Guyana’s health system should have been at the centre of national development. Any nation with healthy people would find itself spending less on its human resource. It would see rapid growth in many areas, not least in the area of its human resource development.
Not so long ago, the then Health Minister Gail Teixeira had told me that Guyana could not offer dialysis because the reagents or whatever is used could not be stored for long. She also told me that Guyana did not have a large number of cases of renal failure.
Then came 5G Dialysis Centre on Aubrey Barker Street. The cost was high. I remember one man was taken there by his daughter. When he heard the cost of the treatment he told his daughter to take him back home to die. She did.
The country has a growing number of renal failure cases. The cases are numerous. There have been a few kidney transplants offered by visiting specialists.
The truth is that the government never invested in such human care. Private individuals took up the mantle. Even the first dialysis machines at the Georgetown Public Hospital were donated by private individuals.
Thanks to some private individuals, dialysis is now readily available.
There is a high incidence of cancer in Guyana but the public hospital cannot conduct its own tests. And even if it could, who is there to read the results. In all of Guyana, medical institutions must rely on the rest of the Caribbean.
In this day and age there is hardly any expenditure in the field of health except for the new buildings. The country is not training enough health personnel. It cannot be that there is no money to undertake such programmes.
The reality is that there is a lack of interest in this area.
And to top it all, the country has got rid of the Cubans who have been keeping Guyanese alive for over five decades.
I keep reminding myself, though, that Guyanese are a special breed of people. Sadly, commitment is not a big thing in their vocabulary. Indeed, there was a time when Guyanese were among the best in the region and among the best in the world.
Most young people were committed to leaving Guyana for the greener pastures. The schools back then trained Guyanese to work overseas, particularly in England. The history taught at the turn of the twentieth century when Guyanese were finding their feet in the world of education was English History.
Students knew more about England than they did about their own country. Young people could rattle off facts about England. They knew about the Crusades and the Buccaneers and the pirates of yore.
They knew about Blackbeard and Henry Morgan and the Mutiny on the Bounty. They knew about the Tudors—the many English kings and queens.
Even the literature was rooted in England. The poems and the plays were studied literature. Every Guyanese knew about William Shakespeare and Henry Longfellow, Samuel Coleridge and a long list of British or English writers.
The novels were compulsory reading. Older people still quote passages from Moby Dick and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and Animal Farm. Young boys read the Hardy Boys and Billy Bunter. The girls read Nancy Drew and of course the True Romances all about young English people.
Even the celebrations were fashioned after the English. Christmas cards featured snow covered trees. Santa Claus was a fat and jolly red nosed White man.
The Examinations were English-based. There were the Junior and Senior Cambridge exams, to be replaced by the General Certificate of Examinations Ordinary and Advanced Levels. There was a lower examination called College of Preceptors.
During the late 1960s, one of the questions for the College of Preceptors English was for the children to write about a day on the tube. I was a teacher at Bartica back then. Some students wrote about swimming on an inner tube used in car and truck wheels.
The question, written by an English examiner, wanted an answer that dealt with a day on what the Americans call subway.
At least the young people were forced to read and to study. And many left for England, the United States or Canada. Later the Caribbean became a second or third choice.
It was probably the same in India and the other colonies like Malaysia and Singapore. The difference rested with the governments. These countries are now powerhouses. Singapore and South Korea see their teachers as being among the highest paid in the country.
A South Korean once told me that the teachers are the people who produce the brains in the country. China came to a similar realization. Not so long ago, it shut down the schools for three years to concentrate on remedying what it saw as a failing education system.
China is a global powerhouse. India has expanded its education system by establishing schools outside the classrooms. It is not by accident that India and China have the best information technologists, some of the best doctors in the world and undoubtedly, some of the leading scientists.
I spent so much time telling of these things because when I look at what passes for government in Guyana I am resigned to seeing the land of my birth fall into the dark abyss.
Children, in large numbers are illiterate. Teachers are semi-literate, doctors for the greater part are general practitioners. Specialists are rare. The few straddle many hospitals in Guyana. They work at one private hospital then leave to work at another with the Georgetown Public Hospital being the cushion.
Not so long ago recruiters came from all over the world to recruit Guyanese teachers and nurses. Those were the glory days of an educated Guyana.
The paucity of even engineers is worrying. Guyanese road builders are merely sycophants of the ruling party. The criticisms of their substandard work have worn thin.
Law enforcement training is also non-existent. Can the average policeman read? But they can take orders; illegal orders.
