Thoughts of a minibus traveller

  Burying our children How many of our children have we buried since the beginning of 2023? Friends my age have children and grandchildren and I think of children as anybody who must be 23 sometimes 25 years and younger because they far away in age from me.  And 'our children' because all of us adults have  responsibility for all of Guyana's children. Yeah, we know.. death is inevitable, we can only choose how we live and not how we die, and the soul is eternal. These work when people my age and older die.  And we know that no And that No parent should have to bury their child. But something is wrong in Guyana.  More and more children dying in ways which are 'preventable'. I am not counting, not all are in the newspapers.  Guyana 2023 But ..  The 9 children since Saturday 26th August, 2023  in the road accident who died , including a 10 month old baby  and the child who visited a function I attended and was cheerful and hopeful about the future; The two boy child

  Heat...   Place hot and the fan is a companion which doesn't dry the sweat on the skin which comes from just sitting and doing nothing. Moving and sweating in the heat is probably better than sitting and sweating.  Things to be done all over, but nothing urgent.  The drying out tree cutting which needs attention still has the 'falla me' insects on them but no rush to sort them out just yet.  I try chopping one morning to move out but a bite on my elbow will remind me to leave it until I figure out what to do. But "falla me" is not the only animal in the yard. New activity in the day as I move around the yard to look to see if the cat is here,  I don't understand what the cat is doing in the hot sun under the fragile shade of a kush grass bush when she could be under the house taking breeze.  Maybe I should crawl under the bush of grass and find out.  And remembering the man managing two tawa in an enclosed space as he cut the dough, fill with dhal , put to

  Main Street Hot afternoon with gray clouds in the South. Main Street Avenue has some stalls selling items related to Emancipation. Some people are working on the Main and Quamina Street part, big speakers going up. They are using winches and chains to put the speakers on the racks. It will be a big event. Watching the hoist and the chains and speakers , and thinking of Quamina, in 1823. The white men murdered him, and hung his body in chains to silence other rebels. They would have had to raise the body with the technology.  Lay out some of the books on the nice bench. Two men watch from over the avenue, nice Shade still. I start with the 'free books' and the older man comes over. Picks up a book. I tell him the price, to answer the question 'What do you know about the 1823 rebellion?" The man said he doesn't know anything. He from Kwakwani (the road side) and knows , like most of us, about the 1763 rebellion. He tells the other man to come over and pick up a boo

  Monday before Emancipation Day 2023. There is a petition to support Red Thread. Red Thread has reported to the police about death threats made against. The police have not bothered with Red Thread. A white visitor to Guyana is concerned about a friend he made, a young Black gay man who is using cocaine and other drugs. The white man wants to help the young man.  2023 problems. Emancipation Day and there is a picture on front page of a newspaper  of a woman prisoner - her face in distress, Black woman.   I write letter to the Editor .    200 years ago, enslaved people were planning to rebel against the white Government of the day. I went to Bishops and QC during Burnham years and after, and I  did 'well' but did not realise that thousands of people rose up in Demerara over two or three days. And that there was a brutal put down.     Maybe because, mixed race coolie man that I am, this history is not supposed to mean anything to me. Or that the post-Independence po