Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Mar 06, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Let me be pellucid so there can be no ambiguous lines. For the past ten days, where I live at Turkeyen right next door to the Caricom Secretariat, we have been enduring sessions of blackout each day. Let me be crystal clear in the use of my words, by sessions of blackout each day, I mean multiple interruptions within the day. There is no three-hour period and after that, we get lights.
The electricity may go at 7 AM. We get it back at 9 AM. It may go at 2 PM. We get it back at 5 PM. Then, when the evening comes, the current may go at 8 PM. It returns at 9 PM. Then interruptions may arrive at 11 PM the same night. And this has been the pattern for the past ten days. It does not affect the Caricom Secretariat that has its own generator. It does not affect the Arthur Chung Convention Centre that has its own generator.
One can bear up with blackout for a period each day but not three or four times a day. To some, it may be an exaggeration when I say that such an overbearing experience we never had even in the breakdown days under Mr. Burnham’s rule. Back then it was six, seven even ten hours of interruption. Then electricity would return and it would last until the next day. At the present time, where I live, this thing is completely exhausting. The night of Academy Awards, my daughter was so annoyed; it came just as the show started.
We cannot go on like this. The citizens where I live should not be subjected to this torture. And it is torture. I would be typing my column, then, the electricity would go. I would wait until it returns. It returns and I continue my column, then ten minutes after, it would disappear again. What is wrong with this country? I put up with this when I was a young man. I am in my sixties now and I am still enduring the mental anguish of constant blackouts. What has changed in my country since I suffered from blackouts when I was a young man?
From blackouts, I go to traffic cops. I believe in my heart there is no other country so foolishly disheveled as Guyana. I am rehashing a topic I covered several times in these columns. Thursday evening I turned east into Hadfield Street after travelling north on Lombard Street. It was vehicular madness at that time of the night. Drivers were turning from the opposite direction too. Manners went out the window. I am talking about the mini-buses.
As I prayed (though I am not religious) that I wasn’t struck from the side, I made it into Hadfield Street only to find two traffic ranks about fifteen yards from that dangerous junction happily chatting with each other in Hadfield Street at the north side of Parliament Building. These men were idle while about fifteen yards from where they were, there was traffic chaos.
I pulled over, asked them how they could be doing absolutely nothing, while there is confusion up the road. The nonchalant gaze told me I was talking to a brick wall. I covered this ground a few months ago. I am back on it and I know I will be back on it indefinitely.
Saturday morning there was no internet service. I called my neighbours to enquire if they had so I can send my Sunday column to Kaieteur News. They didn’t either. I called my editor, who was at home expecting to receive my column to edit it before sending it to be laid out to tell him I was without internet facility. I left the comfort of my home, picked up my dog, and drove to Kaieteur News. The newspaper didn’t have internet service either. KN journalist Suraj Narine did some miracle with his smart phone and sent out my column to the editor.
But let’s return to Thursday. I drove west into the Railway Embankment only to find when I reached Liliendaal that a huge machine was blocking further access. No one from the police force or the Ministry of Public Security had the respect for or felt the obligation to the citizens to tell them do not travel west on the Embankment because bridge repair was in progress.
I will end with a piece of psychological advice to the people of this country whom I do love. Get a pet cat, get a pet dog and fall obsessively in love with them. They will save your sanity if you continue to live in Guyana.
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