Guyana 2023 as we bury more and more of our children

 

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 children who died by suicide in the same village even as the silence around suicide prevention has intensified, (The hotline at 600-7896 .)

 the boy who died by drowning, as other children have died by drowning on casual outings or near their homes

 the boy who died after someone chopped him and his  mother, 

the girl who died in fire after some one killed her aunt and her, and the other child who was nearly gunned down with the big man who was the target of another big man's bullets.

the other children in fires around the country, including the 20 children in Mahdia. 

The six who died by dengue , and maybe others we don't know about, we don't know because their deaths are only to matter to their parents and families and not to the oil producing thriving democracy.

The other children I was not counting because it did not seem important at the time because I didn't want to read bad news or to feel more powerless.

Whuh yuh gun do?

I tried to find out if the village where the two boy children who died from suicide had any mental health resources or if any of the other people mourning their death had access to mental health resources. There are none in Guyana really , maybe the public health system has just given up really and the news about oil and so would wash over the mental health challenges of our children.

We will not be doing anything about road safety really, there will be plenty roads, plenty people who want to drink and drive and so on, and some of us will die on these roads. Or get injured. We will not be able to improve the road users' attitudes, the police response.. the talk of corruption. We will keep encouraging drinking alcohol in Guyana, which means drinking and driving many times. And those who are charged with DUI will never get to understand alcohol as a problem.. they might just go out and repeat again and hope not to be caught.

We will pretend that teaching children not to play with matches will protect them more than acknowledging that in Guyana, many children are left alone at home, by caregivers who have to go and find work and have no child care.  

We will not talk about violence across Guyana and across all levels of Guyana, as we believe we can accept some forms of violence while condemning other forms of violence.

And most importantly, we will not count, nor will we every know because those who are supposed to count, we can't trust them.

So we can't do anything really in Guyana 2023 to stop burying more and more of our children.