspend the partisan for a moment, it impedes clear thinking, clean interpretation.  The personal follows first.

I was a teacher for eight years.  A full-time volunteer.  In the brief interludes away from classrooms, I listened to and heard the struggles of those who were passing strangers to me, at first.  Later, they let down their guard as the months and years passed.  From the few that I allowed to get closer, I had close contact with the uphill task of dealing with surviving in Guyana with dignity intact, and at some decent level.  How they did it then, I don’t know.  How they do it now, I don’t think I will ever truly know.  Understand and empathize, to be sure; but to represent that there is the fullest feeling of the stresses of making ends meet on a monthly basis, would not only be the height of pretense, but also some considerable presumptuousness on my part.

But I know worry and anxiety when I see either.  No matter the efforts to conceal to maintain a little pride.  It helps that I have known what it is to be short both here and overseas.  Those experiences are the best teachers.  Given where circumstances are, there could be no looking away, any failure to identify.  None of my business.  Not my fight.  But how can it not be, when there is knowledge of what is not right?  There were the best schools of instruction along the way.  The first was from the home of the humble.  The second has its roots in the school of hard knocks.  When I say hard, I mean hard.

Thus, there is some association with the terrors of teachers, the plights of public servants, the distresses of minimum wage workers.  Jesus Christ, what to tell the children?  What to go home and tell mama?  Hence, the appreciation multiplies and intensifies that the struggle of striking teachers is also mine.  Roots remind of what once was, and what has long been lived by so many in Guyana.  Those that we take for granted while hustling and rushing along chosen pathways greased with connections, powered by economics.  It is the economics that applies to only so many (the chosen few), that bypasses the greater many massed on the roadside in rain and shine for that coming minibus already packed to capacity.  Did somebody say taxi?  Well, that’s for the paparazzi and cognoscenti.

A trek to the markets and supermarkets is an occasion for dread.  Ah, the prices, the shrunken quantities, and those are in respect to the essentials urgently needed in the home for the family.  If essentials are this costly, and what could be accessed only partially, then what probability for luxury for those living on the edges of a country that reputedly has these translucent statistical luxuries? What opportunity for affording some tiny degree of luxury in a poor society? Yet it is what should be, given the gaudy economics reality of our luscious offshore commodity.

To be absolutely clear, the teachers’ strike is not about visions of luxury.  That would be as elusive as the dreams immortalized in song by the man from the Welsh coal country, Tom Jones.  Too much money all at once could mean pushing already steep prices deep into the stratosphere.  Rather, the teachers are striking to equip themselves with better economic underpinnings to help them cope.  For what could aid them to come out slightly ahead of punishing day-to-day Guyanese reality.  The well-versed people at the Bureau of Statistics, and the Bank of Guyana, came up with an unbelievable number for inflation in 2023.  I can live with generalized inflation, and the lowball number affixed. On the other hand, there is the greatest difficulty accepting food inflation, as smartly calculated?  The only conclusions are that the national experts have perfected a new inflation formula, which is unknown and unused by all others.  Or that they live on some remote, uninhabited wilderness that inhibits any connection to the real world.  Or that their heads are where such shouldn’t be.  It is not necessarily in the sand, but more anatomically oriented.  Food inflation is a real source of alarm for teachers and numerous others.  Inflation is neither lecture hall nor textbook stuff for teachers and their families.  Inflation is constriction.  Inflation is the killer cost-of-living that backs many Guyanese (teachers, nurses, domestics et al) against a wall, what reduces them to living on their knees, and dying by a thousand cuts daily.

The great anguish is that none of this has to be.  The resources are present like never before.  The local leadership mindsets of yore cannot, should not, and must not be what comes to the fore. There is too much.  Too much spending and giving to others more than their share.  Teachers are due theirs.  They must get it, come tyrannies or environmental tumults.  Teachers are people, too.  If the squeezes on them are retaliatory, the time for that has passed.  Govern.  Lead.  Decide.  Deliver.  As all of those should be for all, and not just a few.

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• cognoscenti, Guyana, or selfishness, Politics, punishing day-to-day, teachers

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