I started my corporate career in Guyana with the Guyana
Mining Enterprise in Kwakwani, on the Rio Berbice. Kwakwani was a small mining
town, hanging on the bank of the Berbice River trying not to get pushed into its
deep and dark waters by an aggressively advancing forest. Living in the middle
of the Amazonian rain forest with no family and only a Scarlet Macaw and sundry
chickens, turkeys and a series of wild animals as pets may not be the normal
youngster’s dream job, but it was mine. I lived on Staff Hill, in a small
bungalow with three bedrooms, a living/dining room and kitchen and a veranda on
two sides. Facing the bungalow was an orange orchard that ended in the brooding
mass of the wall of the rain forest. Behind and surrounding the bungalow was a large
open field ending in the wall of the rain forest once again. Living in the
middle of the rain forest meant just that; you had the forest surrounding you.
Me in my hammock in my yard, with the orange orchard and forest visible
I would sit on my veranda in the evenings after the sun had gone down and I had had my dinner. In the days and places without TV or mobile phones, you had time to relax, watch the world go by and simply be in sync with your surroundings. The forest is not a silent place. Forests breathe and speak and are visibly and audibly alive. Even if you don’t know their language – and it differs from place to place – you can still hear them. I could hear Macaws talking to each other as they headed home. They pair for life and have great conversations. Lesson: conversation is essential to a good marriage. Then there are the smells. The smell of the first rain after the dry season. The smell of the markings on trees of territorial creatures which are meant to warn away potential threats. The smell of vegetation, growing or decomposing. When you sit quietly in a forest and let it talk to you, it does. Gently and gradually. Naturally, it takes a little while because first our ears must stop buzzing with the residue of our own noisy, raucous sounds of so-called civilization. They try to drown out everything that the forest is trying to tell you. But if you are patient and give it some time, then gradually the buzzing fades away and you start to hear the breeze rustling in the leaves. You hear water dropping from the top levels onto the canopy below. You hear the occasional ripe fruit or dry branch fall to the floor, to become either food or manure. You learn to tell the difference between a sound made by a living creature – which may be potentially dangerous or useful – and the sound of something that is not a living creature. The forest speaks to you in the voices of the Howler Monkeys announcing that the dawn has broken and, in the evening, that the night has fallen, and they are signing off for the day. Toucans, Parakeets and Macaws talking to each other as they fly, feed and roost. It speaks to you in the rustle of the oncoming deluge which you can hear advancing towards you, not threatening but announcing its progress so that you can take shelter. The wind rustling the treetops sometimes sounds like the waves of the ocean. You will hear all this, and more will happen if you give it some time, are observant, and are willing to learn. I was thrilled to be there. There was nowhere else that I would rather be.
Nick and I on the Kwakwani Trail in Prime Minister Sam Hind’s car (1997)
My first boss, Mr. James Nicholas Adams (Nick
Adams) was the Administrative Manager of Kwakwani and I was his Assistant
Manager. Nick was my manager but even more he was my mentor and guide. Although
he was technically in charge of the whole operation, he let me run it the way I
wanted and that was a tremendous learning opportunity for me. Nick had a unique
way of teaching by delegating responsibility and then periodically calling me
to do a participative analysis of my own performance. He would then reinforce
the strengths and achievements and encourage me to draw lessons from my
mistakes. I remember my first ever appraisal in 1980. Nick gave me the form and
told me to fill it in myself. I was shocked because I thought appraising was
something that the boss did of your work. But Nick said, ‘You know what you did
better than I do. So, write it up.’ I returned with what I thought were my
achievements and then Nick and I had a long chat about them. Thanks to my Indian
cultural upbringing, Nick ended up adding several things that I had left out
feeling that they didn’t really count. I still have that form with Nick’s
signature on it, decades later.
In Kwakwani, I was the youngest member of the Management Team, sometimes by decades. As the Assistant Administrative Manager, it was part of my responsibility to look after the logistics in the entire mining town. There were department heads over whom I had no formal authority, but whose cooperation I needed to get anything done. Some were twice my age and Guyanese and members of the PNC (People’s National Congress – the ruling party in Guyana), while I was a young foreigner. I learnt, very practically, that the best way to make progress was to develop a relationship based on sincerity as that would be the only thing that you could count on, especially in hard times. I remember how Nick Adams used to put it. He’d say, “A relationship is like a bank account. You only have in it, what you put in. And when you need to draw on it, you only have as much as you put in.” That is one of the lessons I learnt in my life and which has stayed with me all these years. That is one of the many lessons that I owe to Nick. Another was in hospitality and consideration. The first time it happened I was astonished. Then it became a regular feature. One weekend Nick called me and asked me to go over to his place. When I walked over, I saw that he had a pen full of live chickens (about 10-12 in all) and a knife. He said to me, “Ya-waar, can you please slaughter these in your way? I will put them in the freezer so that we are sure we give you these when you come over to our place to eat.” Nick and his lovely wife Kathleen knew that I was Muslim and would eat only meat that was slaughtered according to the rules of Halal. So, they made sure that not only was what they gave me Halal but that I would have total confidence in that. What better way than to let me do it myself?
One of Nick’s biggest strengths was his communication; both its clarity and wisdom. I recall an amusing but very instructive incident which illustrates the challenges we faced and how Nick dealt with them. Guyana had recently become independent and was ruled by the PNC (People’s National Congress) which was socialist/communist. The President of Guyana was the very powerful and iconic, Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham (1923 – 1985). Communism/socialism was the prevalent ideology. We addressed each other as ‘Comrade’. I was Comrade (written Cde.) Baig. Bauxite mining was the major economic activity in Guyana and just before I landed there in 1979, the government had nationalized the bauxite mining and calcining operation. One inevitable and tragic result was that people were appointed and promoted more for ideological loyalty than for professional competence. Another result was that the Guyana Mine Workers Union became very strong. Guymine (used to be called Guybau) had 5000 workers and all were members of the GMWU. The Union was run by its General Secretary, Stephen Louis, a huge big man with a voice to match.
One effect of the nationalization and heightened union activity was frequent work stoppages on all kinds of frivolous matters. Then we would meet to discuss Terms of Resumption and arrive at a settlement. The meetings were contests of will, to see who would break down first. The meetings were very important because if we couldn’t arrive at a settlement the issue would go to Arbitration before the Minister of Mines whose other role was as the President of the Union. The typical Terms of Resumption meeting would go straight through for anything ranging from 24 – 72 hours, with short breaks of usually an hour or two to stretch our legs and eat something. Naturally patience was tough to maintain, and tempers would get frayed. This incident relates to one such meeting.
I can’t recall what the issue was, for which the Union had called for a Tools Down. We started the meeting at 8.00 pm and it continued through the night into the next morning. We took a break of about 2 hours to take a shower and have breakfast. Then back in the meeting until 8.00 pm that night. Then a break for dinner and back again through the night. Stephen Louis was holding forth at full strength, his voice resonating and bouncing off the ceiling and walls; my first experience of surround sound. The only option we had was to listen. Our team had Nick as its head and me and another young man from IR (Industrial Relations), who we shall call Jacob (not his real name). Late that night, well past midnight, Jacob’s patience snapped. Stephen Louis had been going on and on about the ideological differences between socialist and capitalist ideologies and why the socialist ideology to which the PNC and the GMWU were committed was superior. Jacob said, ‘Man! Stephen, talk sense man.’ It was as if he had shot Stephen in the head. Stephen stopped in mid-sentence. Turned slowly to face Jacob and said, ‘Boy! (pronounced Bye) Jaykie, waya seh! Talk sense. Like me na takin sense? Ya tink a-we takin nansense? All dis time we bina trying to come to a settlemen and dis Bye seh we bina talkin nansense? Eh!’
The situation was as close to sitting on a powder keg with the fuse burning as I care to remember. In another two seconds, the Union would have walked out and hours and hours of work would have gone down the drain. We would have had to begin again with the additional problem of dealing with bruised egos as a result of good old Jaykie’s comment. That’s when I saw how quick thinking and experience makes a difference. Nick called out, ‘Hol-an, Hol-an man Stephen. De Bye na seh, Leh we talk sense. He seh, Leh we talk dallar and cents. Leh we talk moe-ney! Leh we do dat man. Nof-of dis ideology thing. Leh we decide and go to bed.’
I
swear, I saw relief on Stephen Loius’s face. He say, ‘Ah! Ya, leh we do da.’ And
we did. We finished as the day was breaking and as we left the room, Stephen
came up behind Jacob, affectionately grabbed him by the back of his neck and said,
‘De man Nick don save yar aas. You know waya seh, eh! And I know wa I hear! But
Nick don save a-we. If not, dis meeting was gonna go on for noder two days.
Watch ya tongue Bye. It can geh you into trouble. And you won’ have Nick to
bail you out next time.’ That is where I learnt human relations. In a very tough
environment but where even our antagonists took time out to unofficially mentor
youngsters.
My last story about Nick. I heard this story from his son Owen Shaka Abubakr Adams. When Nick was a young man, and lived in Linden, Demarara, he received a summons from a court in Corentynwhich is at the northern border of Guyana, with Suriname; a distance of about 400 kilometers. To go there in those days (1950’s?) must have been an expedition. Nick had no idea why he had been summoned. But he went. When he arrived at the court, his name was called, and the judge asked him to come forward. As Nick was walking down the aisle, he heard a woman’s voice, ‘He is not the man.’ Nick turned to see a young woman with a baby.
The judge told the lady, ‘Look carefully at him. This is Nick Adams. Is he the man?’ The lady said, ‘He is not the man. This is someone else.’
