My friends and I stood on the periphery of that prayer service yesterday, undecided about whether we truly wanted to relax and participate, but in the final analysis, we couldn’t bring ourselves to get closer. Not like that. Not with them.
And from where we stood, we saw something that made our stomachs turn. What the government called a “national prayer service” looked to us like damage control. A performance. A stage play for the cameras while real Guyanese were still waiting for their dead to come home. We are young. We are angry. And we are not fooled.
Shame on Guyana
One of my friends looked at the stage, at all the polished faces and folded hands, and she whispered, “Shame on Guyana.” She wasn’t shaming the victims. She wasn’t shaming the mourners. She was shaming a government that dares to pray in public while its negligence drowns its own people in the dark.
Let’s talk about that darkness. According to passengers who survived that nightmare, the MV Barima went down at 10:30 PM. Ten-thirty. And do you know when help finally arrived? Four in the morning. Four. That means citizens — mothers, fathers, children, neighbours clung to wreckage in the Atlantic for over five hours. Five hours of screaming into the night. Five hours of watching loved ones slip beneath the waves. Five hours of waiting for a government that never came. And now they want to pray with us?
No Opposition. But Foreigners in the Front Row
Another observer standing near us shook her head and said something that cut through the noise: “It is unimaginable to me that in the middle of a national tragedy, someone in the PPP decided it was a good idea to keep opposition parliamentarians out of the command centres. No updates. No consultations.” She was right. We looked around that prayer service and we saw no opposition participation. Not one. But you know who was in the front row? The foreign contingent. The dignitaries. The international guests. Meanwhile, our own elected representatives were locked out of the rooms where decisions were being made about our dead.nThat doesn’t look like unity. That looks like contempt. One of the young men in our group called it what it was: “bordering on evil.”
And we must make another observation and it is a painful irony. While President Ali was allegedly flying around on a private jet to the soccer world cup, the opposition leader he criticizes endlessly was committed to the work, he showed up and showed out, it was obvious. We’ve watched him. He’s been on the ground. He’s been asking questions. He and other opposition MPs have been doing what leaders are supposed to do, not performing piety, but demanding accountability.
The Reporter Who Told the Truth
And then there is the reporter on the scene. I do not know her name, we just heard her voice, but she was the first person to actually got the real passenger accounts. While Minister Juan Edghill, who conveniently calls himself a bishop, was busy spinning narratives and feeding us lies, that reporter did the work. She spoke to survivors. She listened to the real stories and she shared them with us. And what she uncovered essentially exposed the lies being told by a man who claims to speak for God. A bishop. A religious leader. And he couldn’t even tell us the truth about a boat full of dead people. If that doesn’t shake your faith in both church and state, I don’t know what will.
Three Women. One Sign. And Handcuffs
And then, because things can always get worse, we watched three women’s rights activists were arrested at the so-called prayer vigil. Right there at the vigil. For standing with a sign. They are ‘Lina Free’, Salima Bacchus-Hinds and Romola Lucas and their arrest created a firestorm and prompted the police force to engage in a hasty retreat by ‘deciding not to press charges’. Everyone knows the arrests were politically directed and so were the decisions to release them and without charge.
And while some unknown number of bodies are still floating in the Atlantic, while families are shattered, while young people like us are trying to process a grief that feels too big to hold, the government had time to arrest three women who dared to express their pain with a piece of cardboard. What exactly are they afraid of? The truth? Accountability? A generation that refuses to stay silent?
Dark Days. Sad Days. PPP Days
My friends and I looked at each other as the service dragged on. One of them said what we were all thinking: “These are dark days. Sad days.” And then she added the punchline we all felt in our bones: “Coincidentally, these days always seem to show up with PPP governments.” We are not politicians. We are young people who love our country. We are the ones who will inherit the mess they leave behind. And right now, we are watching a government mourn our dead with one hand while silencing the living with the other.
We stood on the periphery because we didn’t belong inside that performance. We stood outside because we refused to pretend that this was okay. And from where we stood, we saw everything. Shame on them. And God help Guyana.
