The Coil: “Straight/Heterosexual/Normal man is charged for murder of a sex worker“?

Vidyaratha Kissoon  

“Help me hey, what dis mean” the man at the ATM asked. Pay day and it seemed that his wages had not been transferred to his account. He asked me to try again. He checked his balance –  $237. He looked uncertain. He had no way to call the employers to find out as it was after 4pm.  Man probably had bills to pay, things to buy and between the bank and the employers, the wages not there, and nobody to ask when the wages  would be there in his account.

Taxi man earlier in the day said he not making his weekly payments to the base. Money not circulating. He working longer hours and not making it.

Another taxi man had the placard he held last week outside the Minister Ramjattan’s office. He says he has been dealing with police harassment since 2012 when his daughter was hit down on the road by a police officer. He has a documented set of incidents of the harassment.

Woke up Friday morning and grateful that the Hyrdomet office was wrong and that the intense rainfall did not happen, but still looking at every heavy shower and thinking .. oh oh.. hope this is not the delayed rain and we will flood because the water flow to the heavy duty pumps as the same rate as the rainfall.

The blocked culverts in Subryanville for example (from a presentation done by a resident, Damian Fernandes) show that heavy rainfall is not the only problem. Prosperity of some businesses seems to have damaged some of the culverts which used to help clear the water out, especially to the drainage trench  on Sheriff Street.

That drainage trench  looks choked with lotus plants with the nice leaves that make eating 7 curry a special experience.  I am contemplating 7 curry as an Uncle writes about how the 7-curry tasted good after the funeral of an Aunt who  died of cancer, three weeks after diagnosis – “as she would have cooked it” he said.

Thinking of how thousands of these leaves have been used to serve food, many times from trenches where the water might not be drinkable and no damage recorded. What lessons are there to learn from our use of these leaves in how we deal with what is clean and what is dirty?

This on a weekend when Stabroek News has an article about street vendors and food hygiene. Food safety is a concern as Sherlina Nageer wrote in November 2014, but I still had my cane juice from my favourite juice man in a glass washed in a bucket of water with a lot of other utensils and dried on a cloth which seemed multipurpose. Like many other customers, I did not bother too much

He told me that yeah, he gets his food handler certificate every six months and laughed “Yuh gun write how I must stop sell food?”.  He said the only person who ever had diarrhoea from him had eaten “too much pepper. “He ask fuh nuff pepper dat time. He doan tek so much pepper now”.

The group talked.. another man eating right there with his juice resting on the car. “Dey shouldn’t stop we Guyanese, you want know nasty, why dey doan look at chinee” We grumbled about ‘chinee’.. all of us talking.. “Yeah, I know.. we does eat de chinee.. “.. all of us who know de chinee nasty.. but we still eating it –  it is like some kind of contradictory Russian Roulette.. or something.. which might be part of this Guyanese identity.

The nationalism thing was asserted over the cane juice the day after I went to the Ministry of Social Cohesion meeting where Guyanese identity was one of the issues that came up, along with the usual race/ethnicity thing. It was nice to see at that meeting that LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual , transgender) concerns would be raised..This meeting at the end of a week in which a man murdered Noel Nephi Luthers. Nephi Luthers is described in different reports as ‘male sex worker’, gay male sex worker, transgender sex worker, “commercial sex worker” and where the emphasis seemed more on the sexual orientation and gender identity and the work (described as ‘services’ , ‘business’ , with inverted commas or with details in some reports)

In the reporting on the two men wanted for the killing though, there is no mention of ‘heterosexual’ or ‘straight’ or so or what kind of business  they did. Maybe when the men are caught and brought to justice there will be some active reporting of their sexual orientation and gender identity. “Straight/Heterosexual/Normal man is charged for murder of a sex worker“

Social cohesion though, as it is a coolie man and a black man who are wanted for questioning for the murder.