When Nick asked, the judge said to him, ‘A man by
your name, got this lady pregnant and now that she has a baby, he has
disappeared. Anyway, this is not your problem, so you can go home.’
Nick said to the judge, ‘Your Honor, I would like to request you to please arrange for the maintenance of this child to be deducted from my salary.’
The judge was astonished. ‘Do you know this lady?’
Nick said, ‘No, Your Honor, I don’t. I am seeing her for the first time today.’ ‘Then why are you offering to pay for the maintenance of the child?’ asked the judge. ‘It is not your responsibility. This matter doesn’t concern you.’
Nick replied, ‘But the child needs to eat, Your Honor. Someone must pay for that. I am willing to do that.’
For the next 18 years, Nick Adams paid maintenance
for a child that was not his own. He saw the mother, that one time in court and
never saw the mother or child again. But month after month, year after year for
18 years, Nick Adams paid for a child because he had compassion in his heart.
His
Rabb was no less compassionate. So many decades later, maybe even 60 years
later, Nick Adams who was by then suffering from cancer, one week before his
death, accepted Islam along with his wife and sister in law.
The happiest ending; or I should say, the happiest latest story, to my Guyana times was when I got the news in 2011 that Nick Adams and his wife Kathleen had accepted Islam. Nick was terminally ill with cancer at the time and died a couple of weeks later. I hope one day to meet my friend once again in Jannah. He died sinless and pure and I ask Allahﷻ for His Mercy and Grace for my dear friend to whom I owe so much.
Guyana was
also a place of learning. I was alone. I had a lot of time. I loved reading. I
was used to being alone and to reflecting and liked writing down my thoughts.
All excellent ways to conceptualize life experience.
I love the bush and I loved hunting. So every
alternate weekend Peter Ramsingh and I would go on a long drive into the bush
to hunt what we could. Most of this was for the table because in the Kwakwani
of those days, if you wanted variety on your table you had to find it yourself.
And it was not in the Commissary that you would find it either. Mostly, we
hunted the Canje Pheasant found all along the Berbice and its tributary, the
Canje Creek. Another common game bird was the Powis (Curassow). It was as big
as a turkey and good eating. We would also on occasion get an Agouti (Brazilian
Agouti or Red, Orange or Golden Rumped Agouti) or two. And when we were very
lucky, a small Savannah deer. Bush pig, the Collared Peccary (called Javelina)
was also good game and though we both did not eat it, we had many friends who
welcomed our hunts because we were the only people who would shoot a pig and
then give it away.
Peter inherited my yellow Land Rover when the
sawmill started and I got a small Toyota pickup. Peter and I would take turns
driving the Land Rover over the bush trails. It contained in the back,
everything that we needed for our camping and in case of an emergency. A
chainsaw, thick rope, hammocks, spare petrol, an axe, a spade, the ever present
cutlasses and various odds and ends. We would put in a cooler filled with
drinks and some pre-cooked bananas or cassava and off we would go. What would
have been ideal was a cell phone or radio but the first hadn’t been invented
and the second we didn’t have. So we relied on ourselves. What we shot, we
would cook in the bush and eat. What we saved, we would bring home. Sometimes
in the bush we would come across a deep stream and would have to build a bridge
to get across. Sometimes we would get stuck in the sandy soil and would have to
tie the rope to a tree nearby and use the winch on the Land Rover to haul it
out. In the evening we would find a camping place, tie the hammocks to ever
present trees, all conveniently located so that we could tie our hammocks of
course. Then we would light a fire and put on the tea pot. Once we had a nice
cup of tea, we would put on the cooking pot. Peter, meanwhile, would have
cleaned the game of the day. We would get water from the stream nearby, water
that was coffee colored but perfectly clean and tasteless. The bush meat would
go into the pot with salt and chillies, some onions, and as it cooked we would
sit and talk about life.
The big topic of conversation at the time was the
posturing of Venezuela, which bordered Guyana and had a border dispute. There
was some chance that this would escalate to a military conflict. The Guyana
Army was not in a position to face the much bigger and powerful Venezuelan
army, but nobody would admit that. There was some discussion about whether
Guyana would introduce conscription, so Peter was concerned if he would be
called to join the Army. I was a foreigner and so was in no such ‘danger.’ To
speak the truth though, I would have welcomed the adventure. However, as it
turned out, South Americans are far wiser than their northern cousins and the
matter was resolved peacefully.
Another topic was the government of President
Burnham. This was a dangerous topic to talk about in a dictatorship where even
your thoughts would be monitored if they could be, all in the name of freedom
and democracy of course. But we were far away in the bush and Peter was in the
company of a trusted friend. I was therefore the confidant of many ordinary
people who wanted to vent their frustration with the way the country was being
misgoverned. It was amazing to see how a country so rich in natural resources,
so fertile, and with such wonderful people could be run into the ground so
rapidly.
The bush in South America is different from its
counterpart in India or Africa because of the absence of major predators. The
only big ones are the Jaguar and the Anaconda, but neither will actually attack
a person except in special circumstances. So it is possible to actually sleep
very peacefully as long as you are not on the ground.
An hour or so later, once the food was ready, we
would take the pot off the fire, pull out the bread that we had brought, and
have our dinner. Then after some more discussion of world affairs, we would
climb into our hammocks and drift off into peaceful sleep looking at the
stars—possible only because we were at the river bank where the canopy did not
obstruct the view. Those days seem like a dream today. Almost as if they never
happened. And Guyana is so far away from where I am today that it seems as if I
will never see my friends again. Be that as it may, the memories are alive in
my heart and on these pages; they will live on in the minds of those who read
this. We live in the memories that we give others. So it is important to be
conscious of the memories we leave behind. This doesn’t mean that we live a
life for others. But it does mean that we remember one cardinal fact,
‘Everything we choose to do or choose not to do, reflects brand value and
character and is the stuff of memories.’
Remember when you read these pages that if I have
written about a stream, it is there and the water is good to drink. These are
stories of real life, real people, their hopes and loves and fears. And they
will live on until they are remembered.
River Berbice, Guyana, 1980
Peter got another friend Leon Molenuex to build a
flat bottomed boat for me. It was 18 feet in length with a flat bottom, low
sides and a blunt prow. Its back was flat to fix an outboard motor. It had oar
locks and two oars. And it had an ice box in the middle with bench seats, a
plank each on either side of the ice box, forward and rear. Peter and I, and
sometimes Leon would also come along, would load up the boat every Friday
afternoon that we could get away and go up the Berbice River. What did we take
with us? Hammocks, cutlasses, one single barreled 16 bore shotgun each. Rope,
fishing line, hooks and a fishing net. Some rice, cassava, bananas and salt and
pepper. And most importantly some chicken guts in a plastic bag. The last being
what we called our ‘emergency ration’. Not that we ate them, but if we caught
nothing then if you baited a hook with raw chicken guts and trawled them behind
your boat you were sure to get some Piranha. Good eating.
It was a matter of honor for us that we would only
eat what we could hunt or catch. Since neither Peter nor I ate pork, it took
one of the most common items off our menu – Collared Peccary (Bush Pig) that we
would be sure to see. But we never returned hungry. We would trawl as we moved
along and usually caught some Lukanani (Peacock
cichlid, Cichla ocellaris) or Grey Snapper (Acoupa weakfish, Cynoscion acoupa), two of the delicacies of the Amazonian River system and
would roast them for dinner. If we were fortunate then either Peter or I would
also be able to bag one of the several species of Curassows that lived in those
forests. The most common were the Black Curassow (Crax alector) and the
Crestless Curassow (Mitu tomentosum). Or even an Agouti (Cuniculus
paca, Dasyprocta aguti) which is from the Paca family and a relative
of the rabbit and Capybara but much smaller. Game was in such abundance that
there was never a trip on which we had to go hungry but we would also bring
back fish and game for Peter’s family and the families of other friends.
Almost every other Friday evening, we would start
from Kwakwani going upriver, travelling until it got dark. Then we would find a
sandy spot on the river bank and camp for the night. That sounds a bit chancy
when you read it but we had our spots and knew them well so we just headed for
the first one. A sandy bank was necessary because like all the rivers in this
part of the world, the trees of the rain forest trailed their feet in the river
all along its banks. That made landing very difficult and camping impossible.
So you needed to look for a sandy bank. That happened at the bends in the river
where the river deposited its sand and this collected over the years to make
for some very attractive sandy crescents on which we camped.
Our routine was always the same. We would draw the
boat up on the bank and I would collect wood for a fire. Peter and I would then
sling up our hammocks from the trees that bordered the bank, first clearing the
undergrowth around their trunks to ensure that we didn’t end up with unwanted
sleeping partners. We would trawl as we travelled upriver and so we would have
a couple of good size fish in our ice box. Once the fire was lit, Peter would
put the kettle on and I would gut the fish and clean them. Then I would rub
salt into the fish and prepare it for the bake. Taking two large yam leaves (or
any other large leaf), I would wrap the fish securely in it and tie the whole
bundle with a thread. Then I would dig in the river bank for clay and cover the
fish warp with clay and make a ‘brick’ of clay – one for each fish. Once that
was ready, I would remove the kettle from the fire, move the coals aside and
dig in the sand and bury the clay bricks in the hot sand. I would then put the
coals back on top and light the fire again. By the time our tea was ready so
would the fish. We would then dig out the bricks and crack them open, remove
the leaf covering and we had the most delicious baked fish you can imagine for
dinner. There is nothing to beat fresh fish cooked with a little salt, in its
own juices, with a bit of butter melted on top.
