When I was small, I heard this thing
When I was small, I would hear my parents and their guests in our home saying that in India you have the rich and the poor and there was nothing in between. My father and mother and their friends who came to our home were not people who were widely read. I guess they must have picked up their India remark from others.
In Guyana, one would like to think that either you are rich or you are poor, because those are the classes we see all over Guyana. As you drive around Georgetown, lower East Coast and lower East Bank, there are literally countless resplendent buildings going up or have gone up. And these structures are humongous and have expensive clothing.
As I gaze at this new Guyana, those words I heard in my home when I was ten years old ring in my ear. In Guyana, we have the wealthy strata and the working classes. There is hardly anything in between.
When you look at this new Guyana, you see that there is money in this country. You see money the quantity of which puts us in the same category as Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica. But it is a mirage. It is a gigantic deception. Guyana is dirt poor or as one of our top entrepreneurs once put it, “p-ss poor.” Alongside this decadence stand abject poverty, poor wages and salaries, laughable minimum wage standards, cruel old age pensions, a jeopardized National Insurance Scheme and dilapidated public buildings and plantains that sell for a hundred dollars (don’t contradict me on the plantains, I buy them all the time). Continue reading →
When I was small, I heard this thing – Freddie Kissoon
When I was small, I heard this thing
When I was small, I would hear my parents and their guests in our home saying that in India you have the rich and the poor and there was nothing in between. My father and mother and their friends who came to our home were not people who were widely read. I guess they must have picked up their India remark from others.
In Guyana, one would like to think that either you are rich or you are poor, because those are the classes we see all over Guyana. As you drive around Georgetown, lower East Coast and lower East Bank, there are literally countless resplendent buildings going up or have gone up. And these structures are humongous and have expensive clothing.
As I gaze at this new Guyana, those words I heard in my home when I was ten years old ring in my ear. In Guyana, we have the wealthy strata and the working classes. There is hardly anything in between.
When you look at this new Guyana, you see that there is money in this country. You see money the quantity of which puts us in the same category as Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica. But it is a mirage. It is a gigantic deception. Guyana is dirt poor or as one of our top entrepreneurs once put it, “p-ss poor.” Alongside this decadence stand abject poverty, poor wages and salaries, laughable minimum wage standards, cruel old age pensions, a jeopardized National Insurance Scheme and dilapidated public buildings and plantains that sell for a hundred dollars (don’t contradict me on the plantains, I buy them all the time). Continue reading →
Share this: