OVER the past months I have been reading and seeing comments made by a columnist from the Kaieteur News and former supporters of the PPP/C.
Most of them indulge in criticising the party and the Jagans out of a sense of disappointment of not being able to get more out of the party and the government. I remember well one of them who was a director or chairman of the Electricity Corporation running away from Freedom House while it was being attacked in 1962. He ended up in Canada and returned to Guyana in 1992. He claimed he made sacrifices but lots of comrades made sacrifices too.
Some comrades felt the heavy hands of the previous regime, some lost their jobs, some were detained and imprisoned and some even lost their lives because they were Afro-Guyanese and supporters of the PPP. The Fords,  Edwardses, Holders, Gonsalves, Shepherds, Campbells, Browns, Burgesses, McLeans and Fernandes, just to name a few.
Let me not dwell too much on that part of my letter but let me write on some things of the Jagans that I know:
I was 13 years old when I first came into contact with Cheddi and Janet Jagan in 1953. My father used to give me sets of magazines (China Reconstruction) to take to Cheddi for him to distribute to members of the party.
I wonder if these critics know of the time in the late 1940s when Cheddi was refused entry on the upper deck of the McKenzie steamer and Janet came down to the bottom so that she could be with her husband.
Do they know of the many times during the 60s and 70s when he picked up children going to school on Lamaha Street on his way to Freedom House?
Do they know of the time when the British troops raided Thunder Newspaper Office and as Janet Jagan approached the building a British soldier challenged her, bayonet at ready to her chest, and she continued to advance to the building until she was arrested?
Do they know when Cheddi was jailed for six months hard labour and crowds would gather and sing the party song ‘Oh Fighting Men’ until the police fired tear gas at us?
Do they know the number of small businessmen Dr Cheddi helped to start their own businesses?
Janet and Cheddi paid visits to several long yards in the city from Kingston, Lacytown, Werk-en-Rust, Charlestown, etc encouraging parents to send their children to school. They both assisted in preparing breakfast and bathing the children.
There is a certain long yard in Charlotte Street between Camp and Wellington Streets, which had two big buildings in the front part and two range houses, which had 10 rooms (as much as eight persons lived in a room), six outdoor kitchens were provided as well as three toilets and three baths for the tenants.
These were the conditions he met the poor living under when he returned home and he fought against it.
From this same long yard was produced several seamen, two photographers, three land surveyors, one electrical foreman, director of prisons and a professor of mathematics.
Do you know that in the 1940s – 1950s the City Council had employed women to break bricks for the building of roads? Janet paid a visit to these women and fought tooth and nail for this practice to stop, which eventually did.
Cheddi only saw the good in people; I believed a saint walked among us.
I have written this letter hoping for it to be published in your newspaper (Chronicle). I am not a scholarly person as I only attended class up to third standard. I am not gifted with the intelligence of these gentlemen, who write and try to distort and demonise the memories of the Jagans. To them I say look into your hearts and seek forgiveness, for forgiveness is there.