When dinner was done, we would climb into our
hammocks and chat about whatever was at top of the mind until I would hear a
snore in response to whatever I was saying. I would know then that Peter was
off on his trip to dreamland. The rainforest is a safe place as long as you
didn’t do anything stupid like sleeping on the riverbank. As long as you are
off the ground nothing bothers you and I am living proof. There are many
animals which are dangerous in these forests but none that will take a human
being by choice. So as long as you stay out of their normal pathways you will
be safe.
Lying in the hammock waiting for sleep to come, I
would listen to the sounds of the forest and try to identify each one. The
Amazonian rainforest is a rather silent place in the night, unlike Indian
forests. The animals are less vocal and the forest itself muffles sound thanks
to its density – you don’t hear much except insects. If you are near the river
there are not many mosquitos but you do get vampire bats and so you need to
cover up unless you wish to be bitten by one of them. That doesn’t turn you
into a vampire or anything so romantic, but the wound can bleed for a long time
as there is heparin in the bat’s saliva which prevents blood from clotting. In
addition, I am sure vampire bites are not exactly what any doctor would order
so it is better to stay off their menu.
Early next morning, we would start out at first
light, or sometimes even a bit earlier, going over what looks like boiling hot
water because of the ‘steam’ rising from it. That ‘steam’ is the mist that gets
created when the warm water vapor laden air meets the cold river surface and
gives the whole atmosphere an ethereal quality. Engine buzzing with Peter at
the rudder, we would travel in companionable silence, eyes ever watchful for
floating logs. These were the only real danger because if you hit one full
tilt, it would take the bottom out of the boat. A fate not to be contemplated
as the Berbice has Piranha, Cayman, and other interesting forms of life.
The Berbice is a wonderful river that changes its
nature all along its course. Downriver from Kwakwani it is deep enough for
large vessels to negotiate it. Bauxite ore from Kwakwani would be transported
on barges pushed by a tug boat all the way to New Amsterdam on the coast to the
smelter. These tugs would normally have a tow of four barges; each sixty feet
in length which when fully loaded would sink to their gunnels with the weight.
The tug boat captain’s job was a very complex one, negotiating bends in the
river a hundred and fifty feet ahead through frequent blindingly heavy rain
showers and through the night. Since tug boats and barges are about the
clumsiest of watercraft and with the kind of weight the barges carried, this
was no mean task. It was a tribute to the training and skills of tug boat
captains that there had never been any instance of the barges heading out of
the river, cross country across the rain forest.
Going upriver, however, the nature of the Berbice
changes. It is no longer the deep river but spreads wide and shallow with frequent
sandbars; so shallow in places that one could easily wade across. So much so
that on occasion we would have to pull in the outboard motor and drag the boat
over the sandbank. In this also there was a twist. In this river sand, there
were two kinds of dangers. One that it could be quick sand with so much water
under it that if you stepped into it, you could easily sink in over your head
and die a horrible death. To guard against that we would get out of the boat
only one at a time and hang onto the side of the boat until we were completely
sure of our footing. Only then would be let go of the boat and then the other
person would also get off and we would drag the boat over into water deep
enough to float it.
The second danger was that of Stingrays. These are
fresh water rays with a poisonous sting in the tail. Their favorite pastime is
to lie buried and invisible in the sand of sandbars, just under the surface and
wait for something to come within range and then they would sting by shooting a
poisonous spike into it and then wait until it dies to eat it. Their normal
prey is small fish but if you were to step on or close to one of them, then
they would sting you out of fright. I am sure there are more painful things in
life than a stingray sting—I just I don’t know what they are. And if you happen
to be allergic to the poison then 50 kilometers up the Berbice River in the
middle of the Amazonian rain forest is not where you want to discover this.
Even if you are not allergic, the sting means
several days of fever, swollen lymph nodes, swollen foot and almost
incapacitating pain. So what we would do is to put on our boots before we
stepped into the water. Alternatively, you could use a stick and hold it ahead
of you and push it in the sand ahead of you as you walk to ensure that you
disturb the Stingray and drive it away before you get too close to it.
As we went upriver, we would sometimes pass single
houses on stilts on the bank of the river with a little patch of garden at the
back growing cassava, banana, and a couple of jackfruit trees. The house was
one large room built on a high platform with a leaf or grass thatch. The walls
were of woven mat with holes for windows. There would be a couple of dugout
canoes tied to one of the poles with a rickety step going up to the platform.
Children playing on the step or in the canoes would yell and scream at us with
great excitement and delight. If we had time we would stop by and pass out some
sweets or bananas that we would carry for such occasions. Otherwise we would
wave to them and they would continue to wave and yell until we rounded the next
bend of the river out of sight. I always wondered what would make a person go
and live so far up the river in the middle of nowhere, alone without access to
electricity, medical aid, and schooling for his children, and without any
amenities. These Amerindians would hunt, gather honey and balata (wild rubber
latex) and farm a little and would occasionally come to Kwakwani to buy a few
things and sell their balata and honey and some wild meat. But they would not
work at a regular job for love or money nor would they live closer to town.
They preferred to live miles upriver and paddle their canoes several hours to
get to Kwakwani and longer to return, paddling against the current on their way
up.
It was a wonderful experience, buzzing along up
the river hour after hour, listening to the sounds of the forest. Macaw pairs
flying high over the canopy, talking to each other. Macaws believe that
conversation makes for happy marriages and it seems to work for them as they
pair for life and talk all the time. Toucans screaming whatever they scream
about. The booming call of the Howler Monkey sentinel, answered by his
counterpart in another part of the forest. The sudden crash in the undergrowth
as you come around a bend and scare away something that was drinking at the
edge of the bank. From the sound of the crashing you can guess whether it was a
Collared Peccary or a Tapir. Deer and Agouti move very quietly and you wouldn’t
even know that they had been there.
One weekend we decided to go as far as we could
and eventually we must have gone more than a hundred kilometers when we came to
place where the river widened into a huge pool. We entered the pool from the
side that the river flowed out of. On the opposite side where the river flowed
into was a series of rapids and short waterfalls. The sides of the pool were
sandy and made excellent camping ground. We were delighted with the whole
prospect. It was a very beautiful place indeed. Peter and I decided to camp for
the night and pulled onto the sand and dragged the boat far up onto the sand.
No telling if the river would rise in the night and float the boat away. That
is not a prospect to be contemplated, being a hundred kilometers or more in the
middle of nowhere without a boat. Trekking through rain forest is not an
occupation to be thought of easily.
I got the fire going while Peter hung up our
hammocks. Suddenly, I noticed on the far end of the pool near the rapids, a
permanent structure on a concrete platform, a room roofed with corrugated iron
sheets. It looked like a government structure and I wondered what it could be.
Once we’d had our dinner and before it got dark we decided to go across and
take a look at what it was. When we tied up to the little jetty there, an
Indian Guyanese man came down to the water and greeted us. With him was an
American who looked like some kind of technician by the way he was dressed, in
overalls. We made our mutual introductions and it turned out that the structure
was a weather monitoring station with some equipment from Motorola, which
needed repair. The American engineer was from Motorola and had come to repair
the equipment onsite. In the course of conversation, he asked me where I was
from. I told him that I was from India.
He asked me, ‘Where from in India?’
I replied, ‘Hyderabad.’
He got very excited and told me, ‘I have been to
Hyderabad. I have a friend there. His name is J. J. Singh and he works at the
Administrative Staff College. Do you know him?’
I rolled my eyes and said, ‘Do I know him? Of
course, I know him! But look at this, what is the probability that I would be
in the middle of the Amazonian rain forest, hundred kilometers up the Berbice
River, where I would meet an American who I had no idea would be there and we
would have a mutual friend? If there was someone betting on this we would both
be millionaires, man!!’ And we both had a great laugh. Whenever someone tells
me, ‘It’s a small world’, I tell them, ‘Yes, but much smaller than you think.’ And
I tell them this story. To date, nobody has told me a story more unlikely than
this.
One of the areas of my responsibility was the
Commissary. This was the company owned department store from where you got your
weekly supply of food and practically everything else you needed. It had a
small frozen foods section, rough wooden shelves with rice, flour, lentils and
other groceries stacked on them, farming tools, alcohol and beverages, tea,
sugar, condiments and flavors, seeds, and fertilizer for the vegetable gardens
that most people had. There was a small display of regular shirts, pants, and
Dishikis. Basic needs for everyday life in the mining town. Since this was the
only store in town, it did good business. All the stuff came across the Berbice
River by the bus or up the river by barge. The object of the Commissary was not
to make profit and some things were even subsidized by the company. It was more
a social obligation as well as a necessity if you wanted to run a mining town
in the middle of the rain forest.
One day, thanks to one of the periodic economic crises
that we used to go through, there was no rice in the store for several weeks.
Things got pretty bad as rice is a staple of the Guyanese people. Kwakwani
being a mining town in the forest had the advantage that most people had
vegetable gardens where they grew cassava, bananas and tapioca, so nobody was starving
but tempers were high. Their anger was
really against the government of President Forbes Burnham, who was Head of the
PNC (People’s National Congress), but in a communist (called socialist, but
really communist) dictatorship the first thing you learn is to keep your mouth
shut about the Party and the President. But anger must be vented. So, the most
convenient target was the Company and its Management; though everyone was fully
aware that the Company was as helpless as they were individually both in
creating the financial crisis as well as in resolving it. Actually, come to
think of it, a shortage of rice in Guyana was like a shortage of coal in New
Castle. It was more a matter of distribution than of production. The two major
agricultural exports of Guyana were rice and sugar and so not having rice in
the country was ridiculous. But that is exactly what happened on this occasion.
So, people were very angry.
