When a Government Turns Its Back on Its Own—The Tragedy of Bush Lot

OP-ED | By Randy Gopaul
Jay Mobeen’s letter in Stabroek News this week felt like mourning. Mourning for a community once full of life, now slipping further into despair. His words told the story of Bush Lot, a village that raised families, built businesses, and anchored generations of Indo-Guyanese pride. Today, it’s a place where hopelessness has taken root, and too many young people are choosing to end their lives rather than face another day.

Bush Lot was never wealthy, but it was dignified. It had a market, a cinema, a school, a health centre, bars, shops, and rice fields stretching into the horizon. People didn’t have much, but they had each other. They had purpose. They had the comfort of a community that worked.

Now the shops have closed. The elders are gone. The youth are drifting, either to Georgetown or to early graves. Some flee abroad. Others drink, spiral, and collapse under the weight of poverty, unemployment, and untreated mental anguish. Mobeen described the death of a school-aged child, another life lost to suicide, and the growing silence that surrounds these tragedies.

What he described isn’t unique to Bush Lot. Similar scenes play out in villages across the coast. But Bush Lot matters in a particular way because it helped build the foundation of the ruling party. This is where the PPP/C drew its strength, among working-class families in the rice belt, among people who believed the party spoke for them.

Today, the same government celebrates mega-projects, signs oil deals, and publishes glossy press releases about transformation. Meanwhile, villages like Bush Lot are crumbling, not from natural disaster, but from being forgotten. Not just neglected, abandoned.

Mental health care remains out of reach for most of the country. One weekly consultation at a health centre isn’t a safety net. It’s a formality. It gives the appearance of concern while leaving people to suffer in silence. Most won’t walk into a clinic to confess their fears to a stranger. And even if they did, what follow-up exists? What support waits for them when they return home to the same grinding uncertainty?

Religious institutions, mandirs, mosques, churches, still command influence, but they too have lost their way. Their loudspeakers echo across villages on holy days, but they’ve gone quiet on the issues tearing communities apart. They host ceremonies but offer little sanctuary. If the government has walked away from these places, faith leaders have not done nearly enough to fill the void.

What is unfolding in Bush Lot is a human crisis. Not a campaign issue. Not a statistic to reference in reports. It’s a collapse of meaning, of support, of faith in a future. People don’t just wake up one day and swallow poison. That decision follows years of pain, disconnection, and despair. And for many young men and women in Bush Lot, the question isn’t just how to survive. It’s whether surviving is worth it.

The story of Bushlot isn’t about one political party being better than another. It is about responsibility. The PPP/C rose to power with the trust of communities like Bush Lot. That trust is being broken, slowly and brutally, one unacknowledged funeral at a time.

It doesn’t have to continue this way.  Support can come in many forms, community mental health workers, youth development programs, retooled religious outreach, safe spaces for children and teens. And, most importantly, leadership that shows up, not just on stage during election season, but in quiet, hurting places that need to be seen.

Jay Mobeen wrote with grief, but also with a quiet plea. He called on the people of Bush Lot, the churches, mandirs, masjids, and schools to step forward. But the larger burden lies with those in power. The question now is whether they’re still listening to voices like his, or whether the bright lights of billion-dollar contracts have made them blind to the darkness spreading in the villages they once called home.