Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
May 26, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
One day I was going up to the airport and one of my US-based friends in the car was ridiculing the East Bank highway for its narrowness. He blurted out; “this road should have been an eight-lane highway” to which I replied; “why do we need an eight-lane highway with our small population; it will be a waste.”
There are rich countries in this world with small size and population, and they do not have eight-lane highways; Holland, Ireland, Singapore, Trinidad, just to name a few. Do you know more people in Amsterdam ride bicycles than drive cars? If you go to a ministry in Amsterdam, there are more bicycles parked outside than cars. What these countries have is small infrastructure but modern ones with, perhaps, post-modern facilities. And modern technology too.
The world moves on. Progressive development, meaning upward movement, is a human necessity. It applies across nations and individuals. Gone are the days when you see a person breaking into a car and you run breathlessly to get a telephone. I was walking my dog on the Eve Leary beach and I saw two boys moving menacingly toward a couple. They saw when I took out my cell phone and they just turned around and left. That is how far human progress has come. Even in the most rundown district in Guyana, you would not find a home using a coal pot.
This is the way of the world. We as individuals, and we as part of nations, grow and get modern. It is 52 years of Independence today. The individual from the most depressed area of Guyana has a cell phone, no matter how cheap. It has to be the same with a nation in science, technology, engineering, medicine, etc. I will leave morality, ethics and human values for another column on 52 years of Independence. For now let’s look at the physical landscape.
The first holiday Tony Blair as Britain’s Prime Minister took was in Italy. I read that they were cleaning the beach near the castle where he would be staying. Apparently it was dirty. All facilities get dirty, but you clean them. On any national holiday, in any country after the partying is over, the restaurants in the airport would need a good fumigation.
After 52 years of Independence, you can hardly find a clean washroom in any public building. I remember so well as I type this article that as we were waiting in the Georgetown Hospital below the Caribbean Heart Institute (CHI), to hear word on Nigel Hughes’ condition, I wanted to pee badly. I turned the corner, found the washroom, and I swear on my parents’ grave the smell was so horrible, I came near to throwing up that Sunday morning. When I wrote about it, I got a call from Dr. Mahendra Carpen, he wanted to know if I was referring to the toilet at the CHI. I was not, but one of the clinics below the CHI.
I walk my dog every morning outside the Eve Leary Head Office, and one day I had to go to the back building where they monitor the cameras in the streets, and I saw a most sickening sight. Where police ranks are living, and in the yards where they hang their clothes out to dry, escaping sewage was all over the place. A rank saw me looking at the miasma and said, “Mr. Kissoon, this has been going on for years.”
This is the way police personnel live in a country that has one of the largest robbery rates.
Do you know the University of Guyana is older than Independent Guyana by three years? Some first degree programmes are gone, like Physics. You can literally count on your fingers how many master’s degree programmes the entire university offers. After 55 years of existence, a poor Guyanese student cannot do a master’s in Biology or Economics at their local university. UG has never offered a doctoral degree.
After 52 years of Independence, if you live ten feet up, you have to get an overhead black tank imported from small Trinidad which is a mere 2000 square miles. I moved out of my Wortmanville home in 2007 and water hardly ever came at the bottom level, much less the upper flat. If you buy a black tank, you have to buy a pump to send water up to the tank.
Only one road takes you from Georgetown into Berbice. The Railway Embankment stops at Enmore. Both roads have non-functioning street lamps. This is Guyana 52 years after Independence. More later.
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
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