Then one day, rice came. The store keeper,
Griffith, unloaded it and packed it into 2 kilo bags, stacked them on the
shelves and was ready to open the store. A crowd had collected in front of the
store and like most such situations, a combination of old resentment, misplaced
anger, and short tempers, things started to get a little hairy. Griffith phoned
the Office and I took his call. He said, “Yawar, things are bad here. Looks
like there will be a riot and they will break into the store and loot it. They
are calling for Nick. Is he there?” Nick had gone to Linden that day for a
meeting and hadn’t returned. So, I said, “Nick is not here, but I will be with
you in five minutes.” Griffith sounded very doubtful. He said, “Man!! These
guys are sounding nasty. I ain’t know if you can handle it.” Now say that kind
of thing to a 24-year-old with red blood in his veins and what do you get?? Off
I went to the store. The store was about a kilometer down the hill from
the Admin. Office and so I was there in less than the five minutes that I
promised Griffith.
The store was built on a concrete plinth platform
with steps on either side which you had to climb up to get to the door. I
parked my Land Rover to one side and walked up to the crowd. They let me through,
and I climbed up the stairs and stood on the platform and what do I see? A huge
crowd of men and some women, all shouting and cursing (and boy, could those
Kwakwani people curse!!) …. many men with guns slung on their shoulders and
cutlasses in their hands. Now these guns and cutlasses really meant no harm in
themselves as that was the way the men went to their farms in the jungle. As it
was evening, they were all headed there and had stopped by the store. But the
mood was ugly, and the guns and cutlasses were there.
I raised my hand and the noise died down. I said,
“The rice is here. We are sorry for the shortage, but you know this is not in
our hands. But it is here now. Please form a line and come and get it in an
orderly manner.” There was a moment’s silence as I said this. Then the shouting
started again. “Ya rass coolie man wanna come and tell a’we Guyanese how to
live?? Who the rass is you to tell a’we anytin?” I realized that this was not the normal
Kwakwani Guyanese I was listening to. Somebody had started this ‘we versus the
foreigner’ thing and it was catching on. This was the beast of the mob, which
has a mind of its own. At times like this, I believe that if you face the
situation with courage you are taught what to say. Later you can analyze it and
wonder why you said what you did. But at that time, it is spontaneous and
right. I let them shout for a few seconds and then yelled at them, “You wanna
come and loot this store, you gotta kill me first.”
My worry was never about my life but that I would
fail in my task. I could not believe that Kwakwani people would harm me; that
is the normal Kwakwani person. But this was a mob. It was entirely likely that
they would call my bluff and I would die. They would regret it later, but I
would be dead. All it needed was for someone to fire from the crowd or throw a
cutlass and the deed would be done. Mobs give their members the immunity of
invisibility and people can do strange things in such circumstances. The
situation was definitely getting out of my control and I was wondering what to
do, when suddenly Morris Mitchell (Chinee, the truck driver who I had mentioned
earlier) jumped up onto the platform. He was also on the way to his farm, so he
was wearing a much-used shirt, jeans, his cap backwards on his head, cutlass in
his hand. Chinee was a big man. He was well over six feet tall and weighed more
than 200 pounds, all muscle. His wrists were a foot wide (or at least they
looked like they were) and his hands were like shovels. I remember one day he
was sitting in my office and lazily squeezed a tack (nail) into a piece of hard
green-heart wood that I used to keep as a paper weight. Squeezed it into the
wood. Not hammered—squeezed. Get it??
Well, he jumped up onto the platform and in a
voice that was used to being heard over the roar of truck and bulldozer engines
shouted, “A’yo raas lisen and lisen good. You wanna kill dis baay? You gotta
kill me fus. And a’yo raas know, I ain’t gonna die alone. So, who ready??” As
in any mob situation, there is a critical incident that changes the mood. This
was the one here. Suddenly someone started laughing and said, “Man Chinee.
Yawar a’we baay man!! Nobody ain’t gonna do nothn to he! A’we just mad at the
company man!! Anyway, the rice dey ere an so leh we go’n get it. Stand in a
line folks. We ain’t ga all night!!” And that was that. All that camaraderie apart,
the reality is that if Morris Mitchel had not stood by my side, there is no
saying what would have happened. Seeing him with a cutlass in his hand had a
sobering effect and broke the mood of the mob and people came to their senses.
As I say, Guyana is beloved to me because of its people. Amazing people who
would cheerfully put their own lives on the line for a friend.
With Nick Adams on the Kwakwani trail, 1997
The incident did not end there for me. When Nick
got back, instead of a pat on the back, I got my ear burned off for being a
hero. Nick was angry at me for putting my life in danger for no good reason. He
wouldn’t believe that the Kwakwani people wouldn’t have harmed me. He said he
knew mobs and that they had a life and will of their own. People did things in
the mob frenzy which they may well regret later, but the damage would be done.
He was angry, but said he respected my courage and standing on principle and
that he would personally ‘fry my butt’ if I ever did such a thing again. It was
said with so much love and concern for me that I only grew to respect and love
the man even more. He said to me, “Your father told me to look after you
when he left you here and I gave him my word. If you had died today what would
I tell Dr. Baig? Never do this kind of thing again. You hear me?” “Yessah! I
hear you.” I heard you that day and I hear you every time I think of you. I
hear your words, I hear the tone, I hear the love, the responsibility, and the
honor. I hear it and I bless you and thank AllahY that He
gave me you as my first boss so that I could learn from you how to be a man.
And He is witness that you taught me very well. Nick was a father to me in a
strange land where I was alone, and I loved him like my own father.
That is one of the many lessons that I owe to Nick. Another was in
hospitality and consideration. The first time it happened I was astonished.
Then it became a regular feature. One weekend Nick called me and asked me to go
over to his place. When I walked over, I saw that he had a pen full of live
chickens (about 10-12 in all) and a knife. He said to me, “Ya-waar, can you
please slaughter these in your way? I will put them in the freezer so that we
are sure we give you these when you come over to our place to eat.” What do you
say to such a man?
To return to our story, these were the days of President Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham’s presidency. The PNC (People’s National Congress) was supreme. Race was the underlying thread in any conversation. I was not counted because I was a foreigner. But when I was among strangers, who took me to be Guyanese thanks to my fluency in Creolese, I could sense the tension. There was a lady in Kwakwani Mines Office called Patsy. Patsy was the secretary of the Mines Manager (the Big Boss), George Shultz as well as the District Coordinator of the ‘Party’. So, she was a big noise. Patsy was several years older than I was and didn’t like me one bit and tried initially to make trouble for me by embarrassing me. One day she called out to me in a loud voice, ‘Comrade Baig, do you know the meaning of screw?’ There was an immediate hush and an expectant silence. All the typist girls in the room looked up waiting to laugh their heads off expecting me to beat a hasty embarrassed retreat. But to their surprise and Patsy’s consternation, I turned around and said, ‘Patsy, you want me to tell you or you want me to show you?’ The office collapsed into shrieking laughter. You must see a West Indian African laugh to know the meaning of laughing. The whole body laughs, not just the mouth. And the person literally throws himself around the room, shrieking in delight. It got so loud that George Shultz came out of his office to see what was going on and on being informed, he joined in, much to Patsy’s disgust. But she learned her lesson and that was the last time she tried that trick with me. However, that was not the last of her attempts to make my life difficult.
Patsy would take time off on the pretext of ‘party
work’ and disappear, leaving her work with others who resented this, but did
not have the courage to tackle her. One day she did her usual disappearing act
and then ended up in the Kwakwani Club having a drink during working hours. I
was passing by and saw her and suspended her pending investigation. Patsy, as I
mentioned, was the PNC District Coordinator and behaved as if she was the
country’s President. Since she was in real life a secretary and that too in my
office, I tried very hard to convince her that she had to at least pretend to
work. But to no avail. So finally, I issued her a warning letter. That was like
stepping on the tail of a mamba. Given her political powers, this was a slap in
the face that she was not going to take lying down.
Next morning Nick called me to his office.
He had a grave look on his face. He asked me, ‘What happened between you and
Patsy?’ I told him about the drinking incident and the following suspension
pending investigation, which was according to the rule book. Nick was aware of
Patsy’s doings himself but told me that the Minister of Mines had called him
and asked him to enquire. I explained what I had done and Nick being a man with
moral courage, supported me. He called the Minister and explained what had
happened and why. I am amazed today, having seen a great deal of the world,
how, given the political situation in Guyana of those days, Nick could have
stood up for me. He taught me a lesson of standing up for your subordinates
when they are right, and I will remember all my life. This is Nick for you. A
man that I admire, respect, and love with all my heart.
The matter did not end with that because the lady
in question would not let it rest. She demanded that I withdraw the suspension
– I refused. So once again the Minister called Nick and said that he wanted to
meet me. Nick said to me, ‘I just had a call from the Minister of Mines, Cd.
Hamilton Green. Comrade Green wants to see you.’ I asked, ‘When?’ Nick said,
‘Now. So, get ready and go. Patsy has complained to him about you. I will
support you in this so don’t worry but you must satisfy the Minister. Otherwise
things can get difficult (he meant that I could summarily be sacked and sent
back to India).’ But there was no escape as I was also not willing to back
down from my stance, which I was completely convinced, was right. It was also a
matter of asserting my authority without which my life would not have been
worth living.
I arrived in Georgetown late in the afternoon
after a 4-hour drive. I entered the ante-room where Cd. Green’s secretary sat.
I introduced myself but it appeared that I was famous. They all knew me. I was
not sure if I should be happy or alarmed about this. She told me, ‘Show your
face through that window and he will open the door.’ The window was a little
sliding shutter. I moved it aside and looked in as instructed. I saw a huge
mahogany desk with an African gentleman sitting behind it, manicuring his
nails. All the tools for this high precision job were laid out before him. He
saw me peering through the glass and reached under the table top and pressed a
button which released the lock so that I could go in. The door clicked shut
behind me and there I was in the presence of the Honorable Minister of Mines,
Cd. Hamilton Green himself.
