A pressure cooker called Guyana

There are many things to make us send up our blood pressure. For example, if you live in the city you must secure a pair of Wellingtons, the things that we grew up calling ‘long boots’, more so than those who live in the rural areas. This is a radical change from the days when I was growing up in the country. Of course, in the country those who had long boots were the better people. I say better because they were not rich but they were able to put food on their table more often than many. The long boots were necessary because the streets were not asphalted, so one could imagine the condition when it rained. But this was expected and we country people envied those in the city because they had paved roads and all they had to be concerned about was the water from the skies. All of a sudden things have changed. The people in the country have all-weather roads that dry off quite easily while those in the city must contemplate buying boats. I know that I always envied the people in the city because they did not have to worry about mud on their feet like me in the country. Today I live in the city, but I suppose the city is a far cry from what it was way back then, and this sends my blood pressure soaring. But there are things that also make me laugh and I suppose that these do outweigh the annoying things. There was the football match on television and there were the boys at the corner store trying their best to behave as though they were in the ground. Up comes a friend who is across the road. At the same time the people in the store rise to their feet as one man and the fellow, in a haste to see what is going on, runs across D’Urban Street. A car is coming but the fellow does not see it. Fortunately, the car was not speeding. The driver must have been in an impish mood because he drove right up to the distracted fellow, slammed his brakes and honked his horn. There is the joke by Paul Keens-Douglas about Slim or Tall Boy who leapt ten feet into the air. This fellow didn’t get off the ground. He did the next best thing. He spun toward the sound, saw the car, and hugged it as though it was a long lost love. The look on his face then, made me chuckle. Then there was the young reporter who believes that she is the cleverest person around. Of course there are many of them, but this one comes to mind. The hardest thing for this young woman is to get out of bed. She has to go to an 11:00 o’clock assignment but at 11:30 she tells me that she hasn’t yet reached because she could not find the road to the Ogle airport. Of course this should have sent my blood pressure boiling, but I try my best to see the funny side of things rather than carp on those things that would annoy me. Life is about the good there is. And there is a lot of good. A man is walking along the road; suddenly he stumbles and falls. There is nothing in the world that would stop a Guyanese from laughing at someone who took a tumble. But at the same time the very people are going to rush to lend a helping hand. Sometimes an incentive would do well to make those hands even more helping, as some news reports would suggest. At every scene of a disaster there are those who appear to be very helpful when in fact they are helping themselves. People have been known to strip the badly injured and some have stripped the dead, safe in the knowledge that where that person is going he or she would have no need of these earthly things. For all this, Guyanese are really good people. I have seen people rush to give blood to complete strangers; I have seen people share the sorrow of others. And this reminded me of a story that once did the rounds. It is said that the Chinese used to pay Guyanese to cry at their funerals, although the reason offered never made sense. And in any case, with the advent of television, I now know that Chinese do cry for their own dead. But if it were true that they paid people, Guyanese would be very rich, given the large number of Chinese in Guyana. I must now take a quick look at something that caused so many sleepless nights. There I was sitting down and wondering how people in this country would fare because of the non-passage of the anti-money laundering Bill. There was the fear that with the drastic reduction in remittances the exchange rate would have climbed so much higher than it is now. It turned out that the people who call the shots could not care less that Guyana failed to pass its anti-money laundering Bill. It was as if this country never counted in the scheme of things and perhaps it never did.