Jackass ears big

Oct 05, 2008 Features / Columnists, My Column

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There is an old saying that goes ‘Jackass ears big but he don’t hear he own story’. I have been a victim of this saying on many occasions and more recently when the situation hit me I had to laugh.

The saying literally means that one often wants to hear about others but he does not hear about himself. This could be extended to mean that when one is in a situation one does not see the faults. And this is so true of so many people in so many aspects of life.

A man has a wife who is unfaithful but he is often the last to know; or a mother has a daughter who is pregnant. The neighbours see all the signs of the pregnancy but the mother does not. The father is worse. He might not see anything until the baby is born.

I happened to walk around my little old house the other day and suddenly the signs of deterioration jumped out at me. For years I have been waging a constant battle against wood ants and to my credit, I have been winning the little battles to the point that for the past few months, perhaps a year, I have not had a single attack.

But there was the step with a bad treader and I asked myself when did this happen. I live in the place and I cannot remember seeing it going bad.

Then there were the walls to the bathroom. The constant splash of water eventually took its toll on some of the walls and there was some rot.

If I had seen when this was happening I would have simply changed the board and if another board was affected then I would have done the same thing. Jackass ears big. When I saw the rot I called in a fellow to give me an estimate.

The man decided that the best thing would be to change all the walls, replacing them with concrete. That was a good idea until he gave me the estimate. I blinked a couple of times and muttered something that must have been interpreted to mean “No problem”. But there was a problem. The cost.

I bought my house for $24,000 way back in 1979 and that was a stretch. The mortgage was $255 a month on my $500 a month salary.

Then when I attached the lower flat to make the house big enough to accommodate my brood the entire project cost me $49,000 and the contractor actually stole my cement because I was not at home to supervise the construction. Had he been honest the cost might have been closer to $40,000, including labour. That was in 1985.

Three years later when I changed the eastern wall and replaced the wood with claybrick, the cost was $89,000 more than I paid for the house.

A subsequent attachment to the building three years later cost $250,000. And while all this was happening my pay was not increasing proportionately.

Now this bathroom is going to cost me close to $100,000, just to place some concrete blocks, maintain the existing fittings and tile the walls and floor.

Had I noticed the deterioration as it was happening I would not have been in this predicament. I would still have been able to have a small piece to share a drink with the Peeper and some of my friends.

The fact is that things deteriorate around us and we seem not to notice. I see former public servants walking the streets asking for a car fare; housewives buying rice by the pint because a gallon of rice no longer costs 89 cents but a whopping $900; parents having to give children at least $300 if they have nothing to pack in those lunch kits; and fathers running away from homes because they find it too costly to support a wife and children although they end up supporting the children and women of others.

Many people have been depending on the barrel from overseas and the small piece that relatives would send, particularly at Christmas. I still remember the long lines at the wharves as people waited to collect their prags from overseas and of course the truckers waiting to catch their hand by transporting whatever came from overseas.

This Christmas I am going to bet that there would be a drastic decline in the number of barrels coming to this country and an even greater decline in the cash.

This is because of the collapse of some banks in the United States and the laying off of many people who were at the lower end of the economic ladder in that country – many of them Guyanese.

I am willing to bet that like me, the economic planners in the United States did not see the decline coming, with the result that the cost of reconstruction is exorbitant.

This will definitely have an impact on Guyana because people would have less to spend and the economy would suffer a decline and those old public servants would catch hell getting that car fare from the few people they will approach.

Some statisticians have reported that the remittances from overseas were about 40 per cent of the Gross National Product. I can see the exchange rate climbing, thus making things even more expensive and pushing up the cost of repairing my bathroom.

The worse aspect of the fallout will be the criminal activities because young men are going to want money to spend but they will not take the time to find jobs.
I am getting worried.

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