I realized that the whole office was furnished and
arranged to intimidate and put the other at a disadvantage. Cd. Green’s
manicuring was the strangest thing that I had ever seen and to this day I can’t
think of why he did it. I remained standing. He looked me up and down and then
gestured for me to sit. I took a chair a couple of seats away from him and
waited for the crucial interview to begin.
‘So, Mr. Baig, you are from India?’
‘Yes Sir.’
‘What do you think of Mrs. Gandhi?’
‘I think she is a good leader Sir. She is good for
our country.’
‘But some people don’t seem to like her, no?’
‘Isn’t that the case with most strong leaders
Sir?’
‘Yes, that is true.’
Then he came to the point of the interview. “So,
what’s the issue with our friend Comrade Daniels in Kwakwani?”
“Sir”, I said, “to put it politely, her attitude
at work is an embarrassment to the Party that she represents. She does not
work, plays politics, throws her weight around, and generally behaves as if she
owns the place. I believe this is not the impression that the PNC wants to
create among the people. I tried every way I could to convince her to be a good
example that would be worthy of someone who is the District Coordinator, but
she will not listen. So eventually, I had no alternative but to suspend her. I
tried to advise her, but she is a strong woman.’
‘Strong woman, eh!’ He laughed. ‘Like Mrs. Gandhi
maybe! So how do you like Guyana (Giyaana – is how he and most Guyanese
pronounce it)?’
‘I like it very much Sir.’
‘You don’t miss your country?’
‘Everyone misses his country Sir. But Guyana and
Guyanese have been so good to me that it feels like home. I have friends here
who are like my own family. So, I don’t miss my country too much.’
‘Good of you to come Mr. Baig. It was nice to meet
you.’
All the while Mr. Green continued to manicure his
nails; filing, pushing back the cuticles and occasionally clipping an
uncooperative piece. Strange way of conducting a meeting, I thought to myself.
But such are the ways of the high and mighty. To give him his due, however, he
was a fair man and gave me a chance to explain myself and then accepted the
explanation when it made sense. I’m not sure how many people in his position in
other countries would have been equally patient and understanding with a
twenty-four year old foreigner who had taken a stance against one of their own
Party functionaries.
I thanked him, walked the length of the table, the
door buzzed as I came to it and opened, and I walked out. The secretary smiled
at me and I left, returning to Kwakwani close to midnight and the matter was
closed. The letter stuck and was not withdrawn and the lady in question toed
the line. The Minister it seems told her where to get off. In the process, I
acquired a huge amount of ‘respect’ because I had managed to make the reprimand
stick by convincing none other than the Minister himself and because there were
a lot of other poor sufferers who were delighted that the lady got what was
coming to her. They did not have the power to do anything about it but were all
silently rooting for me. There was an important lesson for me to take away; if
you win, you will find that you have a lot of supporters. If I had been
reprimanded by the Minister and ordered to withdraw the letter, then I don’t
know how many of my supporters would have stood on the same side of the street
when they saw me coming. Winners have many fathers and losers none.
Two other lessons from this incident; the
importance of building a good case and the importance of putting it in a way
that makes sense to the listener from his perspective. ‘What’s in it for me?’
is a tune that everyone listens to. It’s about speaking the truth but doing it
in a way that makes sense to the listener in ways that are important to him.
Nick, needless to say, was delighted.
Next morning when I went to see Nick he was
smiling and said, ‘Whatever you said to Hamilton Green, Patsy seems to have got
an earful from him and I don’t think you are going to have any problems with
her again.’ And that is indeed what happened. Mr. Green was a just man and
understood what I told him and acted upon it immediately.
“So, Comrade Baig, you have been living here for two years. What are your impressions about our country?” The interviewer was from Guyana Chronicle, the main English newspaper. I was being interviewed because I was there. Comrade was a gender-neutral term used to address anyone because Guyana was a socialist (communist) country ruled by an iron-man with an iron fist, not always in a velvet glove. My interviewer had come in preparation for a great event, the visit of the President, Hon. Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham who was the leader of Guyana from 1964 until his death, as the first Prime Minister from 1964 to 1980 and as second President from 1980 to 1985. I lived in Guyana from 1979-83 and so in the middle of the reign of the President Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham. We called him Comrade Burnham; meaning we referred to him as that. When he visited Kwakwani, he arrived by helicopter, which was a grand spectacle in itself and for many Kwakwani people, including myself, it was the first time any of us had seen a helicopter. The helipad on Staff Hill was surrounded by people all waving PNC flags and screaming their welcome above the roar of the rotors. As the helicopter landed, the dust thrown up effectively shut everyone’s mouths. Since he was the guest of our company, Guymine, Berbice Operations and I was the Assistant Administrative Manager, it meant that I got to stand to one side with the senior managers including the CEO who welcomed Cdr. Burnham. There was Haslyn Parris, the CEO of Guyana Mining Enterprise (Guymine), Stephen Ng Qui Sang, the Berbice Operations Coordinator, Walter Melville, Personnel Coordinator, James Nicholas Adams, Berbice Operations Administrative Manager and my boss and George Schultz, Berbice Operations Mines Manager. All of them were in the front-line welcoming the President.
Among the things that were peculiar to the reign of Forbes Burnham, (I use the term because to all intents and purposes he was a ‘Ruler’ more than a leader. Some called him ‘Dictator’) was his no-nonsense style, which translated into no-opposition to his policies. Guyana of those days had a pall of fear over it and if you knew what was good for you, you didn’t talk politics. I knew what was good for me. Burnham was dealing with the aftermath of freedom and he and his party chose the socialist way. Guyana was called the Co-Operative Republic of Guyana and was closely aligned with Cuba and Soviet Russia, though it was officially part of the NAM (non-Aligned Movement). This was not to the liking of either the Americans or the British, Guyana’s erstwhile colonizers but that was reality. Guyana paid a high price in facing political blockages resulting in shortages at home. However, in today’s terms, things were easy. Unlike today, Guyana had not discovered that it had oil and so nobody was particularly interested in what Guyana did or didn’t do. There was bauxite and sugar. There was some gold, but it was not really extracted in any big way. There were and are major rivers but no hydro power. There was no organized or large-scale agriculture or ranching though there was land enough and more for both. Guyana was poor. What was also happening was the reality about payback time after any revolution leading to freedom. People who struggled for the freedom remember the promises made during the struggle and are looking to live happily ever after, forgetting that that is only a last line in fairy tales. To develop we need education and very hard work.
Burnham’s policies drove Guyanese out of Guyana and many migrated to the United States, Canada and the UK. As it used to be said at one time, ‘There are more Guyanese in Brooklyn than there are in Guyana.’ True or false, there were too few in Guyana and those that remained were people who really couldn’t leave or were in government jobs where political affiliation counted for more than any competence. The results on the economy and society were hardly surprising or beneficial. On that day Comrade Burnham ascended the podium that had been constructed and spoke, short and clear. I still remember this line in his speech. He said, “A-we Gainese wan far go-va-men to give us everytin while we sit upon we sit-upons and wait. Lemme tell ayo dat if ayo wan devlopmen, ayo gon hav to wok fo it. But we like to sit upon our sit-upons and talk about what the Go-va-men mos do an vat Mistah Bonham mos do but nevah about wa I mos do. That won’t work. Unless we decide to get up and help ourselves, nothing will change.” To me, that made perfect sense. And if someone didn’t like the man because he spoke plainly, well, that is their choice. Burnham was also known for and liked or hated for some of his policies, among which was the banning of wheat flour and the promotion of rice flour. Guyana grows rice while wheat was imported. Naturally this went against the established food habits of people and they didn’t like it. Burnham did it to reduce the import bill, but economic policy succeeds or fails more for subjective emotional reasons than objective logical ones.
Burnham decreed a policy of self-reliance and many imports including food staples were banned. Among the things that were banned apart from wheat flour were also Irish Potatoes, which was rather ironic seeing that potatoes are actually South American and were imported into Ireland. The result was that one night someone came to my house and rang the bell and looking over his shoulder, presented me with ‘forbidden fruit’, three Irish potatoes, smuggled in from Suriname, no less. For an Indian, getting three potatoes as a gift was strange to say the least, but since I lived in Guyana and was totally acculturated, I knew what a great honor and sign of friendship that gesture represented. Forbes Burnham was feared and respected, loved and hated. All hallmarks of strong leaders.
Kwakwani Park Labor Club was an institution. This was a place which had a large hall which doubled as a cinema with a stage at one end. It had a long veranda along one end on which were placed tables at short intervals where people played dominoes with great passion and noise. Inside was the bar, the place for many a meeting, fight and romance. The level of noise in it can only be experienced, not described. The Club could be heard before it was seen. And its smell was never to be forgotten. Playing dominoes in the Kwakwani Club seemed to consist of smashing the domino on the table with all your might and shouting at the top of your voice. I can vouch for the fact that going by this criterion the people who played dominoes in Kwakwani Club must have been world champions. If the game is more than this, then I must beg forgiveness for my ignorance. The Club was also remarkable for its smell. Imagine a combination of stale sweat, beer, and rum floating on heavy humid air in an invisible cloud that came at you as soon as you were within reach. Then it clung to you and entered every exposed pore and remained with you and your clothes through several baths and washes. But this did not seem to bother anyone to the best of my knowledge.
The people of Kwakwani were mostly of African
descent. This, however, is a generalization because in Guyana the racial
mixture is so rich that most people seem to be a combination of many different
races – Amerindian, Chinese, Indian, African, and European. Demographically,
Guyana had at that time about sixty percent people of Indian descent who mostly
lived on the coast. They used to work on the sugar plantations, having been
brought in by the British as indentured labor from India. Another main
occupation of theirs was small time trade. Twenty percent of African descent who
were the descendants of African slaves and also worked on the sugar
plantations. When the emancipation of slaves happened, they walked off the
plantations and settled in the hinterland, engaged in timber extraction and
whatever else they could do. The timber and mining industries are dominated by
them, as are also the Army and the Police. The last twenty percent consists of
the indigenous Amerindian tribes, originally hunter, gatherers who have been
exploited mercilessly by everyone else. They still live in the forests, though
many now live and work on the fringes of whichever town or village that happens
to be nearby. They have the least paying jobs and live mostly by selling wild
meat, fish, honey, balata (wild rubber), and sometimes by working as guides for
others.
In this final section of the population are also
the descendants of the Chinese laborers who were brought by the British to work
on the railway, most of which has fallen into disuse and is rotting away. There
was and continues to be a free mixing of the races though the Indians seem to
keep to themselves and away especially from people of African origin. Indians
everywhere seem to be oriented towards fair-skinned people and practice their
own brand of ‘apartheid’, wherever they live in appreciable numbers, including
in India. The best example of this can be seen if you read the matrimonial
advertisement page in the Sunday papers in India. Almost every single ad will
ask for a bride who above all else is ‘Fair,’ which has nothing to do with her
love for justice, believe me. A very sad practice that harms Indians more than
anyone else, but they have yet to learn this lesson.
Guyana had become independent less than 10 years
before I got there. So, ideology, in this case communist, was still very strong.
As I mentioned earlier, people called each other ‘Comrade,’ which depending on
the tone of voice could be given any kind of connotation from the most warmly
cordial to the positively hostile. As in many such cases, not everyone was a
‘believer,’ but to appear to believe was required. Since ideological alignment
was more important than everything else, efficiency suffered and people who
claimed to be loyalists of the ruling party, the PNC, had personal power far in
excess of their official position.
On Sundays a film would be screened in the Club. Most of the spectators apparently believed that they could influence the outcome of whatever was happening on the screen if they shouted at the actors. So, they proceeded to do the same with great gusto. But strangely nothing seemed to change. The actors continued to do whatever they had intended to do in the first place. Much like government policy in our so-called democracies, which seems to be independent of the screaming and shouting of their poor enslaved populations who have not realized the fact that the script has been written by someone else and will not change with their screaming. Little did I realize while attempting to watch a film in Kwakwani, I would live to see a real-life version of this behavior, thirty years later.
About a kilometer away from Kwakwani Park, up a
small hill was the Officers colony called Staff Hill. In typical British
colonial style, the rulers were separated from the ruled. Even ten years after
independence, Staff Hill was informally out of bounds for ordinary people. It
was meant for Officers, in this case, all black West Indian or East Indian
(people of Indian origin) and though we no longer had a fence and guards as
used to be there in the past, nobody from Kwakwani Park actually came up the
hill except to bring some visiting relative for a short drive to show them how
the other half lived. White and black is not about color; it’s about social
status and attitude.
In my hammock outside my house facing the orange orchard
Staff Hill had two kinds of houses. Bungalow type
houses with 3 bedrooms and a veranda all around them for most of us. And big
wooden houses on stilts with parking underneath them for the really big bosses.
The houses were arranged around a quadrangle with an orange orchard all around
them. There was a swimming pool to cool off. There were tennis courts, a Club
House with a bar, guest rooms, dining room (excellent cooks to boot) with
proper dinner service, uniformed waiters, table tennis table, and a library.
The rules of this Club were very different. The
barman wore a uniform and gloves. You could not play dominos here. And you
could not come to the Club in your shorts and nothing else. You could not shout
at the top of your voice and you could not curse. And no matter that the
British were long gone – as in the case of India, their ways had been adopted
by their erstwhile slaves and upheld as a sign of their own ‘superiority’ over
their own brethren. I am not saying that there is something intrinsically good
about cursing and yelling and unwashed shirts. I am merely pointing at the
reasons we do some things and how we use certain norms to demonstrate our own
superiority over others.
In Kwakwani Park was the hospital where for a year
my father was the resident doctor, Nurse Liverpool the Head Nurse, and
MacFarlane the Compounder. All wonderful people who ran a very good hospital
indeed. Kwakwani was a lovely small town where you knew everyone, and everyone
knew you. There were no strangers in Kwakwani. Everyone knew what was happening
in your life and had an interest in it. And you in theirs. People had the time
to stop whatever they were doing to chat with you when you came past. Nobody
passed anyone on the street without saying, “Aye! Aye! Maan!! Ow ya doo’in!!”
Remember to end on a high note as you say that, to know how it sounded.
They may add, “Ow de Ol Maan?” (Could mean your
father or your husband, depending on who you were). “Ow de Ol Lady?” (wife or
mother). “Ow de Picknee?” (Believe it or not, that means children). And
remember that had nothing to do with whether you were married or not, as I
learned to my own embarrassment one day when I went to the Income Tax office to
file my tax return. The lady at the counter offered to help me fill out the
form, which I gladly agreed to have her do. She asked me at the appropriate
column, “Married?” I said, “No.” She then asked, “Any children?” I said, “I
already told you I am not married.” She looked up at me and said, “Wad de hell
dat ga fa do wid anytin Maan!!” To end this line of discussion, I immediately
accepted defeat and said, “No children.”
The language of the Guyanese is called Creolese.
It is an English Patois and as distinct with its own flavor as French Patois is
from French. Creolese has the taste of Cookup, the sound of the Steel Band. and
the aroma of the rain forest. It is a language of the people and reflects their
culture. I used to speak it so fluently that new locals I met wouldn’t believe
that I was not a native.
They would ask me, ‘Weya fraam?’
‘I’m Indian.’
‘Me-no-da bai, A-mean weya from in Giyana?’
‘Me-na from Giyana, me from India.’
‘Ah! (That is said as an exclamation in a high
rising tone) – Ya tak jus laka-we’
And that was a great compliment. It is really
impossible to render Creolese into text because it is spoken with so much
emotion and voice modulation that without those sounds, it’s not done justice.
It is a language that comes straight from the heart. Creolese has many proverbs
and funny stories with morals that are typical of the language and the people.
For example, there is a famous proverb: Han wash
han mak han com clean (When two people help one another, they help themselves).
Another one: He taak caz he ga mouth (He talks
nonsense).
As for stories, there are several. And in them,
the people of color may appear lazy, but are smart and the White man is the
butt of the joke. Here’s one:
One day a black man (Blak-maan) be ga-in about lookin
for sometin ta eat when he com upon dis garden in de bush. Dey he saw dis great
big bunch of ripe bananas. De man! He very appy! He put he arms around the bunch
of bananas an sey, ‘De Lord is my shepherd and I shall not want.’ He hear a
voice saying, ‘If you don tak ya hands off dem bananas, I gon lay ya down in
green pastures.’
Dey bin the owner of the garden watchin over he
garden when dis man go dey.
And knowing the Guyanese, once this happened, I am
sure the owner would have given some bananas to the hungry man to eat. I don’t
know of any Guyanese who would chase a hungry man away. Guyanese have big
hearts.
Another one involves an Amerindian guide and his
white employer. They are walking through the rain forest. The Vyte-maan (White
man) sees that the Amerindian is walking barefoot, carrying his boots on a
string over his shoulder. So he laughs at him and says, ‘You ignorant
Amerindians are so stupid. Why are you carrying your boots?’
The Buck-maan (Amerindian), he na say nothn.
Then they come to a stream. The Vyte-maan tak off
he shoe and the Bok-maan, he put on he shoe.
The Vyte-maan laugh at he again and seh, ‘This is
really stupid. Now that we have to wade through the water you put on your
shoes? The shoes will get spoilt.’
The Buck-man, he na say nothn.
As they wade through the stream the Vyte-maan get
hit by a stingray. He scream in pain and fall down. The Buck-maan drag he out
onto the other bank and seh, ‘Now who stupid? When me eye cyan see, me na need
no shoe. But when me eye cyant see, is weh I need de shoe maan. So, who stupid,
me ah you?’
Another brilliant one is about this Blak-maan who
goes looking for work. In Guyana, the custom is that the employer feeds the
worker. If the worker works for the full day then the employer gives him a lunch
break and lunch. So, this Blak-maan comes to the mansion of a Vyte-maan. The
Vyte-maan says to him, ‘I have a big tree in the back garden that fell last night.
You must saw it. But you guys are lazy. You take too long to eat lunch. So,
what I’m going to do is to give you food now. You eat first then you work
through till the evening without a lunch break.’
The Blak-maan agrees. The Vyte-maan gives him
banana and cassava and mutton and tea and the Black-maan, he eat like it is his
last meal. When he done, the Vyte-maan tell he, ‘Come over to the back and I
will show you the tree you have to saw.’ The Blak-maan goes around the house
and there is this huge tree that has fallen. The Vyte-maan say to he, ‘Alright,
you see that tree over there, you have to saw it.’
The Blak-maan he look carefully and seh, ‘Me na
see no tree.’
The Vyte-maan can’t believe his ears. ‘What do you
mean you can’t see the tree? It is that great big tree over there!’
The Blak-maan ben down and look heah and deh and
seh again, ‘Me na see no tree.’
Now the Vyte-maan is really angry. So he shouts at
him, ‘You stupid man, can’t you see that great big tree over there?’
The Blak-maan seh again, ‘Me na see no tree.’
The Vyte-maan is in a rage and yells, ‘What do you
mean you can’t see the tree? I saw you see the tree.’
The Blak-maan seh, ‘You saw me see the tree? But
you aint go see me saw it.’
I can still hear the voice of my dear friend and
first boss, Nick Adams telling me this joke and both of us laughing our heads
off. You have to listen to a Guyanese tell these stories with the sing-song
tone of their voice and their actions illustrating what is supposed to be
happening in the story. I can’t put that into this narrative here. But if we
meet one day, remind me and I will tell you the stories in Creolese as they
should be told.
Mail took an average of one month to get to Guyana
from India. That it actually arrived is a marvel of the system which in today’s
email world we seem to have forgotten. But it did come and in the 5 years that
I spent in Guyana, I never had a letter that was lost. As postage depended on
weight, I used to write on very thin, semi-transparent tracing paper with a
very fine nibbed pen to try to get as much matter into it as possible. And
since Mr. Gates had not yet created Windows and laptops were not for machines
and notebooks had 100 pages of 15 lines each, you could not cut & paste or
delete or drag & drop. So, you needed to write after due thought if you
wanted to save yourself the trouble of writing what you wrote all over again.
This is how I learnt to express myself in writing.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief as we loaded the
last railway sleeper on the barge. The
beginning of this particular barge story goes back to when I first arrived in
Kwakwani and saw the mining operations. Bauxite mining was done by the open
cast method, which is one of the most wasteful and destructive methods known to
man. But it made economic sense and long-term effects were not on anyone’s
mind, so it went on. The sequence of operating an open cast mine is as follows.
First the prospecting team identifies where the bauxite ore deposits are. They
do this by drilling holes on a grid pattern, and send back soil samples
sometimes from several hundred feet underground for analysis. This enables the
geologists to create a map of the underground ore deposits. The prospecting
team stays deep in the rain forests away from habitation for several weeks at a
time. Food and supplies would be trucked in to them by Land Rover. Loneliness
was a major issue and alcoholism its outcome. The prospecting teams welcomed
visitors and I would often spend a weekend with them. One day when I was with
one of the teams in the forest, one of the Amerindian drillers came to me
looking very agitated and said, “Man Baigie, I want a week’s leave.” I knew he
had no leave to his credit and told him that he could not take leave. He begged
and pleaded, “Man!! A bin out ‘ere in the jungle too long man. I miss the
ol’lady baad man. You raas na married, wa ya know about all dem ting!” I was
not getting into a discussion about the need for female company so I stuck to
my guns and told him that he had no leave to his credit and so he could not go.
Eventually he became such a pest that I said to him emphatically, “Leon, I told
you, you cyan go.” That got to him. He pulled himself up to his full height of
5 foot nothing and said to me, “Man Baigie, you cyan tell me I cyan go! You can
tell me I cyan come back. But you cyan tell me I cyan go!!” I was so amused at
this obviously logical explanation that I burst out laughing and said to him,
“Alright off with you for three days. I will look the other way. Unofficial
leave.”
The Amerindians were simple people who lived from
day to day without a thought for the future. They worked when they were hungry
and relaxed when their belly was full. Alcohol was the bane of their lives, but
they were oblivious to that. Once an area had been mapped and it had been
decided to start mining, the forest would be cleared in preparation for the
mining operations. This was done by simply sending in Caterpillar D9 bulldozers
(each the size of a small house) which would push over all the trees into one
big pile which would then be burnt. Sometimes these fires would burn for
months. Then the dozers would clear the overburden, which was mostly sand,
until they reached the hard pan. Then the Dragline Excavator would come in and
start digging. The Dragline Excavator is such a huge machine that it has no
wheels or tracks but actually ‘walks’ on huge feet. It is an amazing sight to
see a Dragline Excavator moving. Eventually a colossal pit would be created
with the Dragline Excavator sitting in the middle of it, deep below the level
of the surrounding forest, like some pre-historic dinosaur working round the
clock digging out the ore. The Dragline Excavator would load the ore into huge
Caterpillar trucks with a payload of 50 tons each which would cart it away to
the crusher. The crusher would crush the ore into a uniform consistency and
load it onto barges that a tug boat would then push down the Berbice River to
New Amsterdam where it would be further processed. It would then be loaded onto
ships to be taken away to Canada and the US for smelting and extracting
aluminum.
Arjun and I (with helmet) with the CAT
I often tried to imagine what the whole operation
would look like to someone from another planet flying overhead. They’d see a
huge hole at one end, a living creature with a long neck and a wide jaw with
massive teeth, which continuously bit large chunks of the earth and spit them
into waiting trucks. Once the truck has its payload it drives up out of the
hole up the carefully graded road often circling the pit a couple of times as
the road climbs out of the depths of the earth. A hairy operation in itself as
the road had no safety barriers (not that any barrier would hold a fifty-ton
truck) and the pit yawned on one side of it. It is a tribute to the skills of
the drivers that in the five years that I lived in Guyana there was not a single
major accident. When the truck comes out over the lip, it drives swiftly
through the forest and eventually dumps its load at the ore dump near the
crusher. Then back to the pit. At the ore dump are the Front-end Loaders; huge
machines on wheels with a toothed bucket in the front. This scoops the ore from
the pile into its bucket, turns around and trundles along a few meters and
dumps it into the hoppers of the crusher. Then it would spin in its track and
back to the ore dump for its next load. In the middle of all this would be
another machine that resembles a large beetle called a Scraper. That is what it
does. It scrapes off the top soil (called overburden) into a hopper that is in
its belly and then it takes it and dumps it away from the main pit.
Then there is the Grader that ensures that the
road remains clear, level, and smooth so that the trucks can run without
interruption. It is amazing how many of these machines resembled insects. This
process would go on, day and night, continuously. As I mentioned, open cast
mining is perhaps the most destructive operation on earth. In Guyana in those
days there was not even an attempt at rehabilitating the land, so when a pit
had been mined out, it would simply be abandoned. If you drove around you would
come across many such mined out pits filled with the clearest, bluest water you
ever saw. This was the result of the minerals in the water, one of the effects
of which was that nothing lived in the water. The water was good to swim in and
we did that often. The pits were very deep so it was not totally safe to swim
in them, but when you are twenty-some years old and there are others swimming
with you, you don’t think about safety. Not the wisest thing to do, but I lived
to tell the tale.
When I checked, I found that just as I had
suspected these forests had good hardwood trees. Good for making furniture and
construction material, but nobody had the time to do anything about that and so
they simply burnt them to clear the land to get to the ore. What this burning
did to the environment is a different story and to tell you the truth, I was as
unaware in those days about environmental issues as most other people. What was
obviously clear though, was that a lot of otherwise useful timber was being
wasted simply because nobody was interested in doing anything about it. The
core operation of the company was mining and that was all that any of the
managers were interested in. I made a proposal to the company that we setup a
sawmill operation, which would be able to utilize this forest resource and be a
self-sufficient, profit making business.
The management agreed and this sawmill operation
was given to me to run in addition to my regular job as Assistant
Administrative Manager. My boss, Mr. James Nicholas Adams (Nick Adams) was a
remarkable man who was also my mentor and guide. Although he was technically in
charge of the whole operation, he let me run it the way I wanted and that was a
tremendous learning opportunity for me. Nick had a unique way of teaching by
delegating responsibility and then periodically calling me to do a
participative analysis of my own performance. He would then reinforce the
strengths and achievements and encourage me to draw lessons from my mistakes. I
remember my first ever appraisal in 1980. Nick gave me the form and told me to
fill it in myself. I was shocked because I thought appraising was something
that the boss did for you. But Nick’s point was, ‘You know what you did better
than I did. So, write it up.’ I returned with what I thought were my
achievements and then Nick and I had a long chat about them. Thanks to my
Indian cultural upbringing, Nick ended up adding several things that I had left
out feeling that they didn’t really count. I still have that form with Nick’s
signature on it, 33 years later.
One of my major learnings was that responsibility,
variety, challenge, and satisfaction in a job were largely in your hands if you
used your head and could influence people. I was not the only person who saw
the way the forest was treated or who saw that it could become an independent
source of income. I was the only one who translated these thoughts into a
workable business model. The result was that it was added to my responsibility
and I now had an official reason to spend time in the forest. I recruited my
good friend Peter Ramsingh to be the head of this operation and Peter and I
spent the next five years doing what we loved to do anyway – wander in the rain
forest at will. I recruited Amerindian workers, who knew the rain forest of the
Berbice River valley like the backs of their hands, for the sawmill operation.
These people lived a nomadic life in the forests in semi-permanent camps. They
would clear a small area of the forest and grow a few vegetables, and hunt
deer, collared peccary, capybara, and agouti that came to feed on this new
bounty in the forest. They knew the location of each Greenheart, Wamara, and
other hardwood trees in the forest, which they came across in their wanderings.
Ideal people to do the scouting operations that we needed to locate the trees
we needed for the mill. Once they had located the trees, the extracting team
would go and haul in the trees.
Peter is on my left
Peter Ramsingh was a man of enormous energy,
enterprise, and initiative. Peter got along well with his people and became the
ideal manager of the mill. Peter and I would spend hours in the forests,
accompanying the scouts in their explorations, not because they needed our help
but because we both loved being in the rain forest. Peter’s wife Chandra would
send me things she cooked and would pack us lunch when we took off on our
jaunts. Chandra was Nick Adam’s secretary and a wonderful, patient lady with a
big smile always on her face. To this day, 30 years later, I can still recall
the smell of the vegetation in the dim recesses of the Berbice River forests,
so thick in places that the sun did not penetrate to the forest floor. It was
with great distress that I learnt in 2009 that Peter Ramsingh had died of
congestive heart failure in 2001. One more, dear friend gone forever. Feeling
the pain of parting is the price of friendship. Peter was a truly dear friend
whose memory I honor and will remember every time I think of Guyana.
Once the sawmill had been set up, we went order
hunting and the first big order we received was from the mining railway for
sleepers as they were renovating their tracks in two locations. We were very
excited as this would make our sawmill profitable and prove the point on which
I had projected the whole plan. The only hitch was that the sleepers had to be
sawn and shipped out of the ‘backdam’ (Creolese for forest) to the waterfront
loading point by a particular date, for the barge which would take them to New
Amsterdam. All major material came to Kwakwani by river boat which took back
bauxite ore on the return trip downriver. There was much excitement and lots of
long hours of work in felling the trees from their different locations,
dragging them to the mill and then sawing them into railway sleepers. Once the
sleeper had been sawn it had to have two 8-shaped irons hammered into either
end to prevent splitting. Since we were extracting individual trees of a
particular species from the rain forest, (as distinct from plantation felling)
we had to find the particular tree, fell it, and extract it. The machine used
was called a Skidder, also made by Caterpillar.
The Skidder was a very versatile machine with a
dozer blade on the front end and a large crab-hook at the end with a steel rope
and winch. Once the tree had been felled, the Skidder operator would drive up
to it, in the process making its own track, hook the tree, loop the steel cable
around it and winch it up to the platform on the rear end. Then the machine
would drag it to the mill. Very efficient and fast but also very wasteful as
the machine left huge swathes of crushed vegetation in its wake.
The difference between mechanical and ‘biological’
extraction became even more starkly clear to me when, several years later in
the Anamallais (Tamilnadu, South India), I went to see some timber extraction
operations being done by the Indian Forest Service, using trained elephants.
The way the animals and their mahawats worked with an almost telepathic bond,
was amazing to say the least. And the economy with which individual trees were
extracted was simply delightful to see.
To come back to our story, we had all the railway
sleepers ready and stockpiled at the waterfront in time when the barge arrived.
Now to the tricky part – twenty-four thousand sleepers had to be loaded onto
the barge in 24 hours when it was due to leave. Our innovative solution – work
straight through. And that is what we did. I mean the ‘we’ literally as I
loaded the sleepers, physically, with the loaders. We would take breaks every
two hours, eat bread and cheese and drink large mugs of sweet, milky, tea and
then get back to work.
West Indians being as they are, someone started a
very ribald chant in a catchy tune that others took up and that was the beat we
worked to. Hours flew by, night fell and our willing electrician rigged up some
make shift lights so we could continue to work. And we worked. Come sunrise,
the last sleeper had been loaded. We were all dog tired with aching backs and
bruised hands, but not much the worse for wear. I was young and tough in those
days. We headed off to our homes for a hot bath and eight hours of sleep
straight through.
What was remarkable about this story was that in
the highly unionized environment of the Guyanese bauxite industry, there was
not a single cry from the union about making people work beyond hours or for
overtime wages or anything at all. Later one of the union stewards told me,
“Maan Baigie! Your raas make aa-we shut up maan. You was dey with de bais
loading sleepers and eating wat dey was eating. Wa cud we say maan?? Your raas
smart!!” Which, translated reads: You made us shut up. You were there with the
boys loading the sleepers with them and eating what they ate. What could we
say? You are smart.”
Now the big secret is that I did not do that because
I was applying strategy, but because that is how I work. I never asked anyone
to do what I would not do myself and as it happened, it is also good leadership
strategy. Leading from the front. Demonstrate the standard, not merely talk
about it.
However, this strategy did not always work in
Guyana. I remember my friend, Rev. Thurston Riehl. Father Riehl told me this
story about the time when leading from the front didn’t work. He was an
Anglican priest, Vicar of Christchurch, in Georgetown. The interesting thing
was that Father Riehl had a parish that extended into and up the Berbice River
for more than a hundred miles. He had a motor boat in which he used to go up
and down the river, often alone with only the sound of the outboard motor for
company. He was an accomplished naturalist and had a wealth of information
about the rain forest and its flora and fauna. When he learned that I was
interested in the same things, he and I would spend many hours walking in the
rain forest where he pointed out various things to me. He once told me, “When
God finished creating Hell, he threw all the leftovers in the Amazonian rain
forest.” This referred to the many
charming creatures that live in these parts. From tarantula spiders, to sting
rays, electric eels, piranhas, vampire bats, boa constrictors, anacondas,
bushmaster, black and green mamba, boomslang and an amazing variety of
snakes.
Of course, the forest has its share of beautiful
creatures as well; scarlet and purple macaws, toucans, parakeets and parrots of
many types, Sakiwinki monkeys (also called Squirrel monkeys – very small with
large eyes), flying squirrels, hummingbirds the size of moths which beat their
wings at a thousand rpm, sun birds whose fluorescent plumage shines in the
gloom of the rain forest. Forest sounds that I used to look forward to were the
booming call of the Howler monkeys echoing in the early morning mist, the
raucous calls of macaw pairs who mate for life, flying to unknown destinations,
talking to each other in flight.
I was (and have always been) very fond of animals
and had all kinds of unusual pets. In Guyana, I had the opportunity to indulge
myself because I lived in the middle of the rain forest and there were no
restrictions on what I could and couldn’t own. If I could catch it, feed it and
keep from being eaten or bitten, I could keep it. I had a boa constrictor (12
feet half grown), a Toucan, a free flying Scarlet Macaw, a Tapir, and a
Sakiwinki (Spider) monkey as pets. I also had a large number of hens, Muscovey
ducks, and turkeys, which were pets until they got converted to food. The ducks
were not very good to eat, too tough and also hard to catch as they were feral
and free flying. But the turkeys and chickens regularly added to the larder.
Female turkeys are obsessive incubators of eggs. They will sit on anything
spherical. I once found a turkey that was trying to hatch an electric light
bulb which to its intense disgust refused to oblige. On another occasion, I was
searching for a missing turkey after a rainstorm and eventually found it
sitting in a hollow in the ground that had filled up with water and covered the
turkey and its eggs. The crazy bird still refused to leave its nest and was
sitting on the eggs with just her head above the water. Such were the incidents
of my life…small pleasures that added value, conversation, and fun.
Berbice was a very poor region with most people
farming in the forest. This consisted mainly of slash and burn agriculture
where people would grow cassava, yams, bananas, peppers, and pineapples. It’s
called slash and burn because that is exactly what the aspiring farmer does. He
slashes a piece of forest, leaves the chopped trees and bushes to dry for a few
days and then sets them on fire. This fire burns for a few days and leaves
behind rich potash with acts like fertilizer. The farmer then plants his crop
in the cleared area and gets a bumper crop from the forest soil rich in humus
and ash from the burnt trees. However, that is only for a couple of rounds by
when the rain leaches out the nutrients and the soil goes to it original sandy
state. Then the farmer moves on to a new patch to repeat his cycle. This is how
the rain forest gets inexorably destroyed, patch by patch.
In the Guyana of the 70’s, ideology (communism)
ruled everything – including what you could grow, sell, or eat. Potatoes were
considered signs of the colonial masters (they were called Irish Potatoes –
even though they had been brought to Ireland from South America) and were
therefore illegal to grow. Some farmers in the bush would still grow them
clandestinely. I remember we would sometimes get a gift of 2-3 potatoes, which
someone had either managed to grow or smuggled in from Suriname. The lesson
that value is in the eyes of the perceiver was something I learnt early in
life.
One of the things Father Riehl wanted to do was to
teach his parishioners some skill by which they could make some more money and
improve their standard of life. As there was a ready market both for eggs as
well as poultry and Guyana is a high rainfall area, he thought that duck
farming would be a viable idea. The only issue was the need for some kind of
reservoir of water without which the ducks wouldn’t lay eggs. His parishioners
lived on the River Berbice but the main river with piranhas and alligators was
not the best place to farm ducks. So the potential duck farmer would need a
reservoir that was safe for his ducks. When Father Riehl mentioned this idea to
his parishioners, they typically said, “O! But father, we cyan do nothin! Whay
awe gonna ged da tank?” I can still recall the lovely sing-song tone of voice
these people of Berbice spoke in. Father Riehl thought that he would teach them
some lessons of self-help by example. He got himself a spade and a pickaxe and
marked out a large roughly circular area and started digging.
He said to me, “Every morning I would start
digging and people would stand around and watch in friendly silence. They would
make appreciative noises and comment to each other, ‘Father Riehl, he wok so
hard!’ They would bring me water to drink and would offer me lunch and dinner.
Nobody more hospitable than Guyanese and out of them, my favorites, the people
of Berbice. I lived among them as one of them and so all Berbice people were
family. The whole day would pass and in the evening when the work stopped they
would make a lot of appreciative remarks about how hard I had worked and the
tremendous progress of the hole in the ground. Then came the day when it was
finished and we let water into the pit.
It filled up nicely and all that remained was to get some ducks. But I
wanted to be sure that they would take this on and replicate this work, now
that they had seen how easy it was. But when I asked them, they said, ‘O!
Father, but we cyan do dis.’ I was flabbergasted. In shocked surprise I asked
them, ‘But you saw me do this. So you see that it is something that you can
also do. So what is the problem?’ They said, ‘O! Father, but you’z differen!!’
Guyana was ‘differen’ in many ways. Amazonian rain forest, exotic wildlife and birds, people who were very friendly, and whose life was as untouched by the rest of the world as is possible to